Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Lunacy, Cinema, Parliament
"That's not censorship, mate. This is censorship!" Carnage4Life writes: "After causing a murder trial to be aborted last month CrimeNet has been ordered by the attorney general of the Australian state of Victoria to be shut down. If the site operators refuse to shut down they will face jail time. The story can be found here. In news which can only be considered related, an anonymous kangaroo wrote: "Found a reference to this article on LISNews. Seems the Aussie Parliament pitched a hissy fit when their internet access got filtered. Oh gee, how the fsck do you think the rest of the country feels?" How indeed. That's what happens when you start introducing clashing premises, I guess. Geese, ganders, sauce.
To the moon, Alice -- To the moon! We've frequently linked to NASA photos from Slashdot; what if they said "(registration required)" after them like links to the New York Times? MousePotato writes: "NASA announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Dreamtime Holdings to provide multimedia coverage of astronaut activities. The press release details "creating a state-of-the-art multimedia portal, www.Dreamtime.com, that will, with the click of a mouse, open the door to thousands of images, sounds, documents, blueprints and plans from NASA's currently underused archives. " Interesting to note about it is the fact that they will be using HDTV to give us as well as NASA engineers high quality video." Interesting, too, that billions of space research tax dollars are being used "to create new market opportunities in the multimedia arena."
Does this mean I can watch my -- errr ... "classics" again? The DVD-under-Linux story continues, specifically with an update on LinDVD; soon, the MPAA's claims that there are legal DVD players for Linux users may hold at least a sprinking of water; johnnick writes: "Another update in the DeCSS saga. One of the arguments for DeCSS was that there was no legal DVD decoder for Linux boxes. CNET reports that InterVideo, a licensee of the software that enables DVD information to be decoded, plans to release beta software called LinDVD this month that allows people to watch DVDs on Linux machines."
Microsoft not making a run for the border: Calz writes: "Both Microsoft and B.C.'s Investment Minister have denied that Microsoft is considering moving, as reported in this Yahoo article."
In other news from planet Microsoft, the indefatigable Bruce Perens has this to say about mixed-case licensing:
"Microsoft has been caught in a trivial, easily remedied, GPL violation, which is detailed here. They have been contacted, and their response was, well, dumb.Why do companies get involved in trivial GPL violations? Because the company picks up Free Software as part of one of their products without making a commitment to do the simple, easy, inexpensive things that are required to comply with the Free Software license. Folks, if you can't comply with license requirements as easy as those in the GPL, find other software, please.
One of these examples comes up at least once a month, and I'm going to keep submitting these stories until the situation improves. Maybe that means forever. Today's wakeup call goes to Microsoft corporation, read the account from Tim Burlowski. "
As Bruce says, this looks like a relatively easy one to fix. It could be explained by the complexities of mergers and acquisitions, general confusion, alignment of planets etc, but eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, including as applied to software. Unless Microsoft would like to declare all EULAs null and void ...
It will never matter. The whole "there's no legal player for Linux" argument was irrelevant from the very beginning, probably created as a strawman by an MPAA sympathiser.
And either way, it's product-tying. They're tying the DVD purchase to the DVD-CCA's license fee. It doesn't matter if you're "forced" to buy a copy of MS Windows (and a Windows player) or "forced" to buy a copy of LinDVD, in order to play your DVDs. You're still having give additional money to DVD-CCA and establish their monopoly position. Making your own player or getting it from a totally unrelated organization should always be an option.
And since they insist that everyone pay that license fee (and agree to those atrocious license terms) and are suing people over it, I will always counter-insist that the player I use be unlicensed. If someone wants to make money selling a commercial DVD player for Linux, they should advetise it as being unlicensed. I bet they'd outsell LinDVD, because a lot of people really do care about this issue.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Fortunately, GNU Time Transporter 0.1 was just released, so the world will be saved by Richard M. "Danger" Stallman.
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
I always thought it would be an interesting situation to find a GPL violation in Internet Explorer.
"It's part of the operating system, so you have to open the entire operating system."
MS would then reply...
"No!!! It's not part of the operating system. Look, here's an uninstall for it. You can even take it off of your desktop. You can't have the entire source, just the source to Internet Exploder."
DeCSS can be used to copy DVDs
DeCSS cannot be used to copy DVDs. Once you have decrypted the information stored on the disc, if you put the MPEG onto a disc, no DVD player will play it. DeCSS can, however, be used to get a digital copy of the MOVIE off of the disc. This can be done by other means, all of which lower the quality of the movie. However, since you must compress the movie to get it to fit on a VCD or to be downloaded, the quality is lost in that stage instead.
DeCSS does not make it easier to copy or pirate AT ALL.
Although this is a matter of semantics, I think that those of us that write about this need to make this clear in our writings. Don't forget that the press does occasionally read slashdot.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
I can't help but see some similarity between MS's treatment of the GPL and their treatment of Mac-format floppies... When you're the 364kg gorilla, what you acknowledge determines what the rest of the world acknowledges.
On the bright side, maybe this will form the kernel for that GPL test case we've all been waiting for. If MS really can get away with this, best that we find out soon...
- Michael Cohn
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
state-of-the-art multimedia portal, www.Dreamtime.com, that will, with the click of a mouse, open the door to thousands of images, sounds, documents, blueprints and plans from NASA's currently underused archives.
Only one mouse click. Amazon is going to sue these guys.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!