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Analysis: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed by Congress and signed into law more than a year ago, but its true impact is only beginning to be felt. Corporatism squared off brazenly against the geeks, and handily won Round One. If you're wondering where your Napster really went, read more below.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is an especially devious title for one of the most significant pieces of Internet legislation yet passed. If you're looking for insight into how corporatism and politics work together to control software and technology -- and to potentially stifle free speech and individual choice -- you can't do better. Nor will you find a more textbook-perfect example of dubious, perhaps even unconstitutional, Internet law.
This is how the struggle over who owns ideas, software and intellectual property on the Internet will be waged; Round One in the battle that is pitting corporatism against the geeks. They won.
The DMCA -- largely the fruit of massive lobbying by the entertainment industry, including companies like Time Warner, Disney and other giants of recording and movie industry -- was passed quietly 16 months ago by a normally acrimonious Congress, and immediately signed by the President. Despite the law's profound and far-reaching implications, Clinton's signing of the measure drew little media attention, online or off, and only in the last few months has its impact begun to be felt.
Central to the law is a clause making it illegal to thwart copyright protection methods through the use of software or hardware. Without that power, argued the lobbyists for record labels, traditional publishers and film studios, their industries would be run out of business by the newly empowered Net generation. This is a generation, mostly young, who've discovered that they could create their own culture on the Net, and get the music they wanted rather than pick only from the choices preselected for them by the music industry. And for free, no less. Thousands of artists who wouldn't have gotten through the record industry's artist-selection machine suddenly had channels to distribute their work and find new audiences. Music software is a powerful example of how the Net gave individuals -- especially ones far removed from corporate models of culture and creativity -- a chance to be seen and heard. And it gave music lovers a chance to hear them as well.
And although the law passed more than a year ago (despite opposition to DMCA by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other online free-speech activists, the Act's proponents and their lawyers took their time strategizing about exactly how to enforce and implement it.
This year, the gloves came off -- and suddenly people at colleges all over the country are wondering what happened to their Napster sites. Despite what many schools are telling their students -- often that downloading music simply takes up too much bandwidth -- the real reason for their actions is the DCMA.
Pointedly high-profile lawsuits have been filed recently, as the entertainment industry takes the lead in the war against free culture and the spread of forums for artists to disseminate their work -- at least artists the industry doesn't control. The industry has obviously done its homework, studying how software really works and how information moves, and is using the Digital Millennial Copyright Act as its primary weapon against infringement by people using the Net and the Web.
As a result, with little political opposition or discussion, the DMCA is already beginning to redefine entertainment on the Net, and regain control of popular culture, as corporatists move against free music and movie users. As someone who's been writing about First Amendment issues for years, it's hard to imagine a piece of legislation with greater implications for free speech as well as corporate control of intellectual content. This legislation seems to have anti-trust implications as well: how could any law more actively discourage creativity and competition?
If there is a silver lining in the use of the DMCA to dominate entertainment, it's that day by day, the political issues become clearer. Even though many open source advocates see themselves as technologically centered, rather than politically, the DMCA pits the free software movement, squarely against the commercialist threat to the free nature of the Internet. The corporatists grasp what many young programmers don't: Open source is a powerful political idea, and it's antithetical to the way many modern corporations have always worked.
"The anti-circumvention clauses fundamentally change the balance of copyright," Alex Fowlier of the EFF told USA Today's Bruce Haring earlier this week. "Now we're not just talking about rights to the work, but about tying it to the system it is displayed on, or plays on, or is distributed by. That's one level deeper into control than copyright has been associated with." Tying the distribution, display or performance of a work to a system "affects the users in ways we can't even imagine," says Fowler. "It really hampers the future growth of the Internet." It doesn't do much for the present either.
One reason free music sources proliferated so rapidly was that they often piggy-backed on educational and other sites where music seekers congregated. College students could download music on their schools' sites, in part because the schools believed they were simply neutral, non-liable carriers of content. Since there was no Internet law governing content on Web sites, nobody knew if that was true or not. But it certainly isn't true anymore.
The music industry and its lawyers understood that colleges and universities are powerful channels for commercial music, places where artists, bands and even musical genres are discovered and become popular. They realized they didn't have to shut down every free music site on the Net -- those on instant messaging services like ICQ or AIM, for example -- in order to sharply curb the spread of free music. They could use the DMCA as a way to focus on a smaller number of sites, and on universities and colleges. For an industry that garnered $15 billion in revenues last year, the cost of that focused effort is chump change.
Rather than targeting music distributors or downloaders, they lobbied successfully to get a law passed that made it illegal to thwart copyright protection methods in software and hardware. Music industry lawyers then began notifying colleges and universities that they might be in violation of federal copyright protection laws if they tolerated the existence of Napster and other means of music dissemination. Free music users, accustomed for years to downloading what they wanted, were caught unawares.
The DMCA went a step further, in a legally ingenious way. The law decrees that Internet service providers won't be liable for copyright infringement by their users if the providers remove offending material once they're made aware of it. It's that provision that gains entertainment companies so many powerful new allies in their war against "pirates" -- recruiting, in effect, all the institutions and sites that allow content redistribution, and turning them into culture cops. If they block free music, they're off the hook legally. If they don't, they're liable.
Some colleges seem to think they have a far greater stake in avoiding lawsuits than they do in confronting the real issues involved -- like promoting free expression and diversity in culture. And college students are selective in political issues. There is, for example, a broad-based anti-sweatshop movement on many U.S. campuses, but no equivalently passionate and nationally-organized movement to keep culture free.
(Personal note: As an author who writes online and on paper, I am well aware of the complexity of intellectual content and copyright issues. Writing online, especially for this Web site, means relinquishing reprint, royalty and subsidiary rights that used to provide revenue to writers and artists. The work of me and other writers here and elsewhere on the Web is widely distributed, linked and even printed in paper form without permission or payment. But I've also come to believe that the free (open source, if you like) distribution of content -- even opinions -- offers creators new opportunities: broader audiences, greater impact, road-tested ideas, thus eventually, perhaps even more income.)
While the sweatshop issue (students accuse colleges as well as fashion retailers of buying merchandise produced by sweatshop labor) is perfectly valid, one could argue that the effort by corporatism to attack information software and control entertainment is ultimately of equal importance.
Before the DMCA, for example, a university -- or even a commercial Web site -- could look the other way as people presented, distributed and downloaded music. The legal issue was left between the record company and the so-called "pirates." But in recent months the DMCA has sparked legal actions like these:
- Jon Johansen, a 16-year-old Norwegian student who allegedly wrote software allowing DVDs to be played on Linux-based computers, was arrested at the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA claimed the code illegally circumvented DVD copy protection, and sent cease-and-desist orders to hundreds, perhaps thousands of Web sites, including this one, that had allegedly posted the source code or linked to it. The MPAA filed lawsuits against several sites, as well as charges against Johansen and other software developers, and announced it would pursue other offenders.
- RealNetworks obtained an injunction against a portion of software created by Streambox, designed to allow users to capture or record streaming media sent via Real's copy-protected format.
- The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed suit against Napster, which allows music seekers to trade song files directly from machine to machine without having to post them on the Net. Following the suit, Napster was removed from scores of college and other Web sites.
Umm, business are run and owned by individuals. I think it is every little boys dream to be the supreme fascist and tell every boy what to do, like the music industry and the government. The significt note here is that is a delusional dream. Umm, the question becomes is it the person who sold the gun is responsible for massacres or the shooter? People should be responsible for their own wrongs. Good people should not be responsible for the wrongs of others (namely removing a dispute of copyright as a third party between two parties and being biased towards the first party and being liable as a third party!) Ahh! The evils of fascism. Screw you UCITA, DMCA, Feds, etc. This is like 1984 all over again. Oh well. Boys will be morons.
Do you know how many people were woken up by the N30 Seattle WTO protests? I personally know a dozen people who A) Had never heard of the WTO prior to the protests B) Learned about the WTO because of the protests C) Decided they didn't care much for how the WTO operates after learning about the WTO. N30 was an amazing success, it gave a huge boost to the momentum of the movement, it educated people, it put the WTO talks into complete dissaray, and it woke the city of Seattle up to the incompetence and brutality of their police force.
Direct Action gets results. The N30 protests have given a huge momentum to the international movement to stop corporate domination. The corporate controlled media tries not to connect them, but if you look, there have been about a half dozen massive protests AROUND THE WORLD against corporate domination. You can sit at your computer and whine that protesting doesn't do shit, we sit at our computers to organize.the rest of us are going to be out there GETTING THINGS DONE. It is NOT about getting your name in the paper, it is about showing those in power that WE ARE SERIOUS and getting the message out to the people, it's about getting results and CHANGING THE WORLD.
Flameage perhaps. But not flamebait.
are "fish" and "fish bait" the same thing?
Wow! Does this mean my AOR All Band hand held is illeagal? What a scanner this puppy is. O downloaded the cell phone tower frequencies from a site on the ineternet on 1993 and one nite went nuts putting them all in the scanner, Also I programmed all the Air Traffic Controller frequencies in the region. This is an All band Scanner from LF to 1.3Ghz, AM, sideband AM, NFN, WFM.It was easy to pick up a friends cell phone call, record it, and then call there answering machine and leave the cell phone recording a message. (The things we do when we are kids eh?) Anyway.. AS far as I know AOR still manufactures "All Banders" the new radios have the analog cell frequencies blocked, but it's easy to re-enable the blocked frequencies. remove a diode here, cut an etch there. Ahh.. If if mp3 and other technologies become illeagal then we hust need to go underground. There plenty of robust tools now that would get a robust underground infrastructure going.
Corporate Oligarchy is Fascism. Call the corporate dominators what they are: FASCISTS!
1. If the ISP's TOS prohibits distribution of copyrighted material, how would enforcing this part of the TOS be any different than enforcing the "thou shalt not spam" part of the TOS?
2. Does this ISP have a "non-commercial use" clause in their TOS? If the account is for non-commercial use, this by itself should wipe out any restraint of trade claim.
3. How does one show that one lost money under a claim of restraint of trade for a GPL'd program?
TOS's tend to suck real bad for the user and any ISP that wants to remain in business very long has had a lawyer go over their TOS with a fine tooth comb.
Remember when the debate was wheather or not you could unscramble (== to decrypt today) signals being beamed onto your land and passing through through your skull. "Hey, I didn't ask for this signal to be transmitted here, so if I can decode it, I can watch it, and for free. You want to controll access, run it through a wire that you own and control." Didn't work. Courts sided with big business (duh) and that was the end of that.
- RIAA
- MPAA
Of course, it's not some dark Art Bell government cover-up, but it is the sinister forces of industry coming together to trump the legal system with their might and squash the rights of the people. It's organized, it involves disparate forces working under one umbrella, and it's doing an end-run around the constitution. It's just not a secret.Now who's the ignorant slut?
Honestly I don't know... But what if we were to create an orginization that would lobby to our interests? Have dues like the NRA and pay them to keep our interests in the political view!
We could have a site for members to vote on issues and our hired guns would go to bat for us. What do you think? Anyone interested?
-Dustin
You statement is like saying "Just ignore CCW and anti-silencer laws and carry a modified gun in your coat pocket. There's lots of plans for concealed holsters and home brew silencers on the web."
The point is not to ignore stupid laws but to get them repealed.
This is an excellent example for bringing home to people just how absurd the DeCSS case is.
I have to confess I haven't actually read anything by Torvalds or Cormack. Are they in the practice of inserting a paragraph consisting of a "personal note" in the middle of their writings, as if we would want their biography in the middle of an analysis of the DMCA?
No. The law is not retroactive to old equipment. Your scanner isn't being recalled. You are, however, still prohibited from listening to those freqs anymore.
AOR still manufactures "All Banders" the new radios have the analog cell frequencies blocked, but it's easy to re-enable the blocked frequencies. remove a diode here, cut an etch there.
In 1994, when mfg/import of cell capable scanners was banned, so too were scanners that were "easily modifiable" to bypass cellular lockouts. This explicitly included cutting or adding a wire or diode or any easily removable part. This would include socketed ROM chipt, but prob not soldered ROMs. "readily modifiable" is a murky term. My non-tech-oriented grandma would has a different idea of easily modifiable than I as a EE-wirehead-guru do.
In 1997, the French trucker's unions petitioned the government to address lax safety policies and unfair working hours in the industry, but were rebuffed. The truckers demonstrated their importance to the French economy by parking their 18-wheelers across the entrance/exit ramps of most of the major highways. preventing not only the delivery of goods, but the free flow of all traffic
In light of this, the government quickly returned to the bargaining table and a settlement was hammered out.
Do you think people would start to pay attention if everyone who worked at a service provider decided not to propagate any packets for a given week?
Additionally, the anarchists among us are often keen to abolish copyright and patents, while progressives in particular usually want to reform them to "restore a balance".
Progressives and libertarians are also strongly divided over Internet taxation, as well as taxes used to fund or subsidize Internet access.
Some geeks (seemingly independent of other issues?) have strong disagreements about private-sector censorship and invasion of privacy -- especially when practiced by parents rather than corporations. :-)
There are also some socially conservative geeks out there somewhere, including a few on slashdot. Professional corporate IT is very conservative, but contains a much smaller percentage of computer enthusiasts and computer hobbyists.
Think of the difference between groups like CIEC, VTW, Peacefire, CPSR, EFF, the LP, and then Nader's CPT. All of these organizations "oppose censorship" in some form; do they meaningfully agree on any fundamentals of political philosophy? CIEC included conservative Republicans; the LP's got anarchocapitalists; VTW was chock-full of progressive Democrats; CPSR and the CPT speak for social democrats and even a couple of revolutionary Communists...
If anyone is interested in researching what it takes to create Geek Utopia, check out www.ic.org
Enough already.
>You've mispelled "Dan Akroyd".
You've misspelled "misspelled", you ignorant slut!
There's a law with ample precedent that says if a company mails you something that you didn't order or ask for, you can keep it and use it, without payment.
Satellite BROADCASTERS (key word here) are sending you and me their signal right now. They're beaming it into my house. It's not theft. They're giving me their proprietary signal. How can I steal something that's raining down on me 24/7? All I did was examine the environment (in this case the RF signale present) in *my* *own* *home* and do some transformations on them. How is this theft?
> While I certainly understand how the DeCSS thing runs into problems with this law, how does a band
> that wants to freely distribute its music run into problems?
Simple. Media companies in conjunction with electronics manufacturers stop building audio devices that handle any format other than "SDMI". Instead, all audio devices will only play SDMI audio files.
Releasing songs in mp3 format is not interesting, since no one will be able to play them. They can't exactly give out cassettes and CDs free over the internet. So their option is to release their music in SDMI.
Only problem is that SDMI is a secret format like DVDs. You need to have a code to make a SDMI file that will actually play.
They ask their friendly multi-million-dollar media conglomerate. Sure, they can put out their music in SDMI. They'll just have to sign over their copyrights to the company and accept 2.5% royalties.
So, the band asks their local friendly computer hacker to reverse engineer SDMI so that they can put out their own music files. After some effort this is done. Unfortunately, the "security" of SDMI turns out to be wholly dependent upon the secrecy of the format. Now that the format is known, not only can the band make their own music files, but they can also listen to other music files without contacting the centralized license/user tracking system.
For this reason, when the band's songs are released online, the industry realizes that SDMI has been reverse engineered. They are immediately arrested under the DMCA and sued into oblivion...
Amen... I can't believe the big deal made about such a lossy compression like mp3. It really sounds like crap, you can get "modest" playability out of an mp3 if you decompress it and play it back as a wav file. It some ways it probably sells more CD's than anything else.
The paranoia over piracy is getting alittle out of hand, copy protecting cd's so that legitamate buyers can't make archive copies hurts consumers more than pirates. Rewriting laws to make software piracy the equivelent of rape won't help the problem. ( remember we did this with drug users, not dealers, USERS! )
Frankly our goverment sucks... The best they can do is drum up some dummy legislation about the biggest non-issue our country faces. It would be simply cheaper to roll the monies spent on enforcing these idiot laws into free software development to remove the temptation! It really is not a matter for goverment intervention other than the means that are already used for copyright protection.
The real race it seems is to see which state can put on a "High tech Face" and steal a little limelight for its politicians.
so is there no hope for us? will the fight for Free software turn into another bump on the road to fascist hypercapitalism?
l
the only thing powerful enough to have any effect on a powerful storm is an atomic bomb. we should explode the Open Source movement like a bomb on the world. we need a media campaign promoting our point of view and exposing the cryptofascists. we need explode into the minds of the populace before the storm overtakes us.
these laws that are being passed, UCITA, DMCA, etc. are turning us into criminals. our culture is being criminalized by the corporate dominators much in the same way that the drug culture has become criminalized. I DON'T WANT TO BE SLAVE LABOR FOR THE CORPORATE MACHINE. We need to broaden our movement. We need to place it into a larger context, a larger struggle. We need to unite the world in the battle for freedom.
Read about the corporate slave labor camps: http://www.tompaine.com/features/2000/02/14/3.htm
One of her big problems is her objection to "altruism", defined variously throughout her works. In her rants about the evils of altruism, she invariably chooses to overlook that entities which cooperate will almost invariably perform better than similar competitive entities. In any case, in my book RMS beats Rand every time...
With all these crazy and sometimes obviously unconsitutional (e.g., CDA) laws being passed, one wonders if proposed legislation doesn't have to go through some sort of informal review for its legality before being brought to the floor of the house or senate. Such a review would save a lot of taxpayer dollars in bickering and long court trials. I mean, it's like it would be perfectly allowable for the house, senate, and President to all pass a bill making it illegal to be black. *And* it would be immediately enforcable too! *And* it would not go away until until it's challenged in the courts, a hearing(s) are set, the case is reviewed, long and well funded legal battles to end on both sides, until finally, the courts strike it down. But how much money is wasted by then?
every boy was raised by a women bitch
You miss of course the entire point of the post to which you reply. Blanket notification does not count. You can monitor a network, and amounts of traffic, but if you as a university network admin uses software which can be used as a sniffer, (which sniffit can) and if you ever start such software so that it monitors traffic in a manner that collects (source or destination) and content you have already comited a felony. That is felony wiretapping. It does not matter if your usage policy says you will do this, you must FOR EACH INSTANCE inform before hand those who will be monitored and obtain written aknowledgment of same. Cheers, Windell So that begs the question, how many of you are felons?
"I have to disagree with your assessment of the Seattle protests. It may have sparked more protests, but that's only success if your goal is just to protest."
It woke a lot of people up. That was one of the major goals of the protest. Arrouse the population. It was amazingly succesful at that.
"The Seattle protests consisted of extremely diverse viewpoints that effectively cancelled each other out. You had socialists, environmentalists, libertarians, protectionists, and even globalists who were arguing with each other just as much as they were arguing against the WTO. "
It appears you have a fundemental misunderstanding of just what N30 was all about. Yes there were many diverse viewpoints there. Many groups were represented, some of these groups have contrary views to each other. There is one fundemental thing we all agreed on however, CORPORATE DOMINATION MUST BE STOPPED. That is the fundemental rally cry to this movement. I was at N30, I stood on the streets with thousands of others and faced the police attacking us unprovoked. I was tear gassed. I witnessed the police clubbing people for no apparent reason. I witnessed police senselessly shooting rubber bullets into crowds of people who were standing around chanting. It was Us vs. Them, yes we did talk about different philosphies about how the system works, how it should work, etc. But these were friendly discussions, spoken-word pieces, poems, etc. It was a spirit of open and peaceful dialogue between people who were friends. If you had been there and had experienced that you would understand, it's not about petty ideology. It's about a system that is broken and a movement that is forming to fix it.
"In my experience in actually participating in protests, this is all too common. I used to protest every April 15th against the IRS. However the extreme mixed messages that were being sent to the public caused me to stop. I mean, there
were people protesting high taxes and others protesting low taxes! It was just pointless!"
Protesting the tax system is never pointless! It is too bad your view has been jaded by this experience. I agree that getting a unified message out is vital, in the case of the N30 protests the message that corporate domination must be stopped was a little hard to distribute through the corporate controlled media. Instead they tried to play up some anti-corporate property destruction and turn the protests into a "riot". I know that their efforts at perception management did a lot to distort peoples views of what really happened. However, overall the protests were a smashing success.
"During my college days, there was a large and well organized protest to change the name of a library to "Winnie Mandela Library" in protest of apartheid. This coincided with many other anti-aparthied protests around the country.
They were unsuccessful in halting apartheid, and may have actually prolonged it, since they drew attention to the person of Winnie Mandela and thus to her campaign of "necklacing" and terror."
I would disagree with this. I believe the protests against apartheid did a lot to educating people about what was going on. No, they didn't get immediate results, but they were an integral component of developing a larger movement. In the long term they were a success.
"In short, I have never seen any radical protest succeed in anything other than recruitment."
Recruitment is success. If all the N30 protests did was recruit a few thousand more people to the movement to stop corporate domination then I consider it a success.
I know that many of the ISPs I've dealt with have a clause in their Terms of Service which says that the account may be terminated by either party at any time, for any reason. Any money paid in advance for service not rendered will be refunded to the (former) account holder.
If Signal 11 has signed up for an ISP that has this type of clause, then he's SOL and should start shopping for a new provider.
When I read about the DMCA, I can't help but wonder how many of the corporate types who fought to get the law passed were 'rebels' in the 60's? If you consider that many execs will be in their 40s-50s, it's quite likely that a great many of them are now a part of the establishment that they fought against in their youth.
The problem is that it's no longer just about freedom. It's now about the almighty dollar and about power -- two things that almost always go hand in hand.
There are two messages that the geek community should be sending to these former hippies. 1) It *is* about freedom of speech (something that they most likely at one point in their lives advocated) and 2) USA != World. If they try to fight a world-wide battle based on US law, they will lose.
'Stereolab' returned 72 matches.
'Hieroglyphics' returned over 100.
'Quannum' only returned 5.
Not to mention 'Dieselboy' brings back 55, 'Grooverider' 15, and 'Aphrodite' gives 99.
All of these results are from just one of Napster's servers - don't they have 50 or so running at all times?
The problem with this argument is that you can RE Microsoft's file format under the DMCA for compatability purposes. I think you have to look at this law in the context of other federal IP and general bus. practices laws. For one thing, I seriously doubt that Microsoft is going to try something like that (creating an artificial barrier to entry) given the antitrust microscope it is under. You also must have a very sophisticated understanding of how federal courts construe and apply federal laws. I seriously doubt that a copyright law is going to be used to protect a file format that is specifically created to inhibit competition. The intent of these amendments is to make it illegal to break copy protection. Remember, copyright protects content. It protects a particular means of expression, not the idea that is expressed. So it is a poor vehicle to stop open source software. I doubt that the amendments will be interpreted to prohibit RE a file format for compatability. Finally, there will be market pressure. If I can pay nothing for an office suite vs. $250, I'm going to migrate toward the free software. Someone will license the file format from Microsoft and create a program that will translate the files (plenty of examples of this in existence). In fact, Corel has a Linux version of their suite, and Corel Office does a great job of converting Microsoft Word files. I think the worry that the DMCA is a horrid piece of legislation is overblown hype. All that said, the UCITA is a totally different bag altogether. I can clearly see how the UCITA is a threat to open source, in the very way FOXFIRE described. The UCITA is specifically directed at software. But I don't think the DMCA is going to have the same impact. It's directed at protecting content, and will not make a very good tool to stifle software projects.
