Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Asks Slashdot To Remove Readers' Posts
From: "J.K. Weston"
To: "'dns_admin@andover.net'"
"'dns_tech@andover.net'"
Subject: Notice of Copyright Infringement under the Digitial Millennium Copyright Act
Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 07:08:49 -0700
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2651.58)
Andover Advanced Technologies
Andover.Net
50 Nagog Park
Acton, MA 01720
Phone: (978) 635-5300
Fax: (978) 635-5326
Email: dns_admin@andover.net; dns_tech@andover.net
Dear Internet Service Provider:
We understand that your website, http://www.slashdot.org, is a popular site for developers to discuss topical issues of interest. In that vein, it has come to our attention that there have been numerous posts of concern related to Microsoft's copyrighted work entitled "Microsoft Authorization Data Specification v. 1.0 for Microsoft Windows 2000 Operating Systems" and we would appreciate your posting this email to the site to help relay our position to your users.
This notice is being sent under the provisions, and following the guidelines, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).
Included on http://www.slashdot.org are comments that now appear in your Archives, which include unauthorized reproductions of Microsoft's copyrighted work entitled "Microsoft Authorization Data Specification v.1.0 for Microsoft Windows 2000 Operating Systems" (hereafter "Specification"). In addition, some comments include links to unauthorized reproductions of the Specification, and some comments contain instructions on how to circumvent the End User License Agreement that is presented as part of the download for accessing the Specification.
Although not intended to be an exhaustive representation, the specific comments below, categorized by corresponding activities, are examples of the misuse of Microsoft's proprietary information:
Comments Containing A Copy of the Specification:
"by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday, May 02, @03:37PM EST (#197)"
"by BlueUnderwear on Tuesday, May 02, @04:09PM EST (#239)"
"by BlueUnderwear on Tuesday, May 02, @04:15PM EST (#248)"
"by smartin on Tuesday, May 02, @02:20PM EST (#86)"
Comments Containing Links to Internet Sites with Unauthorized Copies of the
Specification:
"by ka9dgx on Tuesday May 02, @2:52PM EST (#133)"
Comments Containing Instructions on How to Bypass the End User License
Agreement and Extract the Specification:
"by myconid (my S conid@ P toge A the M r.net) on Tuesday May 02, @07:27PM
EST (#362)"
"by markb on Tuesday May 02, @05:47PM EST (#321)"
"by Sami (respect.my@authorita-dot-net) on Tuesday May 02, @01:47PM EST
(#19)"
"by iCEBalM (icebalm@[NOSPAM]bigfoot.com) on Tuesday May 02, @01:52PM EST
(#33)"
"by Jonny Royale (moc.mocten.xi@notners) on Tuesday, May 02, @01:59PM EST
(#51)"
"by rcw-work (rcw@d.e.b.i.a.n.org.without.dots) on Tuesday, May 02, @07:12PM
EST (#353)"
Under the provisions of the DMCA, we expect that having been duly notified
of this case of blatant copyright violation, Andover will remove the above
referenced comments from its servers and forward our complaint to the owner
of the referenced comments.
This email notification is a statement made under penalty of perjury that we
are the copyright owner of the referenced Specification, that we are acting
in good faith, and that the above-referenced comments, as part of
http://www.slashdot.org, is posting proprietary material without express
written permission.
We request immediate action to remove the cited violations from Andover's
servers, in accordance with the provisions of the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act of 1998.
This email is not intended to waive any of our other rights and remedies.
Please confirm your receipt of this request by responding to this email.
Also, confirm the status of this request either via email or via the
following contact mechanisms:
By mail:
J.K. Weston, Designated Agent
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way, 114/2314
Redmond, WA 98052
By phone:
(425) 703-5529
By email: jkweston@microsoft.com
---------------------------
To: J.K. Weston"
From: Robin Miller
Subject: Notice of Copyright Infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Dear J. K. Weston:
Per your request, we are posting your e-mail on this subject on Slashdot.org to help you relay your position to our users.
The balance of your e-mail's content is somewhat puzzling to us. I'm sure you agree that freedom of speech is at least as important a principle under American law as the freedom to innovate, so I'm sure that you personally, and Microsoft corporately, will understand our hesitation to engage in censorship.
Indeed, after reflecting on the nature of freedom for a little while, you may wish to withdraw your request that we remove readers' comments from Slashdot. Please realize that if we censor our readers's posts because they contain ideas Microsoft does not wish to have made public, we may set an unhealthy precedent for other online news outlets and online service providers, including those owned in whole or in part by Microsoft itself.
Meanwhile, in case Microsoft does not decide to have a happy change of heart and support a free and open Internet (which would certainly be in everyone's best interest), we have sought advice both from our attorneys and from our readers about what, if anything, we should do next.
Please expect a formal reply to your request that we censor our readers' comments, which we allow them to post on Slashdot as freely as Microsoft allows user-generated content to be sent through Hotmail and through chat facilities and discussion groups hosted on MSN.com servers, as soon as we receive wise counsel not only from our attorneys, but also from concerned members of the Slashdot community and other interested parties.
Sincerely,
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
Editor-in-Chief,
Andover.net
This doesn't have anything to do with DMCA. They are calling the complete posting of their files a copyright violation, and that would have probably been a violation even before DMCA.
As for their complaint about links and instructions to bypass the EULA, that's just bullshit and even DMCA doesn't make those illegal. Even if they somehow manage to deceive a judge into believing that using WinZip to extract the file amounts to "circumventing technological measures to limit access", then their complaint should be against WinZip. After all, the current wave of DMCA scaresuits is based on the idea that you go after the toolmakers instead of the people who use the tool, right?
DMCA was brought up because it has all the stuff about notifying offending parties, and counter-notifying of mistakes, etc.
Basically, I think they're right about the postings of their files being copyright violations. They're full of shit with regard to the EULA-bypassing. They need UCITA for that to stick.
Yo, J.K. Weston: Slashdot has generated a lot of heat in the past, but that was directed at entities that were only tangetially opposed to the main subject matter of this site. Your client is different. Your client isn't just the MPAA or the RIAA or someone who violated the GPL. Your client is the main enemy of everyone who uses a computer. Think carefully about proceeding to represent that client, because you are the wrong side of a Holy War. No matter what happens, if there's ever a "Microsoft vs. Slashdot" case, you are going to come out of it smelling like shit, Mr. Weston, and everyone is going to remember your name. Walk away now and find some honest work.
"The fields are defined as follows: include-pac - This field indicates whether a PAC should be included or not. If the value is TRUE, a PAC will be included independent of other preauth data. If the value is FALSE, then no PAC will be included, even if other preauth data is present. The preauth ID is: #define KRB5_PADATA_PAC_REQUEST 128
References
1 Neuman, C., Kohl, J., Ts'o, T., "The Kerberos Network Authentication Service (V5)", draft-ietf-cat-kerberos- revisions-05.txt, March 10, 2000
2 Tung, B., Hur, M., Medvinsky, A., Medvinsky, S., Wray, J., Trostle, J., " Public Key Cryptography for Initial Authentication in Kerberos", draft-ietf-cat-kerberos-pk-init-11.txt, March 15, 2000""
I fear that even /. might cave in to the legal power of M$ and remove these posts. This thread should be copied to a servers all over the world as soon as possible by whichever AC's have the resources.
"by smartin on Tuesday, May 02, @02:20PM EST (#86)",
yet the copy I have says:
"by smartin on Tuesday May 02, @03:20PM EST (#86)"
Yet, the headers on 87, and 96 are:
"by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02, @04:21PM EDT (#87)" and
"by scotpurl on Tuesday May 02, @04:27PM EDT (#96)"
However you look at it, it seems they were smoking some of the $3 crack that is so common around here :) (Joke, don't sue me for slander/libel M$.)
Made particularly tasty by this:
"This email notification is a statement made under penalty of perjury that we are the copyright owner of the referenced Specification, that we are acting in good faith, and that the above-referenced comments, as part of http://www.slashdot.org, is posting proprietary material without express written permission. "
Ok, how about we get the option to remove/edit our comments with some sort of system notice that identifies to other users that a comment was there, but now removed by... or edited by...
Of course the anonymous cowards won't be able to do that.
Fuck Ajit Pai
We've had this debate before. Slashdot does not moderate comments. Slashdot allows readers to assign scores to comments, and you can adjust the score you are willing to look at. If you browse at -1, then you'll see Slashdot in all of its unmoderated hot grits glory. Your choice.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Ha! This brings up an interesting point. The lawyer's email itself contains links to the posts which link to the material that they want removed. Therefore, the lawyer's email is also suspect and must be removed! :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I think a little precision is in order on this contentious issue. They didn't say "our content", they said "public content". Quite a big difference.
-Paul Komarek
Having wrote that article I was suprised and pleased to be in the list. I suspect however that the fact that it's included is simply a bug in their legal process that will be resolved in "Microsoft Notice of Copyright Infringement under the Digitial Millennium Copyright Act 2.0"
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I suspect that the fact that it's included is simply a bug in their legal process that will be resolved in "Microsoft Notice of Copyright Infringement under the Digitial Millennium Copyright Act 2.0"
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
By using posts without the author's permission, Slashdot and Jon Katz may be setting themselves up for a copyright lawsuit, but that is up to the people whose posts they used in the book. If Katz is correct, and those people really wanted their letters used in the book, and didn't really want to be contacted for fear of reprisals if the wrong people find out, then there shouldn't be any lawsuits. Either way, it doesn't change the fact that posts are owned by the posters.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
My prediction, and no, I can't back it up, is that if this had happened a year ago, Slashdot would have stood it's ground. But now, I don't think it will.
Malda has always said that he has complete control over the content on Slashdot, but what about this? My guess is that Andover gets to make the decision, and that they aren't going to want to risk getting sued. So if Malda says keep them and Andover says delete them, I bet Andover wins.
When thinking about this, I remember Al Pacino in "The Insider": "Are you a businessman, or are you a newsman?" Slashdot/Andover is going to have to make a similar decision: money or principle. I'm not too hopeful.
"The LINE must be DRAWN HE-AH!"
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Is this Stalin's USSR or USA?
Now it happens that Americans have to hide their speech in other countries. I never dreamed I live long enough to see that.
It's funny that most of you Americans think about your liberties as granted, your freedom as a matter of fact and then, as a first reaction, look for assylum in other countries.
You have a judiciary system that allows you to challenge that, so Fight, otherwise just sit down trying to get your first post or pour hot grits down your pants, thank you.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
> Their content is the owner's responsibility
/. (comparing with the media giants).
So how does one sue AC?
Who do you sue when you wake up and find your car, which you forgot to park in the garage, had pretty obnoxious grafiti all over it?
The same way they should, instead of bullying a "minor" site as
The Napster association is bad enough. If Slashdot does not yank the copyrighted material, not only will Andover lose, but the mainstream press will have a heyday calling all proponents of free software a bunch of thieving zealots. Imagine the impact this will have on the DeCSS case, let alone the future of commercial free-software development.
Slashdot has long been a thorn in the side of Redmond; let's not give MS such a cheap chance to destroy this rival. Nothing would make MS so happy as an excuse to take Andover to court and bleed it dry of funds. Now, the comments explaining how to circumvent the NDA are another thing; in my book, they count as legitimate reverse engineering. Legally testing that legitimacy might be a good thing.
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I agree. If you are quoting sections of the document that is fair use from what I understand (Of course, IANAL) I believe another mentioned the risks in assuming responsibility for posts on this site. I agree with this as well. If you are responsible for any part of the content you are responsible for all of it. I know no-one wants to be the ones to have to go through the legal hassle to fight a bad law, but we do all get upset whenever x company chooses not to fight, we shouldn't be hypocrites now and back down ourselves.
/. should stick to their guns on this one. I believe in picking your battles, but this one is not a minor skirmish. The DMCA is a very big problem so any opportunity to shoot it down must be taken.
However, I'm thinking this might not go that far. The DMCA is a bad law, but companies like MS want to keep it. My guess is they'll bluster and try to make you take it down by threatening you. But, if you stand up, there's a good chance they will back down rather than take a chance on the law being overturned in court. A lot of companies take a tack like that. If you stand up, they might back down and go after people more easily frightened.
Either way, I think
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
If the New York Times had printed an editorial containing copyrighted information, Microsoft would not even think of having them go around and ink it out in every copy of the New York Times distributed, including those in libraries, archives, bird cages, etc. Why should Slashdot be any different because it's printed with bits instead of on paper? Why should a corporation be able to retroactively alter or delete the historical record provided by a news outlet, effectively rewriting the past?
If you are not one of us, you are one of them. Sentient programs. They can move in and out of any software still hardwired to their system. That means that everyone we haven't unplugged, is potentially an agent.
Dear Microsoft:
Thank you.
Thank you for your corporate culture, thank you for your unflagging sense of invincibility, thank you for targeting us.
I'm serious! It's your antics that are going to get the courts to throw out most, if not all, of your customer damaging, ethically questionable, and technically incompetent abuses of your hard-bought legislation. After all, lets not forget the bottom line of exactly what you're claiming ownership of. You're not just defending the trade secret of, say, one of those secret API's you're in so much trouble about. You're defending a trade secret that basically says Only Microsoft can allow something to join a Customer's Network.
Only you, Microsoft, could claim ownership of your customer's networks. Only you could claim the right to admit and deny code into your customer's nets. Only you could do this while desperately trying not to be split up! Only you could do this to such a degree that you'd attack hundreds of thousands of people just *itching* to prove to anyone within hearing distance why, just why Microsoft is a threat.
I mean, after all, lets not forget that Reverse Engineering law came into existence due to IBM's lock-in policy, whose playbook you've suspiciously stolen. Lets not forget that AT&T was infamous for restricting the hardware you could use on their network. Actually, you can forget. We'll remember, and for all I've been trying to believe that your organization shouldn't be split, or placed under a rather ridiculously oppressive consent decree...this ain't helping.
For all the technical respect I have for your employees--yes, at least one of the people you attacked today repsects your coders greatly--I can't imagine how powerless and abused these individuals must feel. Perhaps Microsoft should be split into coders and suits? The coders do the work and get the money, while the suits field the lawsuits that they've spawned with their arrogance.
Yeah, I can go for that.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Which responsibilities do corporations not have that regular citizens do (under US law)? They have to pay taxes. They have to follow the laws, or else face the consequences. Yes, they can *SHAPE* the laws and get laws which favor them put in place, but so could a similarly-equipped private citizen. Thus corporations soon become more powerful that real people.
What slashdot has done is to set up a system with some clearly defined rules than let people play with it. The fact that some users have a defualt score of -2 is a result of lots of seperate actions by users.
Editorial control, on the other hand, is when someone looks at the content before it is published, and makes a judgement on where to publish it, if at all.
The mechanisms are entirely different in a very important way.
I would also suggest that you only remove the posts in question if ordered to do so by a court.
You want to avoid doing anything which might be used to claim that you have excercised any form of control over the content of the posts on your site. This is important because as soon as you start filtering the posts, perhaps even if you are tricked into doing so, you could be held responible for filtering all the posts.
I agree with leaving links up. Additionally the pages that discuss how to remove the EULA from the document are also A-OK. There's no law that says that you have to agree to the license. If it's been published (I'd say it has) then you're bound by copyright law - anything else is optional. Information on how to read parts of it and avoid other parts is fine.
And IANAL but is it not eligable for significant copyright protections if it's not published? Which would have to be the case for the EULA to really stand up.
It's very disturbing to see people (well, almost always it's big corporations, not people at all) attempt to use copyrights to their benefit, but also skirt around the requirement that it be published and that they submit to the rule of first sale (where the copyright owner cannot control the sale, use or ownership of the material after selling a copy himself - it's what keeps used bookstores in business, and is generally a good idea)
As for the posts actually containg the document, I am undecided. Just my 2 cents
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It's ironic, so shortly after the ILOVEYOU virus, that Microsoft still apparantly expects every single user out there to run random executable files to view a simple document! If everybody tried explicitly opening all attachments with Notepad and tried opening all .exe downloads with Winzip, the world would be a lot safer from million-infection computer viruses.
.zip. Someone here said it was a RAR archive, but the only "unrar" program I could find for Linux (binary-only freeware? I feel dirty...) wouldn't open it. Anyone know of Linux tools that will? I'm certainly not going to run it through Wine...
I'm annoyed, however: kerbspec.exe (wow, and they still use those 8.3 filenames, too) isn't a self-extracting
All this talk about Microsoft vs. Free Speech is important, but there's something else that needs to be considered here.
The fact that Microsoft is trying to suppress these articles indicates that they fully intend to 'protect' their proprietary Kerberos extensions. This isn't a replay of earlier extensions, such as the way they transmit DNS and WINS server addresses over a PPP connection, an extension which grudglingly became more-or-less a standard, even though it was placed in the wrong layer). This time they're embracing, extending, and pointing an assault rifle at anyone who wants to try to turn it into a de jure standard rather than simply pay megabucks for Windows 2000.
If Microsoft is successful in protecting its Kerberos extensions as a trade secret, look for this to become their standard mode of operation for every standard they butcher in the future.
And since I know Microsoft is reading this: you people should be ashamed of yourselves. You are a bunch of soul-less monsters. I hope a meteor lands on Redmond and wipes out the whole lot of you.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I seem to remember a court decision in a case against a very large ISP (AOL or Prodigy?) which held that the ISP was liable for posters' comments, only because that ISP already had an existing policy of regular censorship.
By the way, all the talk about how Andover/Slashdot should be held faultless because thay are a common carrier is nonsense. Slashdot is no more a common carrier than the NY Times.
If copyrighted material were published, in whole, in a story in a newspaper or pulp magazine without the copyright holder's permission, you can bet that that periodical would be sued.
On the other hand, I think that trying to copyright openly published, globally accessible, and freely accessible (as in free beer) material, and then trying to claim it as both copyrighted (for purposes of redistribution) and a trade secret is a ludicrous, although creative abuse of intellectual property laws.
The gist of M$'s license is:
M$an is standing on a corner. StrangerA walks by.
M$an: "Pssst. I have a secret. I'll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone else."
Stranger A: "Okay, what's the secret?"
M$an tells StrangerA the secret.
StrangerB walks by.
M$an: "Hey. I have a secret. I'll tell it to you, but only if you promise not to tell anyone else."
