Lessig On DMCA, Adobe, The US Constitution And Fair Use
Posted by
Hemos
on from the lesuirely-listening-to-larry dept.
LarsG writes: "Lawrence Lessig is taking a historical view of IP law and the DMCA in connection with the recent statements by Adobe's John Warnock.
This article appears in The Standard." Lawrence Lessig == smart.
Binary code cannot be copyrighted. Instead, it should be considered a derivative work of (C)opyrighted source code, which must be filed with the Library of Congress. This is also the only way to make sure no one violates the GPL: if they don't file their code, anyone can use their binaries.
Copyrighted binaries don't make sense, as no one wrote the binaries. If anything, binaries are owned by the creator of the compiler. People make source code, and that can be copyrighted, just like a book.
And what if the binary was written in assembler ?? or bytecode for that matter.
I refuse to see any difference between source code and binary files, because a binary can be written in assembler, which is binary code.
The difference is between how hard it is to express yourself in the language.
Should there be different copyright laws just because a book is written in danish and not english ?? Or a program written in python vs. assembler. Python is a interpreted language, like wise is assembler. Assembler is just interpreted by hardware.
So, weather or not something is binary or "source code" i want the same laws to apply for it all.
Actually, you don't have to register a work w/ the Library of Congress in order for it to be covered by copyright law. It does make defending your copyright easier, but it's not required.
Unless you compiled the code yourself and typed the bit-level machine level code into a binary file editor, then you've still created a dirivative work from your source code -- albeit asm code. Very few people can "just write binary". [I used to be able to do that with a 6809, but it's been far too many years ago...]
Who needs an editor. Real computers have front panels with switches and blinking lights.
I used to do it for short programs, esp. hardware tests and diagnostics.
I've run into hardware engineers who wrote all their firmware in machine code. They believed the use of an assembler was reserved for pascal coding, quiche eating, wimps with poor memories.
Ok, to take this one step further (farther?) you didnt write your source code. All you did was press some keys on a board, which sent an electric signal down a cord, which the computer then translated into characters. Now if you have used a DVORK (sp?) keyboard and pressed the same keys, it would come out completely different (and not compile properly, but thats beside the point). Oh, wow, I'm mumbleing (sp?) now, I'll shut up.
The saddest part about the whole piracy debacle is that it is simply too late to really do away with some of the companies that sustain themselves by selling intelectual property. Its kinda sad that that copyright law didn't evolve with the times. But now we have to pay hundreds of dollars for some pieces of plastic that do crazy shit when you shine lasers at them. Hrmph
I would be surprised if most of the readers and contributors to/. didn't sustain themselves by selling intellectual property, or have their salaries/consulting fees paid by companies who are at least in part in the business of selling intellectual property.
The problem is, really, that the laws DID evolve with the times, slowly incompassing more, newer technologies, and doing so in extreme ways. Slowly, the american government has played up to buissnesses and done all it can to make US citizens believe that they would be helpless with out its guidance. Why do copyrights now last longer than the lifespan of the author? Because it keeps information and useful tools out of the hands of people who might find better ways to use them. It makes us more dependant on the Government and the bussinesses that it has become in speprable from. I am not a consperacy nut, nor am I against the US or its government, but I have to wonder how this qualifies as "by, for, and of the people"? The people are the ones being continualy shafted (Shaft) in the intelectual battles. People who make better use of available tools are criminals because they don't have permission to improve on someone elses work. People who find inovative ways of getting things done are Hackers and Pirates for not doing things the right way! All that comes of this mentality is the stifeling of inovation, and the stagnation of the market. Let's face it, if M$ had lost their original pattent on Windows 3.x 7 years after it came out, we might well have a user friendly, secure, and stable OS with a GUI people were already commfortable with. As some few of you may know, I'm the first one to pick on anyone screaming OPEN SOURCE IT for the sake of sounding cool, but let's face it, the copyright laws are just stupid the way they are now. If you don't want to share an idea, Don't publish it. If you publish it, expect it to effect the people who come it to contact with it. That's the way/. works, right?
Maybe so, but few, if any, readers here sustain themselves from selling 'intellectual property' that was created 100 years ago. Each time Congress passes a law concerning copyright and patent rights, the balance is shifted from the public domain or intellectual commons to private/corporate interests.
It's time to get some laws changed to strengthen the free flow of ideas in the public domain. A few examples: 1)reduce the length of time for which copyrights exist; 2)strengthen fair use exceptions; 3)make it clear that reverse-engineering of copy-protection schemes is allowable.
God its sad crap like this get's marked as insightful from the crack smoking moderators around here.
The saddest part about the whole piracy debacle is that it is simply too late to really do away with some of the companies that sustain themselves by selling intelectual property
No, the saddest part is that its too late to go back in time and stop the parents / cousins of people who can't get it through their minds not to steal other peoples work from playing hide the salami.
Its kinda sad that that copyright law didn't evolve with the times.
Actually, copyright has evolved quite a bit over the years. Helps if you actually read the article.
But now we have to pay hundreds of dollars for some pieces of plastic that do crazy shit when you shine lasers at them.
Really? You do? Who is making you do this? Some guy with a gun to your head? Really, if you don't like it, don't buy the damn software.. how hard is that?
--
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Oh, and one more thought. Can anything be done about the way shrink-wrap licenses (both explicit and implied) are subsuming copyright?
If I buy a book, it's mine to do with as I please, including selling it to my brother when I'm done reading it. I buy a word processor and I can only do with it what the producer deems appropriate. Can I sell it to my brother when I no longer need or use it? Not if the producer of the software says I can't in the EULA.
I buy the Beatles White album and can do what I please, including ripping it to my hard drive so I can listen to it at work where I may not have a CD player or passing the input into a plotting device to see what subliminal images are in there. But if I buy a documentary on the Beatles on DVD I can only do what the producer says I can.
You missed the point where Lessig said that intellectual property is both an inout and output, and that if the input costs go up it strangles develpment of more... There is a very valid argument to be made that weaker IP might boost jobs in the software/media industries.
But now we have to pay hundreds of dollars for some pieces of plastic that do crazy shit when you shine lasers at them. Hrmph
We have to? You mean there is law which says that once in a while you have to buy some plastic? Or does a guy with a gun come by, collects your wallet and leaves some piece of plastic as a token of his appreciation?
If you don't think that this crazy shit is worth it, don't buy it.
Kaa
--
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
well, maybe the guy with the gun skips your neighborhood. Nevertheless, it'd just be nice if we weren't in the mindframe that media should cost money. thanks for picking out one word of my statement and arguing with it, but you missed the rest of the idea.
I'm a full-time programmer, and neither I nor my company has any use for IP. My company sells the service of using its big factory equipment, and I write software that controls it, and that never leaves the building.
-- --Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com
My life is in the public domain.
...and I think most of us are aware of that fact. I fail to see the significance of your remark to the current discussion. I haven't encountered a serious post advocating the abolition of copyright and I hardly think that a sensible restoration of Lessig's "intellectual commons" represents the demise of the software industry; quite the contrary, as evinced many times in this thread.
The obvious problem with our current situation, in respect to the DMCA, is where the priorities of the government lie. While the government should be working for the betterment of the American people, instead it is working for the large corperations. The people of America should rise up against this oppression, since the government should be working towards the social well-being of its people. Perhaps it is time that the obviously flawed Captitalist system be scrapped, and a more people-benificial socialist system be put into place. America can be so much more!!
A.H.
"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things."
NAZI = National Socialist party. Try reading a book before being so quick to judge. Under his rule, many socialist programs were introducted for the German people that were lacking before.
A.H.
"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things."
It's quite clear that the individual has ceased to be the "unit of society". Now it is the institution. Laws are enacted (by and large) by the government for the benefit of corporations, both of which are institutions. The ACLU is an example of an institution that has as its goal the advancement of individuals' interests. For those who feel oppressed by the pandering of government to large institutions, the formation of institutions to combat this, such as the ACLU, seems to be the best answer.
Face it, we're not the organism anymore; we're cells.
-- Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
I remember that one of the biggest issues of my American history/government classes is that during the industrial revolution, "laisse faire" (sp?) has always been taken as the rule of thumb; as long as the companies were not endangering anyone, the gov't kept their hands off of it.
That principle is certainly not dead today; gov't groups like the FTC and DOJ only step in when a company pushes the bounds. While there are always people screaming that the gov't has too much control on businesses, I would argue that businesses are free to do nearly everything they want, as long as they pay their taxes and don't hurt citizens or the environment.
However, I would also think that laisse faire works both ways; while the gov't cannot regulate an industry unless it's required, the gov't should not also favor industry unless required (such as during the S&L crisis). However, laws like the DMCA actually benefit companies and do not benefit the average citizen in any real regard. If the founding fathers had a bill like the DMCA to review, they would have probably trashed it, not only for the copyright extentions, but the fact there is no obvious benefit that non-corporations can get from it.
But unfortunately, our democratatic system as it stands is flawed, allowed corporations to buy votes to get such bills enacted. Grassroot campaigns are great, but they rarely have money or media attention to get any votes whatsoever, and many have come to rely on a higher court (which can't be bought) to overturn a law.
What suprises me is that given how fast the two CDA bills were fought and successfully overturned, nothing save for deCSS and Napster has been really pushed forward for anti-DCMA. (IMO, even without the DCMA in effect, both cases would be before courts right now). And to be truthful, I rather not have the DCMA challenged with these cases, because if one of them loses, it sets a dangerous precident that some later case that challenges the DCMA with more legit concerns would have to overcome. A win for the copyright holders might also toughen up some other copyright holders and cause a strong death grip for many sites on the web.
And to come back to the case in point, in the case of copyrights, the time a copyright should be granted should be related to the number of people that would be interested in said product, and the time of delievery to said product. In 1800, say with a million Americans and a lack of rapid communications between the various states, 14 years is reasonable. In 1950, 200 million Americans, and with an interstate system, fast printing presses, and the proliforation of tv and radio, 14 years is overkill, because the large amount of information there and the speed to get it to everyone. Today, with 300 million and the internet, the amount of data has probably exponentally grown the number of citizens, and thus, the time for copyrights should be much much smaller.
--
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Socialism: A social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and political power is exercised by the whole community.
Which one would you pick to describe Nazi ideology? Just because North Korea is officially named the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, does that make it a democracy?
Yes, under Hitler, many socialist programs were introduced, and that he revitalized the German economy of the 1930's, but at what cost? Completely ignoring his Holocaust (which, mind you, is an enormous thing to ignore), and concentrating on the pre-WWII Germany, he *still* created issues for the non-Germans.
The German economic recovery of the 1930's was created on the backs of not only the German workers, but also on the backs of the workers of the countries he annexed. These countries provided a cheap, non-German workforce that can be easily exploited by the German countries, and also created a forced sheltered export market for the German products that did not migrate there.
All this, of course, ignores the fact that he, along with the Japanese and the Italians, started WWII, and the atrocities that followed the war.
Most socialists are (or, I should say "were"... there are few socialists left outside of Ivy League faculty lounges) also fascists, including Hitler and Stalin. You can't really get people to go for the idea of state-ownership-of-everything without first whipping everybody up into a psychotic nationalistic frenzy.
Face it, we're not the organism anymore; we're cells.
*Shiver* That's it, exactly. The great ideological battle of the 21st century will not be between capitalism and communism, or between religious and secular, or even between have and have-not. It will between citizens and the new lifeform we've spawned, corporations.
2. Yes, there is no doubt that, like Stalin, Castro, and many other leaders in the 20th centrury, I was a Facist. However, in Nazi Germany (at least for the Aryan-Germans), there was a redistribution of wealth. (Does the term "Nazi-gold" seem familiar). Before the Nazi rule, people were in absolute poverty, since the great depression drove the inflation rate in Germany so high. After the Nazis came into power, suddenly infrastuture came to Germany. Roads were built. State-sponsered education was avaliable. More jobs were created. (This was money being redistibution from, in part, the very wealthy Jewish business oweners). That's socialism. In fact, many Germans didn't find out about the Concentration camps until after the war ended.
Now I did do some things that, in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have done. However, the Nazis were very much a socialist party... people just forget that it was benificial to the (Aryan) German people, which is why they supported it. The "allied" countries from WWI forced Germany into economic recession, so of course a social-nationalistic movement like the Nazi was bound to happen. Was there really any other choice?
A.H.
"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things."
I object to the words 'social well being'. Who defines 'social well being' anyway? To me, that looks like an endorsement of drug laws, or any other form of government looking after our 'welfare'. That way leads to a system even worse than the one we currently have.
I think large corporations should largely be ignored by government. I think it should be illegal for them to make any kind of campaign contribution or hire lobbyists.
Basically, the people in charge of corporations have found a way to concentrate a lot of political power in themselves using our economic system, and it has got to stop.
That sounds like a knee-jerk reaction to the problem to me.
I could point out that every purely socialist system ever tried has failed miserably, and cost tens of millions of people their lives. The Nazis, who were only very, very, very, very tangentially connected with socialism (a point which you have glossed over in your previous posts) did, in fact, only succeed in gaining power through a confluence of economic factors and an ability to whip the populace of Germany into a frenzied mass of extreme racists. Russia had its purges, killing, what, like 20 million of its own citizens? And millions more, I believe, starved, in the name of creating a worker's paradise.
Hmm... I'm trying to think if I'm missing any obvious ones. China isn't really even close to socialism anymore. In the words of Leon Lederman, it's a gerontocracy(re: government of old people). There are like six very old people who control this country for their own personal betterment, not the betterment of its proletariat. Cuba may be the world's best example of a communist/socialist state, actually, believe it or not. And even there, there are obvious problems. I see no evidence to suggest that life in any of these countries, at any point, is better than the life of the average American today. Socialism was supposed to solve the dehumanization inherent to modern society. But Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and the rest got it wrong.
I suspect that you're going to say that none of these states was purely socialist, but so what? America isn't purely capitalist either. If you're going to defend the USSR by saying that it wasn't a real socialist state, I'm going to defend the US by saying we're not a real capitalist state. No doubt, if we were, the DMCA would not exist. (and indeed, it might not, as it IS government intervention in the marketplace)
I don't know what the answer to the DMCA is, but it's almost certainly not a socialist revolution. Were the US to have a revolution, it would be about six months before we'd have our own Hitler/Stalin/Mao who'd come to power. All three of those men, while doing great things in terms of increasing the power of their countries, did horrible things on a human scale.
And that brings me to my other point. Your user name. I want to let it go, but I can't. Adolf Hitler was hardly a visionary. And he did do some great things, I guess. He managed to resurrect Germany from the defeated shell it was after the first World War into the hellish war machine that it became. In terms of an economic, industrial and military feat, this is impressive.
But, so what? Imagine, for a second, that Germany had won the war. A thousands-year-old people would be extinct. History, as a field, would only exist to serve the Reich. (because you're crazy if you think Hitler would have stopped at controlling continental Europe) Literature, art, music, all would be under extreme censorship. I could go on.
My point is that yes, Hitler did do some good things. But that fact is outweighed by the awful things he did. There is no excusing that, and hearing him called a visionary is enough to make me ill. I pray that you're just poorly informed. Because, frankly, I don't know what to say if you know all of the facts and you still believe what you say.
Yes, every story does have two sides. But that doesn't mean that one of those sides isn't right. Unless you're a complete moral relativist, right is really easy to determine in this case.
I know most of this note is off topic, and I expect to be moderated down accordingly. But some things shouldn't be allowed to go unanswered.
Yes, it does. It is a term applied to gold obtained through tyranny, by depriving communists, Jews, and other political dessenters of their life and liberty. Of course, we cannot apply American laws here in juding the Nazi rule, but at the same time, these are things that should (and for a good reason) be objected by anyone.
In fact, many Germans didn't find out about the Concentration camps until after the war ended.
For a very good reason. Had they known, they would've attempted to remove the government from power, like they did to end WWI.
You also meantion that money was "[redistributed] in part, [from] the very wealthy Jewish business oweners (sic)". Money was also redistributed from the communists, the labor unionists, and anyone else they saw fit.
No, the German people of 1920's and 1930's are not blaimless either; in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler very clearly states his agenda, and the book almost reads like a play-by-play of what he will do in the decades to come. Had these people read his work, Adolf Hitler would probably not have been elected, and have ended his life as a minor political functionary.
1) Castro, despite all his wrong-doings, is not a fascist.
2) The Nazis used socialist methods to gain more votes within the german people. never forget that the Nazis did (in part, at least) earn their power trough democratic elections! Of course, you know that better than anyone... How's the weather in Argentinia?
3) In my (western european biased) book, socialism is not a negative term. We have plenty of "socialist" parties around here who would never dream of taking away private property or outlawing democratic elections. Their main argument is creating a safety net for poorer people in an extremely competitive economy (strong medical and social institutions accessible for everyone). This requires a healthy (or powerful, if you will) governement.
What was my point now? Damn, gotta go to sleep:)
-- I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
There are those of us who apologize for neither state communism or capitalism. We think that, in the end, they are basically the same thing: People attempting to take control through power structures like government.
I say, abolish all government, eliminate authority, and move towards local autonomy and direct democracy. Nobody can represent the needs of you and your community better than you and your community, respectively.
Corporations are given every right of the individual with the exception of voting. They are a taxing paying citizen without voting rights. They have a right to an opinion, the right to lobby, the right to succeed and (most often) the right to fail. They pay massive taxes (as a matter of fact shoulder the brunt of the tax burden--even with loopholes), just like you and I. The reason why they do pay those taxes is because they are damn good at providing a "good" (tangible) or a "service" (intangible). The medium we are posting on is entirely the work of these corporations from providing the "good" of a computer (thank you IBM, Motorola, Apple, Intel, etc.), the "good" of infrastructure (thank you AT&T, Sprint, Cisco, MCI, etc.), and the "service" of providing internet (thank you, again, MCI, Sprint, BBNPlanet, Erols, etc.). There is the further "service" (not "good" in almost all cases) of providing an operating system and browsing software (thank you Microsoft, AT&T (again), IBM, HP, UCB, Linus, Netscape, UIUC, contributors to wustl in the eighties/early nineties). Most of all, thank you Xerox and everyone that ever worked at XeroxPARC
Now, with the exception of Linus, UCB, UIUC, and contributors to wustl, these are all Fortune 500 companies. If you as an individual think there is a better way to do things--do it. Otherwise, remember that the R&D, implementation, prototypes, and other such requires capital. There is risk in providing capital so the payoff must be big. Otherwise, no capital.
If you think that unorganized units without legal protection work, check out liability insurance for a sole proprietorship or joint venture. If you think that capitalism is to blame for the current mess we're in. You are exactly right. Notice that everything I mentioned are American entities protected by American laws. This forum is a product of (more than 95%) American blood sweat and tears. The bottom lines are big because they are risky.
Now, if you think we are coddling the companies mentioned above remember this:
UIUC CS Dept is in the Digital Computer Lab
Berkeley, Carnegie Melon, MIT, etc. all receive their largest funding from corps and gov't grants (mostly paid for by corps)
I hate all this innovation. Let's correspond by carrier pigeon. Or better yet, smoke signals. If you want individuals to take a more prominent role, we can easily return to the 16th century (or worse) before the industrial revolution. But, until someone shows me an innovation I use everyday that came from a society without strong protection for corporations and without protection of any kind on intellectual property (just one--that's all I want), I say we got a pretty good system. Not the best but certainly not as extreme as having the ACLU run the country.
STOP STOP, in the name of the law. The very existence of this thread defies the law of nature. Specifically Godwin's Law from the jargon file.
Godwin's Law prov.
[Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups.
Is not capitalism. It's tha apathy of Joe and Sue Citizen. Corporations are considered persons as we are, albeit through legal construction and specific charter. And just as you or I could lobby to create a law protecting a commercial interest, seen as a natural right for a corporation, so can a non-living entity prosecute to protect the rights taht allow it to exist. Let's face it, with the ability to earn a profit a corporation will die. But the philosophy of capitalism is not the problem. The problem is that instead of learning how to prosecute our rights and staying abreast of when they are impinged upon, we allow people to point fingers. Take of your own backyard and I'm quite sure all other things will fall into place. Flaws or Perfections are revealed when the truth is followed.
Good thoughts on the length of copyright terms. I hadn't really thought about it, but a copyright of 4 to 8 years really makes more sense in the computer industry. Nobody makes/sells new NES cartridges any more, but Nintendo still claims (kinda) full rights on them. Same (but even more so) for old computer software.
As you mentioned, it would have taken quite a few years for market saturation back in 1800, but with today's e-commerce, market saturation within a year or two is much more common. Adding a few standard deviations, and we could say that market saturation should occuir within 8 years over 99.99% of the time.
If companies are only seeking protection from "unfair competition" and not "resource monopolies", then this should be fine to all.
Outdated stuff would be free, and new stuff would be protected until market saturation is reached.
>in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler very clearly states >his agenda, and the book almost reads like a >play-by-play of what he will do in the decades to >come. Had these people read his work, Adolf >Hitler would probably not have been elected, and >have ended his life as a minor political >functionary.
Wonderful how hindsight's always 20/20 eh?
Of course now, almost everybody does it the other way around. They get elected, THEN they get the lucrative book deal.
So do you mean that I *MUST* read all of the ramblings of the likes of pat robertson and jerry fallwell so that I will not vote for them? Sorry, I don't plan to subject myself to that tripe.
And for that matter, you don't really HAVE to have read Mien Kampf in order to know where hitler stood. He merrily blamed jews for all of germany's problems in public while he was running for chancellor.
Oh... you think that a biggoted fascist will not get elected if people know about him beforehand? Well, I think you overestimate the average voter. How then, prey tell, does someone like strom thurmand, well known to be a segregationist, manage to keep his senate seat? How about the guys in serbia who elected slobodan milosovich?
Socialism: A social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and political power is exercised by the whole community.
Ahem. That's not what socialism was, that's what some soft-headed intellectuals intended it to be. As to reality...
Socialism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a close-knit political elite, total socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of aggressive expansionism.
Kaa
--
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Or perhaps we should be more careful in our votes...we all vote for corporations on a daily basis. By buying products (which everyone thinks of automatically), but also where we invest our money. How many of you slashdotters dislike Microsoft (insert any company whose practices you personally dislike here), but own Microsoft through your 401K, etc.?
Your "definition" of Fascism is an accurate qualitative description of the few known Fascist states, but it doesn't define the economic or political/philosophies/ of Fascism. Essentially it can be boiled down to the centrality of the State -- the State is everything -- without the state there would be no coherent nation. It implies but doesn't define an economic order, other than the economic order must be subservient to the state.
Ignoring the "Hitler" poster's attempts to rationalize it, the Nationalsozialist Partei was in fact somewhat socialist -- gaining the political support necessary to get Hitler the chancellory (and hence the ability to rule by decree -- the Nazis never abolished the Weimar constitution) required a program of some socialistic policies in light of Weimar economic chaos and the political challenge represented by the Socialists and Communists of that era. Not all of the NSPD's "Volk" rhetoric was necessarily racist and much of it was used as a justification of socialist policies in light of opposition to socialism per se.