"Ode to grits"
I guess it's just my perverse imagination coupled with intense Slashdot addiction, but it was funny as hell. (Although I bet the good grits.com people didn't mean their site to be such)
If you think that the DMCA outlaws fair use, then explain to me, dipshit, how you think a court will interpret the provision of the DMCA that states that previous defenses to copyright infringement, including the fair use, defense, are not altered by the provisions of the DMCA? These provisions aren't as radical as you are making them out to be. The problem the record industry, the software industry, and the movie industry face is that there was no way to block tools that allow people to defeat copy protection schemes. They had to wait until someone used the tool and made a pirate copy. With the DMCA, they get to take the tool out of the picture without waiting for a thousand individual violations. While this may not be a good thing, it isn't going to doom us all to corporate slavedom. Like the shithead with the CD-RW question pointed out, we haven't been able to copy our CD's until recently, and that hasn't exactly torn anyone apart.
ah..hmm..
i think this subject does matter.
and if you think it doesn't, you are a
servant to powers that be.
laterz...
I have just one question for everyone.
DOES IT REALLY MATTER??
So you can't download music off the 'net. Guess what? That's like making a copy of a CD. And as far as I knew, that was illegal to start with. Deal with it, people, that's the law, it has been for a long time, and they've just found a way to enforce it. If you don't like it, invent a time machine.
Not necessarily.
Before the net I didn't have the means to distribute my music to many people, and I didn't have the opportunity to get music created by people I didn't know personally.
Simple fact of the matter is that I do now.
I can make mp3s, distribute them on mp3.com (or many other sites) and those bastards can't stop me. As long as I can find good stuff on the net, why should I go back to paying them?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
And I know that cops ignore wiretap rules, FBI got busted for doing something like 39,000 without authorization, I wish I could find that url...
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Tell that to the anti-sweatshop sit-ins which have changed university policies across the nation.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
I remember reading a link of someone who was going to do a *real* version of Napster that did encrypted host tables or some such, but I can't find the url now... Maybe after I've slept.
So, got a webpage of ideas for these tools?
I know I can't build them... yet. Who can?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
SO PLEASE ROLL OVER AND DIE. PLEASE?
Really? I could have swarn tesser-ashpool got into the business just after the oil platform was wiped out before neuromancer. Either way go screw yourself you toothless, inbred, banjo picking, maggot infested pile of rat droppings :)
However, I don't think that their misleading comments are what's undermining my privacy. It's the people who are breaking the law, and listening in.
You don't seem to get it... <b>you have no privacy</b>.
That law is the equivalent to saying, that if you are in a room full of people talking that you can only communicate with one of them and you MUST ignore what the rest are saying. Even with this law, in a number of occasions when I talk to someone on a cell phone I could hear (although faint) another conversation between 2 people and it did not seem like they could hear me and my friend talking.
Socialism is dead, dead, dead. Voe libertarian. Socialist are even more into Big Brother than the current scoundrels. What freedom loving hacker would want Socialism?
You may want to disown various socialists states but their practice grew pretty directly out of your theory.
Come on people. Most of us have jobs here, go and buy the CDs and give it a rest. Some of us *OWN* everything we listen to. (Yes, I am aware there are artists using the medium to get awareness, but they're not the ones that are causing the problems now are they?)
Please die. Thanks.
As microsoft is fast learning, you can't compete with what's free.
Morality via legisation doesn't work. I'm not saying that pirating is good or bad but it does allow that wider world to see a product that they normaly wouldn't see in the first place. If programs like the one that allow you to view DVD's on a Linux system are out-lawed the only thing that will happen is that the sceen will move underground and the people that actually purchase a legitimate DVD and watch it on their legitimately set up systems (read free OS) will be prosicuted, for doing nothing other than watching their favorite movies on an OS that they didnt have to pay for. Once again I'd like to say that Morality via legisation doesn't work, just look at what happened during the prohabition years.
OneArmedMan
stevensreaper@ozemail.spam-me-if-you-can.com.au
Don't live on the edge. Jump off it!
In today's cartoon over on After Y2K, he appears in pixelated form... OMG ...he's a YODA!
Hey Jon, how does it feel.... you're the cartoon character you've always strived to be!
There's also some good posts over there in Nitrozac's message board... hee hee!
How in the HELL did copying even 1 software program become a FEDERAL FELONY? Did I miss someone's life or health being directly jeopardized here? Does copying software deserve to have a maximum fine that exceeds that for rape, 2nd degree murder, armed robbery, manslaughter, etc.?
message to signal 11: thank you for the wonderful blowjob. here is your karma. just let me know any time you want some positive moderation! my dick can always use some of your lip action.
The real issue here is the concept of intellectual property rights, at least how we conceive them today. The media and entertainment cartel seeks to position itself as an omnipresent middleman, to garner a nickel for itself each and every time we see or hear some media image. The problem however is thus: a number of people here have stated in the past, "if I can see it, if I can hear it, I can copy it"". This is not only undeniably true, but it has become so trivially simple that it is silly to propose this will not happen, or can be prevented. What needs to change is the idea that a person can distribute a media image, yet propose to retain total control of the rights to that media image. By displaying the media image in a public forum, I really think this constitutes an implicit acceptance of risk that the image will be copied. Because the act of making and distributing the copy is near costless and trivial in terms of effort, it should be assumed that the image will be copied, that is, the distribution becomes direct and free. Is this somehow wrong? I really don't think so, at least when money is not involved. The record companies think so, however, because they want to get that nicked every time you hear that song. What the media cartel needs to understand is that providing media is a service, the media itself is not a product. They need to adjust their business models around this... providing convenience (i.e. priority FTP download), added value (live performance, merchandising items), or luxury editions (in not easily copiable format- autographed cd's?) for example. Where does this leave the author or artist? It's not like most are making a killing in terms of royalties. The media producer, by becoming their own direct distributor, and by providing "additional value" that CANT be copied (such as live performance) must bypass the middleman. With this outlook, cooperative artist-driven associations could easily replace the media engines of today. mtoal@willinet.net
"Jon, I'm s..."
"IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR OPINION IS!!"
(Hmmm...doesn't sound to different from what RIAA/MPAA/etc. actually does)
An ISP that caves to RIAA/MPAA then has to decide if they're going to cave to 1000 other complaints. Make the DMCA as odious as possible to as many people/businesses/politicians as possible!
If you used sniffit without first specifically informing people of its use in that "instance" you are also guilty of felony wiretapping. Just thought it ironic that you used a felonious act to prevent a felonious act. Note that a blanket upfront notification of monitoring such as a usage agreement is insufficient. You must have specifically informed the students prior to its use and recived aknowledgement of same from each student who's traffic may have been monitored, so a flyer or mass email also would not cut it. note that this would not apply at a place of employment where an upfront blanket notifcation would be fine. Cheers Felon
So at what point have you decided is the amount of damage enough to be significant?
Scrappy doo here. Yeah....FCC flack is unreal at times.... I want a protection from emf act®
What also bothers me as an European citizen is the blatant way of declaring a US law for worldwide enforceable. What the f... think those judges - at least we are independent nations and e.g. here (in Germany) it is perfectly legal to use any means whatever necessary to ensure 'interoperability' of software or content you own with your equipment! So much for declaring DeCSS 'illegal' *grumpf*
People are not complying with them now I know of at least 5 companys that are running NT and have not bought enough licenses for their software. This includes backoffice,word and all the other programs that they use. The reason for this is simple, They are small companys with tight profit margins that would be consumed if they bought new license everytime they upgraded their software. Same with mp3,warez,and so on. Nobody is going to buy all the games and apps. I personally will not buy a games until i have downloaded it to see if i like it. My latest download was "the sims" I downloaded it,tried it, and bought it 3 days later. I would never have bought it without trying it. Same with the mp3 and other things. These companys think they are losing money because their work is being copied. But the truth is they would never have probably made that sell anyway
Does anyone remember the William Gibson story where they set up a data haven on an abandoned oil platform in international waters? The more they make BS laws like this them more that sort of a senerio starts to make financial sense. I bet you could get one financed right now if you put a couple of on-line casinos up on it, that way it would be self-supporting/ profitable. The only thing these laws do in the long run is deny uncle sam his share of the take.
That was Dan Akroyd, not Bill Murray.
Except that your salary isn't make or break on *one* *copied* *program* or even 20% copied programs. Oooo, x% of all copies of Windows and Office are pirated. And nearly 100% of copies in places like HK and Malaysia. Yet MS is still the richest corp. in the world! I'm not seeing the harm here.
Although I understand what you're trying to say, I think you have your terminology confused.
<p><i>The reason for this is that it seems to be more and more that the US is ruled by something more akin to a dictatorship. The dictatorship would be the giant corporations and their front organizations such as the MPAA. </i></p>
You're describing an oligarchy, not a dictatorship. To qualify as being a dictatorship, there has to be one (and only one) leader. An oligarchy is a state run by multiple leaders.
Bullshit. Repeat after me: It's just an audio compression format.
How can you blame people's immorality and their penchant for theft on a string of 0's and 1's???
College students don't have the ability to download mp3s onto college sites simply because the schools think it's harmless; They can do it because the schools generally don't know about it. Most schools will attempt to eliminate any type of non-official server they are aware of.
Once again, bullshit. I work for my school's network services. These people are geeks, like you and me. Many of them even own and distribute mp3s and software. The people I work with honestly don't care what the students do with their bandwidth as long as it doesn't impact normal usage, as you correctly said in your next statement. We certainly won't "attempt to eliminate any type of non-official server they are aware of" because then we become the campus network policemen. We have better things to do.
There is no music revolution. We're just trying to find better ways to steal.
Maybe for you there isn't a revolution, but I've discovered several incredible bands that I never would have without the internet and digital music, primarily mp3s. How about Tolerance, a band from Arizona? Or God Among Men from Las Vegas? Or Bother out of Charlotte, North Carolina?
I'm sorry that no one is handing you this revolution in a pretty package with a glossy MTV-esque video to match. It's here and it's happening, with or without your permission or awareness. Maybe you're trying to find better ways to steal, but I'm finding wonderful music from around the world.
You first. Thanks.
The first thing is the case brought against the norwegian for breaking DVD protection. Now there are too issues here. One is that what he did is not actually illegal in Norway (as I understand the issue). This is indeed a nasty abuse of power by big government. Bad big government, no biscut! The other is the more general case, was what breaking DVD protection ok? Well, no not really, its only goal was violating copywrite, it had not productive use.
Gee, and I thought it's goal was to allow people to watch the movies they legally purchased. What's wrong with that? Just because they wanted to watch them with Linux, not MacOS or Windows?
A party for internet concerns?
Heh.. the current political parties would no doubnt outlaw it one way or another.
Hello again Mr. MP3'sPrimaryPurposeIsPiracy Troll.
DeCSS's goal was to allow people that had purchased players for their computers and DVDs to use them from an OS other than Winduhs. The DVD makers are the last people that should be complaining about it, since it means more people (eg, me, I have no use for something that only works under Winduhs) would buy their stuff. But the more I watch the world spin down the tubes the more I think the Amish and the Luddites were right.
Damnit folks, all we need is a few days of coordinated effort. It hurts a bit, but I haven't seen any movies in theaters, rented or bought any videos in any format, or purchased any music that were produced or provided by any MPAA or RIAA members since this started blowing up. If more people did the same THEY would begin to notice that THEIR obscene profits were suffering.
And no, I haven't bothered pirating THEIR content either, I have simply DONE WITHOUT.
City dwellers, for example, have long known that if you are being assaulted on a street, the quickest way to get cops on the scene isn't to yell 'Rape!' or even 'Fire!'. If you need a cop fast, throw a brick through a store window.
Umm, you've wandered onto the wrong site. I think you want the Urban-Legend newsgroup. Maybe try deja.com.
Quit whining, and import a scanner from overseas, or get one in the USA and mod it yourself. www.qrz.com has a bunch of instructions on modifying ham radios.
Why do people sit and whinge about Katz?
I can't stand his articles either and I have the way he uses Slashdot as a personal soapbox when ordinary users can't. It's not democratic.
But you can solve this....... create an accound, log in and set your preferences to ignore any articles posted by Katz.
No more will you be 'forced' to read his stuff and people who like his works (are there any?) won't be hassled by your whining
</public service broadcast>
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Today's
/ aftery2kmain.html
http://www.geekculture.com/geekycomics/Aftery2k
Just one more example of greedy multinationals shovelling the entrails of the poor and disenfranchised into the unslakable maw of the corporate fat cats.
puh-lease don't say puh-lease. it is not puh-leasing to the eyes or ears and will cause my minions to get rather ticked off and take measures
Enter the DirtMerchant
but after *I* read this thing, I am very impressed. With this law? NO. With the fact that the American Government manages to get ANYTHING done, good or bad. YES. Jeez-o-pizza, go look at the thing. I am no longer shocked that Clinton, on record, said "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is." This is what happens when the inmates run the assylums. It seems to me that this is squarely the result of a system that A)is created by lawyers B)argued by lawyers and C)judged by lawyers.
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
I don't know abou you but I only buy stuff that I like, anything else well... Man I can't believe that they get away with some of this though.
Did they send you the DECRYPTION KEYS (key words here), or did you misappropriate them? Satellite vendors are doing the physical equivalent of mailing out locked boxes to everyone under their satellite. Millions of locked boxes all locked with the same key (in the old days) to millions of people. Of course, I do not have the key to open the box, but is it illegal to break the lock on something sent directly to me without my asking? Is it illegal for me to show others how I broke the lock so they can break their lock too and look inside the box? If you don't want me looking at your stuff, keep it away from me. Don't send it to me, locked up in a box and pass laws that require me to ignore what your're flooding me with. Otherwise accept the risk that your mass mailed locked package will be opened by people not paying you for a key, *and* that it is legal for them to do so.
People should have a right to privacy. However, they give up that right in situations where they broadcast their conversations in a way that anyone can listen in. If they want a private conversation, they should use a landline phone or an encrypted cellular/digital phone. If you broadcast in the clear, expect to be heard.
Why not just throw the brick at your assailant?
This is a generation, mostly young, who've discovered that they could create their own culture on the Net, and get the music they wanted rather than pick only from the choices preselected for them by the music industry.
This snippet from Katz's article lays it out clearly. People can create their own culture. So, that means there should be microphones all over the place right? And musicians are cropping up all over the world and their original content is what's occupying all that bandwidth, right?
Therefore, those few scofflaws who are using the new technology merely to copy the work of others, rather than creating their own, should be cast out of 'the community,' because really we're all supposed to roll our own.
What percentage of Napster bandwidth is being used for this purpose? Surely the majority of the bandwidth isn't just being used to shuttle previously released work all over the net...
How many of you own a high quality microphone? You're the only ones qualified to originate MP3's. (well, okay, you can use a MIDI keyboard or guitar and amp instead)
Everybody else can make personal copies of their CD's under "Fair Use" but you are in violation of copyright law (and stealing from the artists you supposedly admire) if you distribute the MP3 files to your friends. And further, it would be immoral to tie up all the bandwidth that's supposed to be used for exciting new orignal work.
I'm glad Katz made it clear in the statement quoted above where the line should be drawn. I wonder if he even has a clue what he said, however.
Does this mean if someone publishes a book with the letters in reversed order and provides a set of lens and mirrors (or whatever) to make it normally readable that it then is illegal under DMCA to learn reading backwards?? How ridiculous!
Perhaps this example could be used in court
As an employee of the IT units of a major university, I have a much more likely explanation as to why universities are shutting down Napster. It's the cost, stupid.
We pay by the gigabyte for our traffic, and Napster was costing us tens of thousands of dollars - and that was just since last August. So, we slapped on Quality of Service (QoS) controls on the router for the student network and bam, that was the end of the Napster problem. People can still use it, provided their combined usage doesn't exceed 50 Kb/s. And in case they try changing the default ports, we rate-limited the connections to the control servers to 1 Kb/s. Now, if we could just figure out the iMesh protocol....
DMCA, copyright issues - that's one hell of a mess we don't want to get involved in. We know there were people running warez ftp sites and trading MP3's long before Napster was born, but we decided early on we weren't going to go on MP3/warez search and destroy missions and would only act if a) someone actually complained or b) the illegal traffic (and yes, it is illegal, Jon) started affecting other people's network connectivity. We never received anything from the MPAA, RIAA, SPA or any other music/software industry hit squad. For us, it was all about cost and ensuring the campus network was usable for people doing real work and real research.
Now, that's one school's response to the Napster problem. Others schools have responded in different ways and may have responded because of threatening letters from the MPAA's legal goons. However, I'm willing to bet that for most universities shutting down Napster, the reason is the cost. So, you come off looking pretty stupid when you start spinning conspiracy theories about the DMCA, Napster and universities. Go back to Wired, Jon - you've got no credibility in the real tech community.
As someone else previously pointed out, there's an old William Gibson story that mentions offshore data havens on old oil rigs. Further, there's a group ("Nutopia", I think - check a search engine for more info) building their own island. And, of course, at least one corporation is now selling inflatable islands.
So what's my point? If you get more than 7 miles (or 200, depending on whose interpretation of international law you read) offshore, you are not in any jurisdiction. With a satellite feed, solar power, etc. you could have a self-sufficient geek colony. The DMCA is a US act - it's not internationally enforceable AFAIK.
You could create your own country, and then the whole software license thing is kinda moot.
Of course, you'd have to keep watch for pirates or invaders...
Just think about it - geek colonies dot the planet, using hydroponic and solar technology for food and power, accepting programming contracts via the internet to bring hard currency into the "geek commune"...
Come to think of it, wasn't there a thread a couple of days back about rich geeks wanting to put money back into OpenSource? Certainly, forming our own country is a way to help O/S...
But cellular never promised this! The lying cellular radio companies implied it by calling their product a "phone", when in actuality it was cellular switched CB radio with 666 channls (really! Later 832 then 2412 channels), only the celluar compamy controlled the channel use and switching. WHEN DID ANY PROMISE OF PRIVACY OCCUR? I MUST HAVE MISSED IT. It's cellular radio, RADIO, as in broadcast. When you talk on a radio, you must be careful of what you say, not go lobby congress to make other people using their ears illegal.
If the record companies don't offer you the business model you want, does that give you the right to break the law?
I sympathise - I'm into techno as well and have found dozens of artists through MP3s - but that doesn't give me the right to do what I do. I do it knowing that it's against the law. And I go out and ACTUALLY BUY the CD if I like the artist to sort of make amends (yes, even if it's a $40 import).
The "it's too expensive, but I'll steal it anyway" argument is inconsisent: you're hurting not just the record companies, but the artists who make this music too. Yes their portion of revenue is comparatively small, but that is irrelevant - they still deserve that portion.
To me, this is just impatience with entrepreneurs to find a workable (legal) and innovative solution to this problem.
It *will* happen. That's what the corporations are afraid of - their power will be eroded by entrepreneurs because they're too big to move quickly & innovate. They WILL be held hostage to the small frys who figure out how to properly use electronic music distribution while making money.
Intellectual property law is not destroyed by the internet - to believe so is to be dangerously naive. The current implementation of IP law *may* be unsuited to this new technology, but throwing out the whole notion of intangible property will be dangerous in a world of scarce skill & talent.
-Stu
Baron Thompsonov you naive little man.
How do you figure the DCMA is not a conspiracy? The MPAA, RIAA, software companies, ASP's, ISV's, VAR's, and a host of other TLA's want nothing more than to turn us into a herd of corn-fed consumers who happily suck down anything they put before us, then do it again in six months to three years. The MPAA and especially RIAA are more than willing to bitch slap their own golden geese to keep their eggs flowing. Restricting us to a narrow list of things we can do with "their" property is exactly what they want, and whether or not there was direct communication between them (I believe there was), they have conspired to strip us bare, all the while telling us we like it.
As for Napster being a bandwidth hog, many of us will only accept first-hand accounts from real university admins who have lived through this, not second/third/fourth hand recollections, half-truths, and rumors! I am willing to acknowledge that it is a big bandwidth hog, but then again so is your netgame of Quake, or listening to an internet radio station, making a voice-over-IP call, or browsing a graphic-heavy webpage.
Banning is not the answer. It is an arms race which can only end in tears, mutual distruction. Banning is a cheap-shot, cop-out, circle-jerk answer. The only real answer is bandwidth limiting and restrictions, not outright denial. But they won't do that. Another conspiracy?
Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Several folks have posted about MP3s being important or justified because they provide an alternative to the ridiculous mark-ups that record companies add to CDs.
Others have responded, citing high production costs encountered by DIY bands as evidence that CDs are actually expensive to produce.
Well here's a real-world example of a small label pressing and selling CDs at well below the prices that major labels are charging, and they've been doing it for more than ten years. (Note also that their price of US$10 for a CD includes shipping and handling!)
Why do the major labels, pressing discs at thousands of times the volume of a small label like Dischord, charge so much more?
The DMCA wouldn't have anything to do with their desire to preserve these huge margins, would it?
But it will never change policy in your favor, and would more than likely get you branded as a kook with nothing of importance to say.
That's exactly what the system wants you to think, that radical forms of protest don't work. That's ridiculous. Some people may think you're a kook (although they're not usually open-minded to begin with) but even they know *why* you did it. And next time, before you make an assertion like that, be sure you've done your homework. The recent occupations at UW-Madison, UMich-Ann Arbor, and UPenn were successful in forcing their universities to drop out of the corporate sham that is the Fair Labor Association and provisionally join the Workers Rights Committee. And what about the 10,000 person occupation in Ecuador? That succeeded in forcing the president to step down.
Hell, this is just what I can remember off the top of my head from the last few months.
No, these aren't 100% wins, but they're steps in directions that wouldn't even occur if these sit-ins never taken place. Don't be so quick to dismiss such an incredibly effective form of protest.
Michael Chisari
Come to think of it, wasn't there a thread a couple of days back about rich geeks wanting to put money back into OpenSource? Certainly, forming our own country is a way to help O/S...
As far as funding open source programmers goes, I don't think creating a whole *country* on an island is necessary (if it is, why not just revolt against our government? it's worked in chiapas, mexico so far), instead why not solicit donations from rich geeks with the intent of starting housing cooperatives? Take a small, old house, pack it full of geeks who are willing to live on a budget, along with all the computer equipment and internet access necessary to create really cool stuff, and see what happens.
If costs are shared properly, and donations are sizable enough, it could alleviate the necessity for a fulltime job. And as any geek knows, it's a lot easier to write free software when you're working 25 hours a week as opposed to 50-60 hours.
Michael Chisari
Very simple.....
I was getting annoyed at his posts and then suddenly remembered the options in my users wassname..........
So I told people what they could do and then did it myself.
This reply has come about because I just had a look at tmy user information to see how things are set-up and noticed I'd been moderated as flamebait for an article that was actually written to be informative
Hohum
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
I'd just like to clarify that this post was not meant as flamebait (and dosn't read as such to me) It was an honest attempt to explain to people how to stop getting articles they aren't interested in.
;)
I'm not sure why I bother sometimes
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun.