StrangerB: Sure. Tell me the secet."
Another stranger walks by.
M$an: "Hello maam..."
I personally consider divulging the secret to be at worst, given that the secret is actually copyrightable, an act of civil disobedience. Consider that, under Brittish law of the time, the American Revolution was against the law. At one time in the U.S it was illegal for a black man or woman to drink from a water fountain designated as being for whites only. Yeah, it's shame those laws were broken!
Another thing, how can M$ claim any rights under DCMA when DCMA has not ever gone into effect yet?
>This information isn't exactly top secret. It's
>not even that interesting, or mildly sought
>after.
Bingo. This isn't about what the information was. It could have been a proprietary chocolate chip cookie recipe, or a plan for building a go-cart for all MS's lawyers could have cared. They just want to create a precedent. They want to jump on something unimportant *now*, so that if someone posts something *really* important later MS won't have to wait for some website operator to consult their lawyers. They want the legal ability to yank anything that they don't like immediately. In their eyes, having Slashdot (a rather well-known largely anti-MS site) as their first target is just icing on the cake.
Certainly not Bill. I'm guessing it was a manager in the technical division who kept hearing about "this slashdot thing" from programmers in the office. He went to check it out, and voila. Instant Manager Karma points with his superiors for reporting possible copyright violations.
n general, I agree. In this specific, I do not. I believe Rob, Robin, Hemos, et. al., are moral individuals. They have been given complete editorial control over /.'s content.
/.'s name into the mainstream. What better than a Free Speech battle with MS to get good press?
/. does not stand up for Free Speech now, it will never get the chance again
How is it that editorial control would extend to making decisions about lawsuits involving not just the site that a person runs, but the parent company that owns the site?
I don't necessarily disagree with you about Taco's credibility or "moralness", and I'm not entirely sure what his role is within andover, but I'm not sure he's the guy who calls the shots when it comes to lawsuits.
Plus, in this case, I believe it will be worth a court battle; it'll bring
I think it's already in the mainstream. Or the internet mainstream anyway. I bet most people who have ever heard of free software or "open source" could name slashdot. Within its realm of operation, (quasi open source) I'd be willing to bet it has better than 80% name recognition.
Besides, on the topic of getting slashdot good press, that doesn't really interest me. I get some news here, but I feel no obligation to boost this site. They seem to be doing fine.
If
I'm not going to say "This doesn't matter" or "this isn't an assault on freedom of speech" because it probably is. But the real battle of free speech is won at the individual level, not by giving more money to lawyers duking it out with another company.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
If so, how far? Under the "six degrees of separation" theory, every server on the net could end up with at least one page with a propagated illegal link.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
bill is crying, loud
slashdot users don't give a
microsoft will be gone
I realize that I am chiming in late, but you did ask for readers' opinions. Here's mine.
The letter from Microsoft under penalty of perjury identified one other post as containing a copy of Microsoft's copyrighted material when it instead asked about SAMBA. Microsoft has therefore perjured themselves. What are the legal implications of this? How does this affect the rest of the complaint?
Nice oxymoron.
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
Hey, at least they're visiting the site.:) I wonder if the M$ guys have accounts?
Humm, maybe they're the Anonymous Cowards that do the first posts.... heheheh
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
You dont make sense.
Oh, someone who reads that site did something nice to us, so we'll let some other unrelated readers post licensed material without the license? Give me a break, you'd do the same thing.
SlashDot may have already given themselves hell. Hell-mouth, in fact.
/.'s grave. Now /. can't really argue that they're more or less free to do what they like with user comments.
Publishing the comments of SlashDot readers sans their permission (the Hellmouth book) may just have dug
OTOH, Microsoft only has the right to demand removal of actual copyright material. Links are a different matter. Hint: Australians are allowed to reverse-engineer things; perhaps there should be a SlashDot department somewhere out of reach of Microsoft lawyers?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think it's worth noting that Slashdot has never removed a post. Having established no precedent, it makes it considerably easier (IANAL!) for Slashdot to claim that it merely a location where data can be posted, but is not a filter or editor of the content within them.
I don't know how this fits in with the DMCA: Anybody know?
-Waldo
>One last thingy that I noticed. There is no digital signature appended to the message, not any other way to identify the writer of this e-mail.
/. is located. In WA it just might be whatever Gates & Ballinger say on a given day -- or then again, the exact opposite.
Hmm. Reminds me of the Helena Korbin days on a.r.s.
ItooANAL, but sending legal notice to people tends to be done on paper by registered post. An email could come from anyone -- a lawyer at Microsoft, a troll wanting to get MS in trouble, or the legal staff at Andover wanting to run up the billable hours &/or get some overtime.
State law here in OR is that you have to send legal notices by snail mail. Prolly is the case in Michigan, where
I say ignore this communication, until soemthing arrives from Redmond that would be acceptible to a 19th century court of law. Like a snail mail or a live human being.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I am no lawyer. But I have met several times this race of mammals roaming in the neighborhood. And this puts me in alert in relation to this letter.
/. should have looked something like this:
/. to give the public acknowledgement of this letter and then asks to inform him about what action has been taken!!!!
This letter claims copyright violations according to "provisions" in a certain law. UAU!
Either lawyers quit the old _ONE_ M$ Way, either someone at M$ is taking the law with himself or this is just a good joke. If you claim a violation AGAINST an act of law, USUALLY you claim no only the law but also the article, paragraphs and, if you are a damn bastard in your profession CITE the law and even DETAIL IT against the concrete violation. Besides you don't strictly claim that you are breaking the law and that you SHOULD do that or that to become the good right citizen. That belongs to the police, the FBI & Co. And even such organisms don't have the right to claim you broke the law and consider immediately that you are guilty (maybe in One M$ Way they only believe in presumption of in-nonsense of their users)
A letter of pretentions to
"According to article 272 point 1 of the Trinitary Act, we consider that the article #33454
is violating our rights as it publishes a detail of our internal specs on Windows^-1. Specifically:
'- You can overpass the login password by pressing ESC'
We consider this information internal to our company and not available to public. Consequently we would require that you remove this immediately"
That is one point on how the letter should look like. A correct letter. Not this mass of foggy warnings that we are seeing here. But not only.
Usually there is a practice for contacts between lawyers before any action is taken. No one likes to wash such kind of dirty laundry in the public. Strangely enough the author of thing asks
Looking at this I can come into three conclusions. Either we are facing a guy with a very good/bad sense of humour, either we are facing some sort of provocation (or call for provocation). Or lawyers, maybe in face of the last events around M$, decided to quit the boat and left their apprentices around...
You dumbass, you miss the point. Go back to your visual basic...
/. That in itself is illegal."
"This isn't about freedom of speech or anything else. It is plain and simple, a posting of content not belonging to the poster or to
Yes, but ONLY for the poster, NOT slashdot.
"The person who uploaded it or the person who owns the BBS? Believe it or not, the person who owns the BBS is the one that gets the lawsuit."
Yeah, this is DIFFERENT, dumbass. BBS operators control their content.. perhaps not all of it, but the fact that they control some of it makes them responsible. Slashdot does JACK SHIT with poster comments, no filters, no censors, it is RAW STORAGE of poster comments. Which the poster owns. There is a big difference here. Unfortunately your VB code has dulled your brain.
that slashdot got hit with a DoS shortly after all this occurred..
8 2,00.html
see http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,362
Hmm.. i may be a conspiracy buff, but id love to see it traced back to the empire... ehehe..
"First, this issue is *not* one of "freedom of speech", it is a copyright issue, plain and simple"
You bastard.. its a copyright issue for the poster. Get a clue.
"Selective publication by a *private* organization is *not* "censorship" -- censorship is *government* restriction of expression *by use of force* (i.e., law or ordinance.) "
wake up. pull your head out of your ass and put the VB script manual down..
"there is a categorical difference between expressing an idea, and reproducing, verbatim, clearly copyrighted work in violation of the holder's copyright."
True, all of the above Microshaft is attempting to censor. Even the msot remote idea pertaining to the kerberos cracp they intend to censor. Read you fucking idiot, read what they hell they are asking, and the posts they mentioned. Then you *may* get a clue you fucking microshaft lemming..
"Slashdot's anarchistic, intellectually irresponsible response does nothing to bolster individual rights, but actually does the opposite, by obfuscating the real issues"
Riiight,.. thank god for microshithole to save us with their strong moral integrity from the degenerative copryright infridngers.. fuck you..
Not really as disturbing as what dog food becomes after the dog has 'processed' it, right? That would explain a lot....
Someone should do a pseudo clean room reverse engineer of the spec. Have someone read the spec without seeing the license agreement, have them relate the spec to another author, and have that author do a write up and post it as a feature on slashdot. The reson the author shouldn't read the spec is to ensure that he is 'clean'. Copyright doesn't cover facts, only expression, so I don't see how this could be illegal.
Of course the samba guys will probably reverse engineer the method by watching the packets fly across the network. Real men don't need documentation!
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Legislating against circumvention and reverse engineering is so misguided, I hardly know where to begin.
... it was kids, working alone, or in small groups of friends. It wasn't done for profit -- it was done for the challenge.
Back in 1982, my parents bought me my first computer -- an Apple II. They also bought me a bunch of games. I was immediately frustrated by how much better the commercial games were then my BASIC programs were. I quickly figured out that if I ever wanted to write "the good stuff", I would need to learn 6502 assembly language. Fortunately, Apple had included a source listing of the monitor ROM, which, along with a 6502 reference card, was enough information to pick up the language and start writing programs.
But the real way that I learned 6502 assembly language was by removing the copy protection from those games. The games were expensive, and the copy protected disks worked poorly, wore out quickly, and were murder on the disk drives. Clearly these games could be "improved" by turning them into small files, which I could more easily carry around on a single disk in my backpack -- a similar motivation as people have in creating MP3s out of their CDs.
(For the curious, the trick was to load the boot sector, which couldn't be copy protected, into memory, then disassemble the boot code and change the JMP instruction that transferred control to the second stage boot loader into a breakpoint. Next, I would execute the boot sector code, allowing the program to drop back into the monitor once the copy protected boot loader had finished loading. Then I would explore memory to see what had been loaded. There were some devilish tricks -- sometimes the byte right before the starting instruction would deliberately contain an opcode designed to trick the disassembler into printing gibberish. Sometimes, the boot loader would load the program into memory, then run an algorithm that XORed one part of the program with another part of the program -- descrambling it. Inevitably, by repeating the process over and over, I would eventually reach a point where the entire program had been loaded into memory and was ready to execute. Then, I would copy all of the individual chunks of the program into a contiguous region, usually in the HIRES memory area, and reboot the machine. Rebooting the machine would leave the contents of the HIRES memory intact, so once DOS had booted up, one could easily BSAVE the program image into a file. Next step was to write a short assembly routine that would copy all of the program sections back into their original location, and branch to the starting instruction of the game. Finally, this was all combined together and BSAVED as a single executable program. There were many other tricks -- like overlaying the RWTS (read/write track/sector) routine (I accumulated an entire disk full of those!), but the main approach of attack was almost always reverse engineering. Doing this, I could fit 5-15 games on a single, unprotected disk, I could back up my games, and they weren't so hard on the disk drive.)
Each game was a battle between the programmer who had tried to protect the game, and myself, and I almost always had more fun cracking the game then from playing it. I used to borrow games I didn't care about, just for the fun of breaking them down into a file.
I was 15 years old at the time, and although it may have seemed like a waste of valuable high school study time to do this, I have found that I use similar techniques to this day. All that reverse engineering work gave me the basic analytical skills that I use to this day, both on the job and off, and if I had been dissuaded from doing so because it was illegal, I don't know what I'd be doing with my life right now, but I doubt it would have been for the better.
The valuable practical experience and education that comes from unauthorized reverse engineering is what the DMCA seeks to deny to the next generation of American computer programmers.
If reverse engineering is now held to be illegal, the effect will not be to stop reverse engineering. Instead, we will criminalize an entire generation of bright young people who are doing nothing other then exploring the world around them, trying to understanding how it works -- applying the scientific method to the things that matter to them -- their music, movies, and computers -- and trying to make them more useful to themselves. It wasn't a heavily financed organization that broke CSS, or reverse-engineered Mattel's encryption scheme
The danger is that if you tell a kid that he or she is a criminal for doing something that is not immoral or unethical, you run the risk that that kid will accept that he or she is a criminal. The real danger of record company executives, and especially ignorant musicians making poor-mouth declarations that "downloading an MP3 is just a wrong as stealing a CD from Tower Records", is that a kid believes it. That's not what this is about, they know it, and they are teaching a very, very bad lesson to the next generation, in a doomed effort to stop something that's about as stoppable as the incoming tide. They don't care what damage they are doing, and that should bother everyone.
The way things are going, the main effect of the DMCA is going to be the creation of a new generation of extremely smart young people with contempt for the law, because the law has contempt for them. It will be exactly what our country deserves for passing laws like the DMCA.
A quote from the Peacefire site:
It's not a crime to be smarter than your parents
Not until the DMCA made it a crime.
Yes, in theory you are correct, but when you're faced with a federal indictment charging you with theft of trade secrets, you are in a bit of a tough position, aren't you?
Bear in mind that theft of trade secrets is a felony in the U.S., punishable by fines of up to $500,000 or imprisonment of up to 10 years. I didn't know that until I just looked it up, and I bet you didn't either.
That's why this is such an appalling tactic. Theft of trade secrets is an extremely serious crime, penalty-wise, and Microsoft has essentially used it to bait a trap for its competitors.
It's your word against Microsoft's money and lawyers.
Want to roll the dice?
It does seem like the inforation could be put to use by the Samba team for talking to Win2000, though.
WRONG! Read the EULA carefully. The license explicitly forbids implementing the specification. Now the Samba team must be VERY careful not to allow anyone who has seen the specification to ever touch the Samba code, or the Samba programmers could face a federal felony lawsuit, and receive up to 10 years in federal prison for "theft of trade secrets." Hopefully none of the Samba programmers went ahead and examined the specification before they realized the implications of the "license."
Of course, the fact that it's not so secret makes one wonder why MS has their panties all in a bunch. I guess they believe in absolute enforcement.
Things becoming clearer? This is still Microsoft.
Except for those users who have an automatic score of -2. Slashdot censors certain users, which could be considered to be editorial control.
I propose the following: If Slashdot removes the comments without having been forced to by an actual court ruling, we boycott Slashdot.
What a dumb idea. Slashdot is us. Slashdot needs our support. Do you always turn on your friends when they suffer a setback? Whose side are you on, anyway?
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
"I sincerely hope that Slash is doing, and has been doing, the right thing and simply not keeping any records of anonymous posters."
Well, what is the answer to this one? Do I need to read the FAQ? You'll find the answer to the question by reading the source code. (I don't know the answer just now:)
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
This email notification is a statement made under penalty of perjury that we...
I find it a little ironic that Microsoft expects to add weight to *any* statement by using the word "perjury". Anybody who is interested in judging for themselves whether Microsoft thinks perjury is a problem can check out Bill Gates video testimony. Personally, I don't think perjury means a thing to this man or his company.
I wonder if it matters at all that Microsoft is quite likely breaking the law with its attack on Kerberos, and supporting that lawbreaking using the fig leaf of DCMA.
I wonder if Microsoft would rather that this post be removed also?
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
The traditional definition of a common carrier is a business that offers a service to the general public, without discrimination, on a regular basis. Common carriers are usually subject to federal and state regulations. A common carrier can not refuse service to a customer except under unusual conditions such as lack of capacity. That is where most Internet companies flunk the common carrier test. They reserve the right to not offer service or to discontinue service without cause. The telephone company on the other hand, must provide service to anyone who can pay for it, even if they are the League of Communist Dope Fiends and Child Pornographers for Satan, Reformed.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And if he's not available, I am a great lawyer. I've never lost a case! And I'll work for almost nothing!
"It does NOT make sense!"
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
The illegal material is NOT on slashdot servers... and according to a recent ruling, slashdot has every right to link to those pages, even if they contain "illegal" stuff... I say just let Microsoft deal with it... if they really want to let through with it, then let them sue whoever the owners of the other servers are.
:)
We, Slashdot, need not worry.
No, that is not obvious. Why would Slashdot/Andover remove posts they don't own?
Slashdot is just like a telephone company or a newsgroup. A discussion group.
Microsoft should ask the original owners of the posts to remove them. But not order Slashdot to remove them!
But should Slashdot/Andover do that?
They (Slashdot/Andover) don't own those posts.
Slashdot is just like HotMail, A telephone company or a newsgroup. They host a discussion forum and they should not be responsible or interfere with the content.
What is interesting is what would happen when SlashCode finally has support for NNTP/Usenet news gateways. Then the Slashdot comments would also automagically appear on DejaNews and thousands of other news servers. Then it would be obvious why it is not the business of Slashdot/Andover to remove these postings.
[I Am Not A Lawyer]
The copyright issue is bogus. MIT owns all copyrights on Kerberos. Microsoft can't get them by re-writing a spec. Doesn't work that way.
Of course it does. If Microsoft writes a new spec for a Kerberos extension (that's what this was, right?), then Microsoft has a valid copyright on that spec. Accordingly, the single posting that was a verbatim copy of Microsoft's work should really be removed as a blatent copyright violation. (I can't see any way to argue "fair use" for a verbatim copy without additional analysis or discussion by that poster.) Postings which discussed bypassing the EULA or linked to the text should be left intact.
The DMCA is evil and should be repealed, but I believe that posting was already illegal under existing copyright laws before the DMCA was passed. I don't know if Slashdot would have been liable for it, but I can imagine refusing to remove it might qualify them as "accessories after the fact" or some such...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
This is a very interesting point. Microsoft's lawyer said it was "a statement made under penalty of perjury", and two of the referenced comments listed under "Comments Containing A Copy of the Specification" actually only contains links to unauthorized copies. Given that a single comment was listed under "Comments Containing Links to Internet Sites with Unauthorized Copies of the Specification", Microsoft cannot claim ignorance of the distinction.
It looks like Microsoft's lawyer may have committed perjury.
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Do you think they would remain for long?
My understanding of the EULA is that you *must* agree to it to be legally entitled to access the content. Even if you work around, it is an illegal access of the document in question, and as such is breaking copyright.
Crowing about free speech isn't going to help, there is a copyright violation in place here, and, regardless of who posted the documents, they should, realistically, be pulled.