North Korea's not really communist or socialist, either, but we'll ignore that argument..
I'd not consider Marx or any of the early socialist/communist thinkers as soft-headed, but that's mostly irrelevant anyway.
Propaganda honestly doesn't make for the implementation of a certain social or economic system. That is, simply because Stalin called his system socialist, doesn't mean it was. Any more than totalitarian regimes that refer to themselves as "Republics" or "Democracies" are in fact either of those things.
Had Stalin's group not destroyed and enslaved the original Russian revolutionaries, you may very well have seen a real socialist nation.
I say, abolish all government, eliminate authority, and move towards local autonomy and direct democracy.
But is not local autonomy and direct democracy a form of government? Is not the elimination of authority also the scraping of protection for those who are injured or in danger of injury who are unable to defend themselves?
It's Argentina, and sadly, there are lots of nazis here, most of them refugees from WWII, because the local government during the war was (unofficially) on Hitler's side, which is a very bad thing and we get to deal with the results every day. Still, no politician who would confess to be openly nazi woulg get one vote (except for neo-nazi kids and the sort which I could count with my fingers), and remember that here in Argentina everyone has to vote. So I don't see how this relates Argentina to Nazis earning power through democratic elections.
by the way, I agree Castro can be a lot of things, but a fascist is not one of them.
-- "Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
I certainly agree that there's no gurantee that being a bigot will deny you a political position. After all, right now it's perfectly acceptable to deny homosexuals the same rights as heterosexuals, and to refer to them as abominations in large crowds, and on TV. In fact, many members of the Vermont legislative branch have been targeted for removal, because they voted for civil unions.
However, in the case of the Germans, I would hope that had they known that Hitler would starve, gas, burn, and work to death millions of jews, that they'd be less inclined to support his rampage. Blaming the Jews for the retched state the Allies left Germany after WW I is one thing, but condoning genocide is entirely different. Honestly, though, I can't say for certain if such an atrocity would be seen as a bad thing to the German people of the time. It is my hope that it would both be considered intolerable that the jews be massacred then, and that it would be intolerable for homosexuals to be massacred in the U.S. today.
Of course neither persecuting jews, nor persecuting homosexuals is acceptable, society approved genocide is simply the most heinous act it could do. Though if countries can start with abortion, capitol punishment, categorical persecution, and other things, perhaps they can grow to accept genocide. Thoughts?
But, until someone shows me an innovation I use everyday that came from a society without strong protection for corporations and without protection of any kind on intellectual property (just one--that's all I want), I say we got a pretty good system
You just used one, the alphabet. i bet you regularly use numbers too. In fact, have you ever factored a quadratic equation? or a cubic? or quartic? how about the Pythagorean theorem (known long before Pythagoris it seems). The wheel maybe? Do you need something more modern and not an tool of information? How about boats? The concepts of Railways and steam engines have existed for millenia (though not implemented until their rediscovery rather recently. Progress will continue without strong IP laws.
But, until someone shows me an innovation I use everyday that came from a society without strong protection for corporations and without protection of any kind on intellectual property (just one--that's all I want), I say we got a pretty good system.
Artificial Satellites - First done by the former Soviet Union.
Movable Type - First done in feudal systems (Europe or China - take your pick)
Banking - Feudal Italy.
Time measurement - Egyptian or earlier
Concrete - Roman
Glass - dunno, but a long time ago
Coffee - Abyssinia about 850AD
If you aren't using any of these daily then you are living in a hole in the ground.
I suggest you take a close look at Europe, whether several nation states have had socialist governnments over the last ten years following the downfall of Communism. The UK has a left-of centre socialist govt at the moment - dont see no terror or aggressive expansionism here.
In fact expansionism is more a policy of the far right then anything.
we don't need a huge centralized government that can kill hundreds of thousands without thinking twice in order to save us from being killed by a gangbanger next door.
the state is the real terrorist. Michael Chisari mchisari@usa.net
good points, but what have they done for me lately? Pythagoras (whatever branch of philosophy he believed in, anyway) was also known for executing people who believed in irrational numbers.
Railways and steam engines (concept known to have existed in 100 AD in Rome).. concept shrugged off because (according to Michael Palin's TV show) it would unemploy slaves and Rome couldn't have that. Good idea, poor system, no innovation.
Progress will continue. At what pace? It took close to 2000 years for Euclid's ideas to be overthrown without strong IP. There was no intellectual property protection. No protection, then individuals have no recourse to those who would stifle it. My way or the highway. He who had the gold (the Catholic church in the occident for close to 1000 years) simply made the person without strong IP rights (ie Galileo) toss out his work and have them burned. And if you think this sort of facism would not arise in our "enlightened" world.. check out Idi Amin, Camir (sp?) Rouge, Chairman Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Kansas State Board of Education (the evolution not in schools policy decreed last year) and other book burners.
Without protection of intellectual property, it will be stiffled. Since everyone can know it, those who oppose it--if they are more powerful--will be able to stifle it by extortion, racketereering, and muscle. Are you pissed of a MS for whatever reason? They didn't stifle Linus. They didn't stifle Lucent (inferno). They certainly didn't stifle AOL. Rather, they inspired the three individuals (legally corps are individuals) mentioned above.
If property is protected under the law, then RICO does apply and stifling technology and advancement is more difficult.
Artificial satelites - first conceived of by Jules Verne. First tele-communication satelite conceived of by Arthur C. Clarke. Sputnik (first working prototype of artificial satelite) put in orbit by USSR. First working prototype of telecommunications satelite put in orbit by US. I use telecommunications satelites everyday.
Movable Type - pretty generally attributed to Guettenburg (sp?) since typesetting doen't make sense in a pictographic language (too many symbols). Mimeo-graph, photocopy, laser-document production, ink-jet document production, all pretty much were developed by Xerox and IBM. I haven't used a hand typeset printing press in--gosh I don't know how long. Most of my info comes from a CRT (invented by--you guessed it, an American in the 1930s)
Banking - Let's start with currency. Currency was written on private banks and not widely accepted until the turn of the 18th century (at least in the Occident, don't know about the Orient) when nations started making private currency illegal. So currency (which now uses microtype, lustrous fibers, special water-marking, etc. developed right here in the good ole' US of A to prevent counterfeiting) I do use. Maybe once a week. I know use credit card and atm card transactions almost exclusively. (Back to the idea of currency written on a bank). Now, the concept of the IOU was used in Banking then and that's what made it work. But now using systems developed here in the US, there is (practically) no IOU involved. So as Singer made typewriters with the qwerty layout and I use computers--thus owing my computer all to Singer, Italians invented banking with (near)instantaneous balance checking. Half a point here.
Concrete My fiancee is a concrete engineer. You'll be happy to know that all concrete used in the United States conforms to specifications invented, patented, and perfected by a society located in Cincinnati, Ohio. The aggregate used in modern concrete is much different than the aggregate used in Roman times. Further, curing methods (initially developed in England, but refined to be strong enough to build the Hoover damn in the US) and reinforcement are also modern inventions of the US. Romans:Concrete::Ancient Egyptions:Skyscraper office buildings (the Pyramids).
Glass. I believe you are on to something here. The first time glass was massed produced in a form similar to what it looks like today was for Louis XIV for the Palace at Versailles. It is still considered good glasswork. But, I do believe glass manufacturing is a natural process (ie, stumbled onto after an eruption of a volacno near a beach--like Mt. Etna in Sicily). I'll give you this one. Don't know too much about the history of glass.
Coffee. Gee, this is a food stuff. The process of perculating coffee or of dripping coffe, or of pressure steaming coffee, or are you referring to the discovery of the coffee bean? If that's the case, I eat many foods not native to the US. If you are referring to the process, I use an automatic drip every other day or so. If you refer to having an intentionally caffeinated beverage, American idea in the mid to late 1800s (Coca-cola at the time was a caffeinated wine. It wasn't the first to add caffeine, but it was the first to add caffeine as a stimulant--once it was found that coca leaves got bad press).
So, while you are correct that I do use many things derived from these ideas, I don't use the direct idea. In much the same way I owe my way of life to Charles Babbage (for inventing the computer), I never worked on Charles Babbage's machine. I work on computers developed in the US by rivals that somehow (maybe by IP protection--perhaps?) all use the same ISA (I use the IBM-Cyrex, AMD, and Intel chips). See argument n my reply above for how that works.
Remove IP protection, then one can be coerced to say (do) something--like turn over intellectual property. Kinda like being force to say the pledge of allegiance in school. Can't do it anymore since (1) violates establishment of religion and (2) violates free-speech. At no point in time are you forced to pledge allegiance. IP protection ensures free speech. You are not required to disperse your information and further it is your prerogative to enforce how you wish the information disseminated. It is counter-intuitive, but are you going to be on the side that:
One can be forced to share intellectual property and information--(like social security numbers)
One can keep certain information private and sue if the privacy is violated--(like social security numbers)
By all reasoning I have seen to having light/no IP laws on slashdot, I should have the right to break into CDnow.com, steal all the information on billing and post it so that it can be viewed for a price. Hey, its free speech, right? Or does that not count because that is personal information for which you make money and should be kept secret? I would like someone to just stand up and address this double standard. What the hell is the difference between a bunch of 1s and 0s representing a piece of music and a bunch of 1s and 0s representing a bank/credit card/line of credit account?
For those who believe that information should be free, free your information. Give me your credit card number. Give me your mother's maiden name. For those who believe it is right to traffic in intellectual property, don't sue when someone breaks into someplace (say a bank) and steals your digital identity. Hell, its only information. Free it all!
Weak or non-existant IP laws in no way force anyone to share information, or violate your right to free speech. You can protect your right to privacy by using cryptography and only dealing with orgainizations that you trust to not share your information. There are existing laws in most, if not all, countries concerning impersonation and credit fraud. These can be enforced without strong copyright laws. In fact I dont have a copyright on my credit card number anyway as one cannot copyright numbers. You are still confusing issues.
I never advocated using the information fraudulently. Just post the information. Are you afraid that someone will use it fraudulently? You would be right in believing that.
So.. If I have some information and I never want that information released, it is alright for me to enter into legal, binding agreements to have that information protected. As a matter of fact, that is my right. The issue is what then? How long is it protected? Most information relating to finance, you will agree with me, should be protected for the life of the entity. Even if you have the information, you cannot disburse it (I never said use it). For example, a corporate credit card number. It is issued to the corporation and has people who are authorized to use it. Why don't people just post corporate credit card information then? Because people will abuse it and defraud--a totally different crime. I am just raising the point that no one will willingly post credit card information because people will use it fraudulently.
As for how long it lasts, the inventor's remaining life plus x years. This can ensure the livelihood of mom and pop operations beyond the life of mom and pop. Otherwise, they would be shut down, no doubt about it.
Now, what is the difference between a piece of paper with credit card billing information and a piece of paper with a poem on it? Nothing really, they are just pieces of paper with information on it. Using the information on one with out consent constitutes fraud, the other constitutes copyright violation (supposing the poem was copyrighted).
If I copy the peom and sign my name to it, there are consequences to the action. If I sell it, I go to court. If I academically publish it, I will no longer work in academe. You will agree with me so far.
Next comes fair use of the information. The poem, for me to get it, would have to be published in some manner. I would like to "fairly use" this published material. Fair use is a (semi)strict legal definition that more or less means not-for-profit use in very special circumstances and quoting.
If I work and toil on a novel/poem/program/concept, I would expect to be rewarded for my effort. If the idea is remarkable enough, I pick the reward, not someone else. Further, the reward should go to me, not someone else. Fraud laws prevent this in the case of money/property/service/etc transactions. Is it unreasonable to think I should have this right for my idea?
Is there such a thing as too important information? What is a definition of too important information? Any information that is that important could no make an impact as large as Bill Gate's American Express card information. That is an important piece of information that would end hunger in several small third world nations. I do not advocate taking it or using it, but that all information is important for a length of (arbitrary) time and should be protected with stronger teeth than civil proceedings.
While I agree that it is free speech to say whatever you want, it is not free speech to use whatever you want. The fact that information is so easy to use, it needs strong protection from the misuse/abuse/theft of the original owner. And if you do not like restrictions on the information, don't use it. You do NOT have a right to it. (Try smoking crack in front of a police station. You don't have the right to use crack) Both crack and information are commodities.
In general, I am leery of anything coming from a Harvard Law professors mouth. Or for that matter, any lawyers mouth concerning laws.
I really am not understanding your argument. IP laws have nothing to do with financial information, finacial information is not copyrighted. I am not advocating that all information should just be handed out, rather I am saying that information released in the public domain should not have the level of copyright protection that it has today. You can chose to release or not release any information that you please.
A poem and a credit card number are very different. A poem is the product of creativity and a credit card number is just a number. One is a new creation while the other is just a number, an integer that has been around for quite a long time.
As far as not having the right to smoke crack there is a very valid argument that you, as a human, have an innate right to do whatever you want to your own body as long as it doesnt disturb someone else's right to do the same. I fail to see how using crack violates anyone else's rights, except maybe if you smoke it in public and subject others to the smoke. I personally advocate the american legalization of all drugs and a ban of smoking in public (how is that for contradiction:)
In essence I think you are still confusing intellectual property with, well I have no idea.
1) Castro, despite all his wrong-doings, is not a fascist.
Fluffy ideological drivel aside, there is no practical difference between a fasicst state and a communist state. In both, the State (or the Party, but those end up being interchangable) is supreme and runs all facets of life & economy. Cuba is structured no differently.
2) The Nazis used socialist methods to gain more votes within the german people. never forget that the Nazis did (in part, at least) earn their power trough democratic elections! Of course, you know that better than anyone... How's the weather in Argentinia?
They earned weight in the Reichstag by democratic elections. Hitler earned the Chancellary through the combination of persuasion and the idiocy of traditional German conservatives, like Von Papin. Hitler earned his ability to rule by decree through blackmail and threats of violence (the day the vote was held on the increased powers, the Stormtroopers surrounded the Reichstag and chanted that anyone who opposed the new powers wouldn't be going home that night. The only MPs that did were generally Social Democrats, and this is partly why many of them were shipped to Dachau soon after the Nazis cemented their dictatorship). Not exactly like the German people voted Hitler Dictator-for-life.
3) In my (western european biased) book, socialism is not a negative term. We have plenty of "socialist" parties around here who would never dream of taking away private property or outlawing democratic elections. Their main argument is creating a safety net for poorer people in an extremely competitive economy (strong medical and social institutions accessible for everyone). This requires a healthy (or powerful, if you will) governement.
European Socialists may not advocate the direct abolition of property rights, but they slowly erode them away through their polices of expanded government and goverment's ability to circumvent property rights when it wishes.
Of course, the requirements for creating this "safety net" requires ending competition and the free market in large areas of the economy (health care, education, etc). So far, these have not produced exactly wonderful results (the large problems in socialized and nationalized health care systems in countries like Britian and Canada are well publicized).
This "healthy" government also invariably ends up trampling on the rights of individual citizens, good intentioned or not.
You are confusing innovation with refinement. Taking the concrete example (at random) the innovation (i.e. the invnetion itself) with refinements of the invention. Movable Type - again this was the invention - the laser printer is, as you say, the development.
Another example - plumbing.
Coffee was the caffinated beverage, not the bean (obviously).
Oh, and the first cathode ray was generated by Sir William Crookes, a British physicist. The cathode ray tube was invented by Karl Braun (a pre-revolutionary Russian - although he was working in Germany at the time). The guy who I think you are talking about is Philo Taylor Farnsworth, who invented an eletronic television system in 1928. Or Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, who showed a "kinescope" at the national convention of radio engineers in 1928. But this is just a refinement of the innovation of signal -> picture on a CRT, credit for which probably goes to Boris Rosing (another pre-revolutionary Russian, working in Russia) and Zworykin's mentor.
You are talking nonsense about currency - coins were widely accepted from the Romans onwards. Banknotes originated in the 14th century.
The point about the qwerty keyboard also misses the mark - qwerty wasn't the first keyboard, it is a refinement of it.
I'm sorry for misspelling it. To my defense, we call it Argentinien in german;)
My comment on Argentina was purely a reference to the fact that some well-known Nazis seeked refuge there after WWII. AFAIK know there have been rumours as late as the 70s that Hitler had actually escaped and was living there. It was not supposed to be inflammatory, only funny (mildly). You'll certainly have noted the nickname of the parent poster.
But thanks for the comment, I'm really surprised at the response my blurb generated...
-- I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
It's very easy to advocate ballance or limited copyrights when you're not the one shelling out millions of dollars trying to create a useful product only to have groups of pirates stealing your work. I'd like to see someone suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers 2)be fair to the Companies' rights and 3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
That would be standard copyright law, with fair use and none of this shrink-wrap "you didn't buy the software, you bought a license" crap. It would still be illegal to distribute copies, but consumer's rights wouldn't be trampled as they are with the DMCA and various other products of bribing lawmakers.
Regarding #3, you can't stop all piracy without a totalitarian state, and probably not even then.
-- How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
"I'd like to see someone suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers 2)be fair to the Companies' rights and 3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software."
Easy. Limit the length of copyright to something more reasonable, say the framer's original 14 years (actually, In order to keep up with the times, I think it should be less than that - the pace of innovation has increased, so the rate at which IP enters the public domain should increase as well). After that time the IP enters into the public domain. Voila, the public gets to use those ideas and information to innovate, while companies have an incentive to create new things since they can't simply rely on selling old stuff to make money. Things get more lively. Lots more innovation. Of course, it will probably mean that companies won't make as much profit as before, but last time I checked there wasn't a legal guarantee of a certain profit margin. Those companies that cannot create new things will likely fail. Oh well. Those that remain will be making genuine contributions to the overall improvement of society.
I am sick and tired of my government working to protect corporations when they should be trying to protect me. The rights of the public should ALWAYS take precedence over the rights of a corporation. Period. Copyright should apply to individuals and not corporate entities.
-- -Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
You obviously have an opinion here, lets hear it.. Got an idea for how to protect the companies interests without being draconian? Great! so far the mass of online debate on the subject has been a little short on that subject.
If you think you got an idea that is neither "Give the big corporations all your money and they will take care of you" nor "What the f*ck, I can steal it so why pay for it" then post it where we can all read it.. Of course the extremists on BOTH sides will flame your ass hotter than a griddle and you'll probably spend the next decade getting your karma back above zero but thats/. for you..... # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
I'd like to see someone suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers 2)be fair to the Companies' rights and 3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
There is such a solution. It's called letting the company that thinks its copyright has been infringed go after the people who are infringing. This is the solution that worked for generations before digital copying became possible, and it's actually the approach that seems to be having a decent degree of success in stopping digital copyright infringement today.
Take a look, for instance, at the Metallica vs. Napster affair; Metallica asks Napster to shut down people who are infringing copyright, Napster does so, and now a lawsuit decides whether the shut down has to continue. This works. In order for a group to infringe enough to do serious damage to a a big software company like Microsoft, they need a large organization that can be tracked down and gone after legally. In fact, when Microsoft complains about the cost of "pirating" of their software, it's almost always complaining about well organized groups that are stamping their own CD's, making bogus Microsoft holograms, and the whole works.
That's why the whole prior restaint (i.e. access controls) aspect of the DMCA is so odious. People are essentially assumed to be infringers before they ever lay hands on the product, and are denied their fair use rights because it's the easiest way of keeping them from non-fair use copying.
--
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I'd sooner see more protection for consumers, and less for companies than vice versa. Very few companies are in any immediate danger of going out of business because of consumer piracy, yet companies act very much as if this issue couls sink them. The most serious and costly piracy is non-consumer commercial piracy commited in countries that have no copyright laws at all, or by indiviauals who will ignore any existing laws anyway. The purpose of laws like the DCMA is to control consumers... customers... the people these businesses are supposed to serve.
-- I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I'd like to see someone suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers
The first step would be returning to the 14 year expiry of copyright. 95 years is draconian and deprives the nation of -true- innovation and progress.
2)be fair to the Companies' rights
The companies' "rights" as enshrined in law are so ludicrously far reaching these days they are laughably unenforceable. When the rights are in equal measure to the public interest, we'll talk again about "fairness".
3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
The most brutally obvious answer is: "Give it away for free". Structure revenue models around other profit centers, such as service, support and hardware. Keep R&D costs under control, and base your development efforts on easily implemented open standards and community effort.
while companies have an incentive to create new things since they can't simply rely on selling old stuff to make money
Such as Microsoft? MS gets revenue (mostly) in two ways: every new PC generates an new sale of one or more products and MS sells upgrades to existing products. Since they can't rely on selling "old stuff" to fill the coffers, they must repackage old stuff as "new stuff" and then extract their money from businesses and consumers that way. I don't think that this is a business model that we would like to encourage.
We live in a world where one person can post copyrighted material on the web, and millions can steal it. The copyright holder can go after the person who posted the material, if they can find them, but they can't practically go after all the people who stole their copyrighted works. How can you sue a million individuals. Our legal system can't deal with this type of crime, and it costs the copyright holder more to pursue the criminals than it's worth.
The result of this probelm has often been copy protection schemes. These schemes usually end up as a deterrent to only those who don't feel it's worth the effort to get around the copy protection. So now we have a law which prohibits circumventing the copy protection. Such a law even makes some sense to me at first thought. The probelm is that the law is being abused. The recording industry is using this law to dictate how you can use the copyrighted materials. They are using "copy protection" to extend limit how you use the material beyond the rights they are given by law. If you circumvent thier "protections" they say you are breaking the law, even if you your actions would have been considered fair use.
I doubt this is what Congress intended when they passed the law, at least not all of the Congressmen that voted for it. The courts need to overturn the parts of the law that interfere with fair use, and Congress needs to create a better balanced copyright law. This time they have to remember that the goal of copyright law is not to simply protect the rights of copyright holders. The law must also limit those rights. The framers of the law must keem in mind the actions of the recording industry to subvert the law and take away the rights of individuals. It's the recording industry that's trying to circumvent the law in this case. The law provides for fair use, and the recording industry is attempting to subvert that. Hopefully the recording industry will lose the lawsuits, but be forced to pay the legal costs of those they are persecuting.
It's very easy to advocate ballance or limited copyrights when you're not the one shelling out millions of dollars trying to create a useful product only to have groups of pirates stealing your work.
Sure. But it's *absurd* to say that if I were to draw a painting of something that *your grandfather* created *fifty years ago*, you would be somehow injured --- yet, if your grandfather had been a writer, I would be in violation of his copyright.
Make copyrights 30 years for companies and 70 years for individuals.
This wouldn't work. It would end up being 70 years for companies too. The creator at the company would be the holder, and assign all benefits of that copyright to the company (hell, probably would be in the standard employment contract). You would need to be careful to prevent this from happening.
Easy. Limit the length of copyright to something more reasonable, say the framer's original 14 years (actually, In order to keep up with the times, I think it should be less than that - the pace of innovation has increased, so the rate at which IP enters the public domain should increase as well). After that time the IP enters into the public domain.