(Note: I am not a lawyer, and any claims I make here here are solely based on my personal interpretation of the DCMA. Please contact a real lawyer if you believe that the DCMA directly affects you. Thanks)
Mr. Katz makes a significant claim that colleges and universities around the country are banning Napster on their campuses because of rampant copyright violations involving the software. Nothing could be further from the truth. Napster is being banned because is uses exceessive amounts of common bandwidth. Schools which have banned Napster have reported usages from 40% to as high as 90% of all commodity internet traffic is Napster based traffic. This is why institutions across the country are banning the use of napster on their networks, not copyright concerns.
Mr. Katz claims that copyright infringement is main reason that Napster has been banned. Yet there has not been a single verifiable case of an institution being sued or threatened with a suit by copyright holders under the DCMA. The content providers I've discussed this with have assured me that the reason that they are banning Napster is the bandwidth issue, and has little to nothing to do with copyright conerns. In fact, the DCMA specifically forbids blanket suits against access providers such as ISPs and universities. If a copyright holder becomes aware of any number of copyright violations, they must contact the access provider with specific locations of the infringing materials and give the provider adequate time to remove the infringing materials. This provision was instituted to prevent copyright holders from forcing access providers to be their policeman, constantly monitoring their networks for infringing material. The DCMA puts all the onus on the copyright holder, not the access provider.
The RIAA and other copyright holders are currently engaged in a suit again the producers of Napster under the accusation that the program was expressly designed to violate copyright. The suit is largely spurious and will probably be dismissed in court. (It is not a crime to own a tool that could theoretically be used to break the law but also has legal uses. Only the use or intent to use the tool illegally is a crime)
Mr. Katz's implication that Universities, Colleges and ISPs are banning the use of Napster because of copyright concerns is patently false and every currently available piece of evidence supports this. If he can come up with evidence that show this is not the case, I would appreciate his presenting it, as it would important in case of a possible suit against copyright holders for violation of the policing provision of the DCMA.
FWIW: I agree. Not all Jon Katz's posts are worth while but this one is, I would say. Anyway, whining about his articles never makes sense.
I think you've missed Mr. Katz's point: actually publishing online and allowing citations and links really does mean relinquishing income from reprint, royalty and subsidiary rights. You're not limiting the viewer to just viewing your work: you're encouraging them to use it as part of a wider discussion, not all of which you own.
Allowing citations and links are important in order to get widespread public discussion, but destructive of one's hopes to republish your "collected works" later for additional income.
If you want to make money and have your work available on the net, grant only limited rights to the networked entity. O'Reilly did this with the Samba book, and therefor preserved my income from the dead-tree edition.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
many universities state very clearly that they will periodically monitor traffic on their networks. By using the network, it is assumed that you are aware of this.
Ha! Look at Walt Disney who made most of it's wealth on ripping-off old fairy tales (Cinderella... Snow White... Mulan).
Or listen to the (excellent) cartoon music penned by Carl Stalling (Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies); an encyclopedic well-timed patchwork of old European classical music.
Now, just TRY to fairly use either of those abovementionned products, and see the robed hordes divebomb you with subpoenas...
--
Horse pucky.
..., if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
...
(4) For purposes of this subsection, the term `interoperability' means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.
...
The explict clause allowing reverse engineering 'for compatability' holds no teeth.
DeCSS is reverse engineering 'for compatibility'. At least according to one Judge if the enforcement mechanism is there to prevent you from creating your own competing product then you can't reverse engineer the product.
Fair Use *is* clear. A law is vague until interpreted by the courts. The purpose of DMCA is to nullify Fair Use.
Thanks for playing. Now go FUD someplace else.
I have no doubt that most bands end up losing $$ burning semi-pro/pro quality CDs but let's atleast break down the cost so you're $10 doesn't look absurd:
Min purchase stamped CD's 1000 @ $2 per
Est. Min printing of cover art [w/Band Member doing artwork gratis] $2 per
Est. Studio time $2000
Est. Production $1000
I est about $7 per disk, ($7000 investment).
Now you have to sell 700 disks to break even.
Do you even have 700 hard-core fans? You're whole distribution channel is the venues you play.
What do you save with MP3's ?
Well first you don't have to do a whole album just a few of your best songs so:
Min: 0
Art: Gratis
Est. Studio time $400 per song
Est. Production $200 per song
Now you've got $600 invested and you have a distribution channel that relies on word of mouth and people with 'net access.
Now why would RIAA fear losing control of the Artists?
Why would DVD-CCA fear losing DVD Player 'market'?
Why is DMCA a very bad thing?
for the First, Last and Only Time, a JJJon Katz Double headerrrrr -- let'ss get rrrready to rrrrummbleeee!
In this corner, wearing the blue shorts with a green stripe, from Freedom, USA, Jon 'Wordy' Katz!!!!
In the other corner, wearing red and white shorts, with the blue band, from Order, D.C... the one and only Wealthy 'Administrator' Powers!
Is the big old mean DMCA limiting the distributing of MP3's by poor starving independent musicans that are looking to use the Internet to gain popularity? Or are devious computer users using MP3's to swap millions of copies of pirated music, deprivating poor starving artists (and agents and studio executives) from their cut of the profits?
Is the big old mean MPAA preventing DeCSS from being distributed to keep Linux users from being able to play DVDs on their computers, or are the evil 3L1T3 Linux Hackers trying to pirate DVDs, deprivating poor starving producers (and studio executives) from their cut of the profits?
It's all about framing the issue, folks.
Funny how the entertainment industry is hiding behind copyright laws as much as entertainment lovers are hiding behind the First Admendment. Seems to me neither side is knowledging the rights of the other, and, unfortunately, in the end, I bet the industry wins.
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Ambrose both had it wrong. "Free Speech" *and* "Copyright Law" are the first resort of scoundrels.
George Lee
Well said.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org)
Bowie J. Poag
I think that's only half true. Remove the record company middleman, but insert an internet middleman like MP3.com instead. (Okay, perhaps you won't bother with these services, but I believe a majority of consumers want a service that categorizes the music, profiles their tastes and interests, and "personalizes" the shopping experience.) MP3.com will make some money on those customer profiles and targeted online advertising, but more importantly they will profit by becoming the de facto channel for new artists to distribute digital music.
And then, like Amazon did with their "1-click shopping" and "affiliates" patent filings, MP3.com will have to defend their digital turf with whatever legal tools they have. Remember how cool Amazon used to be? Now they're the establishment. Funny how that works, huh?
<pedantic>You've mispelled "Dan Akroyd".</pedantic>
HTH! HAND.
Kind Regards,
Kind Regards,
Bruce
As a guy involved in the DVD issue, I've found out the hard way that the DMCA is of direct relavance to me and everyone else who is interested in opensource / reverse engineering/ free speech.
The more interesting parts (for me, at least) of the DMCA are those dealing with the legality of access control measures. This part of the DMCA basically makes it illegal to distribute any software or hardware device which overides some access control measure designed to protect copyrighted works. This type of law does nothing to prevent piracy, bits can be copyed just as easily. What it does do is limit poeple's ability to use *legal* copyrighted works in any way they choose (such as in OS Linux players).
Katz kind of dropped in the DeCSS example at the end with out explaining the legal foundation for it. The DMCA is so broad, however, that it would be difficult to cover it all.
-John
I eat dog. Free DVDs. Horray!
While I do agree that naptster was banned form universities becuase it hugs bandwidth, the fact is that the DMCA is a way for an organized and well funded group to get what they want from consumers (See CSS and the way it keeps UK DVD Drives pricey).
The creation of and subsequent prosecution of the poeple involved with DeCSS has *nothing* todo with copy protection. It has to do with control. Control over distribution, creation, and use of various media. It may not be a conspiracy. I mean we all know what the MPAA really wants ($$) but it leads to the limitation of our music, video, and written choices.
-John
I eat dog. Free DVDs. Horray!
I believe they are truly evil. They're giving capitalism a bad name, and I hate that.
No, you're idealising capitalism. They have no need to care about my needs whatsoever. They simply care about my purchasing practices. Capitalism is about numbers and money - nothing else. They are not giving capitalism a bad name by being unscrupulous... That's part of the game.
But what has to be admitted is that to a large degree and for a long time, it has *worked*. I would contend that the biggest reason all those artists can only distribute via MP3 (ie: they can't get a contract) is that they're music SUCKS.
I guess it depends on your understanding of what "works". I regard the music that most RIAA affiiated labels put out as manufactured crap, so no, it doesn't work for me.
Labels are not there to provide you with listening pleasure. They are there to manufacture music and "artists" which will suit your demographic, influence your purchasing choices and make sure you do business with them. They don't do that by producing "good music", they do it by producing "listenable and marketable" (what I would call) tripe.
Not everyone can get a contract nor needs one. Labels will only fund so much, and only if it's in their monetary interest. By getting out on your own and making some noise, you can get yourself some fans, and some leverage for a record deal. This is the ideal situation, where labels are used primarily for their distribution power.
Check out an Australia band called The Whitlams, who stayed very independent for a long time, built up a loyal fan base, and then went label shopping. It's an interesting story because they couldn't be bought out by the labels... THEY had the power in their dealings, and the labels were afraid of that. Most cases, labels simly use artists, in this case, it was the artists using the label.
If you're happy with the target marketed crap you're being dished out, by all means believe what you do. If you want artists to be able to get out from under the suffocating lump that record labels have put on the industry, support OTHER MEANS OF HEARING THESE ARTISTS AND LETTING THEM BE HEARD.
Normally I ignore people like you, but hell it's early and I'm bored.
First of all, exactly why do you think Katz's writing sucks? Be specific, use examples. Is it poor spelling? Poor grammar? Poor article organization? Just what is it you don't like?
Second, the only occurances of the word "rampage" that I found on the page were the three in your post. Perhaps you should rethink your script idea.
Third, this topic is certainly "stuff that matters". Of course you wouldn't know that since you didn't read the article. You saw it was posted by Jon Katz and flamed away.
So, what your saying, basicaly, is that it's OK for the government to make bad, unconstitutional laws, beacuse you can always just break them?
That is about the most braindead thing I've ever heard.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I can't believe the big deal made about such a lossy compression like mp3. It really sounds like crap
.wav file and decompressing to the soundcards waveform buffer produce the exact same waveform, unless you have some kind of fucked up sound card (or slow-ass computer. Are you using DirectSound with winamp on a slow computer?)
Scientific testing has proved otherwise
you can get "modest" playability out of an mp3 if you decompress it and play it back as a wav file
This proves you don't know what you're talking about. Decompressing to a
When I first got my computer hooked up to this nice stereo I bought for my dorm, I could really, really tell the difference between MP3 and CD sound. But it turned out that the audio coming off the CD player was a lot higher in volume then the mp3s. I adjusted the levels, and it turned out the two sounded almost exactly the same. Also, a 196kbit/sec MP3 is, for most cases, indistinguishable from a real sample.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Ayn Rand is wrong. Fundamentally. If you can't appreciate that, then that's to bad.
Music corporations don't produce music; they merely buy it and sell it. And rape people on both sides of the equations. You pay $15 for a CD, and the artiest gets a quarter. It is severely fucked up, and, if you weren't in your "Ubercapitalist" mode of religious thinking. You would see that too.
Of course, the movie companies are in a different situation; as they produce there own art (witch costs huge amounts of money to produce). The situation isn't so clear-cut, but no one should ever be able to take away are constitutional rights just to be able to make more money.
Additionally, your post embodies the major (though not always true) criticisms of Jon Katz's articles: Verbosely pointless. What was your thesis? "This is bad, but not really that bad. It's complicated". I Think you stated it in the second to last paragraph, but I'm not really sure... Of course, this is the kind pompous, and intellectually immature stuff I would expect from a follower of the church of Ayn Rand.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
There's one problem here. Real Geeks(TM) all know that protesting for protesting's sake is no way to get something recognised compared to a polite means of dealing with it, or reported their /real/ earnings to the IRS.
Seriously though, there's very little else on the planet that annoys me more than bandwagon-ism, the idea of going out and chaining oneself to railings to "protest"; it doesn't mean anything other than "I can get a crowd of clueless morons to support me". As for trying to block lorries coming out of France... run them over, plain and simple!
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
There are IP's that aren't patents, but restrict users in ways similar to patents. For instance, reverse-engineering restrictions (basically restrictions on reading and thinking), are from a practical point of view a restriction very similar to patents, since they attempt to prevent some reimplementations of ideas, as opposed to the copyright-like restrictions on distributing duplicates of a specific implementation of the same ideas. Because of that, there are some patent-like IP's that the Open Patent License covers--there's little use in a patent cross-license agreement that is intended to solve some of the problems of software patents if the intent can be thwarted by reverse-engineering restrictions.
Perhaps the Open Patent License should also address these sorts of restrictions on access to a copyrighted document/work.
(Just to be clear, I don't agree with these sorts of restrictions on reading and thinking, and I doubt they'll hold up in court. But even if the US laws are eventually overturned in court or they're legislatively changed to become more sane, that's no reason not to address the same issues in a related IP license that doesn't limit itself to the US, especially since the US unfortunately doesn't have a monopoly on senseless IP laws.)
Yes the primary purpose of mp3 has been to allow easier distrobution of audio for indie artists. But the primary use has been to pirate audio.
Predestination was doomed from the start.
They [...] want to control our minds in a way that Orwell may have not imagined at all'
Actually, George Orwell did imagine something like this. Several passages in 1984 describe machines that churn out mind-numbing novels, poetry and other forms of entertainment that was acceptable to the establishment. Ordinary people are not permitted any sort of expression. The story begins with the protagonist breaking the law by beginning a journal. In this case, the establishment was government rather than business interests, but the difference isn't significant.
That said, I find the content cartels considerably less terrifying than the organization in Orwell's novel... so far.
href=http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/Sa muelson_IP_dig_eco_htm.htm
This law was destined for a courtroom.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
<>
Student radicals in the 60s (and others) learned early that the real law of the land is designed to protect businesses, not individuals. City dwellers, for example, have long known that if you are being assaulted on a street, the quickest way to get cops on the scene isn't to yell 'Rape!' or even 'Fire!'. If you need a cop fast, throw a brick through a store window.
It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone: look at who makes the laws, who interprets them, and then see how they got into those positions. How many 'grass roots' candidates supported by students or other groups outside the establishment elite have been elected to national political office? Who today remembers John Anderson, Senator Muske, and who ten years from now will remember John McCain? Few. How many get elected twice? Fewer. The rule is simple: business spends a lot of money and in return their voice carries further and faster than does yours or mine. Notwithstanding the moral issues, isn't this exactly what one would expect?
This is now and always has been a 'market economy' in which money is the currency not only of commerce but of politics as well (understandably: from an historical viewpoint it can be argued that, in many countries including the United States, the real purpose of politicians is to make sure that commerce is interrupted as little as possible.)
I'm not belittling you nor making fun of this or any other idea. But free software supporters are now making the same mistakes that 60's radicals made, and are following the same path to societal and historical oblivion. Nice ideas have finite lifetimes because the vast majority of us don't care. The real way to change the world is, apparently, to buy it.
Mike
"Jon Katz, you ignorant slut," was a reference to an old Saturday Night Live routine (way back when it was funny). It's what Bill Murray would say to Jane Curtin at the newsdesk when she gave opinion segments.
:)
It wasn't supposed to be serious.
I can't help but notice that Napster, being the epitome of software that violates the DMCA, is nevertheless flourishing. The powers that be in Congress and the recording industry have decided that their intellectual property must be protected with the full power of the law. Instead, things seem to be backfiring for them and the law is weakened in the process (something which I do not thing is a good thing.) By passing legislation that attempts to prohibit certain means of distribution the industry is engaged in a kind of Operation Foot-Bullet, bringing publicity to the fact that their goods are easily copied and even what software to use. In the process, the law that they spent so much to get passed is being proven to be largely ineffectual. This leads to decreased confidence in the ability of the nation-state to protect corporate profits, something which may or may not be a good thing in the long run. But either way, the distributed and open nature of the Net has put another small chink in the armor of the nation-state. We'll see how many chinks it takes to bring the whole fucking thing to its knees.
- Rev.This statement is being made about the UCITA as well, I think that the gist of the argument is this: Open source projects often need to be able to compete against entreched programs such as Microsoft Word. Using this as an example, a Linux office suite is created, which will read and modify Word files. This Linux software is used to promote Linux as a viable office workstation solution (no need to worry about your office being incompatible with other offices/old documents). Microsoft sees this and decides to encrypt their file format. Now, to be compatible, you would first have to defeat the encryption, but doing do is now illegal. Because Microsoft already has x amount of the word processor market, no one wants to use something that is not compatible, but nothing can be made which is compatible. Translate this to any program which works on data files, and you can see that this could certainly be a problem for getting things like Linux adopted.
This article by Richard Stallman has the situation described well.
Foxfire
Those who can, do. Those who can't, apparently wind up somewhere in Congress.
in history, there is a pattern that can be seen when a new advance in technology/philosophy comes out and is in prominence, it ends up changing the ruling caste structure.
And every time, there some type of a "struggle" or fight to ouster the old powers that be.
People in control, do not like to lose control.
In the industrial revolution, a new group of people came into power. Thus, the industrial revolution. Of course, during this, there were many fights over workers rights, and eventually, the "good guys" (the workers) pretty much won.
Look at the printing press - that revolutionized mass dissemination of information, too.
Today, the old media pretty much ru(i)ns this country. The art (and therefore the culture) is controled through a ridiculously high barrier to entry (high cost) of mass producing media. Under the old system, if you made a song/movie/book, the only way to mass distribute it was through the various large record companies/movie studios/publishing houses.
TOday, you can reach millions with very very little marginal cost.
That scares teh hell out of the mass media outlets. They've lost control, and are now trying to regain control by erecting artificial barriers.
All of this isnt about stopping pirating of content, its about stopping creation of "un-official" artwork.
We're at a very exciting time in this world, but dont expect the next couple of years to be easy... The old media will not be replaced without a fight.
... hi bingo
I have to disagree with you. If it all really comes down to theft, why has the RIAA not spent its time developing a method whereby consumers can LEGALLY download music?
I'll tell you: It's because this has absolutely nothing to do with piracy. The piracy issue is nothing more than a smokescreen to get media attention. (and it's working!)
The threat to the RIAA is that MP3's challenge their absolute control of the music distribution chain. If someone can directly distribute music (legal or otherwise) over the internet, they can do so without involving the RIAA and the rest of the middle men.
It isn't about theft, it's about CONTROL.
----- Leghorn "Not responsible for program content"
The DCMA seems to me to be restricting the use of corporate cultural stuff.
How does it restrict, say, my making mp3s of my own (as in "I wrote and performed it") music?
Let them keep their crap.
I haven't been to a movie in months, and it isn't because I'm boycoting them, it is because, on many, many evenings, I've had something I'd rather do.
I hardly watch television anymore - too busy doing my webs and sculpting and hanging out with people.
The DCMA, as far as I can tell, is the corporate type's way of regaining control of their own content. Which, by and large, is lame corporate content. Let them have it. Let's make our own, and control it as we see fit. I'm not proposing starting anything, I'm pointing out what's already happening. The open source movement is one place where we are already doing it. Open source isn't about making a version of Word that we don't have to pay Microsoft for, it is about new, better, more personal content, with heart. The homebrewers are doing it with beer, also because we can do it better, more personal, with heart, and cheap. There are lots of others. I'm doing it here - I'm providing your content instead of, oh, I don't know, the New York Times.
There is a split between the personal and the corporate. The split is getting wider every day. The DMCA widens that split, and that is OK with me.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
I don't mean for this to sound like a troll, but I am really stunned at the complete nonsense in this article.
Simply put, I think it's very clear that independent music is simply part of the collateral damage done by the RIAA and others seeking to protect their copyrights. Sure, taking out a distribution method rather than the distributors (as is the case with trying to shut down Napster) is overly-broad and therefore unacceptable. But if the RIAA wanted to cut down on the average person's ability to distribute their own music, they'd be targetting mp3.com. I really don't agree with Katz's implication that this is a matter of the RIAA playing the part of culture-gestapo.
I guess I'll have to use Katz's words against him; he says "Central to the [DMCA] is a clause making it illegal to thwart copyright protection methods through the use of software or hardware." What's wrong with that? I don't see anyone complaining about the fact that it's illegal to pick the locks on the front door to one's house.
I am very, very concerned with privacy issues and I don't see a problem with the wording or intent of the DMCA. If/when it starts to be abused (which may already be the case) and that abuse is upheld in higher courts, then I will be concerned.
The big question, though, is where you build this Utopia, and how you protect it from the outside world.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
"I can't stand his articles either...
But you can solve this....... create an accound, log in and set your preferences to ignore any articles posted by Katz."
Just to be difficult how are you reading this one?
or are you only pretending that you hate him to toe the party line and secretly do not filter out his stuff?
The ac's are just trollin' because they like it (truely takes all kinds). But why are there so many people talking about how they filter out his stuff and then post in the articles that are filtered out?
Help me solve the mystery.
Here's my take on the whole MP3 biz.
:)
:)
I want good music. I don't want to spend a lot. I want the actual people who *create* the music to benefit. And, I want it all to be easy. This is what MP3 can be about (and it is about, check out mp3.com).
So why is everybody pirating music? Simple. Record producers have spent millions of dollars telling us what we want to hear. Like it or not, that sort of advertising does work, and people (myself included) have trouble getting over the notion that, if a band hasn't been advertised all over the place, they're probably not good. Naturally, it is going to take time for people to discover the "other" musicians out there. In the meantime, people still want the music they have been told is good.
Ever wonder why the RIAA always goes after the means of distribution and not the distributors? (example, they want the mp3 format made illegal, not just pirate mp3s. They want napster shut down, not just cleaned up). The RIAA is well aware of the fact that there is lots of good music out there, and lots of musicians who would love to give their music away (or charge a few bucks/album). This is the RIAA's real problem. They no longer have a strangle hold on music distribution. The one thing they have left is that people still want the music they produce. When their music is no longer available on napster, they are truly fucked, because it means people have discovered the "other" music out there. It's my bet you'll never see the RIAA go after pirate music, just music distribution in general. They don't want people to discover the alternatives. And as long as forums like napster are flooded with pirate mp3's, people won't.
Anyway, the whole point is that the RIAA is not needed. They don't create any music, they just distribute and advertise it and make $15 for a $16 album (the other dollar goes to the artist, minus $.05 which goes overseas to the poor schmucks packaging cd's, but thats another story).
MP3's allow small bands to produce and distribute their music world wide for free. If you need proof of this, go to mp3.com and browse for a while. Sure, a lot of it is crap, but a lot of it is also really really good.
And, if you want to really scare the RIAA, *DONT PIRATE THEIR MUSIC*, plunk down a few bucks for somebody else's music. That will have them shitting bricks
Hope this is somewhat legible, its hard to write anything longer than "First Post!!!" in this damn little box
Cheers!
Shut up Katz
Too, blocking Napster doesn't have anything to do with blocking our users from accessing free music. We watched Napster traffic; the predominant use was for swapping illegal copies of copyrighted material. Anyone who doubts this is welcome to take a look at the traffic analysis I did using sniffit. I don't know all of the bands captured, so I can't authoritatively state that every instance was that of illegal activity, but it looks to be the lion's share. (Unless Korn, the Backstreet Boys, etc., are suddenly quite altrustic.)