If the original posters want to mirror their posts elsewhere, fine, but see if the juggernaut leaves you alone.
Anyhow, how is an AC going to claim ownership of a post? Without dredging the logs and determining if the server caught the IP of the poster, or checking if it was a logged in posted who checked 'post as AC'*, you end up with a thousand people claiming to be Spartacus.
On the other hand, if this is going to degenerate into Usenet, I'd like a copy of Neil Stephenson's The Big-U posted to a thread.
* If you moderate a comment, then go back to that thread and post as AC, your moderation is undone. I guess the server still knows who you are in this case, regardless of what others may have said.
Although most of this is obviously bullshit, they may have a point, regarding people who posted the entire copyrighted work. So I decided to look up one of their examples of "Comments Containing A Copy of the Specification:". The very first one I checked was this:
That post contains a copy of the specification? They want Roblimo to remove smartin's post because it violates DMCA? Okaaaaay... It sounds like Microsoft's lawyers are way overpaid if they're making as much as McDonalds workers.
What's interesting to me is this possibility: even if smartin's post had contained the copyrighted work, the overall context (the story about the ridiculous attempt at imposing a license that removes rights) might actually legitimize it under fair use. In a story about a lost secret, quoting the secret seems pretty reasonable to me.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Fine, it's not a trade secret anymore, since they themselves published it openly. But the document in question is still a copyrighted expression that describes that non-secret.
The document is still copyrighted. And you can do anything you want with it, within the provisions of Fair Use. Basically, that just means you can not redistribute it in whole, and almost anything else (e.g. coding a competing implementation, redistributing parts of it along with criticism, etc) is fair game.
Alas, some people have been redistributing the whole thing, using Slashdot as the carrier. That's the only problem here.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Microsoft doesn't lose much by pissing off a bunch of avowed anti-Microsoft Linux-lovers.
/. isn't a big loss for them (although I suspect more of us Win32 weenies are on here than anyone suspects -- we are nerds, too) but the front page article in Infoworld talking about how Microsoft is trying to supress the publication of an "open" standard sure wouldn't make too many IS admins or CIOs comfortable with the support for that standard (or it's potential logevity)...
Well, pissing off
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Take this letter as a fair warning. Listen to your lawyers, and don't be too adventurous. But prepare for next time:
Establish an agreement with an off-shore site to provide mirroring. Then if the US site has to remove something, it can note that this can only be found off shore, as the US no longer promotes free speech. (I think that you are a busy enough site that this might even be more efficient than the current arrangement...but you know best about that.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you moderate a comment, then go back to that thread and post as AC, your moderation is undone. I guess the server still knows who you are in this case, regardless of what others may have said.
Copy the link location of the "Reply to This" link and paste it into lynx (or any other browser that doesn't have your slashdot cookie). Without your cookie, lynx (or whatever) will post as a real Anonymous Coward.
(If you only have one web browser, well... get another one. ;-) )
Courts have never been supportive of any attempt to use copyright as a way to limit the ability of third parties to create compatible products or code. I think that nukes the "good faith" right there.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Yes...but is your place called dotopia?
-AP
...simply moving the SlashDot comments database off-shore to it's own private island. Call it, "dotopia." Cannot imagine the cost of the high-speed leased-line it would require though...
But seriously, this is a really good oppertunity to see how good Andover.net's legal department is. If they choose to fight, most of the SlashDot readership will be happy and more secure about SlashDot being owned by a coporation. If they choose to comply, the opposite may happen. In any event, this is good an exciting news: and I am proud to be a witness.
Go get 'em!
-AP
"If I were a Microsoft public relations person, I would probably be sobbing on a desk right now," says Miller.
"Microsoft has no comment at this time," said a Microsoft public relations spokesperson.
The first one is the reason why Jeremy Allison made a big fuss over the issue, and the second is why Microsoft is pressing on Slashdot. The document is clearly still copyrighted material - it could never lose that status. What happens to Andover/Slashdot is still very much in the open.
According to this article by C|Net, the document no longer enjoys the status of a trade secret:
So, if this logic was to be followed, the Samba team would be free to implement an open source SMB server that interoperates with Microsoft's Kerberos, without getting permission from Microsoft.
I am so damn mad at reading this that I could spit nails right now. I went outside and had a smoke so I could calm down and try to write something well reasoned and insightful. I hope I do.
I don't know if Andover wants to do battle and try to show that the DMCA is the fraud that it is - something that was written by a few companies to benefit themselves, but we all knew that - but I hope that they will. I have my checkbook out right now and am willing to make a donation to get this stupid ass law tossed.
I am therefore pleading with the powers that be at Slashdot and Andover to just tell Microsoft to go to hell. We the geek community need to stand up to bullying tactics. It does not matter if it is Microsoft, the RIAA, or Joe's Software Company. It is time to give the DMCA the finger. If we don't, we are giving in.
This is undoubtedly what Micorsoft was hoping for. Why else "release" a protocol spec in such a ridiculous way?
/.? And a careful observer would know that some /.ers are prone to posting banned material such as DeCSS, if it offends them in some way.
When a Micorsoft spokesman spouts bullshit to the public, or when one of their suckups publishes a misleading benchmark or technical analyses, where doe the imperial nudity and the odor of poop get pointed out more quickly and thoroughly than on
The proper response is, I think, to hit them with a subpoena for all internal correspondence pertaining to (a) Slashdot, and (b) the "release" of the spec.
At the very least, you'll get someone sent to jail for destroying evidence. At best you'll get the case dismissed and Micorsoft will get another huge PR black eye right as it goes into the final round of the DoJ suit.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's good to know that someone at Microsoft is reading /., 'cause now we can tell them in person what we think of them.
Messages for Microsoft, anyone?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you don't like it, don't post, or read or anything. Go back to usenet. Are YOU DENSE???? Who cares about ALL CAPS! I SEEM TO BE DOING ALL RIGHT.
Enough of this BS...no-one is keeping you here.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
MS isnt' suing slashdot. MS is requesting that slashdot, as a service provider (they provide the service of allowing you to post content here), they must remove the alleged infringing material (as they DO have the technical means to do this), unless the end-user wishes to contest.
It's no different than if this were slashdot hosting co. and you had a website with them. Yes, you own your website outright, but the hosting co., legally, must remove the alleged infringing material upon notification, which would mean removing the comments, or taking the site offline, or whatever is necessary....
Trade secret is a whole issue unto itself, dealing with whether or not something is a 'secret'.
Copyright applies to any original work. The MS Kerberos document *IS* an original work, copyrighted by microsoft, and, as such, can be copyrighted.
As for trade secret, I believe they may have problems claiming trade secret has been violated. It is no longer a secret, by microsoft's own doing, how their protocol works. Anyone who wants can go get the spec. They cannot claim that it is a trade secret.
A trade secret is like, the recipe (formula?) for Coca-cola. Nobody knows it, at least, nobody who isn't in the highest echelons of coca cola corp.
Should you manage to steal this secret and publish it, you wouldbe guilty of violating trade secret laws, as you knowingly divulged coke's trade secret, which is very valuable to them.
Otoh, if coke offered this secret to anyone who would sign an NDA.. it's no longer a secret after enough people know about it.. even if they are all under NDA.
MS, however, is not suing under trade secret. THeir license simply says to treat the document as if it were a trade secret.. and you agreed to it.
It is illegal to make a program who's primary purpose is to circumvent a copyright control mechanism.
This is not the case with winrar. It's primary purpose is plainly data compression. MS just fucked up here.
What does the fact that they invoke some trade secret lingo have to do with copyright?
Trade secret deals with the materials covered in the documents.. the facts of the matter.
Copyright deals with the document itself.
If you are posting the document itself, you are violating copyright, plain and simple, as you have absolutely no permission from MS to reproduce the document.
If you are simply posting the technical details, and exerpts, re-worded.. that would be trade secret.
Well, I don't want to see Slashdot legally dismantled any more than anyone else does. The posting of the specification on slash, really is copyright infringement, and any court in this country would find against Andovet. Think if they posted the complete text to a new novel online, or if someone posted top-secret documents that they had obtained from their employer under an NDA.
While some readers may applaud these moves, trying to defend them in court is a futile battle (and one of questionable value, IMHO, even if Andover did win).
On the other hand, the "linking" issue, which mirrors the current 2600 case, is an open question. I sincerely doubt that the supreme court would uphold it, considering its first ammendment implications. In essence, a link to copyright-infringing material is an instruction on how to commit a crime, implicitly saying: "Hey d00d, if you want illegal documents, just !" This is a protected first-ammendment right, as long as it doesn't cross the line into real incitement.
Slashdot should remove any posts containing the illegal text, but not bend on the linking issues.
--JRZ
OK so they claim that Slashdot needs to remove copyrighted material? Yet if Slashdot does this then they are responsible for any copyrighted material. So...
Let's post the spec on one of Microsoft's sites. If they then remove it, then they are claiming editorial responsibility for any information posted there. Then we post anything we want under their servers (I'm thinking mp3s here) and they could be held responsible for it. So we'd have the RIAA suing M$ for the removal of this stuff that we'd keep posting. And there's nothing quite like 2 large corporations suing each other silly. Especially if its posted on NBC's news site who would be more likely to claim its within the rights of a news orginization to do so...
Like I said... silly idea.
-cpd
At least one of the comments that they claim contains a copy of the spec, does NOT contain the spec. Post #86 by smartin simply says "What happens to the people that implement it (ie. the Samba guys) even if they obtain the information without intentionally breaking the license. Are they exposing themselves to expensive litigation? Are they endangering the project?" It's post #87, by anonymous coward, that contains the spec. Thus, Microsoft has unjustly slandered the good name of "smartin". Who knows what else they have wrong.
Why can they even call it Kerberos in the first place? It's not Kerberos anymore, it's some wacky proprietary authentication since they hacked it all up.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Courtroom in Seattle, year 2002...
"So, you admit you created and uploaded this web page, in direct violation of the DMCA?"
"Well, yeah, but all it says is..."
"Your honor, it's clear that the defendant illegally reverse-engineered Windows 2001, and then posted this illegal web page. We ask for the maximum penalty under law."
"What did the web page say, exactly?"
"Windows Sucks"
"Guilty, as charged. Take him away."
On a more serious note, I hope that Andover will stand up to Microsoft. The DMCA was passed on behalf of corporations, not the American public.
I agree with another poster: it's a damn sad state of affairs that we (Americans) have to look to other countries to find freedom of speech.
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
Hello,
I was surprised to find out that you read the posts on slashdot, but since we have your attention I would like to say a few things to you. I used your products for personal use for a couple years, from win 3.1 to win 3.11 to the first release of win95. I will never purchase another windows product again.
I found your products to be unstable, unreliable and generally lacking in most areas. I am sorry you feel it's more important to concentrate on destroying all your competitors than to develop quality software.
I find the way your company does business to be distatefull and damaging to the computer industry.
Yet, despite my opinions about your company and your poor products, I do not think it's appropriate for others to violate your rights. Two wrongs do not make a right.
I think the scariest part (and one with legal backing under the DCMA) is where they ask to remove posts that just describe how to access the contents of the document:
:-) )
[Ms asks to remove posts, including...] and some comments contain instructions on how to circumvent the End User License Agreement that is presented as part of the download for accessing the Specification.
Would they mind telling us which posts in particular they consider legally viable to get around the licence? (So we can remove them later, of course!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Moderation is not JUST doen by users (and even watched over by users)- it is also totally optional. You can view the moderation as simply a "display" layer placed over the comments- you can freely view them with or without the logic of this display layer in place.
If it was me my, "official response" would read in it's entirety:
Have they not read the disclaimer on the bottom of all slashdot's pages? "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2000 Andover.Net."
Since when did this piece-of-crap "DMCA" have any validity outside the US? Slashdot is worldwide, don't even think about invoking law beyond your own state boundaries!
Roblimo! Quick - mail back to the listed sources in that email saying that without GPG-signed mail you can't verify that it's really from them. Just fling it in the bin and forget it without GPG.
It's time to fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy, 'cos Redmond is going Bye-byes!
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Posting opinions and ideas and thoughts to Slashdot is one thing, but posting copyrighted material...well, that's different. If I were to post a comment containing the entire text of Snow Crash, one of my favorite Neal Stephenson novels, would you not remove my posts due to copyright violation? I believe you would. And I believe that you should extend the same courtesy to Microsoft and respect their copyrights just as you would respect those of your favorite author. Freedom of speech is not going to be impaired by the removal of a few comments containing illegally reproduced, copyrighted material.
--
There are two things that really confuse me here: Is this protocol GPL'D? If so, doesn't MS completely lack any kind of leg to stand on?
Second, what happens under DCMA if Slashdot fails to comply?
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
We are not breaking copyright because we are not trying to claim that their material is ours or anything close to that.
Insightful?!? This is the most blatantly idiotic thing I've read on slashdot yet! So what you're telling me is that I can go ahead and distribute copies of Metallica's songs on mp3 as long as I don't claim ownership of the song? For the love of root, read the articles posted, read the DMCA, read up on copyright law, but please, PLEASE, stop posting this type of uninformed nonsense here.
To summarise, some users posted entire copies of copyrighted documents in comments on Slashdot, and links to them as well. Some links to other documents that MS is protesting as well were posted. Under the provisions of the DMCA, Slashdot is responsible for removing the posted materials, irrespective of who owns the posts, as it is on Slashdot's server. Also, it should be noted that as users cannot modify and/or delete their own posts, asking the posters (or "owners") to remove the offending material is not really an option. The links to the other documents not hosted on Slashdot is a separate issue, since they don't control the content on the servers that are linked to.
Hope this clears some things up.
----
Dave
Purity Of Essence
- Dave
Second, it's probably safe to tell people how not to obtain documentation.
Rewriting the offhand comment portion of my original post:
Do not, under any circumstances, right click on the exe and choose extract to folder, as this would prevent you from seeing the license agreement.
Third, this is a PR nightmare for Microsoft. They've already gotten reamed in the press for not releasing Kerberos specs, now they're insisting those specs are a Trade Secret?
Fourth, Trade Secrets usually lose their protection after they are made publically available to competitors. Putting the spec up on a public place on their web site and letting the Samba developers download it and then submit an article to slashdot is probably enough to lose trade secret protection.
Fifth, Slashdot needs to move offshore.
IIRC, wasn't there just a case that said that source code is considered protected speech, if you are talking about it and you need to "quote" it, just like what happened in the story they are trying to censor.
Couldn't find the link in under a minute, someone else will have too...
--
+&x
Do you really believe that slashdot wouldn't censor a list of credit card numbers? I think you're being a bit too idealistic here.
that depends on what you mean by censor. I would censor them myself, since I browse at 1 and would thus miss the spamming by the law-breaking AC.
hmm, the best was to test idealism is to test it.
Let's find out, anybody got a list of CC#s? (just curious, a simple yes or no will do....)
There's also this other little problem.... Big props to numb for pointing this out.
--
+&x
The moderation process has nothing to do with selecting or rejecting content.
It is a system in which a quasi-random sample of the community rates the quality of posts.
Down-moderated posts are still out there for the public to see. Slashcode merely allows the user to prioritize posts which are likely to be interesting based on a sampling of opinions. It's no different in principle than peopel going to see a movie because of word of mouth. A movie like the "Blair Witch Project" is almost impossible to ignore, because everyone's talking about it.
With respect to being unable to retract or edit the comments, I believe that is irrelevant to the argument and a very bad idea. It is a bad idea because Slashdot is an ongoing conversation, and posts are records of what was said. To allow users to redact or modify their comments is to change the record of what was said.
It is irrelevant because the ability to retract or modify your works are orthagonal to the issue of ownership. Dr. King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The speech, the courts have ruled, belonged to him. He and now his heirs have the sole right to publish the speech and any derivative works. However, he can't take the words back. He can't eradicate them from the public memory, either in its intangible or tangible forms. If the courts found the speech slanderous, they could order the family to cease publishing it, but could they order the television networks to erase their tapes?
Legally, this argument probably doesn't hold water. However an accurate record of public conduct and speech is very important to a free society, so Slashdot should stick to its guns.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I agree, that publishing a description of the method of avoiding the click-through license is not an infringement even under DMCA. The people who use the method, however, are probably still in violation of DMCA's very broad anti-TPM provision, despite the fact that it is easy to do with widely available tools. I think that "effectively" controlling access to the content in the context of this law means that the user must be aware he is doing something against the author's wishes, not whether it is hard to do or whether the technology to do so is widely available (to argue otherwise puts winzip under the same legal cloud as DeCSS).
I think the DMCA argument has a weakness though.
It is interesting that MS doesn't use a trade secret argument. The problem with a trade secret is that once the cat's out of the bag, it's not a secret anymore.
So what is protected is not the specification of the protocol extensions, but Microsoft's creative expression of these protocols. In turn, this creative expression is protected by a restrictive EULA which forbids disclosure. You are allowed to enjoy Microsoft's expressive prose with the proviso that you're only allowed to do security analysis on it. These interlocking measures protect the intellectual "payload" -- the trade secret of Microsoft's Kerberos extensions.
It's a clever kind of interlocking argument, but like a lot of Microsoft's software, I think it is too clever for its own good. Like Scotty says, the more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to gum up the works.
IANAL, but I see two immediately possible paths to defeating the secrecy of the protocols.
First of all, there is the tainted approach, which requires an EULA violation by somebody but frees the protocol extensions. Somebody with access to the document, either legal or illicit, could write a compatible specification and publish it anonymously. This would be illegal, but since the protocols themselves aren't protected except by EULA, people who receive the new specification would be free to use it since it contains none of the expressive IP of MS. The software does contain a former trade secret that was illegally disclosed, but once disclosed, legally or illegally, it is no longer a secret.
A second approach is for somebody to work within the letter EULA but to violate its spirit. In this approach, you'd do a security analysis -- a very, very thorough and well annotated analys. Then, another party takes this and reverse engineers a full specification.
In the last case, there can be no argument that programs which implement the extended protocols are tainted, since the initial step, which effectively reveals the trade secrets being, is allowed under the EULA. The problem with this approach is that the details of some EULAs might make publishing a detailed security analysis difficult.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
However, this is orthogonal to the original issue, which was that the contents of the document were a trade secret. Trade secret protection extends beyond copyright, and its pretty clear that MS want to effectively prevent anyone from interworking with this aspect of their Kerberos service without their permission. Whether they can make TS status stick on a click-through license is another question.