Problem who owns IP in this country? Disny/ABC, Time-warner, etc. Could you imagen these people no using there finacial mussel to force continuation of their copyrights? More than 1/2 the movie I watch are are morth then 14 years old, same with music. I suspect that for most poeple most of their media consumtion that they pay for is older stuff, this big revene generating source would go away, therefore it will never pass.
3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
The most brutally obvious answer is: "Give it away for free". Structure revenue models around other profit centers, such as service, support and hardware. Keep R&D costs under control, and base your development efforts on easily implemented open standards and community effort. ------
The problem with giving it away is just as you said. They make their money from service, support and hardware. Think about this a moment... How often does Windows crash and screw stuff up? Where's the incentive to build a working program? Would you REALLY want to pay for service everytime? Okay, Microsoft comes out with a new patch, but it costs $50 for each patch or "upgrade". Now the kicker. Windows has to have "Acme Windows" card installed to work properly. So realistically, there is still piracy, everyone steals the upgrades/patches. But we all get screwed on the service/support and the hardware needed. Unfortunatly, it works both ways, and you know if Bill Gates would of thought about it, it would require a "windows" card in every computer just to line his platinum pant pockets with more money.
Copyright should apply to individuals and not corporate entities.
This wouls probably be the most effective way of preventing IP abuse. It's simple, logical, and doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of actually passing:(
Basically, that's what's happening. The Mouse, and all the other characters of the early 20th, are extending their proprietary lives...
But consider: Disney took about 50 years to re-do Fantasia. With a 14-year time limit, we'll see Walt's original concept carried out...And after all, most of their profits come from new or derivative works. When was the last time you saw "Steamboat Willie" and paid for it?
BTW -- I think 14 years is still reasonable. If you get it too short, derivative works will be rip-offs or publishers will just wait until a work enters the public domain.
The millions that stole the copyrighted material from the web are already breaking the law. Most likely knowingly and willingly. How does making it "more" illegal to circumvent the copy protection add *any* protection to the copyright?
I'm not disagreeing with you, I just think that aside from being abused, the basic premise (or rather the part of it that we are talking about) does not seem to have much to recommend it.
------------------------------------- Remember- post early, post often.
Limited copyright term for software: 75 years was too short for you? Fifty years after your death? It had to be changed to 95 years, and 70 years--and likely "forever minus one day," as Representative Mary Bono and Jack Valenti wish? I am truly interested in how you make the "balance" here--and who you are "balancing" with--it can't be the public on the other side of the equation, because your software will never enter the public domain--the source code will never be available, and the binaries will not run on computers then.
suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers 2)be fair to the Companies' rights and 3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
Okay, how's this: Make the term short, say 7 years for software. If the software at that point is still commercially valuable, then give the company a choice. They can either renew it for another 7 years, or they can get a tax deduction on the full remaining value, by donating the rights to a tax-deductible, educational, publishing organization, such as the Free Software Foundation.
Nobody is stealing anything. The public is the one to pay, through taxes, since they will enjoy the benefits if it enters the public domain.
If you are seriously interesting in this proposal, please email me.
But consider: Disney took about 50 years to re-do Fantasia. With a 14-year time limit, we'll see Walt's original concept carried out...And after all, most of their profits come from new or derivative works.
A question mixed up in this is "How new does something have to be to be copyrighted". e.g. so that Disney could get their 14 years (or whatever) on the new version of Fantasia.
The companies' "rights" as enshrined in law are so ludicrously far reaching these days they are laughably unenforceable. When the rights are in equal measure to the public interest, we'll talk again about "fairness"
Also surely if a company should have the rights of an individual they should also have similar responsibilities. Thus companies who commited illegal acts would face "jail", "execution" and confiscation of their assets.
The most brutally obvious answer is: "Give it away for free". Structure revenue models around other profit centers, such as service, support and hardware.
I love this saying. I really do. It sounds beautiful in simple, general principle, but only at a passing glance. The problem is that the "give away your primary product for free, structure your business about around service, support, etc" has yet to actually work. Can anyone point to any successful big business where this has been made a core part of the business and it worked?
In the case of Fantasia, Disney should have copyright over the entire thing, except the surviving "sorceror's apprentice" bit. Unless, of course, they claim to have made significant improvements to it. In that case, I should be able to copy the previous version, but not the new one, and I'd have to be careful to base my derivative work, "Sorceror's Apprentice on the Road to Timbuktu", on the previous version.
I hate those bastards that use anything other than pdf and doc formats. how dare them. (Note sarcasm) Copyrights now are just a political way to structure our economy. With the advent of personal computing and the ability of anyone to make virtually free copies of any piece of information the supply of any piece of information will always match the demand. We are now entering the information age where most information will be free in both the political and economic sense, no matter what kinds of protections governments try to enforce. We have entered an age where anyone and everyone can publish information to the entire world. Changes in how information is distributed can controlled cause massive changes in societies. The first western information revolution started when Martin Luther nailed the 95 thesis to a church door. These ideas spread like wildfire throughout europe. These ideas of freedom from complete control and religious freedom eventually led to the constitution of the US. Now we have reached a new technological level concerning information. Now everyone can publish, not just those with economic power. The changes in the next century will be drastic, sorry to those who continue to think they can control information but it doesn't work anymore.
Movable type started the first information revolution and gave Martin Luther his start. The relative cheapness of the printing press allowed people to experience the written word who did not have the chance previously.
The internet is the next printing press. It is allowing common people to work with a global informion pool. Previously you had to be a governtment or corporate CEO to access this quanity of information in real time.
I wonder what will usher in the 3rd information revolution?
-- âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Interesting, and informative.
by
Lumpy
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· Score: 3
My only gripe is that the statement about pdf. This is a closed,and with-held format. while every word processor worth a damn will read and parse rtf exactly. so rtf is the truely "cross-platform" document format. We do not need all the other crap that is crammed into the documents.
Now, if the word processor manufacturers would get off their butts and let the software read/write Postscript... this would be a true cross-platform, program indipendant, junk-rich document format. but alas... most word processor programmers are dumb as a stump.
-- Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Re:Interesting, and informative.
by
wayward_son
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· Score: 1
M$ Word 97 regularly screws up.rtf format. While many/. readers try to avoid Word, it is by far the #1 word processor in the world in number of users. So much for cross platform.
Re:Interesting, and informative.
by
mtphoto
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· Score: 1
The advantage of PDF is only partly due to the fact that it can be read for free. The other half is that it is contained. Few other document formats have the fonts imbeded in them. Not that useful for a text list, but when a company wants to distribute it's product brochure or manuals online, it's nice to have a typeset layout with a linked table of contents. == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == -mT Looking at something requires only your eyes, but seeing involves your mind.
Re:Interesting, and informative.
by
mtphoto
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· Score: 1
Shit. Maybe I should learn how to make a.sig. retard here.
Re:Interesting, and informative.
by
FigWig
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· Score: 5
My only gripe is that the statement about pdf. This is a closed,and with-held format.
I agree with you completely! If only that damned Adobe would open the file specification. Obviously they are trying to get a stranglehold on the market and blight out the common man.
We need open programs that can read and create pdf files. Without such programs, the PDF format is useless.
So let's fight the power and boycott Adobe until they free the format!
-- Scuttlemonkey is a troll
The United States of America:
by
paulproteus
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· Score: 1
The USA: Making the world safe for Coporate Oligarchy! (...er..., peaceful democracy.....)
-- |/usr/games/fortune
Copyright used to control users
by
Dungeon+Dweller
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· Score: 3
Today, I had to install a USB device on a windows 95 machine. The problem, the drivers are only found on the 98 CDROM, which noone at my workplace has. There are patches for 95 to add USB, but this was decidedly not the solution that we wanted. We had to grab the files off some guy's website, thus comitting an act of "piracy." We were completely unable to find the drivers on Microsoft.com, so I e-mailed their support, saying, "What's up with this?" Well, pretty much. The response said something along the lines of "Buy the CD." So, in order to get M$'s software to work, without committing an act of piracy, the recommended solution is to dump more money their way. Go figure.
-- Eh...
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
Hamshrew
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· Score: 1
This happened to a friend of mine. He couldn't find the new drivers for his MS Intellimouse, and the old ones gave him problems with a piece of hardware. Unfortunately, nobody had the new drivers available, and his "rescue disk" was scratched. Microsoft's site had nothing on it, so he ended up downloading the drivers from a warez site.
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
Quarters
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· Score: 1
You have a 95 machine and you wanted USB. So, instead of patching the OS to add the feature you needed you downloaded a copy of a different OS. How can you not view that as piracy? 95 and 98 are *different* products. Owning one does not give you the right to use the other.
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
mikpos
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· Score: 1
He didn't download Windows 98; he downloaded some drivers.
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
pb
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· Score: 1
Actually, wasn't there a USB update for W95OSR2?
I seem to remember it, because it caused some problems of its own.:)
Did it eat itself on Microsoft's site, never to be seen again, much like the Linux version of their NetShow player that I can't find? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
-- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
Hamshrew
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· Score: 1
Yes, there was. This was for the PS/2 version, though. His Computer didn't have USB support, it was an old PII board(whatever was before the LX... FX, I think)
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
technos
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· Score: 2
You have a 95 machine and you wanted USB
Windows 98 USB drivers will allow USB devices to run under Windows 95. There was no big change to the driver model.
So, instead of patching the OS to add the feature you needed
All you need is the drivers. Besides, the USB patch breaks a large amount of legacy stuff, and still doesn't come with the full compliment that Windows 95 does.
you downloaded a copy of a different OS. How can you not view that as piracy?
If the hardware vendor tells you to talk to the OS vendor, and the OS vendor won't give you the driver because they are monopolistic twits and want to force you into a $200 upgrade, what else can you do? You're only using the driver, which you are legally entitled to as owner of the hardware.
95 and 98 are *different* products
They are? Could have fooled me!;)
-- .sig: Now legally binding!
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
adamk
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· Score: 1
"All you need is the drivers. Besides, the USB patch breaks a large amount of legacy stuff, and still doesn't come with the full compliment that Windows 95 does."
"You're only using the driver, which you are legally entitled to as owner of the hardware."
But you didn't use the driver they provided... Why? Because it breaks a large amount of legacy stuff. Obviously, then, it's not just the same driver, and therefore you are not legally entitled to it.
Adam
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
MattT
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· Score: 1
Oh, you need to purchase the "work" option.
-- -MattT
*** Not speaking for my employer, or any other sentient beings ***
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
winter@jurai.net
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· Score: 1
Funny. I have USB working on Win95. The update has nothing to do with PS/2s. (the USB portion of it at least.)
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
Jenova_Six
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· Score: 1
95 doesn't support USB unless it's got the supplement installed (USB wasn't even release until 95 had been out for a couple of years). I'm surprised you got it to work at all. I used to be escalation support for Win98, and if someone asked me that question, I would have told them it's not supported, and try it at your own risk... Don't expect an old product to support new technology.
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
technos
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· Score: 2
still doesn't come with the full compliment that Windows 95 does
Sorry. Typo. Thet should read
still doesn't come with the full compliment that Windows 98 does
Anyway..
But you didn't use the driver they provided...
Don't buy too many cheap USB devices, do you? Half the time they count on the driver being on the Windows install media and DO NOT INCLUDE ONE. I cannot use a driver I do not have.
Take for example my buddies USB webcam. The driver for it wasn't included in the patch. (which is moot; I think MS vaporized it to sell more copies of 98) The manufacturer of the webcam tells him that he should contact the reseller for it. The reseller points out that the instructions say to 'contact your OS vendor for unsupported platforms' and tells him to call MS. MS tells him 'We're not releasing the driver'.
He called me, I went over with a copy of Windows 98, and installed the driver.
-- .sig: Now legally binding!
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
Kanasta
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· Score: 1
Well, there were patches you said you could add. Why didn't you use them? MS considers W98 to be a different product from W95, so it's no wonder that they want you to pay to 'upgrade'.
If you had owned W3.1, would you still feel that you had a right to get W98 for free so that you could use your USB device?
Given that MS sells betas of its OS to testers, you should consider yourself lucky that a patch exists to add USB to W95.
---
Re:Copyright used to control users
by
BenByer
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· Score: 1
Oh, they are extremely different. To make 98 work with samba you have to change a registry key to let the computer send unencrypted passwords. That is definately a $100 upgrade:) (Note HEAVY sarcasm)
A clear argument, for once
by
Hamshrew
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· Score: 2
Unlike the Adobe person he quotes, this guy actually seems to understand what he's talking about. Instead of making broad generalizations such as "the founders of our country loved IP laws," this guy knows a little bit about the background of IP law, and also presents a clear, non-techie view of IP and copyright law.
He points out that nobody ever imagined that the copyright holder could have such exclusive conrol over content, and I think this is the heart of the matter. Although content control is now possible, and perhaps even legal, that doesn't make it "right." DVD Region coding may be acceptable to some(I think it's dumb and purely greed driven), but forcing someone to "lease" a utility simply to make more money is inheritly wrong. In some cases lease-only makes sense(few consumers need to actually OWN their phone service, for instance), but owning your word processor or paperback book is an option which works, and should be available. If I want to read a book once or 500 times, or eat it, or burn it, I should be able to.
No, smart because he thinks about what he writes and produces well reasoned arguments for his postions. You don't have to agree with the positions but do have to agree that he is smarted than you or I. (I apologise if you are some sort of legal God whose every one line opinion should be accepted without question)
1. I don't have to agree that anyone is smarter than I. I may think the man is a complete fool.
2. I'm no one's god and my opinion shouldn't be taken just because of who I am. The same goes for everyone else.
I'm just a bit tired of reading so many people blindly repeat the "x is supporting linux. x is grandly intelligent." mantra. Each action/entity should be considered on its own merits, not just if it supports your personal position. Maybe the adobe guy makes a few good points or maybe he's a spineless corporate monkey. No one will know if they don't read beyond the second line.
Well said. (I do think Lessig is smart, and I also agree with his opinions, but these are two separate statements. The Slashdot editorial staff needs a little education...)
'smart' is a property of 'lessig' (which is an author, a subclass of human being); you need to call a field accessor:
lessig.isSmart() == true;
Unless you want to go through the trouble of overloading operator== for all the different data types of the fields in the author class, which would create even more problems if you had more than one field of the same type...you see the problem? Too much work. The Second Amendment Sisters
This is off topic, but you just set the value of a function to true. I may be wrong, but that doesn't seem kosher. Maybe you meant: lessig.isSmart = true; At any rate, the point was well taken.:) --------- "There's no swimming in the heavy water, no playing in the acid rain.
--
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
No, you have it backwards. Granted, his statement is kind of silly as it's in a void context (you have to turn on some warning options to get GCC to complain about that), but it does work.
The concern you bring up wrt operator overloading doesn't really apply, since you're only interested in if he is smart, not if any of his fields are smart (if you did, you could just as easily do something like lessig.legs[0] == smart).
But laws are still influenced by big money...
by
Eremit
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· Score: 2
I think Lessig got it right to point out the importance of keeping the focus on "Progress". As we have seen with firms like Intel and Microsoft, IP can be used to slow progress.
So, we want laws that support progress, but at the same time leave enough freedom for the authors to make a profit with their findings. (They should at least be able to get their invested money back.) Where should the line between the need of protection of the authors rights and the wish for progress from the public be drawn?
In my opinion that line was drawn at the right place, but the latest changes indicate that big businesses push successfully to change the "balance" (Lessig got that right as well) to their favor. Is there a way to influence this trend without having lots of money? I don't really believe that many politicians listen to intelligent remarks from normal citizens. So, what is the way to get heard without using illegal means?
Alright. Back that up. Just what exactly is wrong with the PDF format? What better alternatives do you propose, and why are they better? It seems to be a nice enough substitute for PostScript in Apple's new rendering model.
-- If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I think an interesting question to pose is "what should intellectual property law protect?" If you consider that part of the call for strong law is the protection of indiviguals who take longer to develop their idea then say a monolithic entity with 10,000 code writers, it seems to be a duble edged sword. Do we protect more, and potentially limit the speed of development (not as many free minds have the right to work with previous ideas?) or do we free up restriction and face an even larger potential that smaller vendors will be beaten out by larger organizations because they can not protect their ideas from companies that have larger amounts of resources to thow at the idea once it becomes knows?
My Experience With The DMCA/RIAA This Week
by
Seumas
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· Score: 5
This runs ever-so-slightly off-topic perhaps, but since it is a very recent event (yesterday) and ties in with intellectual property rights and the DMCA (though not directly to software... other than MP3's)... Hmm... actually, I guess maybe it isn't off-topic after all?
I run a fairly successful (free) auction site. Yesterday, I had a voicemail left on my machine at work from the Director of Legal Affairs for Universal Records.
When I called to speak with him, and played a little phone-tag, he brought up the concern that a user had posted bootlegged Godsmack recordings, on CD-R's, on my site. Godsmack's management was not pleased with this and voiced their concern to Universal Records.
The representative I spoke with seemed understanding and realized that I am an individual operating a free, non-profit website with no intention to exploit intellectual property ownership. I explained that all I could do was review the auction in question and notify him of any decisions or actions that were made after I weighed his concern.
I reviewed the auction, which the seller had clearly explained in the item's description, was a compilation of bootlegs and songs that were not commercially available by the artist and that, as such, there was no financial impact on the artists themselves. You do not need to be a lawyer (and I am not one) to realize that this is most likely still very wrong. Bootlegging is, generally, a bad thing. And making money off it is probably almost always illegal.
Still, my concern was not for my own legal well-being, as the site clearly states that items being sold are the sole responsibility of the person posting them and all concerns should be addressed directly with that person. My concern was, in fact, how and what precident I would be setting for the future of my site and its users.
My final decision was to notify the seller of the situation, leave the auction up, put a notice on the auction item itself that the record company and Godsmack's management had concerns regarding this and as such, it was no longer available, should not be bid upon, and for all intents and purposes, the item should be considered not to exist. The auction page itself remained, until the seller willingly deleted it, for information purposes.
I notified Universal Records immediately of the decision I had made and received an email confirmation. They seem to have found my handling of the issue acceptable.
Now, my understanding is that even if these bootlegs were, somehow, legitimate and legal, I would have been required to remove/ban the auction until it could be proven that the item was acceptable to sell. Simply by someone claiming a wrong done, I would be required to behave and proceed with the assumption that, until proven otherwise, a wrong had been done. Is this correct? To what extent does this reach?
On a side note, during my conversation with the Universal Records lawyer, he said that (paraphrasing) "Our only concern is that our artists and their management feel damaged by material being exploited to make money which they should have control over." To which I replied, "I completely agree that it is wrong for someone to exploit an artist and their work for monitary gain without respect to the artist and ownership of their material."
Obviously, I was making a slight risk at agitating a lawyer with lots of financial backing by a very large corporation, but I thought it deserved to be said -- and how many chances do you get to tell a major record label what you think of their treatment of artists? I think it had to be done, or I'd be forever kicking myself for missing the opppertunity.
His response? He was silent, long enough for me to have to pose an inquisitive "...hello?" before the conversation continued. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
Re:My Experience With The DMCA/RIAA This Week
by
phenym
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· Score: 1
Now, my understanding is that even if these bootlegs were, somehow, legitimate and legal, I would have been required to remove/ban the auction until it could be proven that the item was acceptable to sell. Simply by someone claiming a wrong done, I would be required to behave and proceed with the assumption that, until proven otherwise, a wrong had been done. Is this correct? To what extent does this reach?
Wouldn't that be treating the auctioneer as guilty until proven innocent?
-- Phenym
Re:My Experience With The DMCA/RIAA This Week
by
Royster
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· Score: 1
I can't fault you for the decision that you made. It's very tough for an individual to face up to a corporation with extensive financial resources.
A look at the DCMA might be in order. Someone can preserve their ISP exemption by taking down copyrighted materials when they are notified that they are infringing. The only material you were hosting was a web page listing an item for sale. I presume that the web page itself was not a copyright infringement -- i.e. not lifted in violation of copyright from someother person. Since all you are hosting is the web page, I don't think that there's a DCMA issue here.
Now the item advertised for sale may not have been legit from a copyright stance, but since it was not in your posession you have no means to determine if it was a copyright violation for the copyright holder to offer it for sale.
-- I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Re:My Experience With The DMCA/RIAA This Week
by
Winged+Cat
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· Score: 1
Wouldn't that be treating the auctioneer as guilty until proven innocent?
...which is one of the problems people have with the DMCA.
Re:My Experience With The DMCA/RIAA This Week
by
divec
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· Score: 2
the auction [...] was a compilation of bootlegs and songs that were not commercially available by the artist and [...] as such, there was no financial impact on the artists themselves. You do not need to be a lawyer [...] to realise that this is most likely still very wrong.
I would certainly agree that such an auction is illegal, which is what I imagine you meant. I'm not convinced it's a morally bad thing, though. It's not causing financial loss to the artist or the publishers (assuming they haven't intentionally kept supply scarce to drive the price up, a la Disney videos). It's not invading the artists' privacy, since the material is already available. It is, however, allowing fans to get hold of material which they couldn't otherwise obtain. If there is profit to be made here, and the publisher has failed to cash in on the opportunity, then it only has its own stupidity to blame.
The idea of allowing copyright holders to restrict the distribution of a work is so that they can reap some reward from it. If they withhold distribution of that work, without attempting to gain any reward from it, then the value of that work is being wasted.
"Intellectual property" isn't like real property. It's not a basic economic right, at least in most legal systems; it's a privilege which is granted so as to gain benefit for society.
--
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Re:My Experience With The DMCA/RIAA This Week
by
EricEldred
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· Score: 1
Now, my understanding is that even if these bootlegs were, somehow, legitimate and legal, I would have been required to remove/ban the auction until it could be proven that the item was acceptable to sell. Simply by someone claiming a wrong done, I would be required to behave and proceed with the assumption that, until proven otherwise, a wrong had been done. Is this correct?
No, not exactly. You may take the intermediate step of requesting that the copyright owner send you by snail mail proof that the copyright was indeed registered in the name of the complainer, and proof that the auction item infringes on the copyright. If you promptly respond this way, you may leave the auction item up until you are satisfied of the claim's proof.
If you are acting as an ISP, you can then claim immunity from copyright infringement by notifying the alleged perp. If the perp cannot produce evidence that shows there is no infringement, then you have a choice: you can either take down the auction item and claim immunity, or you can leave it up and possibly join in a lawsuit of the complainer against the auctioner and auctioneer.
DISCLAIMER: I cannot act as your attorney on the Internet, but I can on TV--but not in Texas, and not in a commercial.
Re:My Experience With The DMCA/RIAA This Week
by
grahamm
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· Score: 1
I agree that copyright holders should be allowed to control the copying of works, but why should they also have the right to restrict the distribution? Once I have a copy of a work which has been produced either by or with the permission of the copyright holder, why should the copyright holder be able to impose any additional restrictions (except for copying) on what I can do with the goods I have purchased.