Finally, while I can't speak to tying media to one platform, the "clause making it illegal to thwart copyright protection methods through the use of software or hardware" does nothing to prevent the free exchange of legal, non-copy-protected content. The garage band can upload their material free of copy protection, and the 'net generation can still do its thing. (www.mp3.com) What it *does* do is make illegal the practice of 'cracking,' from which it seems nothing is immune. (Found a copy of Quark XPress installed on one of our lab computers the other day. It had been 'cracked' - the "crack" program was still in the directory with the executable - presumably to bypass the dongle copy protection.)
I'm not saying every conceivable instance of these technologies has been used for ill. Just the vast majority of them, in my experience. For every laudable example of someone cracking DVD encryption so titles can be watched under Linux, I can point to fifty warez sites (addresses snagged by our proxy server) where the latest key generators and crack utilities for the hottest software are kept.
I'm no huge fan of big business / corporate interests. But illegal is illegal. If I were, say, Adobe (a common target), I'd be pretty peeved if you were tossing around free copies of software I sold for $500. If your livelihood depended on sales of that software title, you'd probably be pretty peeved, too.
geek. lawyer.
All that "federal crime" means is that it's a law passed by Congress, not a single state, and as such is exactly the same everywhere. Federal felonies are no more severe by nature than state felonies. I'm not saying this is fair, but "federal felony" could mean ANYTHING set by Congress to be against the law. That doesn't make it any more severe.
-- "Of course the meek shall inherit the earth. They're welcome to it. As for the rest of us - Pavonis Mons, here we c
Well, are there any alternatives for the entertainment industry? How can you convince a party to repeal a solution without supplying an alternative that qualms their concerns and your own. People with more power never compromise through antagonistic efforts.
Personally, I think the music industry should have simply flooded the mp3s in circulation with poor quality partial cuts for those artists with material they wanted to protect through copyrights. Songs would be able to be previewed and invested in if enjoyed, and who wants to listen to 8kbit 11khz mp3 for any extended period of time?
I don't know if both parties concerns can be collaborated, but without any viable alternatives, there won't be much success in eliminating any negative inroads that the DMCA has into free speech.
I don't think the DMCA can really make a big difference in the end.
Are you sure of that? How familiar with the DMCA are you? It basically gives companies the right to sell us medium with data on it without our having access to it by our own means. If we find some DeCSS-like way of getting at the data, we will be commiting a crime.
But at the end of the day, someone will always crack any code.
Don't be so sure of that, either. These people are wising up fast. Especially now that the whole DeCSS thing is out, I'm sure they know that they need to find more foolproof ways to secure their data. Both we and they know it's possible, too. Take Quake 3 and Divx. In each of these systems, a centralized information server prevents people from pirating either (well almost). In Q3 you can't even connect to an internet server without your key being checked by id's q3 authentication server at least 2 times (once by your client and once by the server you're connecting to). And Divx, you can't watch movies unless it can connect to a server every 3 days (or something). If it couldn't connect to the server, it wouldn't operate until a connection was established. Of course in the case of q3, if you disconnect from the internet then you can play single player or multiplayer over a lan and with divx i'm sure there was some hack in the works to prevent the box from disabling itself but you see my point, i hope. The means to foolproof encryption exist.
"Perspective is lost in the spirit of the chase."
At least there is some justification for the descrambling laws; if you are watching a broadcast that you have refused to pay the going rate for, you are stealing the service. The law making it illegal to receive clear-channel cellular transmissions is in an entirely different category, because it is not aimed at preventing theft of service, it is a fiction aimed at creating an illusory layer of protection for privacy. As any cryptanalyst will tell you, sometimes bad protection is worse than no protection.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This is "insightful" at the least.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Making it unlawful to receive clear-channel cellular phone transmissions is ludicrous. An analog phone broadcasts its EIN in the clear, which is why "cloning" attacks are so easy. This is only possible because the cellular companies decided it was cheaper to substitute the fake security of a legal "solution" for the true security of an encrypted data channel between the phones and the cells. How many billions in stolen service have they lost because of this? No doubt, more than enough by now to have paid for upgrading the protocol.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
We should not fail to grasp the international context in which DMCA has been instituted.
It won't be long before the US will threaten Europe to death to implement it too. All around the world, I see Mickey Cantor and his friends threatening third world countries, including China, to adopt DMCA or else be at war, (economically) with the US.
Will the war be economical alone? I doubt it. Copyright issues will increasingly be the true reason behind military interventions, coups d'état, dictatorial regimes installed to for the purpose of enforcing DCMA, and millions of people dying of starvation and disease in putrid poverty.
Give me a break. How are your rights being infringed on by not being able to listen into other people's private phone calls. Those frequencies are reserved for Cellular phone calls, and the law is there to protect people's privacy. The option of having the transmissions encrypted would be good, if it were practical. At the time Cell phones were taking off the technology was very expensive. I don't know the history, but I also expect that had the Cell phone companies tried using encryption, they would never have gotten it by the FCC at the time. Their only real choices at the time were to implement it without encryption, or not to produce the technology.
Now we're at a point that the technology to encrypt the communications is relatively inexpensive, however it's too late to change now. The current equipment is already in widespread use. You can't just tell everyone with a Cell phone that they have to throw that one away and buy a new one that works with encrypted communications.
Personally, I consider the law prohibiting you from listening in on Cell phone transmissions to be a reasonable restriction to protect the privacy of Cell phone users.
The issue of digital cellular brings up another problem. The ability of encrypting the communications in a cost effective manner was availble when digital cellular was being implemented. However, what level of encryption would you have them use. How long will it be before anything they could have practically implemented to provide real-time encryption would be cracked? I'm no expert on these issues, but I expect that by the time something goes through the several year development cycle, then takes a year or so to get approved by the FCC, then takes a while to get implemented and accepted. What was reasonable at the time it was designed, is no longer worth the effort.
Decryption technology doesn't stand still, while the encryption technology has to in order to provide interoperability with the phones and the system. You can try and update how things work every couple years while insuring backwards compatability, however that adds a significant expense to the system and the phones. If also doesn't protect people who don't buy new phones every couple of years.
Laws making it illegal to listen into someone else's phone calls can't prevent people from doing it any more than laws prohibiting theft and murder prevent roberies and murder. However, I think that people do have a right to privacy, and that people who invade that privacy by intercepting their private conversations should be punished.
People should have a right to privacy. However, they give up that right in situations where they broadcast their conversations in a way that anyone can listen in.
I understand that you feel this way, but that's not how the laws in the US work. There are wiretapping laws that make this illegal, and personally, I'm in favor of those laws.
Nope, the law actually undermines your privacy. It's a stupid and unenforceable law (you can't detect whether or not someone is listening), and, of course, it does not apply to government and police agencies.
/. say that the 40 bit encryption used in the DVD format was to weak to be considered a reasonable attempt, but at the time it was the strongest encryption that could be implemented in an exprotable product.
I agree that the average person gains little from this law. I suspect that the law does get enforced when people are caught using information they gained by this means for illegal purposes.
ie. Someone gets caught for credit card fraud, and they find out during the investigation that they got the credit card number by listening in on cell phone calls.
I also think that it's just as illegal for the police to use a scanner to listen to cell phone calls, without a warrant, as it is for an individual. That does provide protection, as long as the police are law abiding.
As for cell phone companies giving their customers a false sense of security, I'm sure they do try to do that, and I'm sure they succeed for the most part. However, I don't think that their misleading comments are what's undermining my privacy. It's the people who are breaking the law, and listening in.
It provides a disincentive for the cell phone companies to actually use good encryption, not that they would want to do so anyway.
What provides the disincentive is that the FCC would likly block any cell phone implementation the includes encryption. Even though wiretaps require a court order, the government still wants to be able to implement that wire tap easily and conveinently. The government has proven many times in the past that they are willing to sacrifice our privacy in the name of being able to "track down criminals."
I agree there's a problem, but I think you're pointing your finger in the wrong direction when you blame the cell phone companies.
Yes but you shouldn't lie to people and tell them they are having private conversations when they use cell phones, either.
Agreed, but getting rid of the law won't solve the problem.
So, your only option is to use a good defense like strong encryption.
This doesn't address the problem that it takes considerable time to develop and implement these systems, and the definition of "strong encryption" changes constantly. I've heard many people on
Considering the paranoia that exhists in law enforcment any time encryption is mentioned, it's going to be hard to get FCC approval for any system which provides any significant encryption. The current laws against intercepting cell phone calls do little to prevent determined criminals. However, the threat of even a nearly unenforcable law does deter some, and making the equipment illegal will make it possible to prosecute others. When it comes down to it, the laws, while not an ideal solution, seem to be better than not having the laws to me.
Funny, you said it was what Microsoft was learning... I thought it was Netscape that was the goat of that lesson.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
Guys on one point I have to disagree, when in college and ftping MP3's from sites I knew it was wrong, I was breaking laws that protect artists. That HUGE companies were making most of the profits off those artists is irrelevant. Downloading music off napster is no different from buying a book and reprinting it on the net without the author's approval. Even if the publisher makes most of the money it's still the artist that your ripping off. Now I still download music off the net and does that make me a hypocrit, yeah probably but I don't complain when the people who own the music tell me to stop stealing it cause they are just tring to protect there product.
Frode
z
I have no
Thanks to hotline, i've been able to listen to a lot of obscure, independent/small label stuff, some of which I have subsequently gone out and bought - I don't know how I would have been exposed to it otherwise, as the radio/tv promo channels are pretty much clogged with major label dreck.
Speak for youself, what do you mean "we", white boy? I don't want to "steal" music, but why should I have to spend $15-$20 (not "a couple bucks") for something when the creator of the product will only get pennies if anything? Of course I do this, I love music, but I would much rather pay the artist directly, not a bunch of totally useless middlemen. Sorry my friend, but it is you who are missing the point...
And you moderators are slippin!
Releasing songs in mp3 format is not interesting, since no one will be able to play them.
I didn't know that the MP3 standard was designed to disapear after a certain amount of time...
I think you're a bit paranoid: if a band wants to give away free music, they will encode it in a free format, with a player freely available in the net, so everyone will be able to play it freely on his computer.
And as for you, start browsing at +1. I'm so tired of you people and your bothering of the ACs on Slashdot. They can whine all they want, what gives you the right to tell them who they can flame, and who they can talk shit about?
Do yourself and the rest of us a favor, now that you're logged in, change your reading prefrences.
You're in a forest, there are exits to the north, the south and the west. In front of you reads a sign: "Do not feed the trolls"
Being a rising political force entails more than having a bunch of votes. You could give a bunch of monkeys the right to vote, but they would accomplish nothing because they don't have the grasp of the political system necessary to actually change things.
I think what was meant is that the geek community is finally getting public recognition. 10 years ago few people knew what a "geek" was or what one was like. We were like obscure, rare animals no one had ever come in contact with. Now we're more populous and more in the public view. People know about geeks. They know whar we're like, and most everyone knows a geek or two. We also are finally becoming organized, with public forums and such for geeks to unify their voices.. We've moved from lone hackers in the dark to a thriving online society.
So like any minority when grouped together into one voice, we now correspondingly have a say in things. Lawmakers will listen to us because they know that there are such things as "geeks" and that we are a viable group of people.
So instead of sitting back and doing nothing, as you seem to propose, we should AT LEAST try to get things moving in our direction. Even if we fail, at least we will have tried. That is one of the defining characteristics of a geek in my mind -- at least try to do it, even if it seems impossible.
Did Martin Luther King sit back and give up when his reforms were shot down time and time again by white opressors? No. He kept trying, and he made an incredible amount of progress in the end. (Note: I'm in no way comparing our plight to that of black opression, merely pointing out an example of how change in government can succeed.)
So call your friend at University student government. Tell them about software law. Write to your state and federal lawmakers. Let them know you care. Pass around petitions. Help get our rights back!
kugano
You claim that Napster violates the DMCA because it provides a way for students, people and their pet beanbags to bypass the "content control" in the music.
But.. what content control? MP3s have no content control whatsoever. Neither do CDs or audio casettes! So napster does not violate content control, thus it is not "illegal" in the same measure that DeCSS is "illegal".
Napster is a Distribution scheme that bypasses the RIAA's control and thus pockets. That's why they're getting sued -- because Napster makes it "easy" to foster copyright violations, not because they bypassed the anti-piracy measures that the RIAA set up.
Now what would happen if for every transaction on Napster the RIAA could get, say, $.15, much like audiocasettes and "music" CDs have said royalty imbedded in their prices? But of course, that would never do, they'd want the whole $15 for the "CD" or whatever. They're out to make money, after all.
And no matter how you look at it, piracy is still piracy and still (rightly) illegal. Send the artists money if you don't want to pay the record company, but otherwise you're just screwing the artists in the long run.
The only way out for the DMCA is to challenge it on a constitutional basis, not from the standpoint of greedy record execs. Because piracy is illegal. And reverse-engineering is perfectly legal, and the DMCA IS taking that away from us. Otherwise, the DMCA doesn't do much more than flesh out already-existing copyright laws.
- Pizza
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
Oh, come on. Is anyone actually attacking all MPEG audio files out there? The labels and copyright holders are going after people that are illegally duplicating and distributing their music. They aren't just blindly going after people who happen to be using the MPEG format.
There should be no reason that MPEG files that you make and give people permission to distribute would have any difficulty getting onto college campuses. They may very well want to limit that sort of thing to keep their network usage to reasonable levels, but that's it.
There's lots of music distribution going on right now from servers on college campuses which is completely legal. Sometimes it's MPEG audio files, sometimes it's much better sounding losslessly compressed CD quality audio. (Sorry, but I just don't like the sound of MPEG.) Very rarely, the college may send the server operator a letter asking what they're up to. Once the student explains that it's music which they have permission to distribute, they are free to continue. They may be asked to throttle back the bandwidth somewhat, but they're not going to be asked to stop just because the RIAA is complaining about all the pirates stealing the latest crappy pop songs.
There's lots of good music that's being legally distributed on the Internet these days, and the only resistance is the huge amount of bandwidth it takes up (we're talking 400 MB for one CD (74 min) of losslessly compressed music.) Anyone who says that this will kill legal online music distribution is either completely deluded, or just wants their fix of illegal MPEG audio.
Gumbo
What you can do right here, right now, is to go o to the Library of Congress page Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works ( http://www.loc.gov/copyright/1201/anticirc.html ), read the SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS and file a reply comment to the MPAA's or other pro-DMCA submission.
(moderators, I know this is redundant with the same info in another post I just made, but give me a break)
Why does the geek revolution have to be online? Why don't I see us taking to the streets? Getting into the minds of others? Because we're geeks. Not to stereo type anyone, but I've found that we were raised as the "good" kids for the most part, didn't act up, shy, humble. Brainwashed of our self-confidence, we couldn't take to the streets because we'd be embarrassed. Online we don't have to worry about anyone seeing us though. Maybe it's time that they did see us. We always said we didn't care what people thought of us. Then how bout we act on that. We just need to be organized. If you can promise a geek that there will be alot of others with them they'll be alot more likely to show up.
Stop eating the middle class jobs that the rich are throwing at us. Stop being a labor force and start being a political force. Realistically no one but geeks takes what's happening on the internet seriously, because it's not real for them. If we take it offline it will suddenly become very real to everyone.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Take them to small claims court. Nothing fancy, just ask for 3x the ISP fees you paid them, and a court order to reverse their stance. Make the ISP _Prove_ that you have done something wrong. Bring proof that you haven't.
Oh, And be sure you have read the agreement before hand. If their actions are not in line with their own agreement... well, the judge will likely side with you.
But chances are they will want to settle the moment they get the summons.
Empowering copyright protection on the Net doesn't have anything to do with inhibiting the spread of free music - unless, of course, you're talking about copyrighted material, in which case IT'S AGAINST THE LAW ANYWAY. Quit defending pirates as if they were First Amendment poster children - it's a disservice to the computing subculture.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Do us a little favor - tell everyone the name of your ISP, and let everyone who can read stay away from it like plague.
I urge everyone do this whenever we're in our rant mode - don't just tell us the bad policy of your university. Don't just tell us how your ISP censor the crap off your account.
Tell us THE NAME of these human right offenders so we have something for reference when we vote with our wallets.
Thank you.
Napster's been banned here at the University of Guelph in Canada, which is out of the juristiction of the DMCA. Without the threat of the DMCA it leaves us with just the bandwidth issue - so maybe it really is about the traffic, eh Jon?
hoser: Slashdot reader since 1987.
How many years will it be before a political party is formed in the US to represent internet concerns? They'd probably have an advantage once polls go online. It's hard to sustain voter apathy when you don't have to leave your machine to vote...
-- Chapman's Observation #1: Nothing is ever simple
Yes, I thought some of the regular /. readers might appreaciate that link :) Perhaps even more appropriately, try www.hotgrits.com for another grits related site.
I agree. Frankly, I don't agree with locke. However, we see eye to eye in some respects. Feudalism did not work, it died for the most part.
However, i do not agree that corporations will create a new type of feudalism, that, in and of itself, would be self destructive. The idea behind my political standing, if you would, is that in a truly free market, the corporations are forced into a hell of competition, forced to better themselves in order to survive. (Survival of the fittest, genetic law). I know, this is a near utopian viewpoint, as pure capitalism is impossible given current standards.
I guess, in all honesty, I, in current political methodology, lean towards a libertarian viewpoint. But, Being of a capitalist bent, I also realize the need for less government, small government, and the need for the government to stay out of our lives.
I said this in response to a different post, but, in all honesty, who can we blame for making the BILL into LAW?
It was not the companies who made this law, it was the government. I don't care about lobbying, the government should not have the power to pull actions such as these. It's ridiculous. So what if the corporations rail-roaded this, would this have happened if our strangely out-dated dinosaur-like government had even a modicum of respect for our rights, our freedoms? No. Would this have happened if the government had not had the power to shred our rights like so much wet toilet paper? No.
In the end, i find we disagree in ideologies, but we do agree in the simple matter: This DMCA does need to be repealed. it was a knee-jerk reaction, and an extremely unjust and bad one at that.
-Janus
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- I am Jack's throbbing caffiene-withdrawal headache...
Funny I should read this when I first get to work monday morning after spending the entirety of Sunday night reading the Illuminati trilogy, as well as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It creates a stewpot in my mind that begs to be posted.
The DMCA is, in fact, as put in another post, the last ditch attempt by large media conglomerates to fight the future (I don't know if this sentence has been patented yet, my bad). The future being an almost golden-apple scoiety.
The group of pioneers who opened this "inner space" called the internet could not forsee how far-reaching it would become. How, for many people, the internet has become thier source for friendship, love, learning, and growing. I for one, am one of these faceless people flying through cyberspace existing sometimes as only an IP footprint in a server's logs. The internet itself, exists in our minds, with our minds, it has become reality, a medium, through which, a free stream of thought and ideas may be passed.
Theoretically, those of a more intellectual bent are the ones that will use the internet to it's fullest potential, distributing thier works freely, for the rest of the community to alter, and improve. So comes the OSM (Open Source Movement), an exchange that allows intellectual property creators to freely exchange thier code, ideas and thoughts onto a 'net that will allow it to permutate and grow into something that may, one-day, change the world, and reality, as we know it.
Enter the lumbering beast of the Media Conglomerate and old-world corporation. being a person who supports Capitalism to an extreme (free market, little, or no, government) I find that sometimes my ideals and ideology come into question. Namely, how do we use the internet for what it has become, namely, a free exchange or ideas and concepts, material and immaterial, and still provide a free-market where corporations can make money providing certain IRL-material services, while also using the internet as it probably should be?
The answer is not simple. Media giants have a marketing-map which has worked for eons, provide a service, or a material good, and make money off of it, providing it to the common citizens. This, in and of itself, is a simple idea. But what happens when that material good comes to the point when providing it in the material plane no longer turns a profit due to a new "schema" that in turn, allows the private citizens to freely exchange, and re-distribute the works that the conglomerate provides?
The answer, once again, is not simple. it is not as simple as to say that the media giants do not deserve what they earn. That the media giants are nothing more than facets of a faceless "system" hellbent on controlling our lives, and making us purchase name-brand products while churning out endless amounts of new products, which the corporations may in turn, purchase, an re-distribute.
No, in fact, in many cases, the media giants are correct in defending thier proprietary works, due to the fact, they, in fact, DID create those works. They DID distribute those works. They provided a service, to someone, that allowed you to "burn that cd" or mp3 that song. After all, the chain begins somewhere, with someone purchasing that cd, and burning it into a new format.
however, in many respects, the corporation's method of thinking about this is flawed. I, for one, will never stop buying hard-copy cd's. I prefer sticking that magical piece of plastic into my car, my cd-player at home, etc, while curled up on the couch reading a good book (which this post is becoming). The corporations, however, do not see the good that can come from this situation. They do not see me, average joe-schmo using napster to download songs from the internet, listening to them, and the going out and purchasing the cds. because I understand someone DID have to work to create this product, therefore, I will help support thier creation by helping fund them in future endevors.
I for one, will probably never take songs I downloaded and burn them onto hardcopy. There is a simple reason. I don't have the time. Although i spend an average day of 15 hours or more sitting in front of a computer, I don't have the time to sit down, sort, format and burn music cds. it's that simple. Others, however, do.
In some ways, it is in the corporations' right to try to defend thier works. In many more ways, however, they are incorrect. They are like the man, who is stuck in cryogenic suspension for a hundred or more years, and then thawed. Would not that man have problems adjusting to the new age? What if, when he woke up, we lived in a society where no clothes were worn, and people wandered around wearing little plastic buttons that allowed then to instantly have an orgasm? Would he, the man, not have troubles coming to grips with the new reality? He would.
This, in essence, is what has happened. Seemingly overnight, the entire world has altered it's method of thinking, while, the corporations have been in a coma for all intensive purposes.
They are performing knee-jerk reactions to solve what they view as a problem. They are right, in some places, but mostly wrong. They must come to grips, change thier business schema, which, of course, has worked for centuries, alter thier course, and change with the times. This is not easily done, therfore, they are performing knee-jerk reactions, trying to fight the future, trying to fight the world instead of flowing with it like a plasmatic ever-changing organism.
The DMCA is like a child standing there, looking at you saying "Unless I get to be first to bat, I am taking my ball home". The government acts in much the same way. These halls, offices and cities are not filled with the intellectuals the internet is, they are filled with slow thinking dinosaurs that cannot understand the animal, the organism, which is the new society. Eventually, this will change, as those of us brave enough, will stand up to take the places of the old, changing the world as needed. However, by the time that happens, we too, will have become slow-thinking and possible dusty in the old attic. It is a generation gap, it is a time-gap.
All things change given time, all organisms grow, and alter thier makeup to adapt. It takes time however, and, with life moving as quickly as it is, time is of short order.
-Janus
Reccomended reading:
The Illuminatus Trilogy
-Robert Shea and Robert Wilson
ISBN: 0440539811
Cryptonomicon
-Neal Stephenson
ISBN: 0380973464
Atlas Shrugged
-Ayn Rand
ISBN: 0451191145
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- I am Jack's throbbing caffiene-withdrawal headache...