Meantime, where does this leave a hypothetical future version of Samba which would interwork with MS Kerberos? If MS can claim trade secret status then true open source would be impossible. But I suspect that if you wrapped the source code up in a click-through license then MS would not be able to claim violation of the trade secret. Copyright might be a bit trickier: most of the MS document appears to be source code from a .h file, so simply copying that code into your own .h file would violate their copyright. However if you rephrased their source code, using different names but equivalent data structures, then I think that would be OK.
I await the legal advice with interest.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Roblimo's response was somewhat puzzling.
Actually, I found Roblimo's response to contain a rather interesting problem for MS:
On one hand, MS happens to dislike the spread of this information around. On the other hand, it would be impossible for MSN if people started posting possibly copyrighted stuff on the MSN servers and poor, harried MSN admins had to run around deleting every single illegal post.
<Ponder>I mean, can you imagine what would if people started posting all the "illegal" stuff all over MSN servers (DeCSS, Kerberos clippings, etc)? </Ponder>
The DMCA was meant to benefit software houses at the expense of personal and ISP freedom. Wonder what happens when the entity is both?
And Judge Jackson. Include an explanation of how Microsoft is trying yet again to impose propietary standards in order to control the Internet.
It is my understanding that by naming your post Microsoft has sworn, under oath, that your post violates the DMCA. If you can show that your post has not violated the DMCA then i would have thought that Microsoft will be open to being found in violation of purjury laws...
Can this be used against them?
Probably, I broke no laws, and I can prove it.
Now what about defamation of character? That I'm a law breaker? Hrmm..
-- iCEBaLM
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Does MSFT's EULA prohibit parodies being made by people who have viewed it legitimately and clicked etc?
If not it should be possible to read it, parody it (can't see that being hard :) and repost.
of course I might be a fish...
~ppppppppö
As a mater of fact you do not violate the law by opening the MS program. In some country's there is no copy right (or any other kind of protection) for (so called) Trade Secrets.
That means if a foreign native (say of China) opened the file (in China) and post's the information no law has been broken. That foreign native is not liable to abritrary US law.
As to copy rights (or any other kind of rights), you can not take over a public standard and copy right it. It is the equivalent of me buying a copy of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, changing one leter and copy righting it as my own. Actualy in the US I believe that you can not even create derived works baised on someone elses book, let alone copyright and sell that derived work. (Don't believe me? Try writing a derivative of the Dune series and see what happens to you.) Why does that not apply to published (non microsoft) computer protocols?
"but apparently /. can tread on your first post rights... *G*"
/. is not the only one. But the real authority to tread on a comment is the commenter [him|her]self.
;)
And, as Microsoft would have it,
Slashdot should allow post owners to edit/remove their own posts. I know this would not always be pretty and wouldn't work for anonymous posts, but it is possible. I realize that comments don't remain in the database very long, and that once an article is archived, there is no practical way to allow editing. I've allowed users to delete (but not edit) their own posts for years at starshiptraders.com without any problems. At sitereview.org, contributors can edit their submissions without limit -- as long as they didn't post anonymously. We do add a line that says "Updated: [date]" on modified articles to help minimize confusion.
Of course, slashdot is in a class by itself, with it's own small army of trolls and DoS kiddies in tow, and would have to do a lot of analysis and tweaking to get a comment-editing system into place... and it might not even be workable here at all. But, then again, Rob hasn't shied away from too many such challenges in the past.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I'm a college student. I don't have much money. But if slashdot wants to fight this, I've got $100 for their legal defense. Please do the right thing, Rob!
-Dave Turner.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
According to one of their reporters, the influential Seattle Weekly, one of our free weeklies that all the politicos and arts crowd reads, is doing stories on the DCMA and also on MSFT suing Slashdot.
...
They say that they can't get any of the Slashdot staffers to comment on it, though.
I just so love dropping nuclear bombs in Bill G's lap - the expression is priceless and you can hear the screams all the way across Lake Washington
Will in Seattle
Definitely!
Except, the question should be:
A) Compliance
B) Resistance
C) You are Borg - We are Slashdot
D) Hemos
Will in Seattle
Just a silly question, but when I was trying to get E*Trade to release the shares for the coders, I found that a lot of press coverage from other news organizations, as well as any federal agencies one can think of, sure makes large corporations sit back and think.
So, if every person on slashdot forwards the story link in an email to all the tech and business news organizations they know of, the intense spotlight of coverage might change the end result.
It's called daylight, you shine it on worms.
[Note: I own shares of MSFT, so I guess I should email them to complain about misuse of corporate resources to hound slashdot]
Will in Seattle
Looks like it's on cNet, according to this story here.
Anyone seen it on CNN in Tech, or NY Times, or Washington Post yet? How about Seattle Times or Seattle Post-Intelligencer or Seattle Weekly or The Stranger?
Will in Seattle
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Very nice reply by roblimo.
But, should Microsoft persist, I say fight. By any means necessary, short of tactical nukes. The most important thing is to not roll over at the threat of a lawsuit.
If this goes to court, I pledge at least $500 to the Slashdot Legal Defense Fund. Who's with me? Even $20 per geek would add up fast.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Why not? It's not as if they have much to lose in the area of image. People who like them aren't going to change because of this and people who hate them... well they're here. The fence squatters aren't going to care one way or another.
Talk about pathetic lusers, here's a quarter, go buy yourself a real OS.
It's going to be sad, really, when no one is hiring you MSEs anymore. You can hold up a sign... "Will write useless, bloated, insecure, virus-prone proprietary spaghetti code for food..."
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
and then saying "whoa, mr. lawyer, we're just a carrier, all comments are owned by the poster!"
They actually said nothing of the sort. They posted the letter from MS and said, "we're talking to our attorneys"
--GnrcMan--
Apologies if this is a repeat, but I cannot read all 925 comments.
/. may not be beyond reproach, but MS certainly has to answer for it's conduct too. It may influence the court case towards structural remedies if MS cannot be trusted with conduct remedies.
Microsoft is threatening Slashdot by email. MS is trying to prevent the spread of it's specifications. Yet published specs is one of the remedies that Microsoft itself proposes for the punishment phase of the anti-trust trial. This email casts doubt on how sincere (complete) MS would be in publishing specifications.
I recommend roblimo get in touch with the DoJ anti-trust team and apprise them of this email and situation. AFAIK, they have a brief to file soon. Sure,
I simply cannot believe that MS would be so stupid as to send this email out. They may have the right to, but it seems to me very dangerous for them. Imagine the headlines "MS gangs up on techie site".
M$ Sues Slashdot / Can Of Whoop Ass Opened / Slashdot Crushes Them
The problem is that some of the posts simply had the entire document in it. or VERY large chunks of the document. Thats illegal DMCA or not. Most non-fiction books have it marked on the copyright page that its ok to use small sections of the text in editorials. that doesn't mean the entire document. But as far as the links go, MS better not beable to touch them, they should, and have the right to go after ther person the links go to.
To move the slashdot severs to another country. We always say that that is a good way to circumvent american law when it creates censorship of ideas, maybe it is time we take our own advice.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
...and lets slip the dogs of war!
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
Unfortunately, Andover.net and Slashdot ARE in the wrong here. Microsoft is NOT limiting people's free speech, because there are no individual opinions being expressed. There is only copyrighted material being posted for the public to read and study. How would you like if someone took everything from your home and spread them all over the lawn, or perhaps your grades or other personal information and sent them out over the net for everyone to see? Just as there are protections for the individual, so are there protections for the corporation. You all are logical, reasonable people. Your nerds for God's sake! Have some sense!
----
Lyell E. Haynes
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Slashdot doesn't reprint articles it doesn't own from other jornals. It doesn't redistribute mp3's of major pop tracks. Slashdot is not a form of civil disobedience - it is a news site.
So it seems perfectly reasonable that Slashdot should obey the law, and take down the text. (The links can stay though).
I'm all for challenging the DMCA when a good oppertunity arrives. But wait for a case where there is some substance to the defence, and a chance of winning. Fighting an unwinnable case against the DMCA and losing just becuase there are aspects of the DMCA we disagree with is stupid.
This is only an issue becuase it's Microsoft. I dislike Microsoft as much as the next geek, but we can beat Microsoft *legally*.
Besides, I think it is very likely Microsoft was deliberately trying to leverage the DeCSS rulings and publish a secret in such a way that any software produced to interoperate can be considered 'tainted' by illegally obtained information. The Samba people have a chance to fight this - their 'interoperability exception' case is stronger than the DeCSS people, because no one can argue that Samba is a piracy tool. Let them handle this one.
It seems to me, that had the name "Kerberos" been somehow protected all this wouldn't be possible. Apparently everyone can do what he wants with the protocol and still call it Kerberos and even sue others if they distribute his altered specifications.
It would thus make sense to:
- protect the names of protocols somehow, by specifying what standards an implementation must fulfill so it may be called an XXX-implementation (this would have made it impossible for MS to call their protocol "kerberos" while it's not operating with other servers) it would suffice to address compatibility issues here, so one implementation of XXX will always operate with another while it may add additional features.
- include in the protocol specification that any implementation of the protocol is only valid (and may call itself XXX) if its specifications are made public without any legal restraints.
We should look what protocols are out there for MS to grab next.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Actually, this is a rather elegant hack, using existing tools in new and unexpected ways. Who would have thought of reusing a mailing address as a mission statement?
--
This is not my sandwich.
I say we pull the ol' DeCSS game and distribute these comments as widely as possible :) ...and if any lawyers ask, yeah, I'm just kidding, I would never encourage anyone to violate Microsoft's intellectual property rights, because that would be a Very Bad Thing To Do. ;)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
>So now anyone who doesn't agree with you is one
>of Gates' minions?
In the average thread, no. Disagreements are a healthy way to promote discourse. Dissenting opinions are usually a good thing.
But that's the very heart of this matter. Gates is attempting to supress dissenting opinion. He is attacking the very right to disagree. He is attempting to silence his critics.
To support gates in an action such as this is ludicrous. And weather you draw your paycheck from microsoft is irrelevant. It is a galling example of cult-like behavior for you to agree with microsoft that the dissenting voice must be silenced. Notice that the cult of scientology uses remarkably simular tactics to supress it's own critics.
john
Imagine all the people...
Maybe this is stupid, but can't Andover provide a server in Brazil or somewhere where the DMCA doesn't mean anything, and put all "questionable" material/posts there with no copy, cache any bit of it in the US and then just seemlessly compile the page and post it to the users?
Tell me where I'm wrong.
- I like pudding.
The following things must be remembered:
1) We own our posts
2) There still is freedom of speech
3) Microsoft can't always get its own way on things.
I think it's come to the moment when Microsoft are employing more lawyers than programmers, and thats not a good thing.
The more this happens the less people will trust Microsoft, even after a breakup.
I wrote a reply to this yesterday, but my connection was all screwy so it got lost. So here I go again:
... (Score:1)
This is helping. Even if it is only reposting on Slashdot. I am used the text of one of the messages they dislike to express my outrage at their request. That turns it directly into a form of free speech. Hopefully that will help if it does go to court. Because MS now has to request that my posts be removed as well, or Slashdot can simply point to mine and say 'Look, he posted the same link and they don't want us to remove his post.' And then if Microsoft presses the issue it can be clearly demonstrated that my use of this post:
May I claim John Doe #1
by BlueUnderwear on 05:17 PM May 2nd, 2000 EST (#253)
(User Info)
... for This puppy. It's the kerbspec file unzipped and without the legal boilerplate.
is most definately me excersising my right to speak. It sickens me that Microsot would try to prevent people from linking to a standard that they allow anyone to download. It's obscene. If they want people to use it then let them use it. Throw the idiotic EULA away and deal with it.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The most important point to consider that you've brought up is probably that if a user violated Microsoft's Copyrights (whatever they may be in this case), it is up to Microsoft to charge that user, not Andover.
In fact, Slashdot may wish to change its legalese at the bottom of the page stating that posts are Copyright their posters and the rest belongs to Andover. This should be refined to include one of those sweeping comments about "other Copyright and Trademark owners".
If mainstream media does a story about how a child pornographer used PGP to encrypt his porn, are they liable for telling other pornographers how to do it?
If MSNBC did a TV story about the current DVD issues floating around and gave a link to OPENDVD (or other) website, would they be liable for that linking to a site that may or may not violate the DMCA in some way?
These are the counter-questions that must be asked.
The DMCA must be re-written!!
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I have read the entire DMCA.
.exe file (self extracting zip). the .exe requires you to view and click through a license agreement.
IANAL, but I HAVE READ THE ENTIRE DMCA.
While they may have a point about some anonymous coward posting the entire trade secret, their complaint against posting instructions to bypass the EULA is TOTALLY WITHOUT MERIT.
"Comments Containing Instructions on How to Bypass the End User License Agreement and Extract the Specification:"
I mean, if you don't know that you can extract a self extracting zip file with pkzip, you don't read slashdot anyway. DUH. For those not up to date with the thread, what they're referring to is this:
1) Micros~1 posts a "trade secret" inside a zip file that they turn into a
2) Some user on slashdot points out that if you just unzip the file, you don't have to agree to the license.
This information is not a microsoft trade secret. As a matter of fact, it's in the PKZIP manual and help file(s)! THE INFORMATION THEY ARE REQUESTING THAT SLASHDOT REMOVE IS PUBLIC DOMAIN INFORMATION FROM THE HELP FILE OF A FREE UTILITY. IT DOCUMENTS A LEGITIMATE AND INTENDED USE OF A LONG STANDING SOFTWARE PRODUCT.
If microsoft didn't know that users didn't have to read their stupid license agreement to see that file, that's ignorance on their part, not malice on ours.
morons.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
Does DMCA eliminate the ability to cite brief passages in reviews? I haven't (yet) read all of that 59-page beast, but somehow I doubt it. Why? Aside from the tremendous change to present copyright common practice that would represent (the NY Times Book Review can't cite a particularly beautidul or particularly bad passage?), there seem to be provisions in the DMCA to allow breaking copyright protection for exactly the purpose of news reporting!
Where can you find this? See Section 1201.B of the DMCA, which states, clearly, that the Librarian of Congress can determine when it is legal to break copy protection. If you look at 1201.B.i through v, you see what factors the Librarian is to consider when deciding what kinds of uses to allow. Look particularly at 1201.B.iii:
The way I read this (and of course, I'm not a lawyer, YMMV, etc.), even DeCSS would be legal so long as it is used for the above kinds of uses. For example, if I'm a professor of film theory at a university, I might very well write a multimedia scholarly work comparing the use of montage in two different films. Montage invariably occurs over time - the only to make relevant passage comparisions is with the relevant passages of the film in front of you. I'm not a professor, but I did this myself, perhaps eight years ago, when I did a comparison of narrative structure in Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" and "Full Metal Jacket."
So if the comments contain only short passages for the purpose of criticising the work, how could there be any legal problem?
And if there is, who'd like to join me in a start-up company to colonize Mars?
-----
Klactovedestene!
FreeNet provides for distribution of non-localized docs, for which no single site can be held responsible.
So, anything which is/might be censored can be shifted into this realm, then referenced in un-censored publications.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
1. MS criticism & discussion of its products is free speech, not copyright infrigement.
2. Open discussion of a variant of an open authentication protocol (Kerberos) is acceptable, even if said variant is proprietary.
3. Supply a copy of this email to the judge in charge of the Microsoft case, as further proof that MS is a monopoly and tries to stifle competition and consumer advantage. Hey, Slashdot is a competitor to MSNBC, right? =)
Guys, this is it -- whatever you do, don't cave in!!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The really interesting thing is that of the four links mentioned in "Comments Containing A Copy of the Specification:" 2 were links to a copy, 1 was the actual thing (ACed, of course), and one was talking about possible legal repurcussions to the Samba team if they "unzip ~/ms_kerberos.exe"ed and developed! Ha!
;-)
Is this some sort of legal chaf released to make their "non-case" look like it has a leg to stand on?
Does this mean I've become one of the "Comments Containing A Copy of the Specification:" ? No, not to anyone who understands links
And considering I used a Unix unzip on a file downloaded from MS, it's even from official sources! Hopefully some opensource/free software project will incorporate the changes, to allow interoperability (which is legal under the DMCA). Hooray for legality.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I believe that is correct. You can make whatever modifications for your own use that you desire. But if you give/sell/distribute a binary executable to anyone else, then they have all the same rights you have. Including the right to view the source, as well as the right to give/sell/distribute their software to others.
make world, not war
I think this should be handled in the proper Slashdot manner. There should be a poll.
A) Comply
B) Defy
C) Hemos
Why would that be a test? Do you think MS wouldn't remove it from MSN? I can't see any reason they would chose not to remove it.
99% at best. You don't speak for me in this case. I have no problem and think that /. should remove some of the parts of the posts that do indeed obviously violate copyright laws. Feel free to note in your posts in the future you speak for everyone except me.
I should also note that your claim that you represent all of Slashdot's readers is somewhat of an odd claim. Since the MS people obviously had to read this too . . . and you don't speak for them.
In my impression strong beliefs in internet privacy, open source, free software and a strong contingent of anti-MS feelings have built up an almost religious belief that one day there will be some sort of great legal or otherwise apocalyptic event where one if not all of these beliefs will be challenged. I'm concerned that people might use this occasion to try to fulfill their own prophecy.
There's always talk about the great GPL lawsuit where a company (the prophecy wouldn't quite be as nice if it was just an individual) violates the GPL and a lawsuit is filed and GPL is tested in court. There's much rhetoric about how the government and corporations are trying to take away our privacy. There's always unsubstantiated claims about MS's conspiracy to destroy free or open source software. Personally I believe many people actually want some situation like this to occur to confirm their beliefs about MS, or corporate greed, or government oppression. It's always easy to be the wounded hero.
I'm not saying I do not believe in some ways some of these beliefs are true. However I worry that this might be chosen as the great event. It's simply the wrong fight to fight. Slashdot would lose, and for good reason. The information posted is clearly copyrighted material in it's entirety from MS. It's a straightforward case. I would rather see questions of freedom be challenged where it can truly show that people need to pay attention and gather further support, not die a martyr in a dirty case.