Re:My Experience With The DMCA/RIAA This Week
by
SPYvSPY
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· Score: 1
My understanding was that the auction site need only take infringing material off the site for a short period of time (~20 days?) and then can repost unless the claimant has filed a lawsuit based on the infringement.
Re:My Experience With The DMCA/RIAA This Week
by
King_TJ
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· Score: 1
Absolutely! Any artist who tries to restrict distribution of unreleased bootleg material is shooting him or herself in the foot.
Almost anyone I know who listens to bootlegs is either A.) already a big fan, who has already purchased most or all of the musicians' released works and wants additional material, or B.) a new listener who is just learning whether or not they like the musician, by hearing the bootleg recording.
Why in the world would you want to attempt to restrict this type of material from being distributed? If it's of enough value to a musician/band, they should be marketing it themselves.
Lawrence Lessig == smart is not a statement. Lawrence Lessig == smart could yield either a true or false boolean value. either Lawrence Lessig == smart or Lawrence Lessig smart. If Hemos thinks that Lawrence Lessig IS smart, he should have told us so with: Lawrence Lessig = smart But before this, tell me what programming language accepts spaces in variable names. -S
As we move farther and farther into the Digital Age(C), it becomes apparent that current copyright laws simply will no longer be appropriate, or even relevant. Unfortunately, the large corporations that have made huge sums of money off of their IP will fight the death or metamorphosis of copyright all the way to their graves. There just isn't any solution that will appeal to all sides of the issue. Maybe it'll be a wake up call for some companies to change their business model for survival in a completely different culture. --------- "There's no swimming in the heavy water, no playing in the acid rain.
--
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
That's not really true
by
paulproteus
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· Score: 2
That's like saying that this post isn't owned by me because a keyboard and Linus' keyboard driver and Marc's Netscape made it.
I just meant that the only true artform is the original form in which the art was created. If the art was first created through a keyboard, and if the keyboard did not modify it, the art is still mine. Otherwise, the keyboard would surrender all IP rights or else pay me royalties;-).
Thus, you do own your own digital artwork: the artform requires the use of certain tools. However, the art of a program isn't in the binary, it's in the source.
In light of this article, I think it's a pertinent time to repeat the meme:
No copyright has expired in this country since the end of World War 2.
When the copyrights expire sometime around 2008, Congress will most likely vote to re-extend them again. Unlike what the Founders intended, entire generations can be born and die without seeing a copyright expire. A whole generation with no access to a "common pool of knowledge," but plenty of opportunity to be harassed by corporatist police state goons (e.g. 15 year-olds in Scandinavia).
This isn't quite correct. No work created since, IIRC the late 1920's has entered the public domain by means of the copyright expiring. The date is, coincidentally enough, just prior to when Mickey Mouse cartoons started.
Works that did expire were retroactively given their copyright back - this is why you don't see "It's a Wonderful Life" EVERYWHERE anymore around Christmas. You have to pay for it again.
-- --
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.
Umm... I was under the impression that the copyright to the RSA encryption formulae expired not too long ago. And since all copyrights expire a fixed length of time after each individual copyright is given they expire quite often.
And, your post seems to imply that all copyrights will expire in 2008. That is also untrue. Please clarify your posting.
RSA has a patent over a particular algorithm. Patents are not copyrights are not trademarks.
Trademarks last as long as you enforce them. You are not required to register a trademark.
Copyrights last 75 years (with some odd exception clauses) irrespective of enforcement. You are not required to register a copyright.
Patents last 17 years irrespective of enforcement. You must apply for and be granted a patent.
As a result, no copyright has passed into the public domain in a long, long, long, long time. And the original post did not imply all fall into the public domain in 2008, just some of the earliest works currently protected by copyright.
As others have pointed out, that's a patent, not a copyright, and as I recall it's going to expire in September - it hasn't expired yet. I could be wrong about this; anyone have more info?
--
-- $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$]; $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
his isn't quite correct. No work created since, IIRC the late 1920's has entered the public domain by means of the copyright expiring. The date is, coincidentally enough, just prior to when Mickey Mouse cartoons started.
That's not quite right.
Works written before 1923 are all in the public domain. Works published with a copyright notice between 1923 and 1963 are in the public domain unless the copyright owner filed a renewal form with the copyright office at the correct time. All works published with a copyright notice between 1963 and 1977 are still under copyright. All works created since 1978 are copyrighted, whether or not a copyright notice was affixed.
Works that did expire were retroactively given their copyright back - this is why you don't see "It's a Wonderful Life" EVERYWHERE anymore around Christmas. You have to pay for it again.
This is also incorrect. In the case of "It's a Wonderful Life", the copyright on the film expired, and the work was considered to be in the public domain. Later, the original copyright owner determined that both the underlying story and parts of the musical soundtrack had been copyrighted separately, and those copyrights had been renewed. They then acquired those copyrights, and based on those copyrights, were able to suppress the film, not because the film itself was copyrighted, but because showing the film would infringe on the music and story copyrights.
The copyright on the film itself was not retroactively restored though.
Works published with a copyright notice between 1923 and 1963 are in the public domain unless the copyright owner filed a renewal form with the copyright office at the correct time.
Probably only some 20% of works published between 1923 and 1963 were renewed--the rest have fallen into the public domain. Determining whether or not a work was renewed requires checking the Catalog of Copyright Entries from the Registrar of Copyrights in the Library of Congress--see, for books, online lists at the On-Line Books page at UPenn. You can determine registrations and renewals after 1977 online at telnet:locis.loc.gov.
Works that did expire were retroactively given their copyright back
Although jms is correct in the case of this film, it is also true that many works that had entered the U.S. public domain were placed back under copyright by means of the Uruguay Round of GATT, if the work was first published outside the U.S. more than a year before U.S. publication, and other complicated terms such as failure to renew when the author was not a U.S. citizen or resident.
Determining copyright status is not easy now. The Nolo Press book on Copyright by Stephen Fishman is excellent, and there are online resources at the web site mentioned above.
The general point, though is very good--copyright term is too long now. Larry Lessig is my lawyer in the suit Eldred v Reno to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. You can learn more and you can help us at http://eon.law.harvard.edu.
What I do not understand is how the copyright extension is not a "taking" (in the sense of the Constitution's prohibitions on the govt-sponsored taking of property without due compensation)...
It is. This was Lessig's own brilliant suggestion in the original complaint in Eldred v Reno. See the online briefs (some in PDF format only, sorry, I don't agree with Warnock and Lessig on that point!) at http://eon.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno.
Great minds think alike. Send Lessig a black eye-patch!
It's not Capitalism that's to blame, it's our overly-zealous greed coupled with media whoring. People don't need SUV's but hey, that's what all the cool kids are driving. If folks were not so materialistic, if all the Religious Right actually LIVED peaceful and generous lives, if we weren't so sucked in by the flash and splash on television, and yes, if the government was taken back by the people, away from corporations with twisted agendas, America could really be cool. I rambled a bit there but the point I'm trying to make is that we may be a bit f*cked up at the moment, but I believe we'd do better fixing what we've got than trying to switch over to a socialist/facist/whatever system. By the way, Dolfy, what'd you think of "Schindler's List"?;-)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
My only gripe is that the statement about pdf. This is a closed,and with-held format. while every word processor worth a damn will read and parse rtf exactly. so rtf is the truely "cross-platform" document format. We do not need all the other crap that is crammed into the documents.
Not so, as someone who exclusively used a NeXT for years, which was based on RTF, I can say authoritatively that not all RTF's are the same. I had problems with RTF on the NeXT and in Microsoft apps (they even wrote the spec). In any event, RTF doesn't have page layout features so it is not comparable to PDF.
Now, if the word processor manufacturers would get off their butts and let the software read/write Postscript... this would be a true cross-platform, program indipendant, junk-rich document format. but alas... most word processor programmers are dumb as a stump.
PDF ***IS*** PostScript, without the interpreted language parts. It has the same imaging model, which is why it is so good. It also has a well defined text mechanism, which allows searchable text. That was one of the main problems with PostScript, you couldn't easily parse the text out of it.
Burris
The system is out of date.
by
ParticleGirl
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· Score: 4
Since the ideas of intellectual property, copyright law, and the U.S. patent system first came about, a lot has changed. Methodological concepts have become as valuable as machine designs once were-- the design for a new type of cog or a better steam engine was conceptual, but it had specific mechanical specs. Concepts such as (for instance) one-click shopping are also conceptual, but the applications are much more varied due to the very nature of the medium in which they're applicable. You don't need to buy the parts and weld and build and test and hand your sponsors a lump of metal before going into mass produciton; mass production is cutting and pasting, or copying, or making available for download. You can try more things. One of the most obvious results of this is that new technologies mutate and evolve at a much faster rate. Ten years ago, hyperlinking was patented by IBM, but today it's an integral part of an entire breed of technologies. This kind of proliferation would not have been possible had that patent been enforced. The original concept of the patent was supposed to be a limited right that would create an incentive for authors to produce, and that "after a short interval," as Justice Joseph Story put it, what was produced would pass to the "full possession and enjoyment" of the public "without restraint." Not a restriction on proliferating or elaborating on the idea, but incentive to spread the idea in the first place.
Another result of this is the fact that the "thing" that is being protected has become an idea, not actually a "thing" at all. At most tangible, it is a process or method; at least tangible it might be innovative concepts for which the originator should not go unrecognized. Copyright is no longer restricted to "maps, charts and books." It reaches anything "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." It no longer regulates only publishers; it reaches anyone who makes a "copy."...and it is also beginning to reach copies that are not "fixed in a tangible medium;" take, for instance, the recently e-published-only novels and e-released-only albums; though they might not be fixed in a tangible medium, they still seem to be suceptible to copyright laws.
Perhaps the IP laws, copyright laws, and patent system need an overhaul. Well, certainly they need an overhaul. The emphasis needs to be returned to innovation and progress, and the periods of protection need to be shortened. A serious dialogue is a good start. Getting the government to change things takes a long time. What can we do in the mean time?
This isn't the first time...
by
gavinhall
·
· Score: 4
Posted by 11223:
... that the government has taken the interests of business over the interest of technological advancement. The whole thing certainly resembles the patent problem.
Unfortunately, right now we (the USA) as a country judge ourselves based upon our economy. The 1790's weren't the time that we draw most from - we draw more from the industrial economy of the 1920's.
What Mr. Lessig said very eloquently is perfectly applicable to the 1790's. It's not to the 1920's, the time of the economy of the nation being the only priority. Except that our economy is now based on information - most of it entertainment information, but information nonetheless. It's the old "Mickey Mouse's copyright is expiring-let's extend the copyright term" situation.
It took major politics to bring workers rights up as an issue in the 1920's. Unfortunately no polititian wants to touch the copyright and patent issues - because what both parties stand for is money. There is no major political party concerned with issues of copyrights. (Does anybody know Mr. Nader's position on copyright law?)
In this situation, the consitution is an outmoded model. Instead consider the suffering worker of the 1920's as the model - except we don't suffer physically, only intellectually.
Re:This isn't the first time...
by
seaan
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· Score: 1
Does anybody know Mr. Nader's position on copyright law? Take a look at www.cpt.org for a clue; Ralph Nader was a founder of the organization.
I hereby invoke Godwin's Law...
by
meldroc
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· Score: 1
...based solely on the name of the poster of that comment.
Next thread please.
--
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
let the free software switch begin.
by
bbk
·
· Score: 5
Although it's a huge infringment on our rights, legislation like this can only help the free software community.
If people are given a choice between software that truly belongs to them which they have full control over and being led around on a leash by corporate interests that have goals other than their own, they'll pick freedom every time. Free software will take off because it will become the only way people can get what they really want and need. Projects like KDE and Gnome are coming along to the point where switching from other OS's is an extremely viable solution.
That said, it's sad to see developments like this. When it comes down to it, it's greed and powermongering at it's worst.
BBK
Re:let the free software switch begin.
by
Sloppy
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· Score: 2
If people are given a choice between software that truly belongs to them which they have full control over and being led around on a leash by corporate interests that have goals other than their own, they'll pick freedom every time.
I wish I lived on the same planet that you do. On my homeworld, the people blindly throw away their freedom at every opportunity.
---
-- As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Re:let the free software switch begin.
by
jheinen
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· Score: 2
I disagree. Things like this only hurt free software. People, in general, don't care about the 'control' they have over software. They only care if it works and does what they want with as little hassle as possible. The only way free software will make strong inroads on the desktop is if it can do everything the proprietary stuff does as easily as the proprietary stuff does it. The problem is that corporations are hell-bent on trying to get ownership over the obvious, so if you made software that does everything as easily as the proprietary stuff, you'd probably be infringing on a number of patents and various copyrights. You couldn't give it away without facing a host of lawsuits.
Every day, I come closer and closer to believing that the only way to rectify this situation is hacktivism. I used to believe the legal pendulum would eventually swing the other direction and provide balance. I now think this may never happen as our government sinks deeper and deeper into the pockets of corporate interests. Perhaps the only way we can stop this is to make it effectively impossible for anyone to control IP. "Velevet" terrorism, where the only harm is in the corporate bottom-line might be the only way. Unlike other usurpations of the rights of the individual in the past, WE hold enormous power in this instance. The weapons with which to fight are easily obtained, unlike firearms and explosives.
-- -Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Re:dumb as a stump - yes you are
by
Lumpy
·
· Score: 1
Let's see PDF uses that damn compression protocol that isn't open(when they made pdf format there were 60 open types out there, did they use one? nooooo...) and PDF is marketed as a ONE WAY format... read only for your customers.. it was never ever marketed or intended as a document format. Postscript was. Sorry, but PS and PDF are different.. uncompress it and do a diff. you will not find much that is easily compared (other than the text)
And we can look at another factor.. unless you run linux or pay through the nose for Adobe software you cannot get the pdf distiller to create this "wondourous" format. otherwise it would be found everywhere other than the big corperate sites.
It is obvious to any thinking being that what we have witnessed in the last 100 years is an unprecedented (in all of human history!) redefinition of what it is to "own" a "creative work."
The endless extensions to the rights and protections granted to the holders of intellectual property are, especially in their most recent incarnations, nothing short of astounding. No reasonable person can defend the actions of the few, large players in the "Intellectual Property Industry" (another thing the framers never could have conceived of) in transparently prolonging the life of the Mickey Mouse franchise. The DMCA is the current pinnacle of the efforts to coopt the creative by corporate interests; a law which is, in form and function, an anathema to artists (of any dicipline) and their audience alike.
Society is not peppered with man-as-island "artists" and "authors" and "coders," who spin out delicate and frail inventions from ivory towers, desperate for protection from marauding information pirates. We are intimately dependent on one another, on our ideas, our dreams, our goals; each of us fuels the others work as citizens, as thinkers, as creators of new ideas, new art, new programs (an art in itself, certainly). The unprecedented progress we have witnessed in the last century is unquestonably operating in spite of the growing trend toward brutal protection of intellectual property, in a vacuum of both understanding and enforcement. This intellectual growth could not have happened under the culture that is being created today, and a balanced intellectual property doctrine wisely recognizes the necessity of all ideas to mature into the public domain, and ignores the natural ecology of ideas at the extreme peril of those who would live under it.
As a programmer, it is easy for me to follow the news, watch the lawsuits, and reach direct, immediate, and objective conclusions about the impact of intellectual property (especially software patents) on our discipline and the world that it serves. The peril to innovation of the current intellectual property law, and our interpretations of it regarding software, is so obvious that it has spurred a phenomenal and almost unexplainable social phenomenon: free software. But it goes way beyond software, and it's easy to infer how much real damage "overly strong" intellectual property law is doing to our economy among "solution-oriented" disciplines, and this doesn't stop short of harm to our more personal lives in "softer" industries like music, literature, etc.
We have now a very small group of capitalists who have grown very fat by exploiting, and then expanding, the weaknesses of our intellectual property laws. They will naturally stop at nothing to preserve their effortless wealth; they have no interest in creating a healthy society: their only interest is their own success. Of course, in a democracy, their absurdly small minority should be drowned out by the balance of the citizenry. Everyone's interests should be represented, to insure that no one's self-interest foils a fair government in presiding over a healthy society.
Of course, you can do ABC news polls out the wazoo, and you will find numbers that lead politicians pandering greedily to the IP interests. Most American's can't be bothered to think about these issues, even as the quality of their lives are silently eroded by the forces at work. But, for this, I can't do more than to simply quote a very smart man, who once observed:
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands... The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.
The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."
Re:Intellectual Monopolies
by
albamuth
·
· Score: 1
Indeed, the illusion that somehow something as intangible as ideas can have ownership is one of the most irrational developments of contemporary society and could have only been brought about by the most irrational Rationalist system, Capitalism.
However, more laws and more punishments to go with those laws only benefit the strength of the State (and not the corporation) in the end. In order to survive, the State must insure that a criminal class exists - someone to protect "ordinary citizens" from - because without an enemy there is no legitimacy for a Machiavellian State. It makes perfect sense that copyright violators will join the criminal ranks as the State continues the "War on Drugs" and the mostly unmentioned War on the Poor. These changes should be expected and not apprehended; the collective electronic whining of a few thousand liberals from their computer dens won't slow the inevitable corporate/statist steamroller.
I suggest some radical action. Oh, but I guess people are still afraid of that radical label, eh? So I suppose soon I'll be making micropayments for every time I turn on the radio, paying $20 per night for a DVD, and be careful not to mention what's in the secret sauce of a Big Mac for fear of a lawsuit for "reverse engineering".
I do agree with the fact that thoughts should not be capable of ownership, as thought is the substance from which reality is created. However, thoughts are surely things - every thought is a thing.
Every tangible creation you can see at one time originated in thought. One prime example of how thoughts have been misconstrued as having an "original owner" is in the situation where several people may think of an idea at the same time. If many have the same thoughts - who should determine the original thinker of the thought...
I beleive that the direction all this is going - is back to a grass roots barter system. If we want to push for a "radical" change - how bout creating material that is transferable via bartering - no money can change hands. If you want to continue to create free things - do so. If you would like payment - barter, but do not sell.
I would be more than happy to give my computer skills, martial arts teaching, advice etc.. others would be able to offer craftsmanship in other areas - such as woodworking.
Is there no reason why we have to have money as they only currency - money actually devalues all that you create - in that it takes away the inherant appreciation for your creations, as money means nothing. Your service, art, code, etc. is what matters - and only by receiving what someone else has created - or by knowing that you can give your away for free - do you appreciate and get appreciated.
If you trade - you appreciate what you get for what you give. If you receive money - there is no appreciation, just the desire to find something else to use the money for. Money, in and of itself, has no intrinsic value.
*sigh* utopia would have been so great....
p.s. what makes you so sure I am a liberal?
**Copyright me - all material contained within - even quotes from external sources is owned by me, and may not be read, replied to, sold bought or traded without the express written permission of the original creator.
Re:Intellectual Monopolies
by
DaveWood
·
· Score: 2
You're correct in many of your points. But it is important to keep in mind the wisdom of the original copyright laws as they applied to the world for which they were written. Come to think of it, going back to what we started with would be a good start (undoing the most blatant corporate tinkering at least). And then we can think about what we can do to (successfully) re-interpret the old ideas in the world we happen to live in.
We are intimately dependent on one another, on our ideas, our dreams, our goals; each of us fuels the others work as citizens, as thinkers, as creators of new ideas, new art, new programs (an art in itself, certainly). The unprecedented progress we have witnessed in the last century is unquestonably operating in spite of the growing trend toward brutal protection of intellectual property, in a vacuum of both understanding and enforcement. This intellectual growth could not have happened under the culture that is being created today, and a balanced intellectual property doctrine wisely recognizes the necessity of all ideas to mature into the public domain, and ignores the natural ecology of ideas at the extreme peril of those who would live under it.
Your argument sounds good, is in tune with what seems the prevalent view among Slashdot readers, and has clearly gone down well with the moderators, but to me seems lacking in substance.
If we are intimately dependent on one another as you say, shouldn't the things that this dependence is grounded in be the object of property rights so that we can give others the incentive to provide them even when it is not in their self interest to do so. If we don't assign these property rights, we have an externality - a positive one in this case - and externalities lead to what economists call Pareto inefficient outcomes, which means that everyone could be made better off without making anyone worse off. There are two solutions to externalities: (1) government regulation, and (2) assigning property rights and letting the market determine the outcome. Now, I hope that most people would agree that government is no competent for this task single handed. So assigning property rights seems the right thing to do.
Maybe this is what you mean by a balanced intellectual property doctrine, and all you are saying is that these property rights should not last forever. But you following attack on capitalism suggests otherwise. The capital system you are attacking need not and does not depend on infinitely lived intellectual property.
NB this is intended more as a question than an attack.
Re:Intellectual Monopolies
by
DaveWood
·
· Score: 3
Capitalism is not without its fanatical devotees, most of which would quake with fear at the realities of a truly capitalist state. Nonetheless, I do not want to make the impression that I am presenting an attack on capitalism here. Only that, as the quote suggests, we need better protections (or perhaps the right way to think about it is enhancements or catalysts) for the democratic process, in order to prevent the coopting of lawmakers by the interests of a relatively small group of wealthy individuals. As long as there are elected officials, there will be people who find it easier to lobby for unjust laws than to enrich themselves justly - and this is what has left us in the unfortunate state we are now in - one with most definitely unbalanced intellectual property legislation.
The missing piece in many of the uber-IP enthusiasts arguments is often where they got their own ideas from. Taken to its logical conclusion, what they currently propose is atrocious, and will ultimately have a chilling effect on learning, competition, and commerical and cultural development. Beyond that, I think what already we have now is seriously flawed. Coming up with better answers will be tricky, but that does not reduce the imperative. Creating massive "criminal classes" are not a particularly good way to run a society.
Re:Intellectual Monopolies
by
rodentia
·
· Score: 1
Beware the neo-platonism inherent in modern economics. "Enlightened self-interest" is as slippery a slope as "benevolent dictator."
In fact, it might be nice if the people out there creating just to make a buck would get out of the game entirely. It would minimize the amount of cultural, intellectual and material dreck we're flooded with.
Believe it or not, some of us stubborn SOB's create because we are compelled to; called to produce something true, beautiful, efficient, powerful by our lights.
Throw the marketplace of ideas out of the temple of knowledge! We don't want the invisible hand of the market, we want the goddam scientific method!
Now, I hope that most people would agree that government is no[sic] competent for this task single handed
OK, I'll agree. But then, the market isn't competent for this task single-handedly, either. That is, perhaps, the point: That at this juncture in history we have two dominant regulators on the behavior of people, the State and the Corporation. Neither of these can be trusted entirely, although neither need be evil. But both want to increase their power at the expense of the individual. At the moment, as I see it, the State is waning and the Corporations are in the ascendancy. That is the trend we must fight.
I fall back upon a tenet of American politics: Create powers in tension. Don't allow the concentration of power into any particular sector, but create a system where the power structure is divided and shiftable. It can lead to paralysis but it does not generally lead to great evil.
The threat to the liberty of individuals and the dignity of humanity comes from this: More so than ever, the State and the Corporation are allies. The one kowtows to the other, and thus the inherent tension is lost. So we have no one looking to contain corporatism. And like an unbalanced engine, the system will spin faster and faster until it destroys itself.