Are you aware that, on the preferences page, you can block all articles by a specific author? Failing that, you could just NOT READ articles by people you hate. So do us all a favor and just avoid Katz's articles in the future, rather than spewing hate all over the comments section.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
(Responses)
- The MPAA/DVDCCA doesn't want to stop Linux DVD players (tho they likely don't care about making sure one is available either) - but they do think they should have complete control over any software that is able to decode DVDs - meaning licensed players on Linux are possible - but that's where it becomes a matter of culture clash. To a lot of Linux users, it's not just a matter of "not wanting to" pay for a DVD player, for example, but not feeling they should have to - after all, if someone was clever enough to get an -unlicensed- player working, and it only takes a little extra effort to get it working, why on earth should someone have to buy a "Licensed" DVD decoder that can't be modified, shared, etc.?
- The reason the article was posted to Slashdot is, I expect, because it's a convenient starting point. As he mentioned, it will likely be re-distributed. It also helps to rally the people who are interested in doing something to directly change the situation.
1: Protest at the Academy Awards - I think the powers that be are strongly dead-set against anything like this happening at the awards. Short of an award winner slipping it into their acceptance speech, I don't think it'd work.
2: Hand out literature/stage protests at theaters, vid. stores, etc. - I don't think protesting is a good idea at all - hand out literature PEACEFULLY if the owner of the establishment allows you to do so. "Peaceful protest" is still a crime if, for example, it unfairly targets a person's business (video stores and theaters are more slaves to the motion picture industry than the other way around)
3: Spreading the word in the ticket lines/Call-in radio - standard "advocacy" rules apply here - no disinformation, so make sure you're up to speed on all sides of the story. No one's gonna be impressed you tell them about DeCSS but can't tell them A: in what sense the MPAA is correct that it's a circumvention measure according to the DMCA, B: Why DeCSS was released as a Windows Binary, C: Why people should be able to view DVDs without an approved player, and D: why people should care even if they got a licensed player free with their DVD drive.
4: (Taking it to the paper) - not a bad idea - Remember to write for your audience. If an editorial seems too tech-centric, the paper likely won't print it.
5: ("Vote") - Voting by itself does very little. Where a person can have a more substantial impact is if they get more involved - at a minimum, thoroughly research the candidates first. If possible, find out how they feel about these issues you're interested in. Otherwise you're pretty much just casting a blind-vote, popularity contest style. If you get active in trying to convince other people to vote for something you're interested in, that's even better.
Bow-ties are cool.
DMCA -can- prevent free music - here's why
Under the DMCA, it's forbidden to write, distribute, or use any mechanism that compromises the terms of a copyrighted work's distribution. This means the RIAA could claim that MP3 tools, including rippers, encoders, players, any CD ROM drive with CDDA, and distribution channels can be put under that category and that the RIAA can try to stamp them out. Whether or not the tools have legitimate purposes (backup - CDs last about 10 years, or more convenient storage - IE an in-home fileserver rather than a huge CD changer) the RIAA can claim under DMCA that they are circumvention tools and potentially acquire injunctions against them.
Where it gets worse is in future standards. Probably even the RIAA can't stamp out MP3 at this point - but when the next major audio format (DVD audio maybe? Or those "copy proof" CDs they started running in Europe?) comes out, they'll be able to prevent legitimate archival and other fair use. When the next great codec comes along to replace MP3, they can outlaw it or limit it to proprietary products and enforce inclusion of copy-protection systems. Distribution channels are already under pressure.
The big thing here isn't that they can stop everything they don't like - but they can do a lot to -stifle- it. This can actually do a lot to limit open-source development, collaboration, and distribution of such products, since many of the software development and distribution channels we Linux-types use are non-profit - and would crumble under a big lawsuit. Think of Debian in 5 years without the future equivalent of cdparanoia, grip, etc.
Bow-ties are cool.
Thank you! That's what I was planning to say anyway, but you've said it much better than I could have. I don't know why the original post got moderated up. Its not insightful, its just stupid.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
"1. The Academy Awards are coming up later this month. What better place than this to stage a protest on the Motion Picture Association and DVD than here? Can any linux mag journalists get passes to this to ask some tough questions? Ask actors, directors, and producers as well as executives about the dvd problems."
Good idea. Especially if the results get published on the web and in print. Might get some more people to wake up and start speaking out publically against this. And if a major director or actor who's been locked in a closet for the last year or so decided he/she didn't like this and told the MPAA where to put it...
"5. Vote. Not just in the main elections, but in your local elections. They affect you the most.
6. Support campaign finance reform. Stop letting corporations choose which candidates you will vote for."
Another good idea. Also, boycott the products of any corporation that supports the DMCA.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Which I've seen crop up in one form or another in the responses on this thread, but which I think ought to be put out simply and clearly. There's a fundamental shift in thought implicit in the DCMA. When you come right down to it, the intent is simple--it's not just so mega-corps can maintain a stranglehold on the recording industry (though that is certainly its effect), the intent is to prevent the piracy of music/movies. No one argues that piracy is legitimate, and preventing it is a worthwhile goal.
The problem is the method. It used to be in this country (the US, that is) that as little restriction as possible was involved to get something done. It's basically like "innocent until proven guilty"...we assume what you're doing is legit, because we respect your rights. If it can be shown that you're breaking the law, we'll penalize you. The DMCA, however, has turned that upside down. It's just that in this case, the thing on trial is the format and the medium, not a person.
All it comes down to is whether you're allowed to do things until you demonstrate they're wrong, or whether you're not allowed to do things until you demonstrate that they're right. That's the real evil of the DMCA--it's inverting completely the old American outlook. Since MP3 has the potential to be abused, it's banned until someone can demonstrate that it's not being abused. Since that demonstration can never be made (it's impossible to prove a negative), MP3 is just plain banned.
Looks like we'd rather see 100 innocent formats be banned than 1 guilty format go free...
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
So shouldn't we be recruiting all these geeks who've made themselves millions out of startups to fund the free software cause..?
I certainly don't EVER consider things I say on a cellular phone to be gauranteed, private communication...
I think that the point that the original poster was trying to make is that it is ridiculous and big-brother-scary to outright ban an entire section of the electromagnetic spectrum to your average consumer unless he uses proprietary technology to listen to it. I mean, why when most people hear about this law they don't care about any cellular phone company operators who just like to sit and listen in to their conversations for voyeuristic or incriminating purposes? I'm just saying I don't trust those people any more (any probably in some cases even less, I mean does YOUR cell phone company seem like it cares about you in the least??) than your average joe with a multi-freq. scanner, scanning through the spectrum and listening for interesting things.
I must take exception to the above point. The DMCA is not about reclaiming what is theirs. Copyright laws already can handle that. It is illegal to distribute MP3's of copyrighted material and I believe that this is wrong. The DMCA makes it illegal for you to make copies of material you have rights to. If I bought a DVD I should be able to copy it to another medium or access it any way I want. I can not distribute it for that would be wrong. I would not be able to exercise my rights of fair use under the DMCA. I know this is redundant but you are just plain wrong on your point.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
I like the link to www.grits.com!
Actually looks like a really useful webiste too!
I download illegal mp3's because I will not spend 16 dollars on a cd that cost them some absurd amount of money, like 10 cents. Sure, factor in recording/marketing costs and it goes up, but most of what I listen to isn't marketed anyway.
So, do you also pirate all your software, then? That's the same price as burning an audio cd most likely, except they sell it for an absurdly higher profit...
Then again, maybe you see paying that much for this reproduced media as allright, because you're probably a techie that can sympathize with the many hours of labor that programmers go through, and the need to pay them.
Well, record companies have employees to be paid as well... or do they not have a right to earn any money?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I'd say that the most important thing we can do is educate ourselves. Before you rag on Katz for being a conspiracy theorist, have a careful look at what is going on.
As geeks, we will probably be the last to be affected by globalization. I don't really give a f*ck if the thought police make it impossible for me to download the latest Backstreet Boys single without paying for it. But the level of control the "powers that be" are attempting to gain is frightening.
It isn't a conspiracy, it is a bunch of greedy lawyers working for greedy corporations trying to pass laws in their favor, in order to make as much money as possible. What does that mean? If the Man had his way, we wouldn't be able to post negative product reviews online, let alone create laws that favor human rights or the environment versus corporate rights.
How many people do you suppose know what the WTO protests were all about, besides a few news clips? They were about fighting corporate domination, globalization, Orwellian politics, whatever you want to call it.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is just a small piece of the puzzle.
Geeks may not have the voter turnout that "old people" have, but we have a grasp on communications technology like nobody else. Once we educate ourselves, we can begin the process of educating others, by posting messages like this, creating educational content, or just talking about it. Learn not just what is going on in the legal realm, but how your decisions (your job, what you buy, what you eat, where you shop) effect the rest of the world.
So, where do you start? Read the Global Exchange's book "Corporations are Gonna Get Your Mamma" (better yet, don't order it from Amazon, go get it from your local independent bookseller).
Or read Chomsky or Nader. Go see Jello Biafra next time he does a spoken word tour. Stop reading corporate controlled media entirely.
Once you educate yourself, it is your decision whether to do something or not. There are lots of outlets for activism. Join your local Green Party, write a Windows virus, quit your job as the E-trade webmaster, become a teacher...
This whole democracy thing doesn't work unless our population is well-informed and active. What's the other alternative to a democracy? A technocracy? Try plutocracy. The people with the money are the people with power. I imagine that pretty much everyone that reads Slashdot are pretty bright folks. What are we called? The emerging Knowledge Worker class? Even if we "allowed" the Man 10 times more power than he has now, you and I would probably be just fine. We will be able to find a job. We will be able to exercise most of the freedoms we enjoy now. So maybe you need to ask yourself if democracy is worth fighting for.
...are dependent for their financial well-being on the performance of the stock market, and thus, on the health of public corporations.
One should not assume that fighting corporate domination is synonomous with destroying the economy.
When i saw the topic analysis of the dmca i clicked through hoping for an unbiased rundown of the act ... not a politically onesided commentary on its evilness. While I enjoy Jon Katz's writing sometimes, i must say that this piece was pretty much worthless. We need a straightforward description of this law and all of its implications. I suppose I'll have to go read it myself now ... ;) maybe ill be inspired.
We tried to control the day
;)
We don't control the day
The man controls the day
But we WILL control the night.......
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
1984 arrived - just 16 years late.
I have one suggestion to all the geeks out there who think that the DMCA is a bad idea. BREAK THE LAW!!! In the great tradition of the USA, we keep ourselves at the mercy of big business. A law is passed. Lawsuits ensue and generaly a few names in the paper are all it takes to dissuade everyone from doing the same. With the recent measures that have been taken against large universities and private individuals about such matters...we're seeing this very trend hitting us. Now universities and web sites are starting to prohibit "illegal" content from hitting the web.
What do we (as americans) do? We BREAK THE LAW! there are two arguments against this. One is the old "what can i, just a single individual, do? Nothing!" - if this is your argument...then i'm willing to bet you won't be voting in November either. Your best bet would be to take a leap off the tallest building in your town and be done with it. If you haven't had kids yet...i thank you and your family for not further polluting the gene pool. The other argument, one that holds much more sway is, "Well, myself or someone i know may get sued. Lawsuits will take a bite out of my ass." - I have only one answer to this. FUCK OFF THEN!! If everything came at no cost then life would be peachy. Everyone would have four cars in their garages and huge networks wired with fiber. No one would be hungry and all music would be free. That just isn't the case. If something is worth fighting for, it's worth losing something for. Just like most bogus laws in this country, i suspect that people will just bitch and moan but not REALLY fight for their freedoms and the suits will win.
Oh...you may have one final argument: "Come off your high horse A-hole! Breaking the DMCA won't do anything but bring on more lawsuits and cause us more greif!" I have two rebuttals there - 1: Did you read the rest of my post. If you're not willing to sacrifice for it...is it really worth having? 2: Try to think of the last time truly breaking the law actually got it repealed. I'll give you a hint, it starts with "P" and ends in "rohibition."
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
So does it really matter what laws and other bullsh*t they come up with?
You can easily not disply his articles, its as simple as going to preferences and checking the box that has his name next to it. Now I realize these instructions are may be a little too complex for some of you ignorant fools so here is an easier step: IF you don't like his articles DON'T READ THEM!!! How hard is that? I mean, no one is forcing you to click "Read more". Why would read them if don't like them?
Stop complaining, I personally like his articles, and this one was a well written one, there was one point I didn't agree with, but for the most part I thought it was good.
Billy Transue
bill-transue@NOcoolmailSPAM.net
Open Source, Open Standards, Open Minds
I completely agree with you on this one. I find it wrong and unjust to send me information constantly *that was unsolicited* and then say it's illegal for me to use it. *I think i'm gonna send an e-mail to everyone on AOL, but, put "ONLY OPEN IF YOU HAVE RECIEVED PERMISSION FROM THE SENDER." in the subject line* If there was a way for me to tell how many of those people read the message I garuntee you that the return rate would be in the 95-100% range.
There already is a project to create an open, patent-free audio format: Ogg, from the people who brought you CDParanoia. Check it out and contribute if you can.
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
A nice thought, but have you heard of the WTO? It's raison-d'etre is SOLELY for cases like this.
Us here in Canada can't afford to simply ignore what happens in the States, or any other country for that matter. It's the same planet, and like it or not, it'll have an effect on us.
If fly-fishing were banned in every country but Canada, it would *surely* hurt the fly-fishing community here.
That being said, I don't think that the DCMA will mean the end of non-bigtime music. People have the option of NOT CONSUMING the corporate stuff.
You can always go to local concerts for a few bucks, pick up a tape from the guy at the back of the bar, and have 3 bucks left for a beer over the price that you would have spent on a big name album.
Greg
Writing online....means relinquishing reprint, royalty and subsidiary rights that used to provide revenue to writers and artists. The work of me and other writers here and elsewhere on the Web is widely distributed, linked and even printed in paper form without permission or payment.
My understanding of the law was that although writing online implicitely gives people the right to download, read and store in a browsers cache, the copyright still belongs to the origional author.
As a result, I could prevent someone from putting my own work on a publicly accesible website, or printing it and selling it, yet still print it in a paper form and sell it as a copyrighted work.
From the United States Socialist Party's official platform:
"We call for free and open access to information, including the public ownership of all large data bases, so that access cannot be restricted to those able to pay transaction fees."
This, along with what can be inferred from the party's other strongly pro-labor, anti-corporate policies, means that existance of even a moderately-sized Socialist minority could help prevent the passage of laws such as this one which abridge our constitutional rights in order to placate the wealthy minority.
This is clearly only one particular aspect of the Socialist party, which has a very complex platform, but I encourage those unhappy with the current two-party system or simply curious about the alternatives to research the party themselves. Its official web site can be found at http://www.sp-usa.org/.
Also, for clarification, the United States Socialist Party is not in any way affiliated with "socialism" or "communism" as practiced in such totalitarian states as the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, or Castro's Cuba. The Socialist Party rather stands for Democratic Socialism, a policy which has been widely implemented and very successful in many European nations.
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The DMCA is going to be the coup de grace for the commercial software industry in the US. It's completely unrealistic to expect compliance with such a ridiculously biased set of laws - and the result will be that people won't comply with it.
What Napster is really saying is that this genre of mainstream, radio-friendly music is, or ought to be, too cheap to meter. It doesn't make sense that you have to pay $17 (yes, music fans, in many places CD prices are still that high) for a Ricky Martin CD, when the music on that CD is the cultural equivalent of a cheap, ubiquitous product like Coca-Cola. The RIAA has artificially kept its price up, so people have found a means to go around them, via technology. It's theft, strictly speaking... but it's the invisible hand at work.
If major labels were smart, they'd realize that this is a sign to them. They can flex their muscles now and keep supporting high prices for trash music, but for the long term, if they want to make money in the digital age, they'd better get busy making music that people are willing to pay for.
If you don't pretend to be anyone, are you?
This is just the slavery issue all over again. Some people believe that copyrights are a basic right, and are trying to secure that as a right, by imposing it on everyone else. Yes perhaps they upheld Slavery because they thought of it as an incentive, perhaps they upheld it because they put effort into getting and training slaves, perhaps they believed it was right because it seemed to be so integrated with Americas success, or perhaps they did it because lots of prestigious people did it too - and only a thief would free slaves. Of course they had to force it because they bet vast amounts of wealth on the assumption that slavery was a basic right, it wasn't and it was only a matter of time before it blew up in their face. And it was only a matter of time before those who believed that the slave owners could peacfully get along with the anti-slavery people were prooven to be naieve and foolish.
I think they passed the law thinking it would be a good idea (and to be honest some of it is good) and the record companies later discovered the true power it gave them. Since law first started there have been those who would exploit holes in it for their own advantage. The record companies are just cheaters but they'll get their due. I say we push them down and take their lunch money or a swirly.
We don't outnumber anyone, so trusting the american democratic process is not an option (if you doubt me, read DeTocqueville sometime). Tyranny of the majority, anyone?
We could march- if you think you could find a million geeks. I don't mean a million techies ala MCSE, or comp sci grads ala BS in BS. I mean people who bother thinking deeply about what they do, and find meaning for it in a technical realm. A million. Riiiight.
We could seize the moral high ground in a battle that has nothing to do with moral superiority - we can feel good about ourselves as we are legally cut down and some are jailed.
The corporations that give you the fat paychecks (oh, like, most of the dot coms, and red hat, M$, et al) who were started by techies and geeks are doing NOTHING...they have their american pie, and don't give a damn about you. If anything, the actions of people promoting DeCSS and other similar causes would be considered a threat to their well-being.
Me? I have decided that all I can do on my own is check out. Am I giving up? No. But I refuse to give work and effort to people who will use my own labors against me. Let them find the bugs, build the networks, and unfsck the problems. They never thought about how this would all work in the first place...and I am not going to give them the right to tell me how to run it. Let them run it. See how long it works.
And Who the fuck is WE anyways? YOU people who think that the DMCA is some kind of barometer of freedom? Let me tell you about freedom - none of you are willing to die for it, to destroy what you love for it. A few of you are willing to fight on THEIR terms for it. You think the DMCA is some measure of mind control? We are already there if you believe that.
None of you are willing to fight on your own terms with your own unique skills to shut down these corporations. Until YOU decide to flex your collective might (much less even figure out what that is), you will always be subjects of others who live by demagoguery, looting and bribery.
heh...not been getting enough sleep lately...never read Atlas Shrugged just before bed.
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
I'm beginning to become disgusted with corporate America. I know there's a lot of good people down there in the US (I'm in Canada) but dammit, the bad ones are the people in control. The DMCA is simply one soldier on a broader front, civil liberties are nearly gone in the US. From losing the right to skip previews in DVD movies to never having a right to expect the software we buy to work and everything in between. Evil things are afoot in America, the 20% of the people who have 90% of the money seem to want to make that 20 a 5 and the 90 a 100. I was stunned recently when I considered asking the NRA for a membership in exchange for services performed (I don't want to actually give them money - they'd only buy guns =), I see a lot of accidently destroyed lives with the NRA's activities but in light of proto-police state actions such as the recent WTO summit, I'm really beginning to see the NRA as completely neccesary. I can make you believe me just by pointing out a basic fact about the capitalist system as implemented in the US - there are no requirements for a company to act in a moral fashion, in fact companies can be sued by their shareholders if a moral stance affects profits. I see myself becoming one of those marginalized people who by refusing to adapt technologies that shackle me to the ground begins to miss out as the slaves move over to the New World Order's Formats. Thank you Mr. Orwell. Maybe I'll be able to resist, I'm on Windows right now - in a year or so Linux should be easy enough for me =) to use and then I'll switch over and use the DVD-player-which-makes-men-with-knifes-com-in-the- night secretly in a dark corner to bypass the forced previews, until then when I can no longer speak without being identified (Mr. Clinton would like to know who everyone is making a comment - presumeably so they could "get back" to them on it) I'll keep waving my candle in the wind. Tell my grandchildren I'm sorry - it wasn't supposed to be this way. The Night Angel
I think I must be missing something about Mr. Katz's argument, or else it is simply flawed. As I read the provisions of the DMCA amendments to the basic copyright provisions, it makes it a copy right violation to enable the distribution of copyright protected material, e.g., to "crack" copyright protection on a computer game (I'm not suggesting it's limited to that situation). How does this prevent bands from freely distributing music? The law doesn't make it illegal to give things away. Mr. Katz seems very concerned that the new "internet culture" based on free distribution models, open source software, etc. is threatened by these provisions. While I certainly understand how the DeCSS thing runs into problems with this law, how does a band that wants to freely distribute its music run into problems? MP3 is a file format, not a hack that allows circumvention of copyright protection. And by the way, is my CD-RW burner illegal because I could use it to "circumvent" the fact that there didn't use to be a way to copy audio CDs?
Well, this gets us back into the "burglary tools" discussion of last week. BTW, IAAL, so I understand fairly well the importance of intent. And your point that the "heart of the argument is about the legality of uses for information rather than the legality of the mechanisms themselves" was exactly my point. I don't understand how making it illegal to break copy protection suddenly means that open source and open content models are doomed. Again, somebody explain how these amendments stop a band from distributing free music. The idea that companies are going to stop making MP3 players because the record companies want them to is absurd. Those same companies took a run at companies like Diamond Multimedia and lost. And if these amendments are so powerful, how come Sony was not successful in hanging onto its injunction blocking connectix from selling the VPS? I'm sure Sony's IP lawyers are competent. I guess I find it frustrating that there is this weird reaction to laws that are passed to address issues relating to computers. People seem to assume that they are going to have a lot more significance than they really do. Maybe this comes from not understanding the laws in the first place, so that when one does come to understand an area of the law, the impact of all that proceeded as well as the new aspects hits at once. I do agree that making an ISP or a university potentially liable is poor policy. On the other hand, I understand this effort because otherwise the transactional costs are too high to pursue these infringements. This is a shifting of the burden of enforcement from the copyright holder to others. Again, I think this is poor policy.
Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people are more concerned about the "Free Beer" issues instead of the "Free Speech" issues. An excellent example is Napster. I'm sure that Napster could be legitimately used for legally exchanging music, but lets be honest. The main purpose of Napster is to allow people to exchange pirated music. When the big record labels convince sites to disallow Napster, they are not suppressing culture; they are stopping piracy.
I think that the record labels are justified in trying to stop piracy. They go to a lot of effort to produce the music they distribute, when you take their music without paying for it you are effectively stealing from them. If you think they are charging too much for the music you are free not to buy it. However to claim that they are evil because they are trying to stop people from pirating music is pure hypocrisy.
What makes the record companies and the DMCA evil is not that it is trying to stop piracy and tools like Napster. What makes them evil is that they are willing to trample over all sorts of other rights in their quest. We as a community should resist their efforts to make publishing source code or uncopyrighted music illegal. This is a position where we can make a strong ethical stand. However, if we focus on tools for piracy such as Napster or claim that record companies are stamping out culture by going after Napster we only weaken our position.
I would much rather have free speech than free beer. Protecting the right to distribute source code or express opinions is important but protecting piracy is not. By making a lot of noise to defend piracy we diminish our ability to defend the truly important issues.