This email notification is a statement made under penalty of perjury that
Can slashdot ignore the letter because some of the referenced comments do not contain copyrighted material? Better yet, can Andover sue Microsoft for perjury?
--
The shareholder is always right.
So they had a typo on the timestamp- they also had a typo (or similar problem) with the post #.
I believe they meant to indicate post #87, not #86. If you look at #87, it has a bunch of code posted to it.
I have saved some of my Starcraft replays here
There is no way /. should drop this. If you had read the comments accused you'd see MS is covering their ass by censoring discussion. Only a few actually link to the files.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
1. MS should go after individual posters. they own copyright to whatever they post, as per slashdot's terms.
2. a lot of people need to grow up and quick this "fight the power" "down with the Man" crap. would you like it if ms violated your copyright license (eg, the gpl)? do you know what "double standard" means?
now, as far as whether or not those posters violated ms's license (btw, you don't violate a copyright, you violate a LICENSE), is another story. i have one question: some posters claimed that each page had a copy of the license; is this true? (i have not looked, so that i'm not contaminated by their trade secret).
if it's true, then you're fucked. if the only place the terms were displayed was by executing the self-extracting archive, and you used winzip or whatever to bypass that, then you should be in the clear.
slashdot should point out the fact that posters own copyright to their own posts, and that slashdot is not responsible for the content. that being true, you should not remove the posts unless ordered to by a court, else risk the responsibility to have to check every single post.
btw, IANAL
I have another question, if Microsoft submitted this under penalties of perjury are they not in fact now guilty of this, ie haven't they perjured themselves.
I think that this "under penalty of perjury" garbage isn't taken seriously enough, maybe if the Microsoft lawyer was sent to prison for a couple of years for a false claim we'd see less of this kind of stupidity. (Or at least they would be much more careful about it.)
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
I didn't get a chance to see that discussion, so I don't know why it was posted. Was the poster(s) trying to make some kind of point about the material? Would their actions fall under "fair use" guidelines (posting the document in order to have a discussion about it)?
You heard it right! Not only is backing up your beliefs in the constitution the right thing to do, but it's also a lucrative opportunity to make a little cash on the side, too.
I understand your point, sir, but I think that there are much, much more important things to think about. If the staff of Slashdot has to have a meeting and a presentation on the profitability of standing up to Microsoft, maybe Slashdot isn't the right place to fight the good fight.
What are the rules for common carriers? Do they have to remove content if it's requested, or do the lawyers have to go after the person who originally posted the content? And would Slashdot even qualify as a common carrier?
I'm curious...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The BSD license basically says, "Do whatever you want, just don't claim you wrote it." From this interpretation, MS is within their legal rights as far as Kerberos goes. This ain't the GPL were're talking about here.
/. to remove the spec from the comments (assuming DMCA is constitutional).
:)
I think he was talking about the 4th clause (the one that says you can't use the names MIT (or, presumably, Kerberos) without permission of MIT). However, this assumes that MS is using the MIT Kerberos code (they could have done a reimplementation). If they are using the MIT code and IF they follow the license, they have put a small notice somewhere in the W2K docs that some of the code is copyrighted by MIT (which is required by the 2nd provision, probably very much in effect). If they haven't done so then MIT should sue them for a lot of money for copyright infringment.
And in either case (MS reimplemention or hacking on the MIT code), MS has every right to copyright both:
a) Their changes to the MIT code (or their own code)
b) Their specification that gives the changes they made.
Which means that they can demand
Hah, like I know what I'm talking about.
Maybe. But it argues against the idea that in
"an environment for discussion and debate the posting of Copyrighted material should be legal as long as it pertains to the topic being discussed."
That's a fine sentiment, but the court ruling doesn't seem to agree.
No, I think Slashdot/Andover.Net/VA Linux/Whoever has plenty of money for lawyers. Back when Slashdot was a "two guys website" I'd prolly contribute to a legal fund, but not when they and their company have more money than God. Let them spend their own money on lawyers.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
So how does one sue AC?
:-)
The same way one sues Major Domo
Microsoft,
/., that is clearly a case of fair use.
please clarify your stance on copyright. By clicking the EULA, the user agrees to a right that copyright NEVER protects - that of reverse engineering of described methods.
From section 102b of US Copyright law
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
It would seem you would like to allow users to view the methods while not allowing them to reverse engineer the methods. That is precisely the role of a patent under US law - to allow the free propagation of IDEAS and METHODS while giving the INVENTOR a monopoly on its use for a limited period. You would instead seek to accomplish the same thing with a copyright.
You might also recall that copyrights extend for the lifetime of the holder.
If the Microsoft corruption of Kerberos is protected by copyright, you have posted the methods to the web, and you can expect they will be reverse engineered. Copyright provides you no protection against reverse engineering of the described methods.
If, instead, these methods are protected by patent, please inform the world. And stop trying to pervert our copyright law to further your corporate desires - at the expense of the rights of the consumer to reverse engineer copyrighted methods.
As for posting the methods on
MS is right about the copyrighted stuff -- it should be removed. But the links and other stuff -- no way.
Oh thats simple...
Just go to the cemetary, find a gravestone of
a person who died last year at age 5, then name
it after them...the "Mikey Smith Child Protection
Act".
Then write upa bill that will add a law on the
books, making it illegal to kill children with
guns, or something else that sounds really good
but is nicely redundant with existing laws....
then just tack on the stuff to repeal the DMCA at
the end.
Though, maybe I am too cynical?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
In this article about this story. See, typing in bold does let you be heard!
Strange thing is, though, that this is the same logic that MS uses with their EULA. In MS making /.'s copyright statement invalid, they may make their own EULA invalid.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but we were discussing Micros~1's deviation from the kerberos protocol. Most of us did not agree that Micros~1's implementation of kerberos did not fit the standard. Therefore in the context of our discussion, it was legal under fair use principles that we analyse the code.
Agreed. Furthermore, some of the comments M$ cited stated how to get the specifications without viewing (and thus, without agreeing to) the license, therefore the specification could have been posted by someone who never agreed to M$'s EULA. (Note that the earliest post they cited about how to extract - 1:47 PM - preceded the earliest post they cited with the spec itself - 2:20 PM, both on 5/2/2000.) So the EULA can not be proven to apply to the copies of the specification posted here, either.
This could be some really widespread publicity for Slashdot, which in the long run would increase readership. One big article at ZD or CNN + some light follow-up would be much bigger than some small/medium mentions in random articles...
Well, I for one was a little dissapointed and surprised, not at M$ request or at the tone of the response, but that the official Slashdot response was not from our beloved CmdrTaco. So Robin is the editor in chief NOT Rob. I guess this means that Taco and Hemos really don't have much say in what the official Slashdot response will be? I had hoped that the sellout to Andover was just to offload the marketing duties and provide thing like highbandwith and quad servers. How naive of me.
Hope Andover decides to fight the good fight but I'm sure it'll come down to a business decision: are we making money by staying in the public eye with this legal battle?
no sig.
IANAL, but I play on on the Internet: I really wonder if the how-to's will be seen as a circumvention. I don't read in this article that you cannot post a howto, just that you cannot have a technical device or offer a service, that would alow you to circumvent it. I therefore think that Slashdot should not remove those.
Use Adsense for Charity
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!
and DeCSS has already been deemed illegal to have in your possesion
I thought that legality of DeCSS had not been determined yet. There is an injunction against sites hosting it but there is no decision that it is illegal to have in their possession. If this has changed, can someone let me know and give a link to the ruling?
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!
It's very possible. (note I don't have the links for these mostly becuase I'm lazzy, if someone wants to post the links the stories or docs which I will mention) The Holloween docuements show that MS was trying to go after Linux. There is an internal email in which MS wants to make life a bitch for Palm users. This Kerberos extension paper that they are in a huff about is nothing more then extensions to a free standard, to which their making these extension closed might be a violation of the origonal license that Kerberos was released with. Let us assume that you are correct that the spec that was posted to slashdot was in violation of MS's copyright. Removing only that is not what we are angry about. The worst is this. MS wants posts that tell how to get around the EULA, or links to the document without the broilerplate to be removed as well. I think we should remove any copies of the full document but these other posts must stay and that is where the fight is. Do you agree?
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!
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!
It should instead indicate post #87.
--
So many "first post" idjits...so few moderator points... | Delenda est Windoze
--
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delenda est Windoze
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
This along with the precedent argument in the reply are, IMO, the best arguments NOT to remove the comments. This goes beyond the "law" and frivalous interpretations of copyright. It goes directly into the empowering force that is the Internet. We have to decide what kind of internet we want, and we must decide wether that's worth fighting for. My Internet is worth fighting for; I hope yours is too! Rick Terrill
I would think that the very nature of being an AC implies that a poster waiver his responsibility over his post, and as such his rights as well. Still, MS's concerns do not seem to warrant an unprecedented censorship of /. ...
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
I'm not sure it's as cut and dried as AC thhinks it is. M$ wants you to believe it is, but the whole point of the thread in question is that they are trying to make a new legal status that doesn't exist yet, and will possibly (hopefully) be struck down. I read that thread, and one of the issues involved was that M$ was saying this was a trade secret. not that it was copyrighted. IANAL, but once a trade secret is out, I'm not sure there is a copyright. If M$ can find someone who actualy acknowledged the agreement and then sent out the file, they would have an open and shut case. in the other instances, they might still have a case, but not necessarily open and shut. I understood that it was posted as "Open Source" but with the NDA. IMHO, that means that if you go through their site, you're bound. But if you got it somewhere else, Someone, somewhere may very well have broken the law, but you're just distributing open source code that you never promised not to. If you want a test case, get someone who posted the source but who didn't see the NDA to stand up. There's a real possibility there. I would hope that /. would keep them up. I feel pretty confident M$ doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. But then, I thought the same thing about a lot of similar suits. The courts seem to be putting the rights of corporations above the rights of people lately. If it looks like you can't win, keep /. up so we can keep fighting somewhere else.
OK, I've created a community on MSN's Discussion boards: Kerberos Discussion. Let's test their own statements: http://communities.msn.com/KerberosCensorship&nave ntryid=100 I welcome any and all discussions on this. Ironically, they state right on the first page: Notice: Microsoft has no responsibility for the content featured in this Web Community and further in the legal section : Microsoft is not responsible for any use of anything you say or post. Also, when I tried creating a discussion topic entitled "Microsoft lies" or "Microsoft censorship" and it would not let me!!!!!!!!! indiigo/indeego
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
The Iowa Legislature recently passed a law to nullify and protect Iowa residents from the DMCA.
/. to Iowa and post with impunity!
Move to
Alternatively, copy all the "offending" posts and email them using your Hotmail account. Then Microsoft will have to sue itself for violation of the DMCA!
later,
kristau
- Disclosure of APIs, Interfaces and Technical Information. Microsoft shall disclose to ISVs, IHVs, and OEMs in a Timely Manner, in whatever media Microsoft disseminates such information to its own personnel, all APIs, Technical Information and Communications Interfaces that Microsoft employs to enable--
That clearly covers the modified Kerberos interface.i. Microsoft applications to interoperate with Microsoft Platform Software installed on the same Personal Computer, or
ii. a Microsoft Middleware Product to interoperate with Windows Operating System software (or Middleware distributed with such Operating System) installed on the same Personal Computer, or
iii. any Microsoft software installed on one computer (including but not limited to server Operating Systems and operating systems for handheld devices) to interoperate with a Windows Operating System (or Middleware distributed with such Operating System) installed on a Personal Computer.
In fact, Microsoft's incompatible modification of the Kerberos interface probably violates one of the remedy terms:
Microsoft shall not take any action that it knows will interfere with or degrade the performance of any non-Microsoft Middleware when interoperating with any Windows Operating System Product without notifying the supplier of such non-Microsoft Middleware in writing that Microsoft intends to take such action, Microsoft's reasons for taking the action, and any ways known to Microsoft for the supplier to avoid or reduce interference with, or the degrading of, the performance of the supplier's Middleware.
Remember that Microsoft has been found in violation of antitrust law; they've had their day in court and the only remaining issue is the punishment. So issues of this nature should be reported to the Department of Justice's antitrust team.
Yes, Microsoft can appeal. But the disclosure requirements will go into effect while the appeal proceeds. Read the DOJ filing.
I'd do the same thing what? Pay for the Hotmail registration?, yeah, propably so. Get legal with a site like /. for discussions on my products? Maybe., However I believe that M$ is just hiding behind the DMCA et all, I think it would be a better move for them (PR wise) if they were a little more delicate about it and handled it with a touch more tact. They know what /. is, how it works and what the culture is like. The knew the response they would get. I don'tknow why they'd do it. If they were really so upset and wanted to get propriatary information out of the wild, they should be looking at Atttrition, HNN and the like.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Ya know, this is really ironic, M$ standing in full support (read hiding behind) the DMCA. I seem to recall a time not too long ago that one up and coming company ripped off a GUI and it's architecture from another company then marketed it into a jaggernaught product. The main defense the perpetrating company used was in direct oposition to everything the DMCA stands for. My how things have changed.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I agree, very eloquent with a subtle undertone of flame. Good job Rob!
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Sour grapes. They're just having a bad month and needed to take it out on someone.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Some gratitude.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
don't farget ya cockn'bawllz!!!!
do you guys post copyrighted material on your messageboards? if not, then this doesn't apply to you at all.
that dark clothing attracts mosquitos? indeed!
Let's say slashdot allowed posters to add pictures to their posts. If someone decided to post a picture with some classified government information, let's say, would slashdot then object to taking that post down too? I can fully understand not wanting to start censoring things, but this seems to be a pretty clear-cut case to me. I know this is on a different level, but aren't you already kind of censoring what people post, with your lameness filters, as well as with some more stealthy methods? (that is, one can no longer submit a post with "first post" in the subject line) It's possible I'm missing something, so please do correct me if I am.
Whenever someone says "I'm 100% certain that ... I'm speaking for [an entire group] ... when I say this," you can be pretty sure that they're dead wrong. You sir, are dead wrong. Please read my post below for why I disagree with you.
(Police Interrogation Room)
Agent Weston: As you can see, we've had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. Malda. It seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're Rob A. Malda, program writer for a respectable software company, you have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias CmdrTaco and are guilty of virtually every computer [copyright] crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. I'm going to be as forthcoming as I can be, Mr. Malda. You're here because we need your help. We know that you've been contacted by a certain individual, a man who calls himself Anonymous Coward. Now whatever you think you know about this man is irrelevant. He is considered by many authorities to be the most dangerous man alive. My colleagues believe that I am wasting my time with you but I believe that you wish to do the right thing. We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start and all that we're asking in return is your cooperation in bringing a known terrorist to justice.
CmdrTaco: Yeah. Wow, that sound like a really good deal. But I think I got a better one. How about I give you the finger... and you give me my phone call.
Agent Weston: Um, Mr. Malda. You disappoint me.
CmdrTaco: You can't scare me with this Kerbose crap. I know my rights. I want my phone call.
Agent Weston: Tell me, Mr. Malda, what good is a phone call if you're unable to speak.... You're going to help us, Mr. Malda whether you want to or not.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Listen, what ever the slashdot crew does, they have to stick to their guns at all times no matter what.
If they decide to keep the comments up, any other company, person, thing complaining about slashdot posts, the crew has to say "We don't remove posts"
If they decided to delete the comments, any other company, person, thing complaining about slashdot posts, the crew has to say "We will delete posts with just cause"
When the crew decides what to do, they got to stick with it always no matter how tough it is going to be. If the say remove posts from the Microsofts post and Apple comes to them and says "You have our IP on your forums, delete it", the crew has to say "done and done Mr. Apple"
And if they don't delete Microsofts posts when Apple comes up with a simplair complaint the crew has to say "We don't remove posts, we didn't take down MS's IP and we sure as hell ain't doing it for you"
Seriously (I am talking to the crew) you must decide your policy and stick with it, no matter what the policy is and no matter how difficult it may be. When you decide on this M$ case, you are setting it in stone, so make a wise choice.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
So now Microsoft is whining about Slashdot!! What is this world coming to when they get anything they want?! I say take a stand and keep the comments up!!
The Tick : Spooooooooooooooooooooon!.
Neo : There is no spoon.
On the other hand, when you download the files, you agree (and the document even states that you must agree with it if you are wanting to use it) to the terms and conditions of Microsoft. One of those is that you don't copy or reproduce it.
People downloaded this and then broke the law by posting it here. Slashdot isn't a place to spread illegal materials. These aren't original posts here, they're copyright infringements of documents made by Microsoft.
I'm not a MS fan, but I think that /. should pull these down as they're Microsoft's work and not original posts...
kwsNI
Resistance is futile, you will be litigated.
BlackNova Traders
Hrm. Isn't making a false claim under DMCA purgery? You can get disbarred for that.
OTOH, I'm not sure if the legal standard for purgery distinguishes between bad faith and stupidity, and which that was. Might get interesting to be ask them to be real explicit about which posts they want down.
The DCMA makes people who want to claim the ISP
exemption make decisions about what is and what is not "fair use" that they are not qualified to make. Fair use is a very complex piece of law for which there are very few clear guidlines. News sources do not have the expertise nor the resources to judge fair use and the law which puts this burden on them may be unconstituional in that regard.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Pulling a post because it violates copyright in response to a specific complaint is not "editorial control".
/. will have to pull the posts that posted the entire contents of the document. It's hard to argue fair use when the entire document is published without comments.
I strongly suspect that
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
What kind of damages can Microsoft win in this case? If they haven't filed for copyright protection before the infringing action occurs (and they probably haven't), they are not entitled to statutory damages. If they have to prove damages, they're effectively up a creek because they're giving the document away.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
If I leave my door open, stick a poster on it saying "Lot's a money inside! Don't open this door unless you sign a form promising not to take it!", I'm not only rather stupid, but I think I'd be open to a countersuit by a captured intruder or possibly even the government for solliciting a crime.
This line of thinking is always on my mind when I see letters such as this one.
If I were to ROT13 my trade secrets, publish them in the New York Times in that format, and then started suing, isn't there a legal way to nail me?
I'd certainly deserve it :-)
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Hmm... well, I guess I'll go buy all of your books, scan them in with OCR, and post them on my website for free access to all.
After all, no information should be proprietary, right?