Re:Intellectual Monopolies
by
albamuth
·
· Score: 1
The web-site I've linked to in my user header, www.piratemotel.org is going to have a section that is essentially a barterBay, that is, a matchmaking database for bartering. Interested in contributing?
I don't recall if it has been mentioned on slashdot before, but last week, Lessig wrote an amicus curiae brief in support of the mirror site maintainers in the Cyber Patrol/CPHack case.
With the advent of personal computing and the ability of anyone to make virtually free copies of any piece of information the supply of any piece of information will always match the demand.
Amen! Digital information is a commodity, end of story. People need to understand that this is a property of the new medium which we've found: the Internet. The corporations are the people who would profit from others' (or their own) misunderstanding of this. Nobody ever profited from twisting the laws of supply and demand in the physical world, unless they turned the quick buck and dumped ship. With infinite supply, a new business model needs to be found, instead of claiming that the existing architechture is sufficient. IP touches on this especially in the software and entertainment industries--an author's work is his own, yes, but once released into the new medium, it will obey those laws, not the author's idea of what should happen.
-- Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
I don't have a lot of problems with the PDF format per se, but the Acrobat Reader is sorely lacking. For starters, the keyboard controls are counterintuitive. Try hitting page up or page down to move through a document. I do it every time, then smack myself on the forehead and say "wups, shoulda used control-3 instead!" Now click the "Makes the visible width of the current page fit inside the window" button (I kid you not, that's the tool tip) and press the keystroke combination that advances one screen at a time, not one page at a time. That's right, there is no such keystroke combination. The icons don't make a lot of sense, to me anyway. Just check out the ones which have tool tips of "Displays only the page," "Displays both bookmarks and the page," and "Displays both thumbnails and the page" on the left side of the toolbar. Try dragging the mouse over some text in the viewer to select it for pasting to your word processor or notepad. Notice how you can only select entire words? Finally, why does the readme file delivered with my version (3.01 for Windoze) come in WRITE format and not PDF?
-- never ask a question you don't want to know the answer to
Making criminals via legislation
by
revscat
·
· Score: 3
Would it really be so bad if Walt Disney, Co. lost their copyright protections to Mickey & Co? Sure, we'd start seeing Mickey pop up in all sorts of unexpected places, and Disney might suffer harm because of this. But economics is not a zero-zum game. Were Disney to be terminally damaged by this and soon thereafter be relegated to the nostalgia bin, there would be another entertainment conglomerate to rise in its place.
My point? That the "overly strong" copyright laws that exist today are actually weaking our economy. For certain, these copyright laws are benefiting the status quo: Disney, Seagrams, etc. But by putting up legislative barriers to innovation such as these, companies are protected from having to compete in the arena of ideas. Further, I have a very hard time with the idea of almost perpetual protection for cartoon characters, jingles, and pop horror films. There are always the so-called "experts" who frighten Congresscritters with their gloom-and-doom predictions were Mickey to go into the public domain. I hardly believe the world economy would crash. We'd just start seeing more Mickey, and probably in ways that Disney doesn't like. That is not a bad thing.
- Rev.
Re:Making criminals via legislation
by
whoop
·
· Score: 2
Who says anyone has a right to use another person's creation? If Walt makes up a mouse, it's his to do what he wishes, including prevent others from drawing it. When I create a program, I want to be the one that decides how it is licensed. Not you hippies who think you should be able to just because. If having more Mickeys and people doing what they want with it is not a bad thing, how can having more Linuxes be bad? Let Microsoft, Sun, etc use the Linux kernel code in their operating systems to make it better without the need to GPL their things. The whole world will then be less crash prone.
So, it doesn't matter what you wish to be free, information, software, etc. What matter is what the author wishes. Feel free to preach to folks the benefits of freeing what they create. What protects Disney, the RIAA, etc also protects us.
Re:Making criminals via legislation
by
avandesande
·
· Score: 1
walt is dead
-- love is just extroverted narcissism
Re:Making criminals via legislation
by
sqlrob
·
· Score: 1
Who says anyone has a right to use another person's creation? If Walt makes up a mouse, it's his to do what he wishes, including prevent others from drawing it.
OK, so Walt can, in person, make the complaints.
Re:Making criminals via legislation
by
MasteroftheVoxel
·
· Score: 1
Who says that anyone has the right to prevent others from using their creations? If you write a book, I sohuld be able to quote from. I should be able to parody it. And after your copyright period expires, I should be able to do what I want with the characters in it. Mickey's continually extending copyright is oppressive to the rest of the world who would like to exercise their free speech in their own way.
American law has usually sided towards the individual and his rights to use information and technology (whether it be patents or copyrights). I believe it is a balance of rights. Your right to protect your "creation" and my right to execersise my free speech and make use of your creation. Note that many don't believe that copyrights shouldn't exist at all, so don't go assuming that you have a right to own an idea whether it be a book, a character, a song, a concept, a business model etc.
I don't go this far, but think how horrible the world if everything was "copyrighted" and their was no sharing of ideas. Disney could own the concept of a friendly, no, they could own the concept of an animated character. At some point you have to find the balance. IMHO, 70+ years for a corporation to hold a copyright is a bit silly.
Re:Making criminals via legislation
by
Wah
·
· Score: 2
Who says anyone has a right to use another person's creation?
Who says I don't have a right to kill you, oh yea, we all do. Who says anyone has a right to use another person's creation? Same folks. These are our laws, we decide them, and if necessary, we can change them.
Just because you have created something, DOES NOT MEAN you have an exclusive right to control and protect it. These rights are determined by law. Unfortunately, old Walt got enough money together to change the law so nobody else can draw his mouse. Fortunately, enough people are finding out how crooked this whole situation is and are working towards solutions.
You also leave out the question of Time in your statement, this is the most skewed part of our current copyright system.
Re:Making criminals via legislation
by
Daffy+Duck
·
· Score: 2
Who says anyone has a right to use another person's creation?
Well, the writers of the Constitution of the United States of America, that's who. "Limited times" means just what it says.
If Walt makes up a mouse, it's his to do what he wishes, including prevent others from drawing it.
Yes indeed, Walt Disney can do whatever he wishes with his mouse. Oh wait, isn't he dead? How long does he have to be in the ground before he loses control of his creation?
Walt Disney was a creator of art. The Disney Corporation is not. The Disney Corporation is a tax entity that employs creators of art. It is not a legal instrument whereby Walt Disney can reach out from the grave and control the American media in perpetuity.
Except I guess congress is trying to make it that way. Thanks, guys.
Re:Making criminals via legislation
by
nyet
·
· Score: 2
A plague wipes out half the earths population. I come up with a cure. However, I don't believe you _personally_ deserve the cure. I do, however, give it out for free to everybody else.
Do I have that right?
Re:Making criminals via legislation
by
driptray
·
· Score: 1
A plague wipes out half the earths population. I come up with a cure. However, I don't believe you _personally_ deserve the cure. I do, however, give it out for free to everybody else.
Do I have that right?
If you're a drug company you do.
Hey if you want to get started on the ethics of drug companies, who do stuff like raise the price of drugs whenever a particular epidemic occurs, then/. is not really the place. But its an industry where private enterprise, laissez faire governments, and the forces of demand and supply lead to some very bad outcomes.
Kinda like the software industry, except that instead of the outcome being reduced innovation and the hegemony of Microsoft, you get a whole bunch of people dying due to a company's profit maximising price setting.
There's a difference between using PDF or PostScript as a rendering model and as a file format. As a file format, my major complaint is that it is heavily optimized for printing nicely at the expense of usability when reading it on a computer; for example page breaks, having no control over font sizes, usually being forced to have the document fill the screen to avoid horizontal scrolling. HTML is far better for online material.
-- How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Constitution still works, just being ignored.
by
kbonin
·
· Score: 1
The article is exactly correct to draw attention to the language and supporting commentary on Article I. A balance needs to exist between the producers of Intellectual Property's needs to acheive some return on their investment which allows them to produce more Intellectual Property in the future, and in exchange for this "limited" period of protection the public has the right to use this IP without restrictions upon expiration of copyright. A good law, a balanced law, and locked into the Constitution itself.
Congress does not care. Copyright law is just yet another aspect of the Constitution being illegally circumvented by crooked politicians to save the nation from crime and itself, while bending over for law enforcement and industry.
The people have no say, for the most part they are sheep who only care that they have cable television and beer. The Constitution is just a old piece of parchment to play fun legal games and reinterpret the meaning of key words and intents, of course without consulting those pesky "Fedralist Papers" that would prevent such circumvention.
Copyright law, gun control, taxes, mineral/water rights, patent protections, privacy, state vs. federal powers. The entire bill of rights has been augmented with tens of thousands of laws and 'findings' expanding federal control all over areas deemed sancrosanct in that pesky old Constitution.
It will get far worse before it gets any better.
Tangible medium of expression
by
Hard_Code
·
· Score: 2
Would the words "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" rule out the net in the first place? A stream of electrons isn't exactly "tangible". And the data isn't tied to any particular storage medium (I can store an MP3 by etching it in a rock if I want...will they then outlaw copying of rocks?).
Re:Tangible medium of expression
by
coyote-san
·
· Score: 2
In this case, the tangible media is the hard disk and - arguably - the RAM used by the web server and browser, the OS file caches, etc.
The key idea behind "tangible" is that it's sufficiently permanent for someone to disprove a claim of infringement. Or as I like to reword it, it's tangible enough that you can prove the Vice President really did say what Jay Leno was mocking him for saying. One minicassette recorder can disprove a roomful of eyewitnesses.
-- For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Hey-shouldn't we be flaming you for voicing a valid argument that isn't popular? Capitalism...it has struck me that there's no fighting capitalism at this point. It's more of a law of nature in our society. But it's clear that our legislators have very little interest in protecting consumers or extending their rights. But there's a very good reason for that. They know that the government in which they are involvded is painfully dated. They know that it's going to be consumers that end their rule, when they realize that every dollar they spend is a vote, and it's become a more important vote than the one they make in the polls. The real problem, if there is one, is that the public doesn't realize that they are the ones paying the bills for these huge companies. They may be big, but there's no company and no industry that can stand if they're publicly unpopular. That's why they're so eager to control the media. Informed consumers are the enemy of the status quo. That's why I wince every time I go into a CompUSA, or Best Buy and I see the help treating a customer as a mark. If you want to make political change happen, make it happen with your wallet. Forget the ballot-that vote has been sold long ago.
More than anyone, that would be the French. However, none of the Allied nations is clear of responsibility in regards to the excessive punishment of Germany after WWI. But that doesn't absolve Germany for WWII either. There was a lot of poverty all over during the Great Depression.
-- --
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.
Lessig is right about Thomas Jefferson
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4
Thomas Jefferson on Intellectual Property:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
It sounds to me a lot like what RMS has been saying all along.
Re:Lessig is right about Thomas Jefferson
by
istartedi
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· Score: 2
Of course you have to draw the distinction between an idea and an implementation of an idea. For example, Z-buffering and BSPing are ideas. The source code for Quake-3 Arena is not an "idea" in the traditional sense.
Now, Jefferson's notion that protection of intellectual property should be based on public benefit does bear a strong resemblance to the anti-premise expressed in Stallman's "Why Software Should Be Free" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html, "The Question of Premises") but notice that Jefferson does not draw the conclusion that patents and/or protections should never be granted.
I don't necessarily disagree with Stallman's premise--only the conclusions he draws from it. I fear that if we don't learn from history, in particular the history of socialism, we will be condemned to repeat it.
The regular.sig season will resume in the fall. Here are some re-runs:
-- For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Re:Lessig is right about Thomas Jefferson
by
Tim_the_minstrel
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· Score: 1
istartedi wrote:
Of course you have to draw the distinction between an idea and an implementation of an idea. For example, Z-buffering and BSPing are ideas. The source code for Quake-3 Arena is not an "idea" in the traditional sense.
Jefferson's use of the word "idea" in his letter to Isaac McPherson is not intended to refer the technical terminology of modern copyright law, in which "ideas" are distinguished from "expression". His context is patent law. By "idea" he means what lawyers call "the subject matter of patent". Transferring his abstract principle into the realm of copyright law causes causes the reference to "ideas" to be mapped into a reference to "expression". It is a mistake for us to try to evade the implications of Jefferson's principle for copyright by hiding behind his use of the word "idea".
--
I prefer anarchy, but only under a strong & wise anarch
Prevention is the problem, not a solution.
by
Rift
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· Score: 3
I know this is a bit offtopic (and applies to the US) , but My problem with the DMCA is not how much it gives the copyright holder, nor what it takes from the consumer.
I hate what it takes from the thief.
See, it has measures that seek to take away the ability to steal, not just to make it illegal. They say the encryption is illegal to break, and it's illegal to show others how to break it. Next, having a debugger will be illegal because it gives us the abity to figure out the encryption and so break it. (okay maybe an exageration) This is bad. Now, don't take me wrong here, I don't want to live in a crime ridden world. But there is a reason that we have a right to a jury of our peers.. That reason is that only people like us can judge us guilty of a crime. Even people who have admittedly killed other people have been let free, judged to have extenuating circumstance, or other reason to do so. Ever hear of self defence?
So If the ability to kill is taken from me, what do I do when a person who has figured out how to retain that ability triess to kill me? Die, I guess.
No, I don't think that people should or could pirate DVDs for self defence. No, I don't think that copying DVDs is tantamount to murder. I simply think that you can make it illegal for me to do something, and punish me for doing it, but you should NOT be able to take away my ability to do so.
See, a all-encompasing law can not pertain to every case. A body of peers will help to keep the law applied fairly (well, it should, but let's assume it does for now). So let me keep my ability to steal. Just punish me for doing so after the fact, okay?
Murder is illegal, but a kitchen knife is not. Copying DVDs is illegal, but the decryption software is not... oops. At least I can tell others where to get the decryption software... right?
Btw: what happens when thinking about circumventing copy protection is outlawed, and circumventing the 'anti-Bad Thought device' is illegal? Should our ability to think bad things go too? Don't laugh, 600 years ago the idea of sending a message instantly to the other side of the planet would have gotten you laughed at or killed.... there was no other side of the planet, let alone the message part. Yet here I am, doing it.
Like sqlrob asked, please post a reference we can use in getting this through to folks.. This is the kind of awkward question that should be asked by our representatives when the debate comes around again if not before - and if they dont ask it, then we should be asking THEM why not when they come up for re-election! Corporations and PACs can buy publicity and spin, they cant buy our votes - the only way to ensure a politician represents us is to convince them that to do otherwise would be political suicide.... # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Indeed not, since binary code is simply a stream of numbers and numbers cannot be copyrighted. In fact, this goes much further... Anything represented on a digital computer is simply a binary number. Sure, the number is huge but it's just a number. (In fact, it's just an integer.) And numbers cannot be patented or copyrighted as they already exist in the public domain.
OK, I understand that when I take this particular sequence of numbers and feed it as input to a particular decoding program, out comes the latest Brittany Spears or whatever. So what? If I take it and feed it to Word, out comes a file of text. (It's gibberish. But then again, a lot of what is produced with Word is gibberish.)
It's not at all hard to imagine a program that takes an MP3 file and produces a pretty picture... maybe a histogram or something. At that point, can you argue that the MP3 is uniquely a representation of the Brittany Spears song? Maybe I want it for some other purpose. Do I really believe that digitizations has completely undermined the entire basis of intellectual "property"? Actually, yes, but I don't expect the system to fall. This nagging inconsistency at its root might, however, force a rationalization sometime soon, wherein the social contract is reviewed and amended in the full light of day rather than (metaphorically) hidden in the cover of darkness.
OK, I understand that when I take this particular sequence of numbers and feed it as input to a particular decoding program, out comes the latest Brittany Spears or whatever. So what? If I take it and feed it to Word, out comes a file of text. (It's gibberish. But then again, a lot of what is produced with Word is gibberish.)
If you feed it to a music decoding program, and out comes Brittany Spears, isn't that gibberish too?:-)
-- Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Re:My radical philosophy
by
carlos_benj
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· Score: 2
"....since binary code is simply a stream of numbers and numbers cannot be copyrighted. In fact, this goes much further... Anything represented on a digital computer is simply a binary number. Sure, the number is huge but it's just a number. (In fact, it's just an integer.) And numbers cannot be patented or copyrighted as they already exist in the public domain."
Aren't all (english) words, and therefore all texts, simply an arrangement of 26 letters that are in the public domain? You can break down anything to the component level, molecular level or whatever, but that doesn't nullify copyright or patent protection any more than murder can be justified by refering to your victim as a construct of component elements.
carlos
--
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Aren't all (english) words, and therefore all texts, simply an arrangement of 26 letters that are in the public domain?
Yes, they are. That is a far different thing than ssaying that any given word is a letter.
Also blockquoth the poster:
You can break down anything to the component level, molecular level or whatever
I am not saying that, say, the Brittany Spears MP3 is "made up of" numbers. I am saying that, in a very real sense, that MP3 is a number. By allowing a record company to enforce a copyright on that number, you remove it from the legitimate realm of work -- perhaps thereby preventing the creation of a beautiful image whose binary expression happens to be the same number.
Indeed, each ASCII letter is a binary number (isn't "A" 0100 0001?). So if I create an MP3 which happens to have the binary representation 0100 0001, I can copyright it and you can't have any file that consists solely of the letter "A". Indeed, I can quickly write a script that generates streams of bits of arbitrary depth and thereby "pre-copyright" all songs. OK, it'd take a bit of time and oo-gobs of storage, but then, not exponentially more than storing the MP3s themselves.
So, under current law, I apparently can own all digital information. Neat.
1) Not everyone who questions the current state of patents, copyrights, and IP, is out to steal such. Saying "what a minute, is this a good idea" does not make one a criminal.
2) Current copyright laws are not necessarily what the US founders had in mind. And then he goes on to show why I thinks that way.
The US patent system, and the UK's as well, was explicitly set up to spread learning in the population. The Statute of Anne in 1710, which gave the rights to works to the authors as opposied to the printers-publishers, has the title 'an act for the encouragement of learning . ..'. It took until 1774 for the House of Lords to fight off the publishers' fighting of the Statute and to "affirm the public domain created by the 1710 statute by denying common law claims to the perpetual protection of intellectual property"
Before the late 1500s there wasn't much of anything like IP. There were some granted patents, which tended to run for 5 years or less. The response of IP holders to easier copying has been to push the period of ownership out further and further, which doesn't really address the problem of copying IP. Of course, neither does running around trading files and shouting "Music should be free".
Some of the push for longer term IP came from Europe, where establish wealthy families and companies wanted to maintain control longer. The result has been that the the longer terms have spread to the US, where control of IP has left the actual creators and ended up in the hands of large organizations. It's worth the trouble of getting copyright to go for life+70, if it means that the company that actually controls the IP can now make money off of it for 100+years. Corporations can live "forever", people don't.
Copyright, Copyleft, and Copywrong
by
Proteus578
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· Score: 1
while to an extent i agree that copyright laws in this country are stronger than necessary, many/. ers seem to be of the opinion that these laws are basically the equivalent of pure evil. i realize that, in making my next statement, i am also failing to provide the "plan" that i'd like to see suggested, but: if i am going to be inundated with discussion about copyright law (on either side of the argument) i would at least like to hear some constructive ideas about how to make our present situation better...criticism of the establishment's current system is valuable and productive, to a point, then it becomes annoying and perhaps even childish.
Isn't it funny though that moderators thought the troll was interesting?
[[[A NOTE TO EVERYONE IN THIS HUGE THREAD]]]
by
Adolf_Hitler
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· Score: 1
I appreciate that you were willing to discuss my ideas instead of narrowly dismissing them (most of you, at least). It shows that there are some independant/critical thinkers out there, which shows some hope for the human race.:)
A.H.
"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things."
There was a lot of poverty all over during the Great Depression
Of course, if the bloody Weimar Republic didn't make themselves impotent, then Adolf Hitler wouldn't've had the power to do what he did. A bloodless coup d' etat is still that: an overthrow of an exisiting government.
Re:55 years (Unconstitutional?)
by
djKing
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· Score: 1
As copy rights have grown longer than the average life span (the article gices examples of 144 years in some cases.)
Could a constitutional chalenge be mounted based on the fact that current copy right terms don't meet the stated intent of "limited times". Can "limited times." last longer than living memory?
I don't know about the politics of American constitutional law, but "reasonableness" is often sighted in Candian Supreme court rulings.
Acrobat's "page" metaphor is obnoxious when you are using a computer, which has no concept of such silly things. PDF basically sucks unless you print it. Higher resolutions are not always the solution -- even at 1280x1024 on a 19" monitor, some PDF's are inaccessible. MHTML strikes a better balance than PDF, because it's just HTML with embedded graphics (OK, all the files are just gzipped together), so it renders nicely on screen, and generally comes out quite nice when printed. There are already HTML facilities for font embedding, so it's just a question of getting support for it in your browser. This is the same format that HTML mail uses, so you probably have an application that can handle it already. There are no excuses for PDF. The reason it exists is that marketing/advertising departments are slaves to Adobe, much more so than IT departments are to Microsoft.
NO nononononononooooooooooo
by
furiousgeorge
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· Score: 1
>Now, if the word processor manufacturers would >get off their butts and let the software >read/write Postscript... this would be a true >cross-platform, program indipendant,
GAK! Um no, this is a BadIdea(tm).
To review, Postscript is a NP complete language. That is - it isn't just a document description language (e.g. PDF) it's a full FREAKING language.
E.g. a document can also be a virus. And this isn't like the whole Outlook mess, where a virus script is passed around. Thedocument itself (or a piece of clipart, etc etc) would be the virus.
There is a reason why NeXT machines had a setting for 'Display EPS Securely', and the same reason that Apple has ditched PS for PDF.
Re:NO nononononononooooooooooo
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
To review, Postscript is a NP complete language.
What does Natalie Portman have to do with this?
Re:NO nononononononooooooooooo
by
gavinhall
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· Score: 2
Posted by 11223:
Just to nitpick, I think you meant Turing complete. Waitaminit - you mean that's the reason PostScript is so slow - it's NP complete, and each possible display of the document has to be enumerated individually? Now I get it!
Re:NO nononononononooooooooooo
by
furiousgeorge
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· Score: 1
>>you mean that's the reason PostScript is so slow
Yeah. they have to make sure it halts.
(doh! - yes, my mistake. Not enough coffee today).
Re:NO nononononononooooooooooo
by
Refrag
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· Score: 1
Re:NO nononononononooooooooooo
by
gavinhall
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· Score: 1
Posted by 11223:
(This is off the top of my head): There is not yet a polynomial order time solution to solve a class NP problem. The class NP-Complete is a set of problems that have been proven to be mathematically equivalent to each other (any algorithm that solves one in polynomial order time solves them all in polynomial order time). So far, the only solution to these problems is to enumerate every possible solution and then check for the correct one (like the travelling salseperson problem - you must enumerate every possible path and then choose the one with the lowest distance travelled.) That's also why there's such an interest in quantum computing (because they can enumerate all of those possible solutions at once!)