Here is the part that upsets me the most though. Don't you have to commit a crime first before your rights are taken away?! Yes, most people d/l mp3 on Napster that are not backups of the CDs they own themselves. But there is a lot of legal mp3s being traded on Napster too. Why the hell should anyone deny me the right to use an excellent software tool because someone else abused it? That's like saying because every Microsoft product ever made has been used to produce harmful and illegal material (from viruses to storing kiddy porn and everything between) and has caused vast amount of damage (through it's shoddy security or 50 crashes a day) Microsoft should have to pony up couple of billion. Oh wait, they can better spend couple of million to buy off the Congress and problem solved. The fact is this country is based on the idea that the rights on the minority should be considered on the same of if not greater level than that of the majority. If that isn't how you feel, write an amendment to the Constitution or some god-owfull pice of crap law like DMCA, but until then, that's the law of the land.
Too bad in the year everyone wants to be the reformer, the only thing getting reformed is the way the money is funneled.
...by relying for too long on outdated analog distribution methods. For a couple of years now it has been possible to distribute music quickly, easily, and digitally. I should be able to visit (for example) Amazon or Best Buy, select the albums or individual songs I want, and download them in MP3 or another, higher-quality format. But any attempts to move in this direction, such as MP3.com's Beam-It, have been met with threats and lawsuits. Of course people are doing it illegally! Why should I pay $18.99 to Sam Goody for a CD full of garbage when I can get the one song I want for free? I would give you a few bucks for the song if you'd give me a way to do it. Are record and video sales down? Are the giant media companies losing money? No. Cassette tapes didn't destroy the record industry, and neither will MP3. VHS didn't destroy the movie industry, and neither will DeCSS.
I am a Perl programmer and web developer by default. Meaning that when I graduated with my liberal arts degree I couldn't get squat for a job, and just then happened to fall in love with the Net. One thing led to another with the amatuer work I did at home and all of a sudden I was interesting to recruiters.
That liberal arts degree was in Political Science. I was initially struck by how contemptuous the web community was to politics, the utter scorn directed to those idiots in Washington or Sacramento who could never figure out what the net was or how to do anything relevant concerning the net community(s).
Of course, the commercial interests in this country have long ago learned never to ignore the political process--indeed, it was their duty to contribute to it with lots of annual cash. Even Micorsoft, so contemptuous of all politics, suddenly learned two years ago what certain politicians had the potential to do them, and has since increased their political cash donations tenfold.
The DMCA is the direct result of corporate intests channelling legislation directly benefical to them and harmful to others. In this specific case it's the music/video entertainment industry maintaining distributive controls while screwing the average consumer and artists who can't presently get into their channels.
What course do netizens have to combat it? Presently it amounts to Linnux activists handing out flyers on street corners in NYC, urging most clueless citizens to get concerned about the arrest of a young hacker for posting DeCSS. What chance does that have of succeeding against corporate interests who annualy donate millions of dollars annualy to politicans and who hire very good lobbyists? Zero.
Sometime soon the free source movement is going to have to fund a lobbying presence at the federal level to look out for its interests. Relying on writers like Katz, Leonard, and Gilmore to stir agitation long after legislation has passed and flyer campaigns just doesn't work. It's a lot easier to stop a bad law before it becomes one rather than try to overturn it in the judicial system.
I'm quite sure the net will always carry out guerrilla campaigns against whatever corporate interests try to do against them. It's a poor rationalization for maintaining contempt of the political process. It would be much better to legally, openly post DeCSS software than to furtively mirror it.
The old crowd I ran with is petrified of John McCain because he's ardent supporter campaign finance reform. It's a direct attack on the monied establishment being able to greatly influence the political process. The fear is based upon the obstruction of being able to buy legislation like the DMCA. They know that the issue has deep resonance within American culture and think McCain would win the election with it. He won't be nominated becuase too much of the Republican elective body feeds and depends off corporate cash. That's why ony 4 of his republican senator colleagues support McCain--he's too threatneing.
Maybe the open source movement could have helped him, since a lot of what they do is a direct threat against monied interests. Or at least have pushed a legistlative agenda that made it onto a candidate's platform.
Open source can organize/lobby or simply be run over. It's not hard to do and there's a lot of players out there with tons of cash who would love to do it. A free press and Slashdot threads won't do a thing.
Perl ROX
First of let me say that I am a geek and enjoy all the wonders that are afforded us that other parts of society do not get sometimes.
With that said I will now go on to aggrevate the hell out of almost everyone that reads this. In a way I can almost understand where the RIAA is coming from with its belief on Napster. I do not personally use this as I don't regulary download music off the net. I read an article with the creator of Napster and it almost seems like he wants to wash his hands of the whole copyright issue. Like all of you he seems to be saying "I didn't know that all these kids would start using my service to trade copyright music illegaly." From what I have read currently Napster has no way of telling what is free music, and what is music that has been ripped and is actually owned by a record company. If they did then the RIAA would have no reason to complain, but Naptser allows any MP3 file to be listed, not caring of what it is or how it came into being. This is wrong. I also hate the gun argument that basically guns don't kill people, pepople do. While this argument may seem sound, there are actually systems in place so that honest merchants can try and stop guns from going into the hands of wrongful people. There is currently no system like this for MP3's on the net. Until there is some sort of ability for detection of what music is legally copyrighted and what music isn't then we are going to have this war between corporations trying to make money(because this is what business is about) and users who want everything to be as cheap as possible.
I do believe Napster is a great idea and has some far stretching uses in the future, but guess what this is still a start up company. And what do start up companies need other then venture capital? They need users, the easiest way to get users is to leave everything as open as possible and let someone else worry about tightening the restrictions.
As far as DeCSS I agree with the geek community that the MPAA is just trying to flex its muscle and say that only they should be allowed to grant persons the ability to create DVD players.
Just my 42.5 cents worth that will probably be flamed quite badly.
It's not about "an individual or organization's right to proprietary ownership of their own work", it's about what happens when you buy the media, and it becomes your property (The MPAA sees buying a DVD as a liscence, not a purchase).
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
It seems that some time ago the U.S. successfully made laws against everything that shold be illegal. People are still doing illegal things, and we still have hundreds of people getting paid to sit around and create new laws. All that's left for them to do is to ban ways to commit crimes. This lets them brag about how tough they were on crime, and people re-elect them because they feel safe once again.
They don't seem to care that everything they were trying to prevent was illegal in the first place, nor do they care that they've made it much more difficult for an average person to do something that is perfectly legal. If you've bought goods/services (from a company), that you aren't satisfied with, you can always stop buying them. If I don't want a government's services, how do I stop buying for them? -- John OvermanThe US can pass all the laws it wants, they can't expect to enforce it globally. In fact, unless the whole planet gets its act together, these laws won't make a noticeable dent in things. And even if they do, hackers will always exists and there will always be ways to go around any kind of protection scheme that those corporatist monsters can try to think up. Unless of course some governments start implementing martial law over this, but hey... let's stay serious here. :)
My point here is that they can pass all the laws they want for this, it won't eliminate the problem. The only way to eliminate it is to eliminate its cause: greed. Plain and simple.
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I agree with your general idea (and I get the sarcasm in the comment about the US being the land of the free). However I am not all that sure anymore that the US should still be called the land of the free anymore. The reason for this is that it seems to be more and more that the US is ruled by something more akin to a dictatorship.
The dictatorship would be the giant corporations and their front organizations such as the MPAA.
From what I have seen, there are many situations where the elected government has no choice but to bow to the wishes of these almighty corporations!
You may wish to cite the Microsoft case as an example of the government confronting a corporation, but in truth is was the corporations attacking Microsoft in the anti-trust case, as they were the ones who cooperated so willingly with the government. This situation seems more akin to corporations fighting with each other than the people winning.
Too bad the culture of free is being targeted so heavily by the corporations now, as government has also joined in and will only commit itself more to the extermination of that which is free, because the corporations don't like it.
Now Mr. Katz (yes, I mentioned his name, nobody freek out) brings up three cases at the end of his article that are examples of how this law is being abused, lets look at them:
The first thing is the case brought against the norwegian for breaking DVD protection. Now there are too issues here. One is that what he did is not actually illegal in Norway (as I understand the issue). This is indeed a nasty abuse of power by big government. Bad big government, no biscut! The other is the more general case, was what breaking DVD protection ok? Well, no not really, its only goal was violating copywrite, it had not productive use.
The second case is RealNetworks which has obtained an injunction against a portion of software created by Streambox. This software was desigened to get around Real's copy protected format for its streaming media. Again, up to no good.
Finally there is the case against Napster, brought by the RIAA. Now this is rather interesting based on this piece of informa tion. Down the page a bit you will find: "Under last yearís Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's hard to sue Web sites for any illegal activities committed by users. At the request of several companies in the portal industry, for example, the act generally shields sites that are classified as so-called information location tools from liability unless they directly participated in the illegal activity." Inother words, RIAA has to prove that Napster Inc was involved in the illegal abuse of copywrite inorder to hurt them. The fact that the napster application was used for bad things is not at issue, but whether or not Napster Ince conciously allowed such use. According to a lawyer (same article): "If Napster just has music generally listed and doesn't track it and doesn't know about copyright violations, then there's probably no liability," says Levi. "But if the way the site is constructed or the index is built indicates that they know the stuff is not legitimate, then the probably do. That's probably what this case will turn on: what they know."
Just to close, let me say something about the difference between civil disobediance and just disobedience. There are not of anti copywrite people who get angry when copywrite laws get enforced. If you belive that copywrite laws are unfair and that there should be no intelectual property that is fine, but the solution is to write to your elected officials, march, chant, speak whatever. If you break the law then you are just a criminal. Trying to get the laws changed on the other hand is a laudible goal. Wow, I'm gonna get flamed for that last one.
--Chris
I don't know if you read the same article as me but I couldn't even find the words 'media' and 'culture' in the same paragraph.
I think that maybe it's put up or shut up time. For a start if you are so anti-Katz then maybe you should actually have the courage of your convictions and stop posting these attacks anonymously (there is a reason that coward is the second name).
Secondly if you're such as wonderful writer then maybe you ought to treat us to some of your deathless prose. Though how would we know it was you AC?
Go on. Tell us what the magnets say.
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
It seems some of my beta-version predecessors have been causing difficulty for the geek community.
In my personal experience, the online community of geeks can regulate themselves against such blatant scheming by the corporatists in the old media.
The 2.01 release was hacked by a group of pop-culture loving geeks, and several copies are now simultaneously attempting to mount a DoS attack on the slashdot community by posting multiple messages each day under the name "jonkatz". These obnoxious trolls are tying slashdot users in knots, diverting their energy away from the holy grail of open-souce DeCSS and toward raging flames directed against other versions of myself.
Already, I have received ten e-mails saying that this abuse is rampant and destructive, breeding massive amounts of online hostility. For this, my script is very sorry.
> And by the way, is my CD-RW burner illegal because I could use it to "circumvent" the fact that there didn't use to be a way to copy audio CDs? certainly a cd-rw is not inherintly illegal. what is at question is now you use it. for instance, a kitchen knife is perfectly legal, but the act of using a kitchen knife to "circumvent" the fact that another human's body hasn't been designed to withstand a slit throat is not. i do not intend to imply the value judgement that copying CDs is akin to slitting throats. i am simply emphesizing the abstract separation of an object from its use. the only case where an object is illegal would be if it only has illegal use - in effect the posession of the object implies the intention of the illegal use. i suppose any object with a reasonable mass could be used as an innocent paper weight though ... "that crate of crack? its just making sure the draft from the air-vent doesn't blow my paperwork away!" so the heart of the argument is about the legality of uses for information rather than the legality of the mechanisms themsleves.
Proposal: an open source, distributed database search engine, where the search is performed in parallel by a large number of logged-in clients, and results are combined on the requesting client. When a new client runs, it uploads file info onto several other clients, whose location is found from the cached results of the last run / public web sites / hidden ftp servers / information from friends / whatever else you might come up with. Search can be performed akin the infamous worm viruses with graph search depth limitations.
As for the name, we can call it World Wide Search (WWS), or some other silly choice to attract attention. Obviously, this thing has to be portable enough to run on all platforms, including non-Linux.
E-mail me if you are interested.
The fact of the matter is that IP was designed with no considerations for personal liberties or rights. Because of this, everything that is done with IP is susceptible to its weaknesses. Companies can track your buying habits, employers can read your email and the recording industry can chose its victims at its leisure. Under the status quo, the freedom to speak your mind and the freedom to speak in private does not exist in an electronic form, except in constrained, limited ways.
Partial solutions exist for these problems, but like all partial solutions, they have crippling weaknesses. For instance, when it came to email, anonymity and privacy were addressed by using anonymous remailers and encryption. Both have met with strong opposition from government over the years, and because of this opposition, both systems have suffered. When you send encrypted email, you may as well notify everyone that you are about to send a secret message. If the government wants it, they subpoena it. If industry wants it, they steal the keys or they work the levers of the court system to get it, and you're back with the subpoena. As for anonymous remailers, the government can simply target the remailers themselves, either to shut them down or to subpoena the logs.
If people are serious about personal liberties, the solution is to build a software solution that fixes this problem with IP. Napster, Hotline and IRC can all act as buffers between two hosts, and can be used to bury a host deep enough to make it a difficult target. To get serious personal freedom on the internet, what is needed is a distributed, anonymous and encrypted protocol. Hosts should be able to communicate with one another independent of physical location within a network. When using this system, people should be able to be completely confident in the security of their communication. Additionally, they should be confident that they are in complete control over any and all information available about them.
The technologies already exist to build this protocol. The problem is that it would probably be viewed simply as a vehicle to commit crime, and thus the effort of building the protocol would probably be considered a crime as well. While it is true that such a system could be used to aid in crime, I believe that personal liberties, particularly ones that can't cause any physical harm, vastly outweigh this consideration. Besides, it is very unwise to trust the FBI, the ATF or even the local Rent-A-Cop with a position of authority. Law enforcement should be trusted with the task of enforcing the law, not dictating it. On the other hand, I must admit that I do have a lot of respect for and faith in good, old fashioned detective work. When a crime worth thinking about is committed, the criminal will leave evidence worth thinking about. The way I see it, Scotland Yard has been solving crimes the old fashioned way for a hundred years. Now they have DNA technology and surveillance cameras pointed at every cobblestone and hackney carriage in Britain. What are they worried about? The only people who stand to loose from real free speech and privacy are cleptocrats.
I think we should go ahead and build the tools to truly subvert the recording industry. But this time, we're going to have to understand that the "recording industry" includes the FBI. It's time to dust off those ideals everyone had back before Usenet became a hill of Spam - back in the days when Mosaic was still king. Remember? The internet was going to change the world! It was going to let people confidently talk to each other for free, to share their ideas with everyone unhindered. The internet was going to bash down the gates that keep billions of people cooped up by the lucky few. It was going to unleash the creative potential of everyone. This was the whole reason people got excited about the internet in the first place - before anyone made any money off of it, or, in any event, wrote a business plan that claimed they would. Government and big money have found technologies to hijack the positive sociological properties of the internet. Remember why everyone was so afraid of the internet in 1992? Because no one could control it. Its time to find out just how difficult to control we really are.
A long time ago, I used to say stuff like this all the time. The internet represented an expression of freedom that I had never seen before. Then came the Netscape IPO. I got a little carried away after doubling my money a couple of times just by investing in what looked "cool." The Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be a wake up call for us all. It's time to get back to what this was all about in the first place - freedom.
Russell
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
Or better yet, quit whining, and start lobbying. That's been the biggest problem with this whole thing; the whole online community seems to be more oriented towards passive resistance. This is a war of laws. It's a whole different arena. (and one in which corperations are much more experienced in fighting than we are) I apologize if this sounds melodramatic, but if we continue to rest on our laurels, then the corperations will simply waltz on up, and regulate the internet in ways that are best for them. (which always seem to be worst for us, strangly enough) We got suckerpunched once. Let's not make the same mistake twice!
Write your congressman today!
just a tiny little remark. Mp3 have not just uncovered new names. They've made available live shows on a new scale. Many SIGNED bands have their live shows circulate on the net thru their fan base recording and encoding them. For a music lover it's a benediction. But escpecially becoz they're signed artists those shows have a piracy status. Now, I see this as a culturally rich use of .mp3 yet, it's illegal. It's not like there's anything close to that availability on the regular cd market. For some reason, even in the jazz genre, u'd be lucky to get 1 live of a given artist every 2-3 year in the stores when he'd actually play 50-100 gigs a year...
> Those frequencies are reserved for Cellular phone calls, and the law is there to protect
> people's privacy.
Nope, the law actually undermines your privacy. It's a stupid and unenforceable law (you can't detect whether or not someone is listening), and, of course, it does not apply to government and police agencies.
The worst effect is that cell phone companies say to their users "see, it's illegal for someone to listen to your conversations, so you now have privacy!" Of course, all it really does is give free reign to monitoring by the government and by anyone else with suitable motivation.
It provides a disincentive for the cell phone companies to actually use good encryption, not that they would want to do so anyway.
> You can't just tell everyone with a Cell phone that they have to throw that one away and buy a
> new one that works with encrypted communications.
Yes but you shouldn't lie to people and tell them they are having private conversations when they use cell phones, either.
> Laws making it illegal to listen into someone else's phone calls can't prevent people from doing
> it any more than laws prohibiting theft and murder prevent roberies and murder.
Actually this law is even more ineffectual, because you can't detect when someone is listening, while presumably you can detect if you have been robbed or murdered.
> However, I think that people do have a right to privacy, and that people who invade that privacy
> by intercepting their private conversations should be punished.
See above. You'll never know who the culprits are.
So, your only option is to use a good defense like strong encryption.
How about covering some realFree Culture? Get on mp3.com, download a dozen or two legal mp3's, play them, and let us know what you think. And be specific. Name the bands, name the tracks, tell us your reaction. Let us know how many (if any) of the new artists you actually pony up some $$$ to support.
Thank you. I'm glad someone finally said it. Napster is nothing but a great big sack of shit that bogs down any network it's run on. It has zero educational value and I'm damn glad my university blocks it. If I want to steal mp3s I'll do it with my own bandwidth. There's no reason the university should be expected to allow shit like that. The DMCA, evil and disturbing though it is, has not one damn thing to do with it. I seriously wonder whether Katz has ever actually tried using the net at a university. And not Harvard or UIUC, but a normal dirt-poor state university. Here's a free clue, Jon: WE DON'T EVEN HAVE ENOUGH BANDWIDTH FOR RESEARCH, MUCH LESS IDIOTIC BRAINDEAD PUKE MONKEYS WHO THINK THEY'RE FUCKING "LEET" AS HELL BECAUSE THEY HAVE W4R3Z AND CAN STEAL MUSIC AND RUN N4PS73R!!@!@$$!$%!@#!!!!! Jesus, people, get a fucking clue before you open your big mouths. Just because the evil corporatists would love to scare everybody into banning this stuff from their networks doesn't mean that they're actually responsible for doing so.
If you want to see a patent free-audio codec that should end up getting twice the compression of MPEG 1-2.5 Layer 3, check out the OGG Vorbis codec at http://www.xiph.org.
G27 Radio, do you *honestly believe* that the "primary use" of MP3 is legitimate distribution by unsigned artists? Because I sure don't.
/still/ be no "revolution". I am staunchly opposed to the RIAA-centric monopolistic system of music distribution, I really am. It really screws a lot of the artists. But what has to be admitted is that to a large degree and for a long time, it has *worked*. I would contend that the biggest reason all those artists can only distribute via MP3 (ie: they can't get a contract) is that they're music SUCKS. I don't claim to have heard every indy track on the 'net, or that /all/ of it is bad, but a lot of it sure is. Sure, some of it is better than some acts that do have contracts (eg: Zebrahead, Bush, &c), but there's no accounting for taste, right? Anyway, my flame-bastic point is that MP3 is not about a musical revolution where all the indy artists come out of the woodwork and purvey their wondrous works of art, it's about an easy and nearly unstoppable way of stealing music. Whether it's stealing from the artists or the labels or whatever is another question. That the bulk of MP3 exchange is directed at piracy, however, is an undeniable fact.
One thing we can only really speculate about is what MP3's actual *purpose* is. If I recall, the format was developed by the Fraunhofer institute, who patented it. I doubt they were interested in facilitating either piracy or independent distribution.
Now, given that we do not know what MP3 was intended to be used for, what we DO know is what it IS used for. My question to you is, for each song by an independent unsigned artist that is downloaded in MP3 format, how many copyrighted songs by signed artists are downloaded? 1,000? 1,000,000? More? Go to www.oth.net, to mp3.palaquest.com, to any MP3 search engine, and search for copyrighted songs. Now search for indy music. Repeat with Napster. Napster, MP3 search engines, and irc channels like #mp3/dalnet exist as tools of piracy.
Note that this is reflected in the RIAA's actions. Why is the RIAA suing MP3.com? Is it for their hosting of indy music? No, it's for Beam-It, which, as far as I can tell (I know little about it), is a tool for piracy to some degree. Is there an RIAA lawsuit pending against Riffage.com? Not as far as I know. Why? Because they distribute only indy music. The RIAA may not like that, but they (currently) have no authority to quash it.
That said, I hate the RIAA as much as the next person. I believe they are truly evil. They're giving capitalism a bad name, and I hate that. If you believed all their rhetoric and propaganda, you'd think there was something inherently horrible about MP3 itself. This is obviously not true. Personally, my primary use of MP3 is to put my music collection on my computer so I don't have to deal with CD's. For every song on my playlist that I downloaded, there are a dozen that I ripped from my own discs. But I do not deny that I have downloaded MP3's "illegitimately".
[flamebait]
You contend that MP3 is facilitating some kind of music revolution. Ha ha funny. Even ignoring piracy: if the only MP3's people downloaded were by indy artists trying to be heard, there would
[/flamebait]
MoNsTeR
Yes the DMCA does permit reverse engineering for content delivery, but if you need to bypass some copyright protection to RE the content delivery than that is flatly illegal.
I think it says for interoperability, which I interpret as, for example, if I were writing some software that interfaced with your software, I could RE your software in order to make mine work with it. So, if I were working on WINE, I could RE the Xing player to get it to run under WINE on a Linux box. Giving away the secrets that I discovered while REing it is not what the interoperability clause is about, neither is writing a whole new program to run on Linux that does what the Xing player for Windows does. Sorry, I agree with many of the DeCSS arguements, and think the MPAA is out of order, but the interoperability clause isn't one we can use.
I don't know whether the widespread existence of MP3 and similar media is a long term threat to recording companies or not. It may be a threat. The recording companies sure seem to see it that way. And that's why they have been systematically trying to attack and dismantle a free and open media infrastructure. For example, they intend to replace CDs with DVDs with copyright protection. They go aggressively after consumer devices capable of playing MP3 (they lost the first round, but not try to limit capabilities and supporting infrastructure).
Furthermore, the alternatives they propose not only enforce their copyrights, they also limit the ability of others who are not part of their consortia to participate. In fact, without special cryptographic hardware, you can't have an open format that enforces play restrictions.
If there are free, open digital media, people will be able to use them for redistributing copyrighted works. As a society, we have to choose whether we want a world in which only recording companies get to control what gets published or whether we want to give everybody the ability to publish.
The answer is pretty clear to me: the narrow commercial interests of recording companies are secondary to the societal interests in a democracy to allow the free sharing of non-proprietary information, even if the mechanisms for such sharing limit the potential profits of the recording companies by not letting them impose play restrictions. If recording companies want to impose additional restrictions, the burden ought to be on them to figure out how to do that; they already wield enough commercial and market power and don't need the legal system to support their escapades.