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
I sent the following message to the email address at the bottom of the letter. It may never get read by the party in question, but perhaps Microsoft will read it here. I forgot to spell check it, so hopefully it's not too bad:-) Sir, I am very disappointed in Microsoft's handling of this situation. An educated person should realize that with Microsoft's current lack of public support and their legal woes, they should take care when throwing stones. I am not a lawyer, and I do not know a great deal about the DMCA, but I would think that in a PUBLIC forum such as Andover's Slashdot, the individual posters were responsible for their own content. Microsoft should be ashamed of it's propensity to cannibalize publicly recognized industry standards in the name of innovation. You blast Sun for trying to maintain control of Java, while mangling standards in your own network products in an attempt to lock people into your platform. You are the post World War II Japan. The difference being that the Japanese actually improved on the products they ripped off. Of course, you are not the only company that does this, but no one else does it to the extent that you do. Once, I respected Microsoft, but no more. Your greed and lack of ethics has crushed any positive image I once had of you. Chances are you will never read this. It will probably go directly into your circular file, but I wanted to express my disgust. If anyone needs proof that you can succeed with OPEN standards, just look at Linux and the OpenSource phenomenon. How does it feel to be despised even by your best clients? I hate being so negative, but that is the feeling Microsoft engenders in me these days. I really do hope you repent of your current practices. You could once again be recognized as a respectable company. Sincerely, Jeffrey C. Johnson
Microsoft is playing a fast, loose game with the concept of a "trade secret" in a way that completely violates the spirit of the law.
EXACTLY! To emphasise this:
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
There have been several precedents on this issue - as IANAL and I sure as hell ANAIPL, I would recommend you get a good book on copyright for further perusal.
This has been a test of the Slashdot Broadcast Network . . .
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Comments Containing A Copy of the Specification:
"by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday, May 02, @03:37PM EST (#197)"(Score 5: Funny? (Why ? ? ?)
Basically a copy of the original. If this were copyrighted, rather than a trade secret, this would be a violation. Since they foolishly called it a trade secret, it's only a violation if AC signed an NDA with MS.
"by BlueUnderwear on Tuesday, May 02, @04:09PM EST (#239)"(Score 2, Informative)
A Link, that's it.
"by BlueUnderwear on Tuesday, May 02, @04:15PM EST (#248)"(Score:2, Informative)
another link
"by smartin on Tuesday, May 02, @02:20PM EST (#86)"(Score:3, Insightful)
MS are idiots - No reason whatsoever.
Comments Containing Links to Internet Sites with Unauthorized Copies of the Specification
"by ka9dgx on Tuesday May 02, @2:52PM EST (#133)"(Score:5, Informative)
Oh look, another link. MS - maybe you don't entirely undertand the term Trade Secret? Implying that people don't already know it?
Comments Containing Instructions on How to Bypass the End User License Agreement and Extract the Specification:
"by myconid (my S conid@ P toge A the M r.net) on Tuesday May 02, @07:27PM EST (#362)"(Score:3, Informative)
A deeply sophisticated method for cracking the heavy MS security (Snigger)
"by markb on Tuesday May 02, @05:47PM EST (#321)"(Score:1)
Ohh, another heavy duty method.
"by Sami (respect.my@authorita-dot-net) on Tuesday May 02, @01:47PM EST (#19)"(Score:4, Informative)
You Hacker/Crackers. I'm soo Jealous. Evidently, so is MS
"by iCEBalM (icebalm@[NOSPAM]bigfoot.com) on Tuesday May 02, @01:52PM EST (#33)"(Score:5, Informative)
One of the more sophisticated ways - you have to download something first!!! I can see where MS might assume that their average user might not be able to handle that without us malicously showing them how . . .
"by Jonny Royale (moc.mocten.xi@notners) on Tuesday, May 02, @01:59PM EST (#51)"(Score:2, Redundant)
Yes, good old Winzip. The bane of law-abiding citizens everywhere!
"by rcw-work (rcw@d.e.b.i.a.n.org.without.dots) on Tuesday, May 02, @07:12PM EST (#353)"(Score:1)
Look - those linux using bastiches didn't even notice our license agreement. Release the Dogs . . .
All in all, my final opinion is . . . MS doesn't have a leg to stand on. They'd be in better shape if they hadn't called it a trade secret, since then they could claim copyright. I think they'd lose, even then, but it would be possible. Now it's just out there.
Given the ease it took to bypass the NDA, and the fact that it could be done accidently of all things, even under the UCITA, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. I would say, in my laymans opinion, that Andover and slashdot are at no risk whatsoever.
But that's just my opinion.
This has been a test of the Slashdot Broadcast Network . . .
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Obligatory: IANAL.
First, this quote from the bottom of every /. page:
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Does this indicate that, if the copyright owner so desires, any offending instance of alleged copyright violation should be removed? As the copyright holder of this post, I don't have the ability to delete it. Nor would /. delete it if I asked. Should MS be given special consideration because they are a corporation? Should they be given special consideration since they are the owner of the copyright, but not the originator of the post containing the copyrighted material?
Does fair use apply here? Fair use traditionally has not been understood to cover quoting, en bloc, the entirety of a piece intended to stand alone. If the entirety of the Specification has been quoted in /. posts, then it would seem to reason that this does not constitute fair use.
Second, in the notes generated with every "Post Comment" page, this quote:
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
Copyright infringement is illegal. Whether you want to challenge DMCA or not, copyright will not go away anytime soon. (For good reason, I might add. Corporations abuse copyright principles, which were intended to protect original "authors" from the government and large corporate entities.)
Here is where things get sticky. Has the /. adminstration (roblimo, cdrtaco, etc.) at any time deleted posts, even partially? Then MS may have a legal leg on which to stand in court, as it indicates that /. takes editorial control at times. If not, then it may be argued by andover that /. is a public forum. In any case, whether exceptions have been made or not, it is clear that /.'s policy is simply to moderate illegal posts down. It is clear that /.'s policy is not to delete illegal posts (or any other violation of the above).
Clearly, andover would be reckless to ignore MS's request simply because most of us (myself included) hate MS. My vote (FWIW) is for the /. editors, in consultation with andover's attorneys, to do what they think is best. Of course, if this means giving MS the finger, all the better!
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who know binary, and those who do not.
By nature, I'm a lurker, not a poster.
However, I feel I must post my support for Slashdot in fighting this. My advice:
1. Set up a legal fund (maybe through the EFF) as soon as possible and post how we can contribute. Some may say it is premature, but now's the best time to get contributions while everyone is mad as hell. Include some language that any funds not used for this fight roll over to the EFF general litigation fund.
2. Listen to the lawyers, first and foremost. I agree that it would be wonderful to keep as clean as possible of the "censorship" stain, but the best way to win is to play smart and the lawyers should know the smartest way to play. If I'm taking advice in how to play a game of chess, I'll listen hardest to the grand masters.
3. Pick the right fight. Consult with mp3.com, Napster, 2600, and anyone else stung by DMCA. When this goes to the top (and it will), we want to spend our efforts on the best hope for overturning the DMCA.
After writing that last point, I'm thinking that the legal fund could be wider in scope. Could we amass a large enough anti-DMCA fund to hire top-notch counsel to pick the right battle and follow through to the Supreme Court?
Good luck, and keep us up to date (I know you'll do that anyway, but I'll say it nevertheless).
Work as if you don't need the money,
Love as if you've never been hurt, and
Dance as if no one's watching.
So, rather than appear foolish afterward, I renounce seeming clever now.
You forgot to put at the end of the message:
:)
"This letter is copyright by AndOver.net. Reproduction of this email by, but no limited to, email servers, email clients, or other electronic or non-electronic means is a violation of the owners copyright. License to copy this email is given at a rate of $100,000 per copy. By reading this email message you agree to the above terms."
Then email it to everyone you can find at Microsoft, and use a hotmail account. By the time you're done they'll owe you enough money to cover the costs of lawyers you'ld need to keep the whole thing in court for a few years until no one cares anymore
If you look at the list given by Microsoft, there is an hour's discrepency between the time that they give and the time of the actual post. (The difference is still there after accounting for timezone differences and daylight savings time).
That notwithstanding, the number given to the post identifies it as the post that Microsoft was referring to. This means that under penalty of perjury, Microsoft has stated that the following three questions posted by smartin (referred to by the phrase, "the above-referenced comments"):
> What happens to the people that implement it (ie. the Samba guys) even if they obtain the information without intentionally breaking the license.
> Are they exposing themselves to expensive litigation?
> Are they endangering the project?
constitute Microsoft's "proprietary material".
Also, not to start a grammar flame-war, but there's an incorrect verb tense in Microsoft's letter. (I only say this because letters written by lawyers are supposed to have impeccable clarity, precision and grammar to avoid misinterpretation (or reinterpretation).)
Donny
Unfourtunately you are talking about the wrong part of the DMCA. This case (mostly) involves people directly posting copyrighted materials. Even if the other parts of the DMCA were striken as unconstitutional the part which requires service provides to remove copyrighted work upon notification in return for abscence of liability would still be present.
While their are some issues with this section (in cases where the service provider isn't sure the material is copyrighted or it is under dispute ala the church of scientology) this is not such a case. This case here boils down to two issues.
A) is a liscence with no associated sale enfourceable
B) do you believe in copyright
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Just standing up to be counted
I'm holding up one finger to make it easier, Billy
"I am an American. You are a sick asshole!!"
kill -9 microsoft
Interesting would be to argue that the specification, is the property of MicroSoft, hereafter referred to as MS. The specification *is* the property of MS, they wrote every character that is in that piece of text, right down to the convoluted legalese. IMHO, if MS wants to lay claim to the text of the specification, let them. It was probably typed by a full time Bubble-Gum V-2.1 compatible MS-Typist.
/. do: I don't know, honestly.. I'd love to see /. take on MS and WIN. (pun tactlessly intended) I love it when anybody takes on MS and wins though. Every time I see MS getting the bad press they genuinely deserve, I think we all win.
/. go down over the wrong battle, but I sure do admire the stance. Links should remain, as those sites are arguably more responsible for the content than ./ is. Methods of circumventing the EULA should have been considered by MS before release, that's their oversight and thus their problem.
/.) Those arguing (myself included) that the DMCA is a Bad Thing might consider that using provisions of the DMCA itself as arguments against the DMCA is potentially self defeating. Perhaps a better approach is to wait until a clear case of unconstitutionality arises.
However, kerberos itself does not belong to MS. Kerberos seems to be the property of one "MIT", a guy I've never met who lives "up north."
This is the license as I could find in 5 minutes of digging for kerberos.. perhaps a bit dated, as it references old U.S. export control rubbish, but..:
"
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Export of this software from the United States of America is
assumed to require a specific license from the United States
Government. It is the responsibility of any person or
organization contemplating export to obtain such a license
before exporting.
WITHIN THAT CONSTRAINT, permission to use, copy, modify, and
distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and
without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright
notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and
this permission notice appear in supporting documentation, and that
the name of M.I.T. not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining
to distribution of the software without specific, written prior
permission. M.I.T. makes no representations about the suitability of
this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express
or implied warranty.
..."
I didn't see a copy of this licence accompaning the MS specs. Very odd indeed, considering the legalese used in the spec license.
A question to consider: Is MS in violation of the MIT license?
As for what should
(I won: I havn't used a MS product in 3 years, and for me, the wonderfully broken and unstable MS stuff just brings me more business writing and installing for non-MS platforms.. thanks again for the props, Bill. Keep up the good work.)
The more important question however: Is this the right battle? A smart fighter chooses his battles, and I'm not convinced that MS doesn't have a good case to have the verbatim posts removed. As for verbatim posts of the specs, I don't think copyright infringment will be covered by the first amendment should this go to court, and I think that even the most avid MS haters suspect that this is also the case. I'd hate to see
Sure, MS would love to cement the DMCA, and it would be unfortunate to provide them with easy circumstance to do so. (I picture some MS VP in an office saying "Excellent.. Smithers" in response to a report of how things are going here at
"power belongs in the hands of those who know no lust."
Wow I sent an email to the J.K Weston dude. Here is what you will see if you do that.Thank you for contacting the legal department at Microsoft Corporation. This process is provided EXCLUSIVELY for notifying service providers, such as Microsoft.com, MSN.com, MSNBC.com and Hotmail that your copyrighted material may have been infringed. To make a complaint, please provide the information as outlined at . All other inquiries, including but not limited to, requests for technical assistance, reports of email abuse, and piracy reports will not receive a response. For Hotmail technical issues or reports of email abuse, send email to support@hotmail.com or abuse@hotmail.com , as appropriate. To report piracy, send email to piracy@microsoft.com or call 1-800-R-U-LEGIT. I guess they DO NOT want to hear my opinion first hand. Anyway if you do go to court count on me for $25 in legal bill contributions. Not much but if we all do what we can......
As the owner of another internet service these issues obviously concern me. I believe your service much like my own fits into the legal staus and definition of an "Enhanced Service Provider" The same laws that protect AT&T and ISPs protect you.
I quote from my FAQ( http://wickednews.voyeurs.net/faq/#5) I have heard most Internet services such as WickedNews, called Enhanced Service Providers. Is WickedNews an Enhanced Service Provider? And if so, What is an Enhanced Service Provider?
Yes, WickedNews is an Enhanced Service Provider, A site that gives Usenet service (feeds or newsreaders) to anyone who asks, without making any additional qualifications for the service (other than keeping the bill paid), is classified as an enhanced service provider in the United States. This is like a common carrier, the classification for bussinesses like telephone companies and railroad freight firms, but with a bit less govenmental regulation than common carriers suffer. By not regulating the content of traffic passing through them, enhanced service providers are believed to be absolved from liability for "illegal" speech (e.g., copyright violations, obsenity, conspiracy, presidential death threats).
(Henry Spencer & David Lawrence. Managing Usenet. Cambridge: O'reilly & Associates, Inc, 1998.)
From what I have been told if you sensor anything you automatically loose this status, my advice do nothing, but reply to MS reminding them of this information.
I would also hazard to say that you are also covered under the laws on fair use as well...
Bill Dunn
Owner/ Server Administrator
V N Internet Services
www.wickednews.net
newsmaster@wickednews.net
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I see a problem here. When trying to explain to people who are not In the Know about this whole situation, how do you explain to someone that has no predisposition for or against MS or Slashdot that posting methods of circumventing the EULA is not wrong in the first place? Think about it, if this comes to a court case, someone's going to have to explain to the jury that this isn't a karmic response to a few people's deviant behavior. I'd really like to know other people's takes on this, so I can feel more confident in explaining this entire thing to people. Also, I'm not terribly versed on the DMCA. I have read through part of it, but IANAL, and I could really use a summary - including all or some of the potential misuses of the DMCA. Thanks for the help. The Kow
Moo
Why is it ok to break the DMCA but not okay for me to go break the GPL? Seems like a pretty huge double standard to me.
If the posts are copyrighted by their authors and the author may well be in violation of copyright, why does the Slashdot have to remove the article (if the article is to be removed)? Oh yeah, that's right, there's no self-management. That's the difference between an ISP and Slashdot. If some user puts up some illegal web page, the company contacts the ISP and the ISP contacts the user and tells the user that they will remove it or have it removed for them and then directs the company to bug the user. Of course, you can't do that at Slashdot because I can't remove my own comments (and believe me, there are times when I've wanted to, but not now).
.. no AC posting, that's an idea .. and a flamewar) as well as with nested comments. AC postings generally can't belong to the author since the author is unknown and Slashdot should rightfully take possession of those and manage them, but as for the rest of us users, why not give us the say? Then we can turn to Microsoft and give them either an "okie dokie" or a nice mooning.
I realize that such a system causes problems with regards to AC posting (hmm
by myconid (my S conid@ P toge A the M r.net) on Tuesday May 02, @08:27PM EST (#362)
Heres a good loophole. Install Winrar, right click on the icon and select OPEN WITH WINRAR, extract the file.
Whats a license? I never saw one..
----
I suggest we all stand outside the Redmond Campus with bullhorns and shout that, repeatedly.
--
dinner: it's what's for beer
Here's a fun new legal technique, similar to the unequivocably moral Unisys patent plan:
- Take an open standard.
- Add one small incompatibility.
- Hide that incompatibility for a few months.
- Write a paper describing the incompatibility in sufficient detail, so that implementing the necessary changes is trivial.
- Post a warning on the paper that implementing the specification without advance written permission is illegal.
- Wrap the paper in some sort of mechanism which presents the warning and a license agreement nominally waiving fair use, reverse engineering, and free speech rights.
- Make sure the mechanism only works on platforms where your implementation is already present, and, thus, no clean-room version is necessary.
- Distribute liberally, knowing that standard means of unwrapping the document -- on any platform but your own -- will not present the invalid license agreement anyway.
- Wait for the information to spread to all interested parties.
- Use the threat of legal force to intimidate anyone who might be considering writing a competing implementation -- not necessarily even based on information from the paper -- into cancelling the effort.
- Bask in the glow that you have not used dumping, product tying, or buyouts to maintain your monopoly position. Just good old American justice.
As I am not aware of any patent or copyright our friends at Microsoft have on this business process, please be aware that it is copyright chromatic, 2000.It's also unethical. I'm not surprised.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
My real suggestion? Do what Yahoo recently when they were sued for liable because someone posted untrue statements on one of their stock ticker chat boards: Claim that Slashdot has no control over content, and the person they really need to go after is the poster, and if you (M$) provides the right kind of paper, then maybe we can give you some type of information on the poster of the content.
In other words, Slashdot would be required to keep records of all anonymous postings so the poster can be identified later at the whim of some government agency or corporation able to convince a Judge that it needs to strip away the poster's anonymity. This is the worst of all possible results. It would start a chain of results that would eventually tear away every shred of privacy on the internet.
I sincerely hope that Slash is doing, and has been doing, the right thing and simply not keeping any records of anonymous posters. The one case I can think of that would justify record-keeping is in the event that some sort of flood attack had to be defended against, and even in that case the record-keeping should stop as soon as the attack stops.
Do I have a better suggestion to offer? No. Not at this point. I think we've got a hard problem here. Personally, I would tend toward the opinion that Slashdot should remove the copyrighted material, after it's found by a court to be a genuine copyright violation. But for me, there's a big, big problem with that, and it's this: I believe that Microsoft has acted illegally in restricting this material, and indeed, in attempting to subvert the Kerberos standard in the first place; a court should find that Microsoft restricted the material illegally in the first place, and should in fact be stripped of it's right to impose any restriction on the use of this material at all. To put it in fewer words: antitrust law trumps copyright law.