"The text is available on my Web site, Mr. Warnock. In a PDF file.
Adobe Systems has sued Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig for violating the Digital Copyright Act (UCITA). Press reporters quote Adobe Chariman John Warnock saying,"Just because some commie pinko teaches at Harvard doesn't mean he can go around violating the lawful agreement he entered into by using our product." Questioned further in the incedent Mr Warnock further explained that the Harvard Professor had maligned Adobe Systems and Himself in an online editorial. When asked about UCITA violating Mr Lessig's free speech rights Warnock replied, "This ain't about free speech. Its about responsible speech and following the law."
Mr. Lessig couldn't immediaetly be reached for comment, but one of his students reported his comments when the he was served a Court Summons during a class. The student though he heard the professor mutter, "What, the truck?" but he wan't certain.
Briefly, Lawrence Lessig argues that the Clinton administration's regulatory inaction during AT&T's acquisition of MediaOne will have dire consequences for the future of the Net. Among them:
1) "Customers accessing the Internet through cable will have no guaranteed choice of ISPs. Instead, the cable company will pick the ISP. Rather than allow consumer choice among scores of providers offering broadband Internet service, the cable company will permit just a few ISPs of its own selection."
2) "... cable companies [will] design the next generation of the Internet on the model of the old telephone system--in which the network owner, by dint of choosing the ISP, gets to control the kind of content and use the network will allow. "
We're not living in a capitalist society. We're living in a consumerist society.
Back when capitalism was first concieved as an economic system, it was stipulated that the market would be driven by informed consumers, who would vote with their money for the best product at the best price and everything would click along nicely. What we have now is uninformed consumers blindly plopping down their money for shoddy goods that they really don't need. You're absolutely right in your analysis otherwise though. --Fesh
-- --Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Re:55 years (Unconstitutional?)
by
SedentaryZ
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· Score: 1
I almost hate to post this since I don't remember where I read this (other than to say it was by following links from a/. article:) but I believe a case came before the Supreme Court several years ago where this was addressed. I was browsing through the Court's opinion statement and it seemed to say that it was completely up to Congress to decide upon an acceptable definition of 'limited times'. What I found even more troubling was the court letting the retroactive copyright extension slide by as well.
I really wish I could remember where I read this so I could point at it. Maybe it's time for me to wander back through some of the IP/copyright articles in the/. archives.
The reason it exists is that marketing/advertising departments are slaves to Adobe, much more so than IT departments are to Microsoft.
I'd disagree. While most graphic designers (who do the design work for marketing/advertising) are dependent on Adobe tools (and Macs), the reason they go with PDF format is that they can control *exactly* what you see, nothing else gives them that control. Of course, PDF is less usable for the consumer, but marketeers value control more than they value what the consumer really wants...
--
.sig generation error:468(3)
Yes, his other ball was eaten off by a goat...
by
cyberdonny
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· Score: 1
...when he tried to urinate in its mouth, as a stoopid schoolboy's wager.
While I understand what you're trying to say, and I sympathise with your position, the elemental root of the problem is the association between "software" and "product".
Software isn't a manufacturing industry, it's a service industry. Programmers are more akin to mechanics than to assembly line workers.
Doesn't it seem odd to you to attempt to sell anything that costs nothing to duplicate, is easily duplicated, and easily distributed once duplicated? It's as flawed an idea as, say, basing one's national currency on blank white 8.5x11 inch paper.
Or in other words "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well, then don't do that!"
Of course, the common complaint against this idea is "I'm a programmer! How do I feed my kids if I can't sell software?" And the answer is - most programmers don't work in the for-sale software industry as it sits today! The vast majority are employed by banks, hospitals, manufacturing companies, and so on as in-house problem solvers. The for-sale software provider is (statistically speaking) a minor player, and a bit of an abberation.
If you are a for-sale software programmer, and you are losing sales to "pirates" (I actually prefer the term "librarians" myself) well, it's YOU who are shoveling your money out the door. Why do that?
Re:The problem is the "product"
by
Boulder+Geek
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· Score: 1
Of course, the common complaint against this idea is "I'm a programmer! How do I feed my kids if I can't sell software?" And the answer is - most programmers don't work in the for-sale software industry as it sits today! The vast majority are employed by banks, hospitals, manufacturing companies, and so on as in-house problem solvers. The for-sale software provider is (statistically speaking) a minor player, and a bit of an abberation.
I've been a programmer for about 15 years, and I've never met an in-house programmer. I have, however, met, and worked for, people and companies who sell software to hospitals, banks, etc... The fact is that companies by and large do not want to be in the software development business. Most would rather let someone else deal with developing and maintaining software, so that they can concentrate their efforts on the things that they do best.
-- A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Re:The problem is the "product"
by
jms
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· Score: 3
I've been a programmer for about 15 years, and I've never met an in-house programmer. I have, however, met, and worked for, people and companies who sell software to hospitals, banks, etc...
It all depends on what businesses you deal with and what sort of computers they use. The job description is usually "systems programmer" or "systems analyst", and these are usually mainframe programming jobs.
This job is only possible because most of the big mainframe packages are distributed as source code, and companies that use them need to customize them. It is difficult to install and maintain an MVS system without having someone on staff who understands IBM assembly language and can do some simple programming. These programming systems typically have hooks in them called "exits" that you need to write short assembly routines for. Most systems programmers spend their time making little customizations or tweaks to large, vendor supplied source-code based systems, not writing big applications.
Look in the technology want ads for the keyword "BAL", which means, "Basic Assembly Language", i.e. IBM 370 assembler. Also, MVS, CICS, and VM. Those are the main in-house programming jobs, and they are always in demand. Even more so, now that most universities don't teach mainframe programming anymore.
Most would rather let someone else deal with developing and maintaining software, so that they can concentrate their efforts on the things that they do best.
The cost of having a software vendor make and maintain custom modifications to their product for your company will generally exceed the salary of a good systems programmer. Remember, we are usually talking small changes, not wholesale development, although some well-established companies develop their own software systems. The advantage to having an in-house programmer is that they can do something this week that would take months of negotiations with the vendor to get done. Also, the in-house programmer is the go-to person when disks crash, software crashes, etc. A systems programmer can rip through a huge core dump, find the symptoms, get on the phone with IBM, and have a five line source code patch downloaded and installed in an hour that fixes that specific bug without touching anything else.
Companies that buy pre-packaged, object-code-only operating systems and software packages don't need systems programmers, because they have no source code to customize. They also have no choice but to install big service packages, if they even have that option, that often introduce more new bugs then they fix. They are at the complete mercy of their software vendors.
Kuro5hin.org is now having a discussion on the death of copyright, started because of a discussion on the Freenet mailing list. What if Freenet really took off and copyright became unenforcable? What would happen to artists?
Re:the death of copyright...
by
rodentia
·
· Score: 1
Gosh, your right, prior to the development of mercantile capitalism and the elaboration of english common law vis intellectual property, ART DIDN'T EXIST!!
If we've learned one thing from reading JonKatz, its this:
You can't generalize what the framers of the Constitution believed 200+ years ago to how we should interpret it today!
Remember, Jefferson believed that the US would remain a nation of independent farmers. He didn't believe in foreign policy or the advancement of technology and never saw industrialization on the horizon. He also believed in an extremely strict interpretation of the constitution. Something that went out the window, say, less that 10 years after it was written! He was extremely short-sighted - but not wrong - its just the US evolved into the complete opposite of what he expected.
Thus, why are we looking to the dead white male framers of the constitution as a guide to how we should behave today? So the framers never intended strong IP law? They also acknowledged the existence of slavery, and prohibited women to vote. It was a very different era...
Most of lessig's argument is bullshit. What ole TJ said 200+ years ago has no bearing on whats going on today. I hate to appear to bash the Constitution like this, but the reality is that the Constitution today is not used at all like it was originally intended (especially by TJ).
Re:A Word on Thomas Jefferson
by
SoupIsGood+Food
·
· Score: 2
The civilization that we have today, and the long march toward freedom and justice that began in Philedelphia by "white farmers" more than 200 years ago, was created beacuse of, not in spite of, the constituition.
Our darkest days have occurred when we turn our back on the careful balance of freedom and responsibility embodied in the Constituition for expediency.
President Jackson decided that the Constituition was in the way of modern politics, and said "The Supreme Justice has made his decision, now let's see him enforce it." He then marched the Cherokee off to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.
I hate to see lawyers decide how technology should work. Especially with regards to software.
The comment about things like PDF readers being integrated into the OS shows how misguided he is. Anyone who has done any work on OS's knows that that kind of functionality does not belong in an modern OS (despite what MS would say - IE, hint hint).
Its fine that he doesn't understand this - he's a lawyer, not a computer scientist. But he does have a lot to say (and some power) in the technology world, which, frankly, frightens me. Its politicians and lawyers that allow us to end with such wonderful pieces of legislation as the DMCA.
Mr J. Smith was quoted as saying, "Gosh, yessir, I did build the frame for the constitution, but I sure didn't think it was such a big deal, just a simple wooden frame with a little string to hang it on a wall... now I find everyone talking about The Framer like I wrote the thing..."
Re:Lawrence Lessig == smart
by
Phroggy
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· Score: 1
Yeah, but I agree with him too, so it's OK.
--
-- $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$]; $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Re:55 years (Unconstitutional?)
by
Royster
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· Score: 4
That was a district court decision in Eldred v. Reno. It is scheduled for hearings in from of the circuit court of appeals in July. There is more information on the OpenLaw site.
-- I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Anything represented on a digital computer is simply a binary number.
Evidently you have never taken a course in computer science.
Computers store configurations of electrons. These configurations correspond to 'on' and 'off' states. That is all. If you wish to interpret that as a binary number, that is your interpretation. A computer has no concept of 'number'. If you choose to interpret as text, you can do that too. Or you can even interpret the on/off states as a Britney Spears mp3.
IANAL, but I know copyright does not only apply to text. It applies to any form of recorded human expression. And those on/off states are certainly human expression.
Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is
It [copyright] applies to any form of recorded human expression.
Not so. While copyright applies to more than text, it does not apply to all forms of recorded expression. Heck, there is text (like trade secrets) to which it doesn't apply. Another form of recorded expression to which it doesn't apply is mathematics and science -- you can't copyright Snell's Law. Nor can you copyright the number 3. Or, for that matter, the number 20 495 860 385 076 968 840 495 689 039 673 068 305 847 658 573 857 395 738 957 935 476 039 750 385 038 503 934 (base ten).
How can you possibly blame M$? You should have received drivers with your h/w. Why should they be expected to supply drivers for 3rd party h/w? If I purchase a musical horn for my car, the vehicle manufacturer sure as hell isn't responsible for making sure the horn's mounting brackets are up to standard and wiring interfaces properly.
My GeForce, Modem, NIC, burner, CDROM and Monitor all came with their own drivers FROM THE MANUFACTURER. Are you saying M$ should have supplied those too?
Anyway you have the patches for 95 to have USB support so use 'em. If that isn't "viable" perhaps you should look at another O/S...Hmm..how about Linux? It seems to be the fav. of M$ bashing Zealots. USB for Linux
Perhaps you can purchase some common sense with the "auto +3 for bashing M$" karma. Just because a product doesn't have exactly what you want doesn't mean they are using copyright to control you. If that were the case, any s/w you pay for to get an upgrade or added feature would be immoral in your world.
--Clay
Re:M$ bashing karma whore
by
Chakotay
·
· Score: 1
My GeForce, Modem, NIC, burner, CDROM and Monitor all came with their own drivers FROM THE MANUFACTURER. Are you saying M$ should have supplied those too?
But did they come with drivers for MacOS, BeOS, Linux, Solaris, UNIX, AtheOS, OS/2, The HURD, BSD and what have you more? Why are you exempting only Microsoft from their obligation to write device drivers, and not all other operating system creators?
Applications run on the operating system, thus they should adapt to the operating system. Similarly, the operating system runs on the hardware, and should thus adapt itself to the hardware <i>by providing drivers</i> for that hardware. Many manufacturers make and deliver their own drivers for Microsoft Windows, because that is the most often used operating system, and because other hardware manufacturers do it to, so if they don't, they'll lose their market ground. But in essence, the burdain of writing device drivers is <i>not</i> with the hardware manufacturers.
)O( the Gods have a sense of humour,
--
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
Re:M$ bashing karma whore
by
CodeMunch
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· Score: 1
Forget the OS period. I didn't exempt M$ from anything their product was designed to do. The drivers for each of those O/S's should be supplied by the creator of the product (h/w)...or do you want M$ to be creating drivers for MacOS etc... as well? (God...that'd be a stable system...)
If you want to install additional devices, the drivers should be distributed with the H/W. It is the h/w manufacturer's responsiblity to provide a working interface to a current system for the their product. A TON of h/w is designed and manufactured AFTER the O/S is distributed.
Put another way, If you make a hack device for yer pc, it isn't M$'s job to make drivers for the o/s to interface with it. It is up to you.
If Nortel makes a new phone it is their responsibility to create an interface that works with the current phone system. It isn't the current phone company's place to go around creating drivers for every 3rd party that crops up.
How can you possibly justify it isn't the responsibility of the manufacturer to provide an interface for their product?
--Clay
haha government run software?
by
ArchieBunker
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· Score: 1
By the time you submit the code it will horribly obselete.
-- Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Re:haha government run software?
by
synaptic-impulse
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· Score: 1
By the time you submit the code it is just horrible.
What about right and wrong?
by
Somnus
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· Score: 2
Lessig's article is about the pragmatic motivations for IP policy; the reader posts are volleying on the same foundation. What about basic property rights? If I create an IP product, be it a song, program or article, should I not have full property rights? Why should this basic right be abrogated in the case of corporations?
The Constitution is a fabulous piece of work, but the artificial provision for patents is incongruous and infuriating. Instead of contextualizing IP as a human right (like press, speech, religion, etc.), the Framers prop it up using "promotion of progress." This is clearly a collectivist argument. What we need is a dialogue about the precise nature of property rights; the policy details would be easy to codify thereafter.
Perhaps, the Slashdot community cares about rights as long as they apply to the masses -- how sad.
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring epicurean ***
Re:What about right and wrong?
by
sqlrob
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· Score: 1
Lessig's article is about the pragmatic motivations for IP policy; the reader posts are volleying on the same foundation. What about basic property rights? If I create an IP product, be it a song, program or article, should I not have full property rights? Why should this basic right be abrogated in the case of corporations?
Because it needs to be, or the copyright term needs to be redetermined. Currently, it is X years after the creator's death. It is entirely possible that a corporation will not die.
Image if when you brought a peice of property in your town, that you continued to own it even after you died and nobody could use it. The United States would become a vacant gost town. IP ownership is the same. There are millions of scientific research articles in musty libraries and nobody is allowed to put them in a database, except for a few of the largest ones(which you have to pay for). Why? Because these journals 'own' the articles, and it is not economically viable for them to digitize them, and this information just fades away....
the big problem there is that the the government already blew that out the window by allowing CORPORATIONS to exist at all!
that french term, coined by Joseph Smith, means LEAVE ALONE.
as you say, the government leaves business alone, and that *should* work.
but by allowing HUGE MONSTROSITIES to behave as INDIVIDUALS, we've created a NIGHTMARE!
"capitalism" isn't the problem, as capitalism DOES NOT EQUAL "corporatism."
what i'm trying to say is that corporations are unnaturally created and fostered by "business law" and that corporatism FLIES IN THE FACE of the laisez faire concept.
but by allowing HUGE MONSTROSITIES to behave as INDIVIDUALS, we've created a NIGHTMARE!
Except that US corporations are not treated in the same way as people. Whilst they have at least the same ability to hold property (in some cases greater) they are also exempt from most criminal law. That they cannot vote in (infrequent) elections dosn't really make much difference in practice.
That they cannot vote in (infrequent) elections dosn't really make much difference in practice.
Especially since they don't really need to vote. The corporation itself can contribute to campaigns, often in much larger amounts than individuals can, in order to influence the outcome.
-- It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
On what basis do you claim that corporations are "exempt from most criminal law"? There is an entire section of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines that addresses sentencing of corporations and other institutional defendants under the federal criminal code. Nor am I aware that any state exempts corporations from its criminal laws.
On what basis do you claim that corporations are "exempt from most criminal law"? There is an entire section of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines that addresses sentencing of corporations and other institutional defendants under the federal criminal code.
There does not appear to be anything here equivalent to "jail". Either as a sentance or for a defendant awaiting trial. If a person had to appeal their sentance they are likely to be in jail until the hearing, yet for Microsoft it's "business as usual" even after being found guilty.
is when slashdot equates your name to 'smart'. What an ego trip that must be:)
Re:55 years (Unconstitutional!)
by
Dr.+Manhattan
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· Score: 2
What's more, this was made retroactive to all current copyrights in October of 1998.
Which is unconstitutional. Article 1, Section 9. No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Well, it should be. The Supreme Court stupidly held that that only applied to criminal law, not civil law, back in 1789. Schmucks. The Sonny Bono act would have been unconstitutional. And, frankly, should still be. See here.
I rambled a bit there but the point I'm trying to make is that we may be a bit f*cked up at the moment, but I believe we'd do better fixing what we've got than trying to switch over to a socialist/facist/whatever system.
It's not an all-or-nothing deal though. We already have socialist aspects integrated...like socialized health care and education and some socialized, or at least heaviliy regulated and hand-picked, industry. We don't have to "switch over". We *can* fix what we've got by introducing some common sense reform...instead of having knee-jerk reactions that imaginary "socialism" and "communism" will turn our country into some fascist tyrannical police state. It's all so tired and stupid.
...that anarchists write FAQ's to guide each other? ...that they form required participatory committees?
Sure sounds like organized government to me.
Re:Isn't it interesting...
by
rodentia
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· Score: 1
Don't confuse anarchy with chaos. Break it down: an - particle meaning not or the absence of; arche - primacy, power, sovereignty; also, empire, magistracy, authorities, command (of a body of troops). The point is to eliminate the hierarchy which was formerly required to organize the efforts of large groups of humans into effective units. The need for such organizational entities grows dramatically smaller with each passing day.
It is not the absence of direction, it is the organization of mankind in the smallest possible groups. In this light, a goodly proportion of the structures of social culture as we know it are complicit and must be reified.
The free software movement as described by ESR is an excellent example of functional anarchy: the smallest possible functional units; self-organizing to achieve a common goal; dissolving and reforming based on the needs of the participants. ESR hasn't even begun to imagine the implications of this new social model.
-- illegitimii non ingravare
Re:Isn't it interesting...
by
MaximumBob
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· Score: 2
Sadly, I've never been able to argue with anarchists. They've got a compelling vision of the way things should be. However, it's quite possible that things like ESR are the only valid applications of this sort of social model. It's very tough to say whether or not it would work in real life.
And while anarchism, as it's presented by its proponents, sounds very attractive, what it comes down to is that trying it has this huge risk, since it may very well not work. I'm not dissatisfied enough with the current system to try and find out.
Re:Isn't it interesting...
by
MaximumBob
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· Score: 2
work: succeed, survive.
Ok, you do that. But if it brings about the collapse of society, and increased poverty and famine, understand that I'm coming after you with a gun.
Not you personally, but you know what I mean.
Re:Isn't it interesting...
by
MaximumBob
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· Score: 2
The anarchism FAQ was written by people who believe this would work. Of course their "what would an anarchist society look like" doesn't say, "Oh, hey, yeah, there's a SLIGHT risk that we're very wrong about human nature."
But I think that if you believe, without reservation, that people are completely capable of working without hierarchies, I think you need to slow down. I'm not saying hierarchies are necessary. I'm saying that anarchism contains a lot of risks, as I see it, and I'm not willing to implement it to see if I'm right or wrong.
Re:Isn't it interesting...
by
rodentia
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· Score: 1
...tough to say whether or not it would work in real life.
Software development is real life, Bob; it's how I feed my baby. The heuristics of the coordination and direction of group effort has a broad theoretical foundation and has been generalized with some success. The OSS/FSM is a new model which happens to implement the dusty, 200 year-old interface known as anarchy.
-- illegitimii non ingravare
Re:The REAL problem...
by
blackwizard
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· Score: 2
If you really want to get technical, you could argue that it's capitalism that actually sparks the greed in the first place -- so now we've gone full circle, and it's capitalism's fault again.
I'm not very good at explaining the whole deal, but there is a good (huge) FAQ at:
It's been awhile since I was forced to read any socialist propaganda, but one semester in college, I was subjected to quite a bit of it. Just goes to show, that you gotta check your profs out before you decide that that section of the class fits into your schedule best.
((rant mode on)those F-ing required HU/SS electives... BOREING!!! who assigns "required electives" anyway, what an oxymoron. The least they could have done if I HAD to take non-CS classes is let me take PS chemistry or physics electives. But NOOOOO You *HAVE* to put up with that humanities/social science (heh "social science" there's another oxymoron) crap. sigh... no wonder our educational system is going down the toilet. At least *I* got my BSCS while it still is a *CS* degree and means something. ok well, (rant mode off))
But one of the primiary tenants of the socialist philosophy, as I recall, is the establishment of the socialist state by means of a violent overthrow of democratic society. And subsequently any private property WOULD be siezed by the government and redistributed as it saw fit. "The socialist manifesto", or something it was called. Supposedly, it was written by the guy who invented socialism in the first place.
Hardly sounded like "never dreaming of taking away private property or outlawing democratic elections" when I had to sit through it. Oh, and was this professor EVER a socialist. He went out of his way to make it sound like a "workers paradise" or some nonsence like that. God that class was torture.
> ((rant mode on)those F-ing required HU/SS > electives... BOREING!!! who assigns "required > electives" anyway, what an oxymoron. The least
Their intention is a good one; to create a well rounded, well informed individual. Whether or not this is effective is an entirely different story.
> they could have done if I HAD to take non-CS > classes is let me take PS chemistry > or physics electives. But NOOOOO You *HAVE* to > put up with that humanities/social science (heh > "social science" there's another oxymoron) crap.
Believe it or not, there's more to actually living than algorithms. As for "social sciences", they're no more an oxymoron than any other sort of science. Certainly there's a lack of percision to the analysis and prediction of psychological or economic events, but that says more for our ignorance, than there being no "science" to social issues. We must keep in mind that there was a time where biology involved crude practices, but it's certainly improved over the years. So while I too sometimes smirk when I see some individuals claim to be scientists in one or another social study, I hold the belief that someday there'll be a more informed and reliable system.
> sigh... no wonder our educational system is > going down the toilet. > At least *I* got my BSCS while it still is a > *CS* degree and means something. ok well, (rant > mode off))
What it is worth is up to debate. I think that not recognizing the "Communist Manifesto", and not knowing of Marx's works shows that your educational process did indeed fail you, somewhere. But really this is only the opinion of someone that appreciates all sciences, and not just Physics or Computer Science. To a more specialized scientist, these things might be less important, and I don't wish to come off as implying that you're stupid or inferior, because you're neither.