Of course, in practice, it's trivial for anybody who wants to to listen in on the cell phone bands anyway. All ECP did is remove the responsibilty for cell phone carriers to worry about security.
ECP has made cellular phone security a lot worse because it removed any incentive for cellular carriers to make the investments necessary to make their systems actually secure.
As for the cost of implementing encryption and deciding on keylengths, those are pretty trivial. Cellular phone companies roll out new protocols and phones with steady regularity; adding encryption with a reasonably secure key length would not be a big deal. Furthermore, key lengths that are reasonably secure by today's standards would be sufficient because cell phone streams are real-time, not recorded (and it would be impractical to do so for an adversary in a properly designed system).
I don't condone people listening in on private conversations, but the ECP has made the situation worse, not better.
In this regard, it's perhaps worth pointing out that some of the greatest works of classical music would be considered "stolen" by today's definition of intellectual property, borrowing themes, ideas, and whole passages from previous works. The same is true of many great works of literature.
The notions of "intellectual property" and "piracy" in today's US society are being shaped by commercial and corporate interests. They may, in some areas, overlap with societal interests, but in other areas, they clearly do not.
So, the whole point of this furor over Napster and DeCSS is that, if their legal challenges are succesful, the RIAA/MPAA get more control over content than they should according to copyright law.
In different words, when taken together with its legal interpretation and fundamental technological principles, the effect of the DCMA is to limit the availability of free music as well. And, frankly, I suspect the RIAA is quite happy about that, too.
Jon Katz seems to be implying that the only way to allow "freedom" and "culture" to survive in our society is to all people to exchange illegally copied MP3s with impunity.
Now he may be right that the fact that all these corporations own all this music is culturally problematic.
But asserting that the solution is to, well, allow copyright to be bent for all those good souls who don't want to pay for their CDs, is crazy. Maybe we should be able to steal and read his book, too, without paying for it, in the name of "freedom"?
Copyright is copyright. They own the music. They get to charge what they like, and they get to prosecute the people who break it. Is anyone really arguing these students aren't primarily getting illegal music via Napster?
Attack this some other way, or you'll be destroying the freedom of authors to own their own works -- if you could in fact break copyright law for good, which you probably can't.
Some people take the stance that they will fight it by not buying anything, only copying stuff off of the net. This doesn't do any good though, it just encourages RIAA and the MPAA, and it deprives the artists entirely.
Can we fight it legally? How do we put together a collective voice that is strong enough to take to washington and take to the courts to have a real impact?
what about technically. That is, afterall, our forte. MP3.com seems to have made a place for online distribution directly by the artists, but has it been effective? MP3 based online radio is certainly an option ( at least I could listen to the radio at work, which I can't do now because of tempest shielding).
Ultimately this will be a legal battle, but our best bet is to do an end run around them technically. To find, embrace, and promote a way for artists to get money directly from the people without going through the record companies. Choosing your battleground is one of the most important strategic decisions and there is no question that we control the technical battleground.
We have already decided that MP3 is the format of choice. we have several great methods of distribution, so now how do we get repay the artists whose music we want without lining the pockets of the record industry.
Open source and free software does present the parallel to this fight. Five and six years ago we never dreamed that we could get payed for working on Open source software, and now we have Open source companies that are IPO'ing with valuations in the billions of dollars. What did we do, what did we learn, and how can we take those lessons to the artists to open source music without starving them.
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
Oh please, shut your hole. If you have a problem with katz, register and disable him in your profile. nobody is forcing you to read his articles.
I for one enjoy katz articles, and love his writings here on slashdot. I'm really FED UP with all you AC's shouting every time he writes something. Register yourself, and make yourself a katz-free profile. I'm sick and tired of your stupid rantings.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - arcade@kvine-nospam.sdal.com - arcade@efnet
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
The DMCA is not trying to redefine entertainment on the web. It is trying to reclaim what is legally theirs ... The purpose of the DMCA is to defend against outright copyright infringement, which is what we are all doing.
This happens to be utter bullshit. Allow me to provide some context for the current mess.
Originally -- mid-century -- copying information (in particular, copyrighted works) was hard and expensive. Unauthorized use wasn't much of an issue. Then technology such as Xerox copy machines, VCRs, etc. made certain kinds of copying easy and cheap. The result was a re-write of the US copyright laws which created a certain balance that right now most people find "natural". Basically, harsher penalties for copyright infringement were offset by "fair use" exemptions. The law essentially said that noncommercial use of copyrighted works is OK, as long as you don't go bananas with it. Fine and dandy. This is the situation that we are all used to. I would like to point out that as time passed, the penalties for breaking the copyright law were becoming harsher and harsher, thus tilting this balance somewhat.
Fast-forward to the end of 90s: enter DMCA. What DMCA does -- forget all the bullshit about entertainment on the web -- is outlaw fair use. Any company that bothers to put any kind of a "technological device" to restrict access can now forbid fair use. Yes, Mr.Smith, you can copy that disc for your own private archival purposes, however to do this you will need to access its contents for the copying operation, and *that* happens to be highly illegal.
So DMCA is not about music, not about entertainment, and not about taking the caviar out of the mouths of recording industry execs. It's about the radical change in the balance of power between information publisher and information user. Guess who loses...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Now let me get this straight. You have written a program. By your authorship, *you* control the copyright. And now you say your ISP has cut off your access because you are distributing your own program? Three words: Restraint of trade.
What you need is a good lawyer who will write for you a pointed cease-and-desist letter, describing the nasty things that happen to entities who engage in restraint of trade (a felony, IIRC). By being unable to distribute your *own program*, you are now incurring actual damages (in the form of revenue losses) and that's enough for a lawsuit. Also check your Terms of Service; my guess is that they are violating it, not you. Not to mention that the denial of your free speech rights should cause the local ACLU to take an interest in this case. I'd also advise you change ISPs, but that goes without saying, doesn't it?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
It's questionable how legal prohibiting the distribution of copyrighted material is in the first place. Prohibiting someone from distributing THEIR OWN WORK seems absurd. Besides, spam is "push" type, but allowing people to download something from your website is definitely "pull" type.
2. Does this ISP have a "non-commercial use" clause in their TOS? If the account is for non-commercial use, this by itself should wipe out any restraint of trade claim.
No information is available about whether the program was being charged for or not. And it seems that IF there was a "non-commercial use" clause in the TOS, that would have been the phrase invoked, as the legal grounds are much firmer.
3. How does one show that one lost money under a claim of restraint of trade for a GPL'd program?
It's not about the money, it's about freedom to engage in trade. There is nothing in the GPL that FORBIDS selling GPL'd software; the source just has to come with it, that's all.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The SNL opinion-debating piece was in turn a spoof of the "Point-Counterpoint" head-to-head opinions on the "60 Minutes" TV news magazine.
I guess that all depends on who makes the next codec.
So far, the music biz has been coming up with these formats, and then going through technological and political high hurdles to make them inaccessable, in order to protect their own interests. Would they be able to do the same if the Open Source community created and promulgated their own music standard?
Remember, this is a culture that created an operating system almost from scratch. Surely an audio compression scheme would not be beyond the abilities of a small musically-inclined cabal of geeks.
MP3 showed us two things. First, that an audio standard without hardware is marketable. Second, that smaller bands love such electronic standards because it allows them to market themselves for Web costs.
Create a standard, copyleft it, and publish it to make it unpatentable. Start talking to the indie bands. Show how to make "Rio"-style players--again, post it to the Web and make the plans unpatentable. Create drivers for popular computers--again, copylefted.
Get that far, and then start talking to the Indies. Show them how to set up a Web page with their tracks plus links to the player software.
--The basis of all love is respect
While it is common to complain that the law has, somehow, fallen way behind technology, modern experience has shown that, even granting the proposition, the Congress has manifest even less understanding as it undertakes to "update the law."
IP law, at least, is rooted in clearly understood public policy recognizing the conflict between granting a monopoly to provide incentive for authors/inventors and the engines of commerce necessary to provide incentive for the delivery of that technology and further innovation. Adjudication of IP laws in view of those policies leads, according to we Strong IP guys, to a sound foundation for evolution and growth of a technology based economy.
Common law adjudication, as opposed to passage of new law, works well in this regard. Left to itself, the cases and the law tends to converge to reasonable compromises between these issues. The development of Copyright infringement law regarding software is a glowing tribute to the success of policy-based common-law adjudication.
However, as Congress adopts its "updates," it seems to have lost track of the carefully negotiated balance of concerns, and is simply allowing power grabs to the most monied and obvious constitutencies. Thus, we have wholly unbalanced revisions of the law: trademark dilution; copyright technology circumvention and worse.
While I am known to be one of the stronger voices favoring Strong IP in these letters, I fervently oppose the DMCA, which I believe is not "Strong IP," but rather a new kinds of property right. Circumvention law gives unliminted-term de-facto patent protection for unpatentable and un-novel inventions. Dilution gives rights in gross to words stolen from the English language. None of these things has anything to do with the careful balancing of concerns that we Strong IP use as the foundation of our arguments.
My point is that DMCA doesn't protect IP. It protects some new kind of special interest entitlement, unrelated to the subtle balancings that are the cornerstone of IP.
Accordingly, notwithstanding my Strong IP stance, I join the voices of despair assailing DMCA and its ilk. It is time to change the trend of mindless power-grabs, and to make the Congress accountable -- before they actually *DO* destroy America's competitiveness.
Slightly off-topic, but I'm a bit miffed that people don't realise that the students are not the only ones pissed about the banning of Napster. My school recently added itself to the list of Napster free campuses. A few people that work in the computer center, primarily the poor souls who work the help center, are trying to work around the ban because they want their napster. Additionally, I've spoken with several professors who are all quite irked about the ban These aren't c.sci. professors or engineering, math, physics people: It is the philosophy professors.
Point? Point is: there are more people pissed than the RIAA realises. There is no stereotypical Napster user and there is no stereotypical "copyrighted MP3 downloader".
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Oh! And which ISP was it? I need to know so if I'm doing business with them I can drop the account, and tell them why.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
However, the story is a great example of corporate virtue (the link is for people who don't feel like cutting and pasting http://anotheruniverse.com/comics/features/superma nrights.html ).
I'd like to note this quote:
Everybody remember that the next time AOL/Warner says they are looking out for the best interests of their artists..All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I wasn't advocating doing nothing, I was pointing out a serious problem. What to do about it is open to question.
But, if you're interested in my $.02:
1) donate money to groups like EFF and FSF.
2) attract media attention. Probably needs both a disruptive and a reasoning element. Peaceful disruptive actions to attract the cameras, a reasoning spokesperson to explain it all.
3) Oh, and you've gotta have a definite agenda - can't be a hodge-podge of ideas.
4) A plan for the future - I see education as the only way of saving the future. If people don't learn how to reason for themselves, we'll become more and more enslaved to whatever image the media chooses to dominate our minds with. So, in my view, we need private education (100% free vouchers, for example) and as much money as ya'll can bear to spend on it. I would prefer education be supported for all ages, not just teenagers.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
"john katz, you ignorant slut."
This is moderated as insightful? If the same article had been written by Linus Torvalds or John Carmack, the sycophantic praises would have been ringing to the heavens. However, because everyone's favorite object of scorn decides to analyze the DMCA, this type of childish castigation is considered okay, and even moderated up.
I read Jon's article several times, and nowhere did he use the word "conspiracy," grand or otherwise, nor was a conspiracy implied. I am left with a few possibilities to explain your misreading: 1) your tongue is planted firmly tongue in cheek, 2) your tongue is planted firmly in your anus, 3), you are functionally illiterate, or 4) you have listened to far too much Art Bell.
Either that, or you have such a huge hard-on for Jon Katz that your brain fails to engage properly.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Can you please stop putting everything in the same basket.
While I agree that DCMA is a bad thing, I'm disgusted by this article FUD.
The DCMA does not prevent you from distributing free music. It prevent you from distributing music that you have to pay to get it.
If you are an artist and want to make your music freely availlable on the web, nobody and no law can prevent you from doing it.
If you want to argue against this act, do it in the sense that it remove you the right from faire use that is in the spirit of the people who wrote the first copryright act.
You can also say that the act protect the distributor and not the artists.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Katz talks about how wonderful the Net is in allowing new artists to make it around the record industries selection procedures. The whopping majority of mp3s being traded, however, are the works of the bigshot celebs who have already made it. Sure the new kids have a chance to distribute their music, but it's not as though they've suddenly found an equal market. The primary purpose of mp3s is (and always has been) to steal the latest best-selling albums so that you don't have to fork out a couple bucks for it.
While you're mostly right, Katz has a point, and I'll use myself as an example. I am into techno music, which isn't all THAT popular in the US. Without my mp3's and irc channel, I wouldn't have found out about 80% of what I listen to, because it either isn't available in the US or isn't marketed here so I don't know about it anyway. Or, even worse, it might cost 25 - 30 dollars for an import copy. I'm not going to pay that much. Which leads me to a comment on point number 7:
It all comes down to theft. We want to steal music that other people have spent millions to produce, and they want us to pay for it instead. We're pissed off because they're coming ever closer to preventing us from illegally copying their works. We have no right to be as righteously indignant as Jon Katz has portrayed himself.
While there is a grain of truth in this argument I'm sick of hearing it, because it turns the issue into a right/wrong black/white with no grey area arguement, which it isn't. Record companies are not pure good, mp3 users are not pure bad.
I download illegal mp3's because I will not spend 16 dollars on a cd that cost them some absurd amount of money, like 10 cents. Sure, factor in recording/marketing costs and it goes up, but most of what I listen to isn't marketed anyway.
Record companies don't offer me the business model I want. Namely, downloadable cd's that cost under 5 dollars. This can be done. Actually, it can be done when the record companies, i.e. the middlemen, are out of the picture. While marketing is needed for sales today, I'd like to see an environment where the average citizen is a lot more proactive about what they listen to. I find lots of new music through mp3 sites, I download lots of new songs from artisits I've never heard of and I find out what I like. And (gasp) sometimes I even buy the cd's of these artisits I discovered through mp3's!!!
The whole idea of intellectual property will have to go through a major overhaul, both in law and how our culture views it from an ethics standpoint. Capitalism needs intellectual property rights in today's information age, but the internet throws it right out the window. Therefore I see the internet as being incompatible with capitalism.
The issue hasn't come to the breaking point yet, but I think corporations would agree with me, which is why you see bills passed like the DMCA. They must censor the internet to maintain their interests.
According to the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1996, no service provider can be held responsible for what people do on their service. The only people who could possibly get busted under the DMCA would be the people using Napster. Even then, is Napster breaking any copyright protection methods? No. There is no security built into audio CDs and there is no security built into MP3s. If Napster stripped information from the audio industries "secure" format, then maybe it'd be relevant. Even then, the issue of the colleges is irrelevant. They cannot be held responsible for what their student do. If the students are using the schools server space to serve them, the school STILL can't be busted.
But I'm certain they got a couple letters from the RIAA telling them they COULD be implicated under the DMCA. They can't. So much for bastions of knowledge.
Esperandi
Since the last time I posted facts like this someone lost his cookies because I didn't include a link and was too stupid to look it up himself and ended up convincing moderators that I was just lying, heres a damn link:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/hr2265.html
That's the fulltext of the No Electronic Theft Act. If you've never read it, you might want to.
"IANAL so what the hell do we do now?"
I'm not a lawyer either, but I'd say get a federal judge to suspend the law and take it to the Supreme Court. It only took a couple weeks to get it to the Supreme Court with the CDA (longer to actually get it HEARD of course, but it was suspended until it could be heard) and the Supreme Court seems to have a few good heads on their shoulders voting 9-0.
BTW, Streambox has released a new beta of StreamboxVCR, the product under injunction... they got a deal and removed all capability to download RealMedia content using the PNM and RTSP protocols. The thing is, if they modify StreamboxVCR to honor the "copyright switch" that RealNetworks puts in, they'd be allowed to include that (though that would mean it couldn't download 99% of the content on the net). The catch? RealNetworks isn't giving Streambox the info it needs about the copyright switch to incorporate it (surpise surprise, it would make RealPlayerPlus completely useless). I wouldn't worry about Streambox even though it is one of my favorite products of all time, they'll most likely win their case arguing Fair Use and using the case againt Sony when VCRs were created.
Esperandi
Bullshit. The PURPOSE of MP3 was as a superior music-encoding format; at the quality it gives, 10:1 compression is leagues beyond anything that existed before. MP3 is very (most?) commonly USED for piracy (although I still have a problem equating robbery and murder on the high seas with unauthorized duplication of data), but that is not MP3's PURPOSE. This is an important distinction.
2. The DMCA is not trying to redefine entertainment on the web. It is trying to reclaim what is legally theirs. Record companies spend millions of dollars signing artists and releasing albums so that they can make a profit -- this is no less noble than any other business. People have found an easy way around this, however, and they're taking advantage of it. The purpose of the DMCA is to defend against outright copyright infringement, which is what we are all doing.
Yes, they do. Unfortunately the WAY that they do it is greedy and immoral. This by itself is not a problem; business are in business to make money. I don't have to like it, but I don't have the right to stop them. But the RIAA has established an illegal monopoly; they have used antitrust practices time and time again to squash smaller competitors; and with the DMCA, they are again using their power to unfairly restrict trade and competition. THIS is why they are so widely hated.
3. College students don't have the ability to download mp3s onto college sites simply because the schools think it's harmless; They can do it because the schools generally don't know about it. Most schools will attempt to eliminate any type of non-official server they are aware of.
This is true. I spent four years at UCLA, three in the dorms; if they found you running an unauthorized server, they'd more likely than not disconnect your Ethernet without telling you, or (as in the case of one friend) BREAK INTO YOUR ROOM and turn off your computer. (They got a lawsuit for that one!)
4. I hate having to repeat this, but copyright issues are not why schools are concerned. They're primary issue is with *bandwidth*. If napster didn't hog up so much space in the pipes, nobody would give a damn.
Bullshit. UCLA's official position in these kinds of instances was that they didn't want to get sued for millions of dollars. UCLA has more bandwidth than you can shake a stick at; the usage of every dormie on campus wouldn't dent it.
5. Free music sites did not proliferate because they piggy-backed off of educational sites where users. They proliferated because they had FREE MUSIC. Sites run off of school servers are nearly impossible to find. Go to the UC Berkeley web page and tell me where you see mp3s.
Nobody runs them off web pages, they go into #freemp3 and tell everyone they have it. Didn't you ever run an MP3 server in college? I did. That was how I advertised. It worked.
6. Katz admonishes colleges and universities for worrying more about copyright infringement than about free speech; He absolutely fails to realize that these artists' never intended that their work be given away. Free speech doesn't mean "gratis."
Katz isn't saying that it's okay for people to steal the new Limp Bizkit CD; he's saying that by restricting students from using services like Napster, they are also being prevented from using them for LEGAL purposes. Would you ban knives because they can be used to kill people?
7. It all comes down to theft. We want to steal music that other people have spent millions to produce, and they want us to pay for it instead. We're pissed off because they're coming ever closer to preventing us from illegally copying their works. We have no right to be as righteously indignant as Jon Katz has portrayed himself.
For one thing, it does not cost "millions" to produce music. The majority of the cost of a CD (about 80% of it) comes from distribution costs, as well as artificial price jack-ups imposed by middlemen (and the RIAA). Production cost as a percentage of the CD cost actually falls as more CD's are printed; you only have to pay for production once, but each additional CD costs something extra.
But if I download a Limp Bizkit MP3 or two, the RIAA has lost nothing. Why? If I listen to the tracks and decide I don't like them, then I don't buy the CD. I haven't wasted my money. If I listen to the tracks and decide I want to be able to listen to them in my car, then I go and buy the CD. And guess what? THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I DID. On Saturday I bought the Limp Bizkit CD SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE I HAD DOWNLOADED THE TRACKS FROM NAPSTER AND I LIKED THEM. If Napster were illegal, and I had never been able to acquire those MP3s in the first place, then the RIAA would not have gotten the money that I spent on the CD. In fact, I have done this three or four times so far (Cake's "Fashion Nugget", Chris Cornell's "Euphoria Morning," and so on) and I intend to keep doing so. (Yes, I know I can often hear them on the radio, but often not. "Euphoria Morning" only had ONE single on the radio ("Can't Change Me"), and that's not enough for me to go on. Only after hearing a second song by Limp Bizkit, "Break Stuff", did I download some other tracks and listen to them. I liked it, and so I bought the CD.)
The point that Katz is making is that the RIAA is attempting to illegally (further) restrain trade and act as a monopoly. If the government isn't going to break it up, then I guess someone has to. Might as well be those of us who agree with Katz.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
A big problem with the DMCA is that it goes well beyond copyright. The "anti-circumvention" provisions encourage proprietary content formats. The DMCA has been used against programs that play Playstation content, for example, even though copyright violation was not even alleged. The Streambox Ferret injunction involves a plug-in that modifies RealPlayer to offer a second search engine. (That injunction is based on a "derivative work" theory, which is wierd, because Streambox isn't distributing a modified RealPlayer, just a plug-in for it. That's a bad precedent; a legal bar to modifying legally obtained software.) And we all know about DeCSS.
It's going to get much worse before it gets better. Players (even monitors and speakers) that won't play unauthorized content are the future. The plan is to encode copy-protection information in audio and video in a way that can't be removed, and will survive both compression and conversion to analog. So when protected content hits the final output device (speaker or monitor), Bad Stuff happens. The SDMI crowd originally wanted the first play of protected content on an MP3/SDMI player to cause the MP3 capability to self-destruct, but that's been abandoned for now.
The clear direction is to eventually obtain the kind of hammerlock on video and audio that Nintendo has now on games for its platform. Keep this in mind.
Hi,
;). So I can only sit and wait what'll happen.
There is almost no way to avoid this topic online, having DMCA, but also (something like) ELITA, the DVD stuff etc. It's all around and it is worrysome.
Yet, I do not feel like I have the complete picture. You see, I don't live in America. So there's nothing I can do against these laws in the way Americans can do (you know, like going to the Santa Clara courthouse `n' stuff
You could claim that it is none of my business, then. I answer with this: America has got important relationships with Europe, and they do take care of "internationalizing" some rules. Especially the Copyright laws, which apply "for the world" (and that is because of these international relationships). Also, when it comes to "new" things, European countries have the tendency to say "how was that solved by the others?". So what happens is that when America creates an important law on a "new" topic, this law will sooner or later influence some European laws as well. It is also important that these Big Businesses we're talking about also go beyond country borders*.
Slashdot is very OK but it doesn't, and cannot, inform people about what's going on in other parts of the world, in such a way that the people of that country will be able to respond quickly. I am also not a politics guy, so I don't follow everything that's going on in my government. And although I write "I" and "Europe" all the time, I know from previous Slashdot postings, that more people in other countries than America are worried.
In concrete words, I think that there is a need for a "slashdot international" that keeps people up-to-date about the international or country-specific legal topics.
Cheers.
__oooO__Footnotes___Oooo__
* The author lives in Holland. The nearest IBM bunker is in Amsterdam, the nearest Microsoft nest is somewhere in the BeNeLux (Belgie Netherland Luxembourg), and the nearest McDonalds, Shell, etc. are around the corner. Just in case you didn't realize how international Big Businesses behave.