If you look at the whole issue in that light, this turns into an act of civil disobediance, and that can actually excuse you from breaking certain laws. Let me say it again, in different words: I believe that Microsoft have broken the law by attempting to subvert the Kerberos standard and that the poster is justified in retaliated by making Micrsoft's restricted information public in the way he did. Yes, it's possible the poster broke copyright law in this case, but the principle of civil disobedience should excuse that.
I think the specs for Microsoft's perverted mods to Kerberos should stay right here on Slashdot until Microsoft has answered in a court of law for its latest trust-making strategem.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
The government has seen fit to protect the rights of Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA, and others. Should we, as mere citizens sit here and question the legitimacy of this position. How can we sit here and argue that we might somehow have a better grasp on the situation than our elected leaders.
Our leaders are being paid good money by the tax system and political action commitees. Do you think they are being paid because they don't know anything about their job? Imagine if you showed up to work tomorrow, totally oblivious as to how to do your job properly. Wouldn't you be fired? They wouldn't stay there if they didn't know what they were doing!
What these posters did is wrong because our politicians said so. And really, what more justification do we need? I call on the editors of Slashdot to condemn these people as government heretics, and remove these posts immediately!
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Well, your argument is well if its targeteted to the person you answer.
;)
But, to answer you, with my opinions;
1. Forced disclosure is ok. What other way to track down spammers?
2. They cannot ask them to remove it. When posting it to slashdot, well, it would be the same as leaving flyers all over the city. It would be impossible to remove them. It would be the same as dropping flyers down by airplanes. Impossible to remove.
3. It is impossible, because "the system works that way". If you dropped 1 million copies of some of your work, over a city -- it would be impossible for you to remove.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - arcade@kvine-nospam.sdal.com - arcade@efnet
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Let's try to keep the postings here to a certain standard of maturity. We must appear (because we ARE) to be Microsoft's peers, not Microsoft's unruly next door neighbours' children. If this ever reaches court (who knows, let's hope not), and Microsoft can show 400 postings which say "fuCk yOU mICRo$oft", it won't help too much. Keep calm, keep thinking.
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
Now I know that, deep down, the Slashdot editors (and owners) are anti-censorship and, specifically, anti-removing-the-comments.
BUT, while the spirit is willing, the flesh may be weak. That is, if Microsoft actual sues (or threatens to), Slashdot may cave for financial reasons.
So I propose the following: If Slashdot removes the comments without having been forced to by an actual court ruling, we boycott Slashdot. Hopefully that will provide the needed reverse financial pressure.
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Actually, another very good point. If you believe that the original MIT license means that any added licensure restrictions by MSFT are null and void, you should inform MIT of this demand (by physical letter, since we do not have legal digital signatures to verify at this moment). And you should consider contacting the ACLU and EFF.
Attempts to enforce licenses which are in violation of the original license are unenforceable in a court of law - they can threaten you, they can twist the truth, but a judge will laugh in their face.
Will in Seattle
If you had *read* the article, the books will be in HTML on the web!
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
I agree. By /. using the columbine posts without the posters permission, I think they set themselves up. They seem to be saying in one case, "it's our content, we'll do with it what we want" and then saying "whoa, mr. lawyer, we're just a carrier, all comments are owned by the poster!"
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
How about we all just mirror the content?
I have.
By the way, that's one hefty assed page. It's a big ass file. I'm going to probably go through and cut much of the chaff from it.
Post all the messages, links included, to USENET. They can't sweep it under the carpet from there.
Yea, then he changed his mind and decided the thing to do would be to turn tail and run, while blowing up his own ship.
Somehow setting SlashDot's self distruct sequence then moving everyone over to hotgrits.org isn't the greatest solution they could come up with.
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
If my knowledge of copyright law is correct (Not necessarily so), the user posts may fall under fair use -- provided that not too much was used. Fair use is not just limited to educational use; critique and public commentary are included.
This is even more true because the posts are noncommercial. Otherwise AC has some serious royalties due him/her.
-Walker
Taiwan or Malta would be good - they don't have copyright laws there at all, so MS couldn't really do anything about it.
For any interested, there will be an article in Friday's Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com) regarding Microsoft's letter, /.'s reply, and so forth. The article will be by John Schwartz, who, along with Rob Pegoraro, tend to cover /.ish issues. I think that anyone who reads /. on a regular basis will enjoy the direction that the article takes. Schwartz can be contacted (nicely, don't abuse this guy, he's one of the few decent tech writers in a major media organization) at schwartzj@washpost.com This heads-up comes from someone else with a @washpost.com address, explaining the ability to give advance notice. stil
But are they really? It may say that on the comments pages, but as we've seen the administrators seem to have no compunctions about taking the posts and publishing them elsewhere to make a profit (that fact that it is a profit that will be donated to charity is of no relevance).
No, but they (gov't) should put yo' ass in jail. If they could find you... You do know that the FBI reads /., right?
Do you really believe that slashdot wouldn't censor a list of credit card numbers? I think you're being a bit too idealistic here.
Oh please. So now anyone who doesn't agree with you is one of Gates' minions? I can't believe slashdot has come to this. It's really become the case that any and all dissenting voices are either moderated into oblivion or dismissed as "crazy." I for one do not work for Microsoft, and never have. I have a dissenting opinion not because I was told to, but for other reasons. Gross generalizations can only serve to make the one making them look foolish.
Microsoft is attempting to create a new legal classification ... an API that is published, yet illegal to use.
This is not new. How long have Unisys and Fraunhofer been doing this? The interface to GIF is restricted by the LZW compression patent; MPEG audio layer 3 is also patented.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Archives, which include unauthorized reproductions of Microsoft's copyrighted work entitled Microsoft Authorization Data Specification v.1.0 for Microsoft Windows 2000 Operating Systems" (hereafter "Specification").
Agreed, if they don't want it up, pull it. They wrote it and they own it. They get to say where it shows up and where it doesn't
In addition, some comments include links to unauthorized reproductions of the Specification,
Now you can shut up. You're essentially shooting the messenger. If slashdot isn't hosting it then it isn't slashdot's problem. Indicating that such information exists is merely informing slasdot readers, not infringing your copyright. You don't like those sites, go after them, then the links will be dead and useless. You're just being lazy.
and some comments contain instructions on how to circumvent the End User License Agreement that is presented as part of the download for accessing the Specification.
Now this is what puts a hair across my ass. Now you're not even attacking the messenger, but the message. If people break your EULA, go after them. This is really telling people, flat out, that they cannot even talk about certain aspects of your software and policy.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
This is great. As a news site, publicity and name recognition are your life blood. They've really put you in a win win situation. If they decide to take you to court and you eventually lose the extra publicity will be worth far more than the fine. On the other hand, if you win then you get the "David slays Goliath" kudos.
The worst thing that can happen if you tell them to fuck off is better than than the best thing that can happen if you give in.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Who would have thought slashdot would be one of the first potential court cases to test the DMCA :-)
Someone should start a fund to help Slashdot in case Slashdot does get sued by Microsoft, even though it's very unlikely Slashdot will win.
Slashdot is not exactly a poor business that's barely trying to stand on two feet. I don't think they need a legal defense fund from the general public, besides which, although I read slashdot, I am completely unwilling to contribute money to the legal defense fund of a for-profit company. If they're making money off of their readership, (and rest assured that they are) they don't need to have us further help them financially by paying for their lawyers should they get sued.
I'm not anti-business, and I'm not anti-slashdot, but I would no more pay for slashdot's legal defense then I would for, say, Amoco or Bell Atlantic's legal defense.
The DMCA definately sucks, but in the end, companies will do what is best for their profitability. If they're publically owned, (like Andover is) then they pretty much have to. Your dollars in their defense fund won't change their strategy, and in the end, if the "stand up for the right thing" it will be because management has decided that that's the best thing to do in terms of long term profitability (for whatever reason) not out of some strong moral conviction.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I agree it's out of line to remove the links. But if, under DMCA, links to illegally-copied material are ruled illegal, then are links to links to illegally-copied material illegal?
In other words, suppose someone places a copy on a server in Lilliput, out of the reach of DMCA (and perhaps a rogue nation that doesn't acknowledge intellectual property rights at all). In this hypothetical, a webpage in the US with a link to that copy in Lilliput would be illegal. But now suppose there's a webpage in Shangrila, also out of reach of DMCA, that has a link to the page in Lilliput. Would it be illegal for a webpage in the US to have a link to the page in Shangrila?
Does the "illegal link" propagate?
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
This is the right place at the right time to start working to dismantle this dreadful law, passed nearly two years ago while much of cyberspace wasn't paying attention.
Some rock bands and music companies (for completely different reasons) are invoking this same law, as will any large corporation with lawyers that doesn't want to see something published. Under the worst provisions of the DMCA, you don't even have to prove copyright infringement, just allege it..and the ISP can only avoid liability by booting the offenders or deleting the allegedly offensive material. To restore access or content, you have to file an affidavit under the jurisdiction of the federal judge in your region.
This is one of the reasons it's outrageous for a corporation like Microsoft to use the DMCA to remove public comments. Almost nobody online was paying attention with the entertainment industry rushed to get this law passed, maybe because nobody imagined companies like Microsoft would jump in to use it to try and control what they call "proprietary" information, but which, in fact, will have the affect of censoring, chilling free speech. Slashdot is lucky, in this case, to be owned by a corporation..it has access to lawyers. To really grasp the horror here, imagine if you're a smaller website or weblog.Step one: The DMCA has to be repealed or re-written.It's much more offensive and damaging than the Communications Decency Act would have been, and much more enforceable.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Granted I don't care too much most of the opinions of slashdot editors (or posters for that matter). But it is good to see than when something real and serious comes up the editors here at Slashdot can put down the bias and the "revelery" for a moment and do the right thing.
:)
F /...
Your response was brief, to the point, and most importantly not inflammatory. Microsoft is a corporation, so of course its going to act like one. This fact seems to get lost on many slashdot posters. The DMCA is something they fought for... and now something they are going to use to fight with. This is as it should be. Its the lay of the land now... the way it works. Currently.
Unfortunately for Microsoft (and any large coroporation) they move slow and reacte even more slowly. The power of the net comes from its ability to inform many people of all of the facts on any issue almost instantly. Long gone are the days when it took months or even years to start a proper counter-movement. Now it takes days... Microsoft has felt this before and they will feel it again. What was acceptable for big business in the 80s became less so in the 90s and now in the zeros those who can't change and adapt to a smart, all knowing consumer are doomed to failure at that consumer's hands. This is the "internet economy"... not some company with potential billion dollar profits 5 or 6 years after starting up, no its consumers finally having real choice and power.
It is about time
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
Microsoft didn't ask Slashdot to remove comments which were critical of the company. They asked Slashdot to remove articles which violated Microsoft's legitimate copyright.
Some of the comments which Microsoft wants /. to remove are not part of Microsoft's copyrighted material. They simply give advice on how one can circumvent an EULA.
Unfortunately, the DMCA makes the dissemination of such advice legal.
I'd like everyone reading this to stop for a few seconds and ponder this. If you write a howto which helps people obtain documentation you could be prosecuted under the DMCA.
A bit scary? I think so....
The time has come for Andover to secede from the United States. This will allow a huge expansion in business operations.
Suppressed organizations like Napster will be welcomed with opened arms. "IP Address of Convenience" registry will be available to other companies who feel the weight of the DMCA pressing down upon them.
Absolutely nothing a Scientologist or Microsoft or Metallica lawyer can do will matter in the slightest. It will be sort of like Canada, but not lame.
JonKatz will of course be named minister of propaganda and warm fuzzy feelings. CowboyNeal gets the ministry of statistics. Of course no form of expression will be censored, but people wanting to plaster dotcom advertisements over everything will be politely asked not to.
Good Things like microbrew, quality pizza, convertibles, game developers, mechanical wristwatches, fine clothes, USB, penguins, snowboarding and DVD will be encouraged, and perhaps even subsidised.
If you forget to dial the '1' before a phone number, there will be no annoying voice reminding you - instead the phone system will just know you meant to do that, and connect you anyway.
After the Andover goes the way of most non-US$ currencies, your old savings will be worth so much that there will be no need for a real job, nothing but open source hacking on state-supplied Athlons, punctuated by nerf gun wars and visits to the "mainland" for baseball games. Hooray!
> The DMCA needs to be stopped before it stunts technology permanantly.
More correctly, it will stunt _American_ technology permanently. If this trend is allowed to continue and the US falls farther and farther into restrictive legislation, it won't be long before other countries with less restrictive laws will pass you by. Show the lawmakers in the US how this will affect company's ability to compete on the world stage, and perhaps they will think twice about its usefulness.
For example, recently the US eased restrictions on exporting of encryption. Why? Because US companies were concerned about other counties coming out with equivalent or better products which they then shipped to the world, while the US companies could not.
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
I've been waiting for this to happen for a LONG time. I vote for a refusal to edit the posts or remove. And furthermore I vote that all of us users start appending those posts to our new posts like this:
... (Score:1)
May I claim John Doe #1
by BlueUnderwear on 05:17 PM May 2nd, 2000 EST (#253)
(User Info)
... for This puppy. It's the kerbspec file unzipped and without the legal boilerplate.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The notion that Microsoft should be allowed to censor /. or any other medium is repugnant, and were this solely about this then I'd be throwing my hat in with everyone else who has knee-jerked and screamed "WE HATE BILL" with all their might.
If only they'd bothered to look at the issue here...
Microsoft say that certain posts infringed their copyright, and, if we're honest, they did. People blatently posted material copyrighted to M$. Such posts should never have been allowed to remain on the server, but they did.
Please don't do anything daft and turn this into a legal case that slashdot/Andover can't afford. I fear you would lose, and it wouldn't even be a blaze of glory you'd go out in.
--
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
See, for example, LA Times v. Free Republic
Dear Microsoft -
Its nice to see that you are continuing to live up to your reputation of attempting to squash any open discussions of your business practices.
Instead of pulling out the DMCA and trying to use it to control, take a look at some of the comments that were made. At the *very* good points that developers and other IT people made about your release. And consider them an independent discussion of your business. The people who were discussing you are in a large part the people who are also your customers, your developers, and the very community with which you want to be having open discussions.
The best thing you could do at this point is to retract your letter, *apologize* and perhaps contact the Slashdot crew about an 'Ask Microsoft' regular feature. You might be surprised at some of our questions -- and who knows, you may surprise us in a *good* way with some of your answers.
Check out Magic Firesheep!
Circumventing the EULA is not illegal. It has no copy protection, it is a simple archive and can be opened in almost any program that handles that sort of file(iw winzip). Just because doing so is against what the EULA says, you must remember that the EULA was never agreed to when somebody decides to simply open it in winzip.
Also, simply linking to sites that contain unpacked versions that don't have the EULA on it is not illegal, or at least isn't yet(and hopefully never will be). The MPAA tried to get the courts to block 2600 from linking to DeCSS sites(and DeCSS has already been deemed illegal to have in your possesion). Why should slashdot stop linking to sites that contain microsofts implementation of the kerberos protocol when its not even illegal to have to begin with. There is no law saying a EULA must be present when you look at something from a company, even if a company wants it to be that way. I say it's time for Microsoft to realize that their days of blind bullying are over. Don't take down any posts concerning that story.
Not to mention the fact that "posts are the property of the person who posted them" to begin with. Stupid lawyers
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!
"At the root of the issue is whether Microsoft legally has the right to keep its Kerberos extensions under copyright. As far as I recall, Kerberos extensions could only be kept private for in-house development. Obviously, Microsoft's Windows 2000 goes a bit beyond that."
And
"Remember as well that Microsoft has made the spec publicly available as long as you agree to certain terms--including that you don't tell anyone else the spec. Clearly, that's a ridiculous premise."
Even while it is on trial for abuse of its monopoly position, Microsoft is using the usual tactics (absorb, subvert, suppress) to abuse and strengthen its monopoly position.
The only way this will ever be stopped is to break up Microsoft. Well, short of nationalization, and summary execution of all key officers. Personally, I favor a breakup and summary executions, but I'm a moderate.
Is this a violation of DCMA? The reverse-engineering action occurred outside of DCMA's jurisdiction. MSFT's problem, as per their lawyer's letter, seems to be with the DCMA violation itself. Yet they are also complaining about proposals to bybass the EULA to view the document.
Which of the four stages are we at now? Then they fight you... Guess what stage is next???
Posting anonymously because their lawyers are probably scanning every post on this thread (scary).
I'm very confused, where in my post did i include any part of M$'s information? I've never even downloaded or read it in whole or in part. I can't understand why you or the evil empire thinks that i did? Here is what I said in it's entirety:
What happens to the people that implement it (ie. the Samba guys) even if they obtain the information without intentionally breaking the license. Are they exposing themselves to expensive litigation? Are they endangering the project?
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Can any lawyer here confirm or deny this?
Did the email have an attachment with a .vbs extension by any chance?
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Just a note (because IANAL almost goes without saying anymore):
How about it be assumed that whoever posts is not a lawyer, thus eliminating the "IANAL" acronyms and instead, but "IAAL" for "I am a lawyer" for the rare person who has the credentials.
Of course, there are some issues with this, but really, if you're taking serious legal advice off a public forum, you need more than just legal help.
Woz
These should be added to the list with insightful, etc.
+1 Trade Secret
+1 Copyright Violation
+1 National Secret
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Surfing the net and other cliches...
(Who Meta-Meta-Moderates the Meta-Moderators?)
I believe it is out of line to remove links to Microsoft's documents, but the comments actually containing the document are probably a legitimate target for removal.
Microsoft is playing very dirty pool with this "specification."
... congratulations. You are now legally ineligable to work on them because you have been "contaminated" by exposure to Microsoft's trade secrets.
... an API that is published, yet illegal to use. If they are successful with this, expect to see future APIs released in this fashion. At least when Microsoft kept their secret APIs secret, people could reverse engineer them, safe in the knowledge that they could not be sued by Microsoft. Anyone who utilizes an API that has been published under these conditions is in danger of having to defend themselves against an accusation of breach of contract, and having to prove that they did not see the poisoned API document.