> But one of the primiary tenants of the socialist > philosophy, as I recall, is the establishment of > the socialist state by means of a violent > overthrow of democratic society. And > subsequently any private property WOULD be > siezed by the government and redistributed as it > saw fit. "The socialist manifesto", or something > it was called. Supposedly, it was written by the > guy who invented socialism in the first place.
As I alluded to earlier, this is the Communist Manifesto (written by Marx and Engels), and though while it's one interpretation of it, it's not entirely what one should consider as the intended interpretation of it, as it's not. If you read the article carefully, and use a little European and American history, you can paint a picture of an industry-enslaved world, where worker's rights were virtually nonexistant. They'd work some 16 hours a day, in poor working conditions, without public education, and any number of other retched things. There was, as there is now, quite a social divide. Of course the effects of being on the other side were much worse than they are now, because of social reforms in most of the post-industrial world. With that image in hand, we can look at setting in which the Communist Manifesto was written. It did indeed call for the removal of a class system, the procurement of what was refered to as Burgeois property by the collective, but not simple property, such as "artisan's property." If you carefully read the entire manuscript, they go into detail as to what this entails. The group involved, however, wasn't to be a totalitarian regime e.g. Stalin's, but rather all of the working class, in a free society. If you had more carefully read the document, you would also note their stance on other socialist philosophies, and would not accidently mistake it for a Socialist Manifesto. In fact, in some versions it explains why it wasn't called that, because of other groups claiming the title of Socialist.
Of course you should also note the many noble institutions indicated, that we've later implemented in post-industrial societies, such as public education. Other things like the distribution of population we've done the opposite of, but that's not remotely important.
It really was intended to be a worker's paradise, since the worker would not be owned by corporations, but rather the corporations by the workers. Perhaps some of the ideas are a bit narrow sighted, but there were many good things that modern societies have adopted, and many other good things that might not be so bad to adopt, but won't be because of the amount of wealth situated in the hands of a small number of people, and the propaganda spewed about socialism and communism in the U.S. Luckily, many European countries haven't been infected with McCarthy's nonsense, and Reagan's witch hunts, and socialism isn't a dirty word there. I'd venture that many of the individuals that live there also don't refer to the Chinese as communists, since they've probably been educated properly. Honestly, though, I don't know for certain, so if anyone outside the U.S. would like to comment, I implore them to do so.
{ why(Lessig.trustgovernment)==true } ??? It is government that creates and enforces copyright laws, after all. Lessig wants the same people that WROTE the laws to somehow SAVE us from them. Lessig is an old-school statist;he is determined that government 'have a role' for the sake of having a role;the idea of government as anachronism is utter heresy to him. This is a war of technologies -- the best copy-protection technologies vs. the best cracking technology. To the cunning, the spoils!
Yet what you propose is a government - either a technocracy (the specific idea) or a meritocracy (the generalization). Of course, a technocracy devolves into a totalitarian state like 1984, and a meritocracy on a large scale tends to cause the rise of those who are best at stealing, not best at creating.
-- Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet.
The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
PDF is meant for printing mostly, as for otherwise if done correctly it looks quite nice. If you have a large document that you need on the web and need to be printable a pdf is the only reliable way to go, no browserism to worry about. Slaves to adobe? Considering quark beats adobe on the publishing end in numbers i think that statement is a little off.
I've used adobe products for a logn time now, why? Because they do the job well and i know how to use them.
There is one other thing, with a pdf you can lock it so no one else can mess with it, try that with an html page.
As a file format, my major complaint is that it is heavily optimized for printing nicely at the expense of usability when reading it on a computer; for example page breaks, having no control over font sizes, usually being forced to have the document fill the screen to avoid horizontal scrolling.
Acrobat was created before the web took hold as being a way that people using different sets of applications could exchange data using a higher common denominator than ASCII text.
The disadvantages that you speak of are actually advantages to others. Designers can send fully formatted files to one another and printers and know that each recipient is looking the same exact thing.
If 2 scholars were coloaborating across the internet, one using Windows and one using Linux, they could note things to one another such as "the 3rd word on the 14th line of the 28th page needs to be changed". That statement means absolutely nothing with web pages because they render differently depending on platform, browser, and the available fonts on a system.
HTML and PDF's both have their advantages and disadvantages. I HOPE that HTML doesn't ever get extended to the point that it tries to compete with PDF as a file format. It'd add way too much overhead to our browsers, which would only lead to a buggier internet experience.
Laisse Faire doesn't mean hands off
by
chocolatetrumpet
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· Score: 1
it means nuture the capitalist
:-)
-- Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Re:What about right and wrong?-ideas aint property
by
mrloco
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· Score: 1
Because it [idea] is not property. Sharing an idea does not reduce it, as does a piece of land or a box of chocolates. Ideas belong to the creator until they are revealed in any form. Then they belong to the world. However, to offer encouragment for you to share your idea, we (the people) have granted an artificial monopoly over that idea for a limited time. Intellectual Property is a misnomer. Ideas never were, are not, and never will be property, though some might attempt to have the law view them as such. Presently, though the law gives FAR too much license to the copyright holder, ideas are still not property under the law.
The problem is that a polymer created by a research team of thousands using million dollar research labs and million dollar steel plants, that cost 23 million dollars to design, falls under the same protections as what the executives at Amazon.com came up with during a power lunch.
Maybe the length of the patent should be variable to the expense involved. If I can prove that I spent a million dollars coming up with an idea, the government might grant me a 25 year patent, while an idea resulting from a much less expensive process might only get a 2 or 3 year patent.
Or, hell, maybe all patents should last only as long as the company has not recouped the research costs.
Crap. None of this is enforcable. Ditch the patent system.
-- Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
If people are given a choice between software that truly belongs to them which they have full control over and being led around on a leash by corporate interests that have goals other than their own, they'll pick freedom every time.
Please...
The "people" you're referring to are only a small subset of the people on the planet -- most of them would be slashdot readers too.
Give a choice between software they can pay for that is easy to use and software that is free, but unknown to the mainstream, a majority of people (i.e. the mainstream people) will choose the prior because it will seem like there only choice! Nevermnd if you explained to them about the political and philosophical advantages of free software they'd stare at you with a glazed look.
The day that free software is packaged, marketed and igven shelf-space like pay-for software is the day your statement will reach a wider audience.
Here's a neat trick for defending copyright: place a copy (if it's digital, a CDROM is preferable) in an envelope, seal it, and mail it to yourself. When you receive it, don't open it, but instead keep it in a safe place. The time stamp added by the post office is considered legal evidence of the date as long as the envelope remains sealed!
I read somewhere that that doesn't really hold up in court that well because it's pretty weak evidence. Basically, the mail-yourself thing isn't really sufficient evidence (you can open and reseal letters, for one). There was something about having to get a notary public to verify your letter to yourself was legit -- maybe a before and after (something like notorize s/he saw you seal the thing in the envelope and mail it to yourself and then notorize again that you received it in the mail unopened). Bear in mind though, I'm no lawyer. If you want to know for real what the cheapest, safest way to copyright something is, you can either go w/ the copyright office or talk to a copyright attorney. Sorry. Them's the breaks. ---
Unless you're registering a copyright on something extremely unusual(*), you probably don't need an attorney to register a copyright in the United States. Go to the Copyright Office's web site, download the form, fill it out, write a check, lick the stamp, find a mailbox. The end.
(* By "unusual," I mean having an unusual form -- something other than ordinary text, recorded music, works of art, etc.)
your original point was about copyrighting compute
by
para_droid
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· Score: 1
your original point was about copyrighting computer code, not copyrighting numbers. my point was that they are not the same thing. you completely missed that, and you a fucking moron. a discussion of numbers is completely irrelevent.
however, i am not convinced that even your(irrelevent) examples themselves are correct. if Snell had written a book containing his Law and you printed copies of it, he could have prosecuted you. he couldnt have stopped you using the Law, and perhaps if you just copied the statement of the Law it would be allowed under fair-use... but his actual expression of it is copyrightable.
of course you cannot copyright a single number, in the same way you cannot copyright a word. But when your combination of numbers/words gets to be a certain size (sufficient to express an idea that is uniquely yours, i presume), you can enforce copyright over it.
there's no point debating this, because computer code is (mostly) not numbers, it is not laws of nature... it is CPU instructions, written text, sampled sound, drawn graphics, all of which are covered by copyright laws.
Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is
Finally, why does the readme file delivered with my version (3.01 for Windoze) come in WRITE format and not PDF?
Often the readme files give tips if you're having problems getting the software to work. If you were having a problem even starting Acrobat Reader, then having a README only in pdf would be rather useless.
Re:55 years (Unconstitutional?)
by
SedentaryZ
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· Score: 1
Ding!
Thanks for filling in the details here. As soon as I posted my comment, I realized that I wasn't even sure if it was the Supreme Court or one of the lower courts that made that ruling.
Calling All US Voters!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
by
Astralmind
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· Score: 1
Every November we have an opportunity to change the way the US Government works by casting our votes for various elected officials. Yet time and time again we go and same the crooks back to office. NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE THIS WAY. By re-electing these officials we giving them a pat on the back and saying good job every time. If you do not like the laws which are passed then vote to change them. If you do not, then you have no right to compain!!!!!!!!!!!!!
True Lassiez Faire and DMCA, etc cannot coexist
by
browser_war_pow
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· Score: 1
In a true lassiez faire system it is up to the corporations to protect their own IP. If they cannot, then that's their problem, not the government's.
Most corporations are like fat sheep that have grown lazy under the protection of the shepherd (the government). If the shepherd leaves then the corporations would be eaten alive by the wolves in the free market. Find that hard to believe? Without governmental protection of IP, most music, movie and software companies would die within a few years of the revokation of the IP laws.
Mickey poping up everywhere
by
wowbagger
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· Score: 2
Wrong. Sorry, thanks for playing.
If Di$ney's copyrights were to expire, we would not see Mickey poping up everywhere. Mickey is not covered by copyright, he is covered by trademark. And as long as Di$ney defends the trademark, and has it in use, they will continue to hold it. Copyright only covers the movies Mickey was in. So, should the copyrights fail, we could distribute "Steamboat Willy" to our hearts content, but we couldn't use Mickey's image in anything we created without infringing upon Di$ney's trademark.
This is all the more reason that the arguements that "we must extend copyright so that our characters won't show up in porn." don't wash.
Re:Mickey poping up everywhere
by
Mr_Ceebs
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· Score: 1
Like there's going to be a huge market for Mickey porn anyway, I can see there would be some but why should there be more proyection for an imaginary character, than for an individual. It would be quite legitimate for someone to make an artistic version of say Prez Clinton's life as a porn film and he would have much less protection. If it's thoroughly legit for me to go out and do that, why should a cartoon mouse get any better protection
He's dead Jim and its still copyrighted
by
dattaway
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· Score: 2
"It's worse than that. Almost nothing has expired since 1923" ". . . Come look at the milk in my refrigerator!"
Even sour cream has an expiration date, but a once its under a copyright, it and its dead author will never cease to expire and become free again.
It's about fair use and privacy
by
mithras001
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· Score: 2
I think that much of the discussion is centered on the wrong topic. According to Lessig (and IMHO), the problem with copyright in the modern age isn't about whether copyright can survive at all, or whether it should last for a shorter period. It's about fair use and privacy.
Fair use is the clause that says it's OK for you to photocopy several pages out of a book you own to bring along on a trip. It's OK for you to make a mix tape of your CD's. It's OK for you to print out that article you read online because you want to read it on the john. You can do all of these things now, perfectly legally, for no cost, and without writing anyone a letter, turning over your credit card number or Social Security number or home phone. All of this is possible partly because our Government had the wisdom to carve out a place for reasonable use, and partly because it's awfully hard to sucessfully enforce restrictions on these behaviors.
In a copyright-enforcing digital world, potentially none of those things are true. As someone above mentioned with shrinkwrap licenses, in the digital world, they can easily write code to prevent you from copying, printing, or reading a work twice in the same day. You can be charged for every time you listen to an album. You can be prevented from copying a short section to add to your journal. And, perhaps most ominously, you can be required to submit personal identification every time you do one of these activities.
For an example, check out eBrary, a site implementing software to charge you a quarter to highlight and copy text, or print it.
Re:It's about fair use and privacy
by
rodentia
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· Score: 1
You are absolutely on the mark and Ebary is an outstanding example of the problem. I notice they have the temerity to trumpet their praise for public libraries and generously offer to share 5% of the revenue generated from co-branded Ebary terminals placed with such institutions. No doubt this will merely protract their death throes.
I'm quite confident we'll soon hear of publishers refusing to sell to public libraries, as they are known to be conducive to copyright piracy.
The banner on their site says it all: find, interact, understand, acquire.
-- illegitimii non ingravare
Time to Add Surface Area to Our Developer Lives
by
bigweenie
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· Score: 1
It is time for every regular poster and reader at/. to run for office. We can all run in mass against one another and flood the precincts with like-minded people, at least in respect to eliminating the abuse of patents and copyrights to the detriment of our children.
Everyone of us is qualified, assuming of course you are an American citizen. We need to put software developers in Congress. How do we do that? By each one of us trying to get there. We are so much smarter, in some cases so much richer, and some of us even better "networked/connected" than these hand-out grabbing sycophants that we get to select from on election day.
Any one out there interested in having an election where the/. karma measurement for each candidate is the lead story on CNN?
"She said, 'You are not as dumb as you look.' I replied, 'Thank you.'"
Re:your original point was about copyrighting comp
by
gilroy
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· Score: 2
OK, I am obviously chasing phantoms here, but hey, I like to hear my own voice. So here goes:
Blockquoth the poster:
your original point was about copyrighting computer code, not copyrighting numbers.
I can only assume either (a) I am being more obfuscated than usual or (b) you're not reading the actual posts. Here is the contention: A computer file is a collection of bits, in that it is recorded as a series of binary states (one being designated "on" or 1, and the other as "off" or 0). Every file has a definite start and a definite end. You can therefore string the bits together, with the start bit being the least significant and so on. Taken togather, that string of bits becomes a binary number. That's the connection that was being made.
Concrete example: Let's take the following "picture" and encode it. My picture is simply a crude letter L, as follows:
X
XX
Now, we'll encode that as four pixels, meaning we really have
X.
XX
or, assuming "X" is the on state,
10
11
I'll assume our tiny encoder (gPEG?) takes the upper left corner as the first bit and then proceeds left-to-right and then top-to-bottom. Our gPEG would then consist of the following bits in a file:
1011
This is sort of significance-reversed (although that isn't terribly relevant). I can view this as the binary number 1101, or the base ten number 13. My "picture" is really just a number. Of course, the gPEG conversion would allow me to reverse the transformation and produce a picture. But another program (gNOTE?) could instead read this as a sequence of pulses to the speaker in my computer, making a little ditty.
Same file, different interpretation. It's just a number, and what you do with the number determines what it means. In that sense -- admittedly, as my original subject line indicated, a radical sense -- the file itself is not copyrightable, because it is just a number. Sure, playing it through the gPEG makes it a picture, but playing it through gNOTE makes it a sound.
Hypothetical: I take a CD which I own and rip a track to MP3. I take the MP3 file and, using a specially-written program, interpret the data as pixel hues for a PNG. Perhaps, if the original MP3 happens to have especially nice behavior, the picture that comes out is aesthetically pleasing. (It'd have to be an abstract thing, of course.) If I then sell the PNG, am I violating copyright?
PROCEED WITH CAUTION: If you say "yes", you are saying that encoding an MP3 entitles someone to ownership of a number... allowing that someone to sue a different artist, expressing himself/herself in a different way (say, PNG), were to create an image whose binary representation happened to match the MP3. Given that, I'd rush out and artificially create MP3s that happen to be the binary strings 0 (easy), 1, 10, 11, 100, etc. And then I'd own most of mathematics.
Also blockquoth the poster:
because computer code is (mostly) not numbers, it is not laws of nature... it is CPU instructions, written text, sampled sound, drawn graphics
No, a file is none of these until interpreted by a given algorithm. A tape recording is physically different from a book, which is physically different from a painting. But digitize them, strip them of their associated extension, and suddenly they are indistinguishable. If a file doesn't end in MP3, how do you know it's a song?
I know you won't agree but that's OK -- you're just wrong. The system is fundamentally flawed, because it does rest upon a fallacy; i.e., that songs, books, articles, pictures, etc. have physically meaningful distinctions in the digital domain. They don't -- they are each just a number -- and therefore the system creaks and groans and (I believe) ultimately crashes.
Eventually the IP system will Blue Screen of Death . What happenms next will be extremely interesting.
Define "well rounded"...
by
SvnLyrBrto
·
· Score: 2
>Whether or not this is effective is >an entirely different story.
They're not effective because they use totally the wrong approach. I can become a well-rounded individual on my own WITHOUT sitting through the rantings of some clueless ivory-tower type about how how evil capitalism and democracy are.
HU/SS classes use the "this is how I think, therefore this is how you should think. Now memorize and regurgitate it" approach. So that's what you do memorize his rantings, regurgitate them onto the exam papers, and forget the entire horrible expierence when the semester's over.
Real classes, OTOH, such as the CS/PS/MA series give you problems that require thought. They teach you how to solve problems. They require you to exercise your brain. Therefore the knowledge is retained.
The difference between the "ranting zealot" and "challanging taskmaster" approaches to education is why, while the author of the "socialist Manifesto" escaped me till you replied; I can still knock out the pseudocode for Cohen-Sutherland or UNIX Quicksort in a few minutes, and have them functional in C shortly thereafter.
Mabye SOME people CAN just photographiclly remember all of the random spewings of clueless old geezers. I, usually have to have to THINK about something to retain it past finals time, however.
OTOH... You want well rounded? Well, hundred year old politics is definately NOT by forte. Wanna talk history of Ska music, and the influence of first and second wave bands on the current third wave and ska-core bands? How bout the evolution of punk rock/straight edge/anti-racist action culture? Or perhaps vulcanology? Or underwater sound propagation? Fun with pyrotechnics? The merits of Rollerblade in-lines vs. Oxygens or Bladerunners? Or, speaking of Blade Runners, classic and modern SciFi? Or plate tectonics (well, perhaps that should fall under vulcanology (my next vacation is to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.))?
Or if you MUST talk politics, how 'bout modern, relevant stuff; like DMCA issues? Or the Fed's idiotic "war on drugs" where armed robbers, rapists, and other violent criminals are being set free to make room in the jails for durg offenders with mandatory minimum sentences? Or perhaps the archaic and barbaric death penalty and the people about to be executed despite many discrepancies in the trial evidence? Or why I won't shop at the gap, and why I won't buy nike shoes or exxon gas?
There's plenty intresting of stuff to be "well rounded" about without obsessing about a proven-wrong 100-year old dead crackpot.
>The group involved, however, wasn't to be a >totalitarian regime e.g. Stalin's, but rather >all of the working class, in a free society.
Ah, but that's the kicker isn't it... Socialism, as it has been practiced in every socialist regeim that existed, HAS been a brutal, oppressive, police state. Take your pick: USSR, China, Cuba, N Korea, N Vietman, Cambodia, etc... So what is "real" socialism... The theoretical ideas of a long dead philosopher; or the actual fruits of his work, as it has been put into existance?
>worker's paradise, since the worker would not >be owned by corporations, but rather the >corporations by the workers.
Well, lets see... Last I checked, I don't live in a socialist country (Limbaugh-esque rantings about the "People's Republic of Kalifornia" notwithstanding) and yet, I, and all of my co-workers, have these papers in our bottom-left drawers that say "Option Grant" on them...
>propaganda spewed about socialism and >communism in the U.S.
>Luckily, many European countries haven't been >infected with McCarthy's nonsense, and Reagan's >witch hunts,
Well, they DID threaten to destroy the US you know... does "We will bury you" ring a bell? AND there's the little matter of the conquest of half of Europe, and the threats to take the other half, right after we...
(and before you jump on me being US-centric, I KNOW the US was not alone, and that England was just as important, if not moreso. I *AM* a CS major after all, And I would be majorly remiss to not know where Alan Turing was from. If you can find a copy of "The Ultra Secret" by F.W. Winterbotham, you should read it. It's a fascinating first hand look at the exploits of Bletchley Park.)
...fought the largest war in history to stop the nazis from doing the same thing. Such would be described by PR types as a BAD THING(tm) if you want people to have a good impression of you.
Oh, and there is the little matter of the cuban "revolution" and pointing nuclear missiles at us from 90 miles, right in the perfect position for a no-warning "decapitation" strike. The Berlin blockade and Berlin wall, and the Afghanastan invasion are also not very good ways to convince people that you're "peaceful socialists" trying to bring about a "workers' paradise".
Now, McCarthy was, of course, inexcusable. A cliche to the tune of "when you obsess about your enemy you become like that enemy" comes to mind. And I'm not familiar with any "witchhunts" under Reagan. But I can sure understand the concern. There we had the largest military power in the world promising our annhilation; and they were happily gobbling up big parts of the rest of the world as stepping stones towards that goal. Not exactly something that *wouldn't* engender a good deal of distrust, and yea... outright paranoia.
But remember... just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're NOT out to get you.
john Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku: I am not a drone. Remove the collective if
-- Imagine all the people...
Re:Define "well rounded"...
by
mbaker
·
· Score: 1
> They're not effective because they use totally the wrong approach. I can > become a well-rounded individual on my own WITHOUT sitting through > the rantings of some clueless ivory-tower type about how how evil capitalism > and democracy are. > > HU/SS classes use the "this is how I think, therefore this is how you should > think. Now memorize and regurgitate it" approach. So that's what > you do memorize his rantings, regurgitate them onto the exam papers, and > forget the entire horrible expierence when the semester's over.
This wasn't my experience with social electives. They involved a good deal of discussion and interaction, and had nothing to do with Ivory towers. However, it was expected that one would know what groups belonged to what philosophy, and what and why they believed it. This shouldn't be too much different from good History classes in HS, save they're more informative. Understanding philosophies is more a matter of analytical thinking and critical reading skills, with memorization simply being the means of retainment.
> Real classes, OTOH, such as the CS/PS/MA series give you problems that > require thought. They teach you how to solve problems. They require you to > exercise your brain. Therefore the knowledge is retained.
University mathematics and physics are more often than not just as memorization oriented as any other subject. Rarely will you find yourself doing proofs for everything you study, or discovering principles on your own. You'll more often be introduced to a method of solving, and then be given practice sets in order to memorize and pick out which method belongs to which type of problem. At the same time social electives have subject questions and essays, where one analyzes and elaborates on the meaning of what you're reading.
> The difference between the "ranting zealot" and "challanging taskmaster" > approaches to education is why, while the author of the "socialist > Manifesto" escaped me till you replied; I can still knock out the pseudocode > for Cohen-Sutherland or UNIX Quicksort in a few minutes, and have > them functional in C shortly thereafter.
It's the "Communist Manifesto," not the "socialist Manifesto."