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
a side effect of the millenium copyright act was to enable creators to reassert their ownership of creations they were not able to hold onto originally. one example i can think of is that the family of jerry siegel has been able to reassert their rights over the superman character. http://anotheruniverse.com/comics/features/superma nrights.html while we complain about our rights to copy and distribute mp3s, its possible that many creators who were forced by corporations to sign away their rights in the past, can now reassert those rights. this, of course, is not limited to comics, but to movies, music, books, etc.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
It seems that US copyright law has now made the leap from content (the songs) to format (.mp3 file) to media (digital information) to means of dessimating media (university networks). Every single one of these conceptual leaps broadens the scope and power of the law and, further, increases the degree to which it can be misused or misapplied. A law regulating the distribution of digital information over university networks obviously has greater scope and potential for abuse than one regulating the encoding of .mp3 files.
The copyright war, which is still but neonatal, is one aspect of that problem. The National Research Council recently studied copyright and came up with no good solution for the problems Katz mentioned. They did conclude their report with an intriguing thought: perhaps we should rethink the notion of basing our intellectual property tradition on something like "copying" (as in "copyright") since information technologies completely change what copying is. (Click here for their press release.)
Copyright is just one part of something bigger; trademarks and patents, also ways of protecting intellectual property, are drastically changing too.
As far as patents go, consider the efforts of Amazon to patent its one-click shopping process (as has been amply discussed here on /.) and the efforts of companies like Celera, Incyte, HGS and Athersys to obtain thousands of patents on the human genome. (Click here for more on that problem, which is only partly related to information technology.) As someone appropriately said, were Columbus around today, he would try to patent America.
I know less about trademarks, but I understand there are parallel problems in that arena.
The solution doesn't seem to me to be corporation-bashing. (Indeed, having worked in the lobbying department of The McGraw-Hill Companies, I got to see how earnestly corporations care about keeping information accessible while still turning a profit.) Instead, we should do some real hard thinking about how intellectual property can survive in the Information Age -- and we should keep fighting against ridiculous cases, like the DeCSS case, brought on by people who just don't realize what a period of tremendous change this is.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
That said, there are *good* clauses, like specifically allowing reverse engineering for compatibility. BRAVO!.
If a law takes away nine freedoms, and specifically permits you to retain the tenth, "BRAVO!" is hardly the reaction I'd have. Perhaps "This is awful" or "BULLSHIT!", but certainly not "BRAVO!".
In other news, I've announced that my new law will eliminate your ability to speak, read or communicate, but I'm still allowing you to think subversive thoughts. You also retain the ability to stand on your head and stick your tongue out (in your own home only, of course). Reaction from slashdot posters: BRAVO!
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I'm fed up with this corporatism that runs America. All you have to do is look at the Bush campaign. Here's a guy that will say whatever you want him to say depending on how much cash you waive in front of him.
Hollywood is trying to keep us from watching DVD's on Linux. The recording industry is trying to keep us from listening to music on our computers.
They buy the politicians to pass legislation to do so.
So how do we fight back? I've heard some people on slashdot say that they won't buy dvd's until the dvd fiasco is straightened out. But is it really making a difference? Folks, I hate to say it, but they don't give a rats ass about you the individual and whether you choose to stop buying dvd's. The way to fight back is to take it to the masses. Stop buying cd's? Once again, they don't care.
We can complain all we want on slashdot, but how many people actually read slashdot? If we want to be heard, we need to take it to the mass media.
I live in Virginia. Our local newspaper didn't mention one thing about UCITA until the day after it passed. It wasn't until a week later that someone wrote an article talking about the possible downside to UCITA.
In order to be heard, we need to come together in an organized effort. Corporatism thrives on the basis that a company has more pull than individuals.
What would I like to see done?
1. The Academy Awards are coming up later this month. What better place than this to stage a protest on the Motion Picture Association and DVD than here? Can any linux mag journalists get passes to this to ask some tough questions? Ask actors, directors, and producers as well as executives about the dvd problems.
2. Hand out literature at movie theaters or video stores about the dvd situation. If they won't let you, stage protests.
3. When the summer concerts begin, go to the ticket lines and talk about mp3's and how the record companies are trying to prevent you from listening to what music you want. Call up bands on radio call-in shows and ask them about mp3.
4. Take it to your local paper. Most people still get their information from newspaper or television. Slashdot hasn't gotten that big, yet! Hopefully, in time, it will!
5. Vote. Not just in the main elections, but in your local elections. They affect you the most.
6. Support campaign finance reform. Stop letting corporations choose which candidates you will vote for.
Well, with 1.4B growth last year, maybe they're not doomed dispite their very best efforts to the contrary. That testifies to how much people like music, not how much they care for the record industry as a whole (aka "the man").
Things like the DCMA only are legally binding in the good 'ol US of A. The land of the free, remember? Well, let me tell you - I'm a Canadian, and our commie red pinko way of looking at taxes looks pretty good right now compared to some of the scarey-ass things I see coming out of the politics south of the border.
The rest of the world has little to fear from the evil MPAA and RIAA, so don't sweat it. They can procecute all they want, but it won't stem the tides that have been launched. Do they have any apprecationf for the sheer VOLUME of bits being passed around? The movie industry is next, and they know it. What do you think is driving the amazing demand for huge hard drives? Excel spreadsheets? No! Porn and Mp3s. Once 100gb drives become common, DVDs next.
Consumers love freedom, and they're not as stupid as they look. But dispite all the fire blowing in washington, all the people whining about their rights being taken away - your rights in the "real world" are already gone. Has everyone forgotten that it is a FELONY to pirate software?
Too bad all the people calling for handgun legislation didn't understand the real reason that bit about arms is in the US consitution, and no, it wasn't so the NRA can hunt deer with M16 assault rifles.
Kudos from North of the border..
..don't panic
I feel the need to point out something that really terrifies me.
...
What can we, as a group, as a rising political force
I don't think we are a rising political force. Not in comparison to the elderly. Think about it - the demographics of this country are such that the number of people age X is growing faster than the number of people age Y, where X > Y.
In addition, older people vote more, so an rise in the number of 50 year-olds has greater voting power than an equivalent rise in the number of 30-year-olds.
We (younger, working people) are losing power, daily, as people live longer and longer, and the birthrate goes down. Power is more and more in the hands of those who no longer work, but instead are dependent for their financial well-being on the performance of the stock market, and thus, on the health of public corporations.
So, there's no way you're going to convince them that your freedom is more important than their financial security, and I doubt there's any way this balance of power is going to tip back the other way. It's going to get worse and worse, actually.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Something I don't often see pointed out is our culture's view of the whole situation. Pirating has been around as long as intellectual property, but keep in mind that "stealing" intellectual property is considered bad in our society.
For better or for worse, many people who share that view become hypocrites when there is something of value you can steal with little chance of being caught or punished.
However, bills like these pass with ease, and anyone who stands against it is painted as a pirate, similar to any other witchhunt in our history. While our vioce can be heard, and it needs to be, it's going to be very hard to change the environment (culture) that allows these bills to pass.
Some colleges seem to think they have a far greater stake in avoiding lawsuits than they do in confronting the real issues involved -- like promoting free expression and diversity in culture. And college students are selective in political issues. There is, for example, a broad-based anti-sweatshop movement on many U.S. campuses, but no equivalently passionate and nationally-organized movement to keep culture free.
Colleges and Universities have ALWAYS been this way. The leaders of change at any of these institutions have always been the students, and the administration and often faculty stand directly in opposion to them. The reason is simple: the people who run these insititutions are wealthy and powerful, and thus they generally stay with the status quo. Lawsuits are bad for PR. Bad PR means less funding. Less funding is less money.
As far as the students, this isn't a very "sexy" issue as far as what students typically take up. Most college students who are also activists don't understand technology well enough to argue this issue anyway. Frankly its very rare for engineering and computer science students to be involved with the community/civil rights/etc. This is very unfortunate.
john katz, you ignorant slut.
i hate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act as much as the next guy, but it's hardly a grand conspiracy, and it has little to nothing to do with the consumers. The threat of MP3s come from artists who use them. If an open medium for distribution is embraced the recording industry is cut out of the picture.
As for that crap you were talking about universities...please. Napster IS a bandwidth hog, and a number of the universities have publicly stated they'd allow napster, were it to be "leaner."
John Katz, you talk a good game, but I listen to way to much Art Bell to be taken in by standard conspiracy theories. Provide more evidence, please.
If you're looking for insight into how corporatism and politics work together to control software and technology -- and to potentially stifle free speech and individual choice -- you can't do better. Nor will you find a more textbook-perfect example of dubious, perhaps even unconstitutional, Internet law.
Well, apart from UCITA perhaps.
One reason free music sources proliferated so rapidly was that they often piggy-backed on educational and other sites where music seekers congregated. College students could download music on their schools' sites, in part because the schools believed they were simply neutral, non-liable carriers of content. Since there was no Internet law governing content on Web sites, nobody knew if that was true or not. But it certainly isn't true anymore.
If this is carried out to its full extent then no-one will have a web page hosted in the US unless its for something really inoffensive, like cooking - check out this site. By forcing sites to be legally responsible for their content this law ensures that content will remain minimal - for small organisations like colleges that would be unable to continually monitor the content of student web pages it will be far easier simply not to have these web pages. It's far easier for them to do this than to face repeated lawsuits.
The real point of this law is intimidation. It's main target is not professional pirates, most of whom don't live in the US anyway, or the people who download pirate music, most of whom it'd be very difficult and time-consuming to catch, but smaller bodies which can be easily accused and which cannot effectively fight back given such accusations. This law is just another way of the music industry asserting their control over music - one of the oldest parts of human culture and one of the few things which separate us from animals.
That is more a case of the classical pre-DMCA tactic of filing semi-valid (at best) lawsuits hoping to scare someone into submission.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
The recording industry is worried (and rightly so) about becoming redundant in our new information age where any joe blow can set up a worldwide distribution network through the internet, and so they are fighting back with everything they've got.
The same thing happens whenever technology empowers consumers to manage their own content... just look at the VCR. When they first came out, the movie companies all screamed bloody murder, and kept whining about how this was going to obliterate box office sales. Now 20 years later, box office sales are still soaring, and the production houses are making billions off of rental sales. The invention of the magnetic audio cassette was before my time, but I imagine a similar debate raged then.
Of course now the boogeyman is "perfect digital copies". One word: BUL^&$T! You ever listened to an MP3 on a hi-fi stereo? Sounds AWFUL compared to the real deal. How is listening to an MP3 from Napster any different from recording a song from the radio onto a cassette tape? They broadcast this stuff freely on the radio all over the planet and then sick the lawyers on us when we use technology to migrate to the internet, which not only makes sense, but is INEVITABLE! If the bloated media giants weren't drowning in red tape and shortsightedness, they'd have been selling music on the net 5 years ago.
The real solution, IMHO, is to get all of this out in the open, and talk to the people who really matter, the artists whose work is being spread. When exactly did the corporations that simply sell the music become more of a focus than the people who create the music?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
At present, outside of the Geek Community and a few other niche (such as library) players, people just don't care about the DMCA. It doesn't appear to affect them directly, and they really aren't concerned about their Constitutional Rights. We have to take this battle to them.
If I Understand Correctly, as of next October, more provisions of the DMCA come into force. About that time, again IIUC, it may well become illegal to videotape information off of the air/cable/satellite, particularly if it's off of a scrambled (HBO, etc) channel.
Next October, someone needs to "illegally tape off of the air/cable/satellite" and force themselves to get charged for the "crime". Then they need to do a reasonably incompetent job in court, and LOSE. Then they need to get the story out - that VCRs are now illegal, except for playing back rental tapes. This involves the rest of the poplulation.
Obviously, first someone needs to review the DMCA and see if I do understand the DMCA correctly.
The strategy here is to force the right lawsuit, and show exactly how BAD some provisions of the DMCA really are, and how they hurt EVERYONE's rights. Right now, the general population really doesn't have much sympathy for 'some hacker kid in Norway.' General ignorance about hacker vs cracker doesn't help, either.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That's the question that needs to be looked at here. What can we, as a group, as a rising political force do to stop this?
Be careful to remember something: The powers that be ("Power Elite" according to C. Wright Mills, "Ruling Class" according to Marx and Bakunin) like computer geeks right now. They think that we're interesting little beings that do things they don't understand and make them lots of money doing it. But we could very easily fall out of favor with them very quickly. All it takes is some good ol' fashioned free speech to make them revile us more than independant organic farmers.
Right now, we keep basically silent. We may post to Slashdot or usenet and bitch and complain, but the Power Elite/Ruling Class don't read Slashdot or Usenet, because they can't control it (yet, be cautious, Andover). Once we start to speak out against the decisions they're making about the way we conduct our lives, they will hit us. And the louder we speak out, the harder they will hit us. This is the way it is, and has been for centuries.
Now, don't let me discourage you or anybody who's interested in making themselves heard. Quite the opposite, I think that's what needs to be done. Here's a few suggestions that I can think of:
Forget emailing or writing your senator. Honestly, when has that ever really worked? Instead, stage a sit-in protest in his office. Force your way in, and refuse to leave until he hears you out. Notify the press. Bring U-Locks and lockboxes in case they try to drag you out. Contact people from the Ruckus Society or Direct Action Network to learn more about how to plan such an action, and what your legal options are.
Print up some honest-to-goodness propaganda. Check out Subvertise or (if you're really talented) Adbusters for some inspiration. My belief about propaganda is that it should be radical and in people's faces. Don't sugarcoat things, and don't be afraid to challenge people's concept of what's right and wrong. A poster that screams "Copyright Is Theft!" or "Information Wants To Be Free!" is going to intrigue people a lot more than one that says "We think that the DMCA is dangerous to the free software community because of the implications blah blah blah".
Third, there's going to be a lot going on in Washington, D.C. on April 16th. Remember Seat tle? Well, this should be even better. Get your butt out there and make a case against the monopolization of intellectual property. You may want to learn about more of what's going on (it's not just software that IP affects), such as the situation with AIDS drugs in Africa, or the patenting of crops by Monsanto. Also remember that the people protesting are not against globalization (well, unless you count Pat Buchanen as a protester). What we're opposed to, to varying degrees, is corporate rule, greed, and how the Power Elite/Ruling Class are using the idea of "globalization" not to open borders for the prosperity of all, but to create a new form of colonialization. Intellectual property is one major way that they're doing this.
These are a few of the options. I know you said that we should work from inside the system, and that's fine and dandy, but the truth of the matter is that direct action gets the goods. You have to get in people's faces, make them feel a little squeamish (or sometimes downright terrified if the situation is urgent enough), and force them to deal with the issues on *your* terms, without the benefit of having a speech writer churn out the BS beforehand.
Michael Chisari
The biggest threat the DMCA poses is that corporations are afraid of it. In true CYA (Cover Your Ass) mode these corporations are pre-emptively censoring and removing customers from their networks for things that may be offensive, illegal, or libelous - often with little or no supporting evidence other than an e-mail saying "I don't like so-and-so and will sue if you don't remove him."
The DMCA has locked us into a form of public-censorship by allowing ISPs to do this legally without regard to the evidence. The DMCA removed accountability controls for dozens of services and acts. This is the threat, this is why it MUST be stopped. Corporations are beginning to realize that they were not thinking when they signed on to this.. they are now realizing it is a sword that cuts two ways... and some of the smaller corporations are realizing they are ill-equipped to defend themselves against this. And how can they? The DMCA has removed the ability to fight unfair denial of resources.
Yes the DMCA does permit reverse engineering for content delivery, but if you need to bypass some copyright protection to RE the content delivery than that is flatly illegal.
Read the full text of the preliminary injunction in the New York DeCSS case and you will see that this is exactly how the MPAA is going after DeCSS.
We got duped, now we need to figure out what to do to fight it. although Jon doesn't remember the media coverage around the DMCA going through congress, I do. There was a tremendous amount of lobbying done by the software industries and the EFF. Everybody relaxed and celibrated when the Reverse Engineering clause went in, without even relizing that it was taken away immediatly in the 'Copyright Protection Mechanisms" clause.
That is where we died. That is the battlefield that we must fight on now. They thought they could beat us technically with poorly implemented encryption and we trounced them. But now the battle has moved to their battlefield, the legal system.
IANAL so what the hell do we do now?
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works ( http://www.loc.gov/copyright/1201/anticirc.html )
DO NOT JUST EMAIL! READ THE SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
File a reply comment to the MPAA's or other pro-DMCA submission.
I am really beginning to resent the fact that Slashdot feels the need to go out prostelitizing in the name of all "Geek-dom". Quite frankly I am embarrassed for some of the people here on slashdot for holding the views that they hold. Furthermore, it gives people who are geeks but do not share your views a bad reputation. Quite frankly, I don't believe in your communist, "productive-mind raping" views. I think it's great when someone decides to put their work up in the public domain. But I also believe in an individual or organization's right to proprietary ownership of their own work. So please, Mr. Katz, and the rest of you slashdotters, please don't go around screaming "these are geek views", because not all geeks think alike. That's what makes the geek community so great; the wild variation and depth of views and intellectual pursuits. If I wanted to participate in a clone culture I'd go where the real action is: MSDN.
Now the software industry is doing the same thing. Constitutional rights be damned.
('we' being 'the citizens of the United States of America' for all the foreign slashdotters.)
That's the question that needs to be looked at here. What can we, as a group, as a rising political force do to stop this? They ('they' being 'the forces of big business who want to control our minds in a way that Orwell may have not imagined at all') have managed to run this through the Congress using tremendous amounts of money that your average geek doesn't have. (The only one that DOES would be Gates, and we can be pretty sure he doesn't care either.)
Some ideas:
Anyone else have ideas as to how we can turn things around within the system? I'd prefer to start inside than try to break it from outside.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
Colleges are not ISPs, and bandwidth isn't free. They have very limited bandwidth for their userbase, often doubly hampered by halfassed attempts at upstream providers. If ANY application starts pegging their outgoing traffic at 100% 24/7, they're going to ban it or shut it down.
I spoke with the admin of a large university in upstate New York, who told me that the actual content of the traffic doesn't concern him unless someone complains about it - but if any one person or application starts using huge amounts of bandwidth, irrespective of what they're doing, he'll move to shut them down.
So long as bandwidth isn't free, Napster cannot exist in the high-speed environment of a university LAN. While I personally don't like the DMCA and would like nothing better than to see it repealed, this particular issue has nothing to do with it.
1.Katz talks about how wonderful the Net is in allowing new artists to make it around the record industries selection procedures. The whopping majority of mp3s being traded, however, are the works of the bigshot celebs who have already made it. Sure the new kids have a chance to distribute their music, but it's not as though they've suddenly found an equal market. The primary purpose of mp3s is (and always has been) to steal the latest best-selling albums so that you don't have to fork out a couple bucks for it.
Oh puh-lease. The primary purpose of MP3's is and always has been to steal the latest best-selling albums? Wake the fuck up! The primary purpose of MP3's has been to make it easier to widely distribute audio--something that big companies have had a stranglehold for a long time now.
It's no suprise that the MP3 format gets used for piracy--it's made for distributing audio! You say that "the whopping majority of mp3s being traded, however, are the works of the bigshot celebs who have already made it." I know this is probably obvious to most people but I'll take some time to explain this to you:
Local musicians commonly spent US$10 PER CD to have CD's manufactured so they'd have something to give to their fans, AT A LOSS. The big studios, OTOH manufacture billions of CD's at a fraction of the cost, then sell them in thousands of stores across the world. Now, does it really seem like much of a suprise that most of MP3's available happen to be the same music that has been the most widely available?
7.It all comes down to theft. We want to steal music that other people have spent millions to produce, and they want us to pay for it instead. We're pissed off because they're coming ever closer to preventing us from illegally copying their works. We have no right to be as righteously indignant as Jon Katz has portrayed himself
It does NOT all come down to theft. The fact is that MP3's are gaining popularity with local musicians who want a method to distribute their music without getting bent over by a major record label in the process. Stopping the distribution of MP3's is the only way for the big labels to insure their dominance. In case you haven't been paying attention, piracy by MP3 has not hurt them. The threat is music that is distributed by MP3 that is NOT pirated.
There is no music revolution. We're just trying to find better ways to steal.
God this is such a troll...you keep using the word "We" a lot, and I know that should have been an indicator early on... If you're speaking as a member of the RIAA then I apologize, you're not a troll and I applaud your honesty on this point.
Well "we", as in my group of friends, are very excited about the opportunity to use the MP3 format to distribute music globally. The fact that the MP3's we will produce in the coming month will face hurdles getting onto college campuses due to the efforts of the RIAA helps no one but the members of the RIAA.
No, without the ability for everyday people to distribute digital audio without the RIAA as middle-men, there will be no music revolution.
numb
- Katz talks about how wonderful the Net is in allowing new artists to make it around the record industries selection procedures. The whopping majority of mp3s being traded, however, are the works of the bigshot celebs who have already made it. Sure the new kids have a chance to distribute their music, but it's not as though they've suddenly found an equal market. The primary purpose of mp3s is (and always has been) to steal the latest best-selling albums so that you don't have to fork out a couple bucks for it.
- The DMCA is not trying to redefine entertainment on the web. It is trying to reclaim what is legally theirs. Record companies spend millions of dollars signing artists and releasing albums so that they can make a profit -- this is no less noble than any other business. People have found an easy way around this, however, and they're taking advantage of it. The purpose of the DMCA is to defend against outright copyright infringement, which is what we are all doing.
- College students don't have the ability to download mp3s onto college sites simply because the schools think it's harmless; They can do it because the schools generally don't know about it. Most schools will attempt to eliminate any type of non-official server they are aware of.
- I hate having to repeat this, but copyright issues are not why schools are concerned. They're primary issue is with *bandwidth*. If napster didn't hog up so much space in the pipes, nobody would give a damn.
- Free music sites did not proliferate because they piggy-backed off of educational sites where users. They proliferated because they had FREE MUSIC. Sites run off of school servers are nearly impossible to find. Go to the UC Berkeley web page and tell me where you see mp3s.
- Katz admonishes colleges and universities for worrying more about copyright infringement than about free speech; He absolutely fails to realize that these artists' never intended that their work be given away. Free speech doesn't mean "gratis."
- It all comes down to theft. We want to steal music that other people have spent millions to produce, and they want us to pay for it instead. We're pissed off because they're coming ever closer to preventing us from illegally copying their works. We have no right to be as righteously indignant as Jon Katz has portrayed himself.
There is no music revolution. We're just trying to find better ways to steal.ICQ: 49636524
snowphoton@mindspring.com
Got Rhinos?
The digital millenium copyright act certainely posses distinct dangers to existing leeway under copyright laws. But it also forces the law to "smarten up" about the digital world. That said, there are *good* clauses, like specifically allowing reverse engineering for compatibility. BRAVO!.
:-)
Before people snipe at it based on the above (which is certainely a valid perspective), I would highly encourage people to peruse the bill for themselves. Its long, yes, but very clear and direct as these things go. The complete text can be found online, but there are also many good abridged versions! Give it a shot....this is a very accessible and important document for all of us (even non-americans).
Sometimes I think its better to institute a clear law I agree with less...than to continue using a decrepit and unreliable set of rulings. AT least now I have some idea of the "official" stance on things.
-nullity-
I am nothing