The purpose of releasing the specification under this sort of "license" is NOT for the benefit of the user or programming community. This license is specifically crafted to provide a weapon that Microsoft can use against people trying to write programs that are compatable with Microsoft's interfaces.
The license only authorizes the use of the interface specification "for the sole purpose of allowing review of the Specification for security analysis." The license does not authorize the use of the interface specification for the purpose of utilizing the interface by third-party programs.
If you were planning to work on a program to interface to Microsoft's Kerberos, and you have seen these documents
Microsoft is attempting to create a new legal classification
Microsoft is playing a fast, loose game with the concept of a "trade secret" in a way that completely violates the spirit of the law.
As for the question of whether to remove the posts, I would argue that the posts that contained complete, verbatim copies of the program files should be removed, but the rest of the posts, especially the posts that describe how to open the files without agreeing to the EULA, should be left intact. Microsoft did not ensure that persons receiving the API specification could not access the specification without agreeing to the licensing terms, their trade secret has been revealed, and is no longer a trade secret. This is what Microsoft is trying to whitewash in asking that these posts be removed. They are attempting to establish that they can publicly publish an API, yet identify it as a "trade secret", then use it as a weapon against competitors.
Make no mistake, this new tactic is a direct attack on open source projects that compete with Microsoft's products, and we as of yet have no effective defense because we have been taken by surprise.
I hope that the outcome of this is that a court eventually finds that Microsoft lost trade secret status when it publicly published the specification, and I hope that whatever Andover decides to do in this case advances this goal.
Only the loss of trade secret status will stop Microsoft from pulling this dirty trick in the future. If they win this, expect all future Microsoft APIs to be similarly poisoned.
Let us not forget that the DMCA has a reverse engineering provision. It is lawful to reverse engineer software for certain specific purposes. One of those purposes is interoperability. Since Microsoft's whole point in protecting it is to prevent interoperability, isn't it legal to circumvent protections for that purpose?
Comments Containing A Copy of the Specification:
.
.
"by smartin on Tuesday, May 02, @02:20PM EST (#86)"
Now, I went and looked at this comment. Wanna know the big secret? Here goes:
Posting the data is all well and good, but.... (Score:2)
by smartin on 03:20 PM May 2nd, 2000 EST (#86)
What happens to the people that implement it (ie. the Samba guys) even if they obtain the information without intentionally breaking the license. Are they exposing themselves to expensive litigation? Are they endangering the project?
Ummm... exactly where is there a trade secret in this post? I'm waiting...
Eric
Actually this would be the perfect test of the DMCA. The posting of the actual document is obviously in violation of Microsoft's copyright, however the links to it and the instructions for bypassing the EULA would certainly provide a good legal test of the DMCA. Rob, take down the actual document where it is posted on Slashdot, but leave the other posts. We need to choose our battles, DMCA is one I think we can win. Posting copyrighted material (like the specification) is not.
Someone should start a fund to help Slashdot in case Slashdot does get sued by Microsoft, even though it's very unlikely Slashdot will win. Maybe hire Johnny Cocran to take the case as well as Andover's lawyers. He's had great experience when it came to the O.J Simpson trial ;)
Anyways, everyone needs to write their representative now! This link will allow you to do so with ease. The DMCA needs to be stopped before it stunts technology permanantly.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Okay, I propose a test. Let's post these Microsoft copywrited materials to some discussion group on MSN. If it's gone within a certain amount of time, then Slashdot should remove their copy. Else, Microsoft is being horribly hypocritical, and I'm sure that can't look good in court. But then again, I don't think there's a provision in the DMCA for hypocracy.
Being one of the named (hey you bright microsoft lusers, you forgot to capitalized my L!) I certainly don't want my post yanked, I did nothing which violated any law.
I simply stated that to get past the End User License Agreement for the Microsoft "embrace and extend" kerberos spec file located h ere is to just open it in winzip and extract it.
I mean, what possible law could I have violated, being a Canadian citizen and all? These comments belong to me, not Slashdot, if MS has a problem with them, then you talk to me.
The file is freely downloadable by anyone, in an easy to extract and read format, I thought this is what MS wanted? If not they would never have done it.
Now as for people posting the text to the file in whole, well, that's a copyright violation, and MS needs to go ahead and sue those people (comments belong to the poster), but as an unmoderated forum, slashdot is no party to it.
What if the same thing happened on an unmoderated group on usenet? How are you going to yank it after it's out there? You going to sue the news servers? No, you sue the person who did it.
MS is just making this worse for themselves, the whole kerberos thing would probably have just dissapeared and would have been forgotten by the majority, but now by doing this, they rehash it and just make it worse for themselves, next thing you know there will be mirrors upon mirrors of the pdf file everywhere. I personally am thinking of rewriting the document in my own words to hand off to the kerberos guys now, which I didn't even think about before.
Microsoft, you really know how to shoot yourself in the foot. Kudos.
-- iCEBaLM
We got a microsoft suit to send slashdot an email with the word "blueunderwear" in it twice. Thanks to blueunderwear for tick them off.
Reading this comment, something occured to me.
:-), I think it's reasonable for the lawyers to investigate the posters a bit before responding to MS's demand. I think we can all agree that the response will need to be *very* different if Slashdot/Andover/VALinux can show that the offending posters work for Microsoft!
Is it possible that the comments which many of us feel might have crossed the line (e.g., posting actual content instead of just links) were planted by Microsoft employees specifically so Microsoft could make a fuss about the "clear violation of law" and (hopefully) eliminate additional posts which would have otherwise been left alone?
I have absolutely no evidence that MS did this, or that it even contemplated it, but the problem with playing dirty is that reasonable people have to assume the worst from you. Because of MS's history (written entirely by Mac sorehead losers, no doubt
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
It might be even more fun to do this to M$, if they (an individual company) keeps fighting things in court, maybe they'll bankrupt... unlike the Entertainment Trust which still owns a lot of people's hearts and minds.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
First, I agree that you don't speak for 100% of Slashdot's readers. It's been common knowledge for quite some time that gates has commanded his minions to infiltrate, monitor, and astroturf Slashdot. You can see some of them in this very thread that you started, and quite a few more in the other threads on this topic.
Speaking for myself, however, I agree 100%.
Look. We all knew this was comeing. It was only a matter of time before gates moved to silence his critics. It is an inevitable part of any tyrant's rise... seize control of the critical press. Make sure ONLY your viewpoint is heard by the masses. Stalin did it. Mao did it. Castro did it. Hussain did it.
And let's face it. Outside of gates' own astroturfing schills, most of the Slashdot community IS critical of microsoft. Now Gates has begun his own campaign to silence his critics.
I say FIGHT! Do NOT submit without making gates pay dearly for his every inch. The old cliche applies. If you give an inch, he will take a mile. But if you stand your ground, this MAY be the turning point in the struggle for freedom. Who knows? Mabye resistance REALLY is not futile.
And don't keep the fight in the courtroom only. Take it to the public. Let the media know that gates is attempting to do away with the first amendment. And I don't mean just the tech press like ZDnet and Cnet. Take it to the mass media! CNN, AP, the New York Times, even sensationalist press like Fox. Let the WHOLE WORLD know what gates is trying! Put that Andover IPO money to good use; take out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal.
But above all, NEVER GIVE IN! If microsoft suceeds, if gates takes away our right to freely speak and write, critically or no, who knows what right is next on his list during his ascension? Keep and bear arms would be the next logical chioce, but free assembly, trial by jury, and redress of grievances would also be high on his list.
Slashdot should learn from others who fought such battles against tyrants. The forces of good invariably have triumphed in the past, and I hope that we triumph in the future. Adopt the philosophy of other great fighters. I am reminded of one quote in particular. Some of you might recognise it:
"We shall have no truce or parley with you,
or the grizley gang who work your wicked will.
You do your worst.
And we shall do our best."
-- Sir Winston Spencer Churchill
john
Imagine all the people...
I think the problem is quite different from actually providing that information in this instance.
If we just moved the contents of those comments somewhere else, sure we'd put slashdot off the hook, but it would escape this important opportunity to oppose the dmca.
If slashdot removes those comments, the DMCA has a precedent, and this site will be the place that set that precedent. I think it is of utmost importance not to do that.
You can take all the controversial stuff you want, and hide it in another country, but if you keep running and hiding, soon there will be no country free enough to hide that information in. Someone needs to turn around and oppose the DMCA head on. That's what will stop it.
Ale
Here it is guys. Here's the chance you've been waiting for.
;-)
I've seen tons of posts saying basically "I'll fight them if they come to my door/portal/site!" Now you have the chance.
You knew this was coming. You knew it would happen eventually. Now stand up and do what needs to be done.
1) Slashdot should not have to remove "any" comments any more than an existing paper magazine should. (Some magazines occasionally have crossed the line - but if they can print a retraction in tiny letters on some back page so can Slashdot.
2) Microsoft should be made somehow (I don't know how - any ideas?) to pay for trying - IN THE MIDST OF THEIR ANTI-COMPETITION BATTLE - to silence information about something they're working on. To this end I suggest sending letters and e-mail to the Justice Department regarding this recent behavior.
In the interest of standing up for what's right I give Slashdot permission to contact me as needed regarding anything that I may have seen or heard on Slashdot. I give no such permission to Microsoft under any circumstances.
The Tick - "Spoon!"
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Here's my input:
Yank the posts that copied the original Microsoft documents. They clearly own the copyrights, and that is a reasonable request.
As for the links and the comments about the EULA, tough nouggies, theose are protected free speech, copyright the original posters.
-Jeff
I have not read the comments so I am not certain this pertains. The law explicitly says that it is legal to uses copyrighted material if it is for editorial purposes. Considering that Slashdot is clearly an environment for discussion and debate the posting of Copyrighted material should be legal as long as it pertains to the topic being discussed.
LOL! I love their address:
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way, 114/2314
Redmond, WA 98052
Says it all really :)
I suppose that this had to happen sooner or later given some of the things that get posted to /. every time a "trade secret" story comes up here. It's ironic really that it's everybody's favourite company, Microsoft, that's the one to finally do it though :)
Anyway, given that this is exactly the sort of thing the DMCA was created for I very much doubt that Slashdot would win if it ever goes to a court of law. /. did have posts which contained copies of the information which were forbidden under the MS Kerberos EULA, and the recent court case victory for shrinkwrap licenses doesn't put /. in a good position.
The one way I can see to fight this is through publicity and public opinion. Microsoft aren't liked, and if enough of a stink is raised they may back down. And /. is great for raising a stink, especially when it comes to Microsoft :) So everyone should be working to publisize this as a violation of free speech and general interference by a corporation intent on making money at the expense of other's work.
And I fully expect that the relevent posts will already be mirrored in a hundred places across the net by the time this gets posted anyway, so, like with DeCSS, it's a battle that's lost in practice but being fought for control :)
As soon as you start controlling what people post, you will become liable for everything posted!
I'm 100% certain that when i say this, i am saying it for all of Slashdot's readers:-
No matter what Microsoft threatens, no matter what they say, do not give into them. This is not because it is Microsoft, but because Free Speech is far too important, especially on a forum such as Slashdot. Give them hell.
As a side issue, i have a feeling this could turn into a very intersting thread. It covers all the things Slashdoters love to hate: Microsft, the DMCA and Censorship.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
If I'm not mistaken (IANAL, naturally), actually hosting the material is illegal. BUT, linking to it is perfectly fine. So, someone make copies of all the comments... stick them on a server off in some country where they can't be touched, and post a link moderated to +5 on the story in question linking to that page.
/. off the hook, and the comments would still be there and totally visible.
I think that would get
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
Personally, I would not cooperate with such a request without a signed opinion letter from counsel stating that (1) there is no fair use involved; and (2) there is no improper motive in the request. If it turns out they've overreached, you can pursue disciplinary action against the attorney who signed it. Most lawyers will be very reluctant to sign such an opinion letter because of the legal risk it creates for them. And if the requestor won't provide such a letter, it makes subsequent legal action on their part much more problematic. Plus, such a demand on your part is obviously reasonable. Note that the letter must not simply be a demand, but must state that it is an opinion of counsel.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
Comments Containing A Copy of the Specification:
"by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday, May 02, @03:37PM EST (#197)"
"by BlueUnderwear on Tuesday, May 02, @04:09PM EST (#239)"
"by BlueUnderwear on Tuesday, May 02, @04:15PM EST (#248)"
"by smartin on Tuesday, May 02, @02:20PM EST (#86)"
Comments Containing Links to Internet Sites with Unauthorized Copies of the Specification:
"by ka9dgx on Tuesday May 02, @2:52PM EST (#133)"
Comments Containing Instructions on How to Bypass the End User License Agreement and Extract the Specification:
"by myconid (my S conid@ P toge A the M r.net) on Tuesday May 02, @07:27PM EST (#362)"
"by markb on Tuesday May 02, @05:47PM EST (#321)"
"by Sami (respect.my@authorita-dot-net) on Tuesday May 02, @01:47PM EST (#19)"
"by iCEBalM (icebalm@[NOSPAM]bigfoot.com) on Tuesday May 02, @01:52PM EST (#33)"
"by Jonny Royale (moc.mocten.xi@notners) on Tuesday, May 02, @01:59PM EST (#51)"
"by rcw-work (rcw@d.e.b.i.a.n.org.without.dots) on Tuesday, May 02, @07:12PM EST (#353)"
"They invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here!" -Jean-Luc Picard
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but we were discussing Micros~1's deviation from the kerberos protocol. Most of us did not agree that Micros~1's implementation of kerberos did not fit the standard. Therefore in the context of our discussion, it was legal under fair use principles that we analyse the code.
Not only that, but according to MIT, kerberos is released under a bsd-style licence. Well, this is what a bsd-style licence looks like. Micros~1 totally abused this licence, and MIT should take away their privilege of calling the software kerberos. Kerberos is a MIT copyright, not a Micros~1 copyright. Micros~1 does not have the right to pursue this.
I usually play devils advocate when someone spews misinformation about Micros~1. This time, it is totally obvious that they have left the realm of the clued.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I'm so frustrated, MS might as well have written the law -- it's damn near airtight (even though its application here has to be unconstitutional). Stanford Law's archives were somewhat reassuring in this "fair use" of copyrighted materials quote.
"The framers of the constitution maintained that a free exchange of knowledge is essential for the good of society, and it is from this assertion that both copyright law and the fair use doctrine find their roots." *
Now here is the relevant excerpt MS can bury Andover with (notice, I said Andover):
Does anybody see anything that would help here? Just making information to circumvent the liscence makes Andover guilty as hell of making information available to more-easily cirumvent the software liscence. A serious crime. .pdf? I open all my .exe files with Winzip -- Don't you!?!?"
* http://fairuse.stanford.edu/articles/
If anybody asks me, I'll say: "you mean there is a liscence on that
There are 3 points to this "request":
1 - Removal of copyrighted material
Posting of copyrighted material is wrong. There is no reading of
the copyright laws of the USA that allows for the verbatum copying of
copyrighted material whether it be with a printing press, photo copier
or email. There is very little justification to the notion that
an editorial requires the entire contents of the document. So, the
initial posting was wrong and illegal and the poster may be liable for
damages.
The question still remains: shall slashdot remove the copyrighted
work? It is not a question of free-speech. Even the Evil Empire is
not "requesting" the removal of the comments, only the copyrighted
material. This is within the rights of the copyright holder.
Posting the material was both wrong and illegal (even if its
Micr$soft'$). Knowingly keeping the posting is still wrong, even if
the legality is in question. It seems to me that the slash dot people
are interested in doing what's right.
2 - Removal of links
A while back SlashDot posted an article on a similar subject. The
Mormon church sued to have links to copyrighted material removed from
a web site. The judge found in favor of the Church. From an article
in the New York times: ( search for "mormon" on SlashDot for a link to it)
Claiming that the Tanners were improperly pointing viewers to
sites that contained illegal copies of the handbook, lawyers
for the Mormon Church succeeded in getting Judge Campbell to
issue an expanded restraining order. This week, she also
issued a formal preliminary injunction, which prohibits the
Tanners from directly posting the contents of the handbook or
posting on their site "addresses to Web sites that defendants
know, or have reason to know, contain the material alleged to
infringe plaintiff's copyright."
This would seem to be along the same vein as the "request" made by His
Royal Gatesness. Having had it brought to SlashDot's attention, they
now "have reason to know".
In reaching her decision, Judge Campbell made two key
conclusions. First, she reasoned that anyone who went to a Web
site and viewed a pirated copy of the handbook was probably
engaging in direct copyright infringement, because that viewer's
browser automatically makes a local copy of the text.
This is an interesting definition of a "copy", yet it sets a legal
precedent that might effect SlashDot's case.
In addition, Judge Campbell reckoned that by posting the addresses
to the pirate sites after they were ordered to take down the handbook,
and by otherwise assisting people who wished to locate the pirate
sites, the Tanners were liable under a theory of contributory
copyright infringement. By their actions, the Tanners "actively
encouraged" browsers to directly infringe the church's copyright,
Judge Campbell wrote.
This argument could easily apply to SlashDot as well.
What makes Judge Campbell's 10-page opinion significant,
lawyers said, is that there are few other instances where a
court has ruled on the practice of knowingly linking to or
posting addresses for sites with infringing material.
Which should give me cause to reflect as the precedent this might set.
So, while I disagree with this judgement, it is also very applicable
(at least on the surface) to any case that SlashDot might be involved
in with respect to links to copyrighted material.
So should the links be removed? What would SlashDot gain by leaving
them up. They would get sued (probably) and then the court would
decide. Should the court decide against SlashDot, that would be a
victory for the Redmond Monopoly and a strengthening of the above
legal precedent. Should SlashDot prevail, it would bring the above
decision into question, which would be a good thing.
My suggestion: talk to a good lawyer and see what your chances are
(assuming you have the money for the legal battle).
3 - Links to instructions on How to Bypass the End User License
Agreement
This seems the flimsiest "request" by the World's Richest Nerd.
Micro$oft does not own the copyright on these articles. I have not
read the DMCA but this sort of thing falls outside copyright and
should therefore be allow. Also, EULA are questionable. I do not
know if they have been challenged but they seem to go to far into
keeping people from "fair use" of the copyrighted work.
Again, consult your lawyer, but leave these up.