If you had the misfortune of code-based algorithms courses, then it seems that implementation details are simply a matter of rote memorization. That is, you weren't involved in developing algorithms from scratch, probably didn't do proofs for most of them, or any of the other thought-oriented approaches. Having implemented them in a class seems none too different than writing an analysis of any given philosophy. Certainly if I said "develop for me, an algorithm to do X," and you spent time contemplating the algorithm and doing the abstract mathematics and such, you'd see more a though i.e. "task master" approach, as opposed to a "problem set" approach.
On a somewhat unrelated note, what would you suggest is the behavior of a ranting zealot?
> Mabye SOME people CAN just photographiclly remember all of the random > spewings of clueless old geezers. I, usually have to have to THINK > about something to retain it past finals time, however.
Though I must admit I was born with a good memory, I have to confess to spending as much time contemplating the various philosophies I come in contact with, as I do mathematics or physics. To treat one as worthy of study, and the other as something I should simply "memorize" without thought, would be akin to cutting off a leg. Most importantly, I like to seek out and learn about topics, indepent of "old geezers," though I still find their thoughts as invaluable as anyone else's.
> OTOH... You want well rounded? Well, hundred year old politics is definately > NOT by forte. Wanna talk history of Ska music, and the influence
I'd be willing to discuss any or all of these topics, though I must confess ignorance to a few e.g. ska, punk history, etc.
> Or if you MUST talk politics, how 'bout modern, relevant stuff; like DMCA > issues? Or the Fed's idiotic "war on drugs" where armed robbers, > rapists, and other violent criminals are being set free to make room in the > jails for durg offenders with mandatory minimum sentences? Or perhaps > the archaic and barbaric death penalty and the people about > to be executed despite many discrepancies in the trial evidence? Or why I > won't shop at the gap, and why I won't buy nike shoes or exxon > gas?
Though you might disagree with Marx, his philosophies may be quite relevant today. Given that many of the problems Marx attempted to address have yet to be solved, at the very least his ideas can serve as an influence in more modern ideas. We are, after all, just standing on the shoulders of giants.
> There's plenty intresting of stuff to be "well rounded" about without > obsessing about a proven-wrong 100-year old dead crackpot.
Marx wasn't a crock pot, nor have I ever seen any proof that all of his ideas (which account for more than just the Communist Manifesto) are wrong, nor even that Communism is "bad." If you've any information otherwise, I would be more than a little interested in reading material.
> Ah, but that's the kicker isn't it... Socialism, as it has been practiced in > every socialist regeim that existed, HAS been a brutal, > oppressive, police state. Take your pick: USSR, China, Cuba, N Korea, > N Vietman, Cambodia, etc... So what is "real" socialism... The > theoretical ideas of a long dead philosopher; or the actual fruits of his > work, as it has been put into existance?
There have been no real socialist regimes, and certainly no communist regimes. None of the above were or are communists, and none of them even fit the meaning of socialism. For example, the People's Republic of China, is no more a Republic than it is a Communist state. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was no more Socialist, than it was a Republic, than it was Communist. These are all totalitarian regimes, which no form of the above allow.
The actual fruits of Marx's labor may very well be things like public education, socialized health care, welfare programs, labor laws, and any other number of things that Marx was fighting for, that didn't exist in his day. To suggest that Marx's ideals flourish in China is an insult to him.
> Well, lets see... Last I checked, I don't live in a socialist > country (Limbaugh-esque rantings about the "People's Republic of > Kalifornia" notwithstanding) and yet, I, and all of my co-workers, have these > papers in our bottom-left drawers that say "Option Grant" on > them...
And countless people working for a wage unable to support themselves toil, while people's rights are bought away as the DMCA is passed, at the same time that a man is fired for seeking to treat his carpal tunnel, as people wait in line in a soup kitchen, as G.E. gets away with dumping countless amounts of PCBs in your lakes and streams, while someone without health insurance breaks a leg, while another man is denied a potentially life saving treatment, because it may not work, while another U.S. corporation owned factory opens up in China exploiting slave labor.
In any event, many of the benefits of the modern U.S. are "socialist" in nature.
> Well, they DID threaten to destroy the US you know... does "We will bury you" > ring a bell? AND there's the little matter of the conquest of half > of Europe, and the threats to take the other half, right after we...
The U.S.S.R was never a communist nor socialist state. It may have ended up one after the revolution, but Stalin ended up in control, and he executed or enslaved the majority of the revolutionaries.
> Oh, and there is the little matter of the cuban "revolution" and pointing > nuclear missiles at us from 90 miles, right in the perfect position for a > no-warning "decapitation" strike. The Berlin blockade and Berlin wall, and > the Afghanastan invasion are also not very good ways to convince > people that you're "peaceful socialists" trying to bring about a "workers' > paradise".
They were neither.
> Now, McCarthy was, of course, inexcusable. A cliche to the tune of
Crazy, I'd say;-)
> comes to mind. And I'm not familiar with any "witchhunts" under Reagan. But I
Ahh, Reagan. While he was the head of the Screen Actor's Guild, he was a key agent in the blacklisting of actors that were thought to be, or were openly communists or socialists. These people were in turn unable to get jobs, and any number of other good things. He testified in front of Congress about his labors, and the U.S. Government of course had nothing against persecuting people because of their beliefs. They were commies, after all!
Reagan the President was more of a joke, where as in his youth his was a bigot that made up for his inability to act by making sure others weren't given the oppurtunity. But of course since the U.S.S.R collapsed during his Presidancy, people will stand up today and say they're "Reagan Republicans," and everyone sees this as a good thing.
Before betraying your ignorance of other political systems, remember that we here in the EU have several socialist states. Technically here in the UK we have a "socialist" government.
I certainly don't see any terror campaigns here, for example.
The evil is done by the far right and the far left - who meet in the middle. Both sides (capitalism and socialism) have strengths and weaknesses to them.
As a socialist myself (centre-left) I believe in protection for the poorer sections of society, but to tar us with a brush of "violent overthrow of democracy" shows a naivete beyond measure.
Blindly bashing either only goes to prove you understand neither.
-- ...Upgrade now to Schrodingers Dog...
uber-IP enthusiast replies...
by
lukel
·
· Score: 1
The missing piece in many of the uber-IP enthusiasts arguments is often where they got their own ideas from. Taken to its logical conclusion, what they currently propose is atrocious, and will ultimately have a chilling effect on learning, competition, and commerical and cultural development.
To be honest, I'm not really a uber-IP enthusiast so I might not be the best person to reply to this, but I'll give it a go anyway. What I'm enthusiastic about is doing more of what is important to me and for others to have the same opportunities. Now, some of the things that are important to me depend on the creativity of others - I'm a student and spent a lot of time digesting the ideas of others in books, I also enjoy reading Slashdot. The people whose creative energy went into these books and Slashdot needed some incentive to employ their energies in this way. For some, that incentive may have been public spiritedness, the respect of others, and for others it may have been some financial reward.
It is clear that not all incentives for creativity are financial and not all financial ones depend on IP. I don't dispute this. But it is equally clear that there are some cases of where the creativity of others could provide something useful and important to me but for the people cable of provide the required creativity, there exists no sufficient incentive to do so. Assigning intellectual property rights can provide the required incentive. The authors of the books I read receive royalties, the designers the processor in the PC I am reading Slashdot on can patent their design. So, the books get written and the computers built: I can develop my own idea from the ones in the books and the comments on Slashdot that I read.
So it seems plausible that IP has indirectly helped me develop my ideas and had a positive rather than chilling effect on my learning.
Is this what you consider the atrocious proposal to be or is this what you mean by a balanced intellectual property doctrine . If it is the balanced doctrine, then what exactly is the atrocious proposal and what is the difference between the two?
Re:uber-IP enthusiast replies...
by
DaveWood
·
· Score: 2
This is not complicated. Atrocious is extending copyright expiry every time a major media company is about to lose a franchise. Atrocious is outlawing non-criminal acts such as reverse-engineering, benchmarking, defeating copy-protection: this is a subtle legal point, and I'll forgive you if you don't understand it, but only committing a crime actually makes you a criminal. There is a delicate balance to be struck when refining the protections of authors, and making it illegal for me to reverse-engineer is too much protection.
Truthfully, many of us would be working in pizza hut if we hadn't warezed our first compiler at 13. Truthfully, many of us would be pretty bad at what we do if we were always afraid of looking under the hood at how things work. But that's been outlawed now, and god forbid it should take - because that is the culture that gave us what we have today, and if we keep piling on favors for record, movie and software companies, it will be gone tomorrow.
You may never know it, of course. Many important things pass unheeded, their absence known only through the diffuse, general malaise of what was, and what could have been.
Technological mechanisms
by
Convergence
·
· Score: 2
Copyright is just a law. As such it can be enforced, unenforced, repealed, left alone, or strengthened.
Technological measures which attempt to preserve copyright. Those can be broken.
Re:Technological mechanisms
by
EricEldred
·
· Score: 1
That's true. But it seems to me that the "rights management schemes," although they claim to be founded on copyright, are really attempts to subvert copyright and do not deserve copyright protection.
I think Lessig is pointing to the chasm between the "pirates" on the one hand and the "overprotectors" on the other, and is suggesting that a balanced copyright law fits between, and is indeed the best solution for the Constitutional reasons, to "promote Progress."
I would like to see U.S. copyright law turned back to the state it was before 1976. Fair use should be allowed as in Sony vs Universal Studios, the Betamax case.
But then the problem would be that publishers would insist on "rights management schemes" instead of relying on copyright law to protect them.
It seems to me that if publishers wish to enjoy protection by copyright law then they should openly publish (including source code for software) and the term needs to be very short, so the public enjoys the benefit of it while it is still useful. I don't understand why copyright term needs to protect works for so long, since very few of the works have lasting value. Instead they should be recycled into the public domain, from which all new works emerge.
So how do we vote the crooks out?
by
yerricde
·
· Score: 2
The choice tends to be between Republicrat Crook Foo and Republicrat Crook Bar. If crooks are the only candidates, how do we vote the crooks out?
Betcha didn't know that Lessig was an invited guest at a formal White House dinner. Not sure if it was him or his wife that was the initee. I also cannot remember who the guest of honor was as this took place at least a year ago. I post this late because the anti-Clinton trollers would start posting random comments.
I like what Lessig writes. I was 1st introduced to him via/. Many moons ago,/. featured the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. If you don't understand what this means then I suggest that you search the web to figure this out.
Anyway, I'm out of here. I'm going on vacation. If you see me post when I'm on vacation, then you know that I'm one sick puppy.
There is no inherent problem with PDF as a file format given its intended use, which is to permit the exact replication of formatted documents, including all fonts and layout. The original purpose of PDF was to permit the transfer of print-ready files from one machine to another, ensuring layout fidelity. Hence its use in IRS forms and other government documents, which are often machine read and thus require that the position of fields on a page be regular. PDF as a file format has not adequately been extended to account for the unique capabilities of online or dynamically-driven content, and this is a weakness some would find. Frankly, though, that's why there are multiple file formats; each format is supposed to do its one job as perfectly as possible. Also, just as a point of information, in this offtopic thread, PDF is a superset of PostScript; the PDF specification includes all of PostScript Level 3, and is in some senses the logical progression of the PostScript language.
Owning a Piece of Your Mind
by
jetson123
·
· Score: 2
Mickey Mouse, Windows shortcuts, the Beach Boys, and all the other successful copyrighted works have become part of our culture. We have learned to interact with copyrighted programs and use copyrighted stories and images as symbols in our communication. By giving companies nearly perpetual ownership of these artifacts, we are essentially giving them ownership to parts of our language and our thoughts.
The original copyright terms of 14 years seemed entirely appropriate. They give authors and creators more than enough time to be amply rewarded.
But, absent a legislative remedy, we need a social one, one everybody can adopt. And that's actually not that hard: just avoid using or referring to proprietary artifacts, images, and symbols as much as possible. Avoiding reliance on such proprietary cultural artifacts has many advantages, foremost that the non-proprietary alternatives usually don't come bundled with an agenda to make you or your kids buy more or eat more. And the destiny of the non-proprietary cultural artifacts is determined ultimately by its users.
So, say "no" to Power Rangers, Disney, and Microsoft software. Arabian Nights, Greek Mythology, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and GNU Software are better, more interesting alternatives anyway.
Capitalism as an econmonic system has existed since the beginning of writing. There are price records for ancient Sumerian and Assyrian markets that date back to around 2500 BC (or close if I remember the dates of the first records found near the northern part of the Tigres) The offical economies were fixed price barter economies. independent monitary mediums did not exist until coins were used in Lydia around 900 BC. The price records show inflation due to declining supply of certain goods, something that should not happen in a fixed price economy. The capitalistic law of supply and demand is the basis for EVERY economic system in history. I hate to break it to you, but that is how the evidence we have shows it. You should note that I am not at all advocating pure capitalism as a political structure as Ayn Rand does.
Re:The problem... Socialism works... in Europe
by
pyrotic
·
· Score: 1
Socialism is an old European tradition. GB Shaw, Oscar Wilde (champagne socialism), the Fabian movement, to name just a few English varities. Strangely, France has a socialist Prime Minister now, as does the UK. In theory anyway.
I think the US dictionary must have it's own defenition of socialism.
A string of letters can, by definition, be copyrighted or trademarked, because a string of letters is essentially a text. But numbers cannot be copyrighted, by those same copyright definitions. You can copyright "Coca-cola", but you cannot copyright "1274-8986". Digitised media are in essence just a huge number. What, technically, is the difference between "1" and "123 093 709 145 680 134 673 136 130 086 690 634 635 523 582 853 816 966 418 116 669 924 147"? Nothing. Sure, the latter, when put through some kind of decoder (ASCII, Wave, MP3, MPEG, JPEG, foo, bar, baz) you might get something else, like a bit of text, a bit of music, or a picture.
As a little mind test: If you encode the DeCSS source code... How can anybody see that that string of ones and zeroes is just that? It might just as well be a bunch of garbage...
)O( the Gods have a sense of humour,
--
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
Re:Almost, but not quite...
by
gilroy
·
· Score: 2
At last, someone who seems to have understood my point... I don't really believe this destroys IP law, but it's certainly an issue.
Standard USB drivers are hardly what I would call foriegn hardware to them, all hardware is 3rd party, as M$ is a software maker, and USB is supported, they just don't put the drivers on the site because they want you to buy the CDROM, anything else stupid that you're going to say? Sorry, but if you're going to start a flame war, bring it on.
"Standard USB" was foreign to ANYTHING back when W95 was released. Yes, M$ is a s/w maker but it is not their responsibility to make s/w for 3rd party H/W, especially when that H/W was designed & sold to the masses YEARS after their product was released. Next you'll tell me that M$ is responsible for making an IE3 PDF plugin so I can read the damn annoying things. Adobe created one for me so that I can use their product. Just as your H/w supplier should have given you drivers so you could use their product. It's just common sense IMHO.
Call me a nitpick, but == is for comparing/defining numerical values...not strings (at least in Perl).
Who says he was using Perl? What about C? Actually, you can't really compare strings very well with the == operator in C either, but who says those are strings? I don't see any quotes around them. --
I thought that the Berne Convention had harmonised most country's copyright rules. Here in the UK, the copyright timer only starts after the author's death. So a work is still in copyright while the author (or artist) is still alive and for a period (it used to be 50 years, but I think it is now longer) after his/her death. Is the USA different?
First of all, the post I'm replying to is not a troll. Off-topic perhaps, but not a troll. Now I'll give the moderators another hint - moderation is primarily meant to rate a post on how relevant it is to the conversation, if it is interesting, off-topic, or whatever. See how I attached "[OT]" to the subject? That means I'm basically self-moderating my post, pointing out to people that if they don't want to read something not related directly to the coversataion, to not bother reading this, thereby getting rid of the need for moderation. So don't waste your points on me.
Second of all, "Lawrence Lessig == smart" is a perfectly valid expression (in C at least, provided you ignore the space:-) It would return TRUE (a non-zero number) if Lawrence Lessig is, in fact, smart, or FALSE (zero) if he is not. This is a valid statement in the same way that this:
1;
Is a valid statement. It doesn't actually DO anything, but the compiler couldn't give a rat's ass. They're useful in things like this:
Lawrence_Lessig == smart ? give_him_money() : 1;
... which is basically an if statement which doesn't do anything if it is not true (but you're too lazy to write out the whole if statement.:-) --
Re:The problem... Socialism works... in Europe
by
MaximumBob
·
· Score: 2
I suppose I should clarify that, for the most part, I think of socialism in the Marxian, revolutionary sense. European socialism has moved well beyond Marx, and I find it hard to call it socialism in the same way. It's a weird sort of capitalist type system mixed with a large amount of state intervention. But it's hardly socialism in the historical sense of the word.
Not that I'm complaining, since, if the Europeans did have real socialist governments, they would have long since launched into another dark age.
Re: PDF (was: dumb as a stump - yes you are)
by
Refrag
·
· Score: 1
From my quick scan of certain portions of the PDF SDK, you should be able to create a PDF document without the use of Distiller. Although, I would expect this would quickly get complicated, but not over everyone on/.'s head.
However, I would like to see an Open Portable Document Standard similar to PDF, or see PDF become an open standard. Just to get it out from under the control of Adobe, since it can be such a powerful format. My entire department is switching to PDF (from hardcopy) for document distribution world-wide.
Then why do hardware manufacturers only make drivers for (some versions of) Microsoft Windows, and sometimes for MacOS, and conveniently forget BeOS, OS/2, Linux, UNIX, Solaris, BSD and so on?
I do partly agree with you, but there are two sides of the issue... On one side, it's the OS manufacturer's responsibility to make their OS interface with all hardware, and on the other side, it's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to make their hardware interface with all operating systems. The problem is that currently they are measuring by two standards. Hardware manufacturers happily provide drivers for Microsoft Windows, because if they didn't, their hardware wouldn't sell, but then they conveniently forget the alternative operating systems, causing the alternatives to drop out of the competition with Microsoft because they simply don't support the latest and greatest hardware, and that IS what most computer geeky people want: the latest and greatest hardware to run the latest and greatest games. The PC has turned into a game console.
Now, I'm not saying Linux should be turned into a game console, quite the contrary, but that's definitely a market Linux will never be able to compete for. Linux should go after servers and office workstations. Leave the gaming to Microsoft. They're damn good at that, and you'd never be able to compete there anyway, at least not within the foreseeable future.
Okay, I kinda drifted away there, but I hope you get my point. Don't get me wrong, I do see your point, I just choose to disagree with it:)
)O( the Gods have a sense of humour,
--
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
... that was basically what I was trying to say, but you expressed it in a much more eloquent way.
I share your opinion completely, and I'm a little surprised to see the confusion between socialism, communism, as well as the negative connotations surrounding both around here. Dismissing ideas and opinions as undemocratic, totalitarian or even fascist to avoid discussing them thoroughly is a very dangerous habit, and I sincerely hope it's not an "american thing" but rather one of ignorance.
Social justice is a noble goal, be it in the form of a manifesto or whatever...
-- I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad we can't have 'software == smart', as a precursor operation to and not to be confused with 'software industry == smart'.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Binary code cannot be copyrighted. Instead, it should be considered a derivative work of (C)opyrighted source code, which must be filed with the Library of Congress. This is also the only way to make sure no one violates the GPL: if they don't file their code, anyone can use their binaries.
Copyrighted binaries don't make sense, as no one wrote the binaries. If anything, binaries are owned by the creator of the compiler. People make source code, and that can be copyrighted, just like a book.
|/usr/games/fortune
The saddest part about the whole piracy debacle is that it is simply too late to really do away with some of the companies that sustain themselves by selling intelectual property. Its kinda sad that that copyright law didn't evolve with the times. But now we have to pay hundreds of dollars for some pieces of plastic that do crazy shit when you shine lasers at them. Hrmph
-f
A.H.
"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things."
It's very easy to advocate ballance or limited copyrights when you're not the one shelling out millions of dollars trying to create a useful product only to have groups of pirates stealing your work. I'd like to see someone suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers 2)be fair to the Companies' rights and 3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
I hate those bastards that use anything other than pdf and doc formats. how dare them. (Note sarcasm) Copyrights now are just a political way to structure our economy. With the advent of personal computing and the ability of anyone to make virtually free copies of any piece of information the supply of any piece of information will always match the demand. We are now entering the information age where most information will be free in both the political and economic sense, no matter what kinds of protections governments try to enforce. We have entered an age where anyone and everyone can publish information to the entire world. Changes in how information is distributed can controlled cause massive changes in societies. The first western information revolution started when Martin Luther nailed the 95 thesis to a church door. These ideas spread like wildfire throughout europe. These ideas of freedom from complete control and religious freedom eventually led to the constitution of the US. Now we have reached a new technological level concerning information. Now everyone can publish, not just those with economic power. The changes in the next century will be drastic, sorry to those who continue to think they can control information but it doesn't work anymore.
My only gripe is that the statement about pdf. This is a closed,and with-held format. while every word processor worth a damn will read and parse rtf exactly. so rtf is the truely "cross-platform" document format. We do not need all the other crap that is crammed into the documents.
Now, if the word processor manufacturers would get off their butts and let the software read/write Postscript... this would be a true cross-platform, program indipendant, junk-rich document format. but alas... most word processor programmers are dumb as a stump.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The USA: Making the world safe for Coporate Oligarchy! (...er..., peaceful democracy.....)
|/usr/games/fortune
Today, I had to install a USB device on a windows 95 machine. The problem, the drivers are only found on the 98 CDROM, which noone at my workplace has. There are patches for 95 to add USB, but this was decidedly not the solution that we wanted. We had to grab the files off some guy's website, thus comitting an act of "piracy." We were completely unable to find the drivers on Microsoft.com, so I e-mailed their support, saying, "What's up with this?" Well, pretty much. The response said something along the lines of "Buy the CD." So, in order to get M$'s software to work, without committing an act of piracy, the recommended solution is to dump more money their way. Go figure.
Eh...
Unlike the Adobe person he quotes, this guy actually seems to understand what he's talking about. Instead of making broad generalizations such as "the founders of our country loved IP laws," this guy knows a little bit about the background of IP law, and also presents a clear, non-techie view of IP and copyright law.
He points out that nobody ever imagined that the copyright holder could have such exclusive conrol over content, and I think this is the heart of the matter. Although content control is now possible, and perhaps even legal, that doesn't make it "right." DVD Region coding may be acceptable to some(I think it's dumb and purely greed driven), but forcing someone to "lease" a utility simply to make more money is inheritly wrong. In some cases lease-only makes sense(few consumers need to actually OWN their phone service, for instance), but owning your word processor or paperback book is an option which works, and should be available. If I want to read a book once or 500 times, or eat it, or burn it, I should be able to.
Well, enough ranting. Back to work :)
- Free tabletop fantasy gaming! Grey Lotus
(Lawrence Lessig == smart) == (Lawrence Lessig == same opinion as me)
'smart' is a property of 'lessig' (which is an author, a subclass of human being); you need to call a field accessor:
lessig.isSmart() == true;
Unless you want to go through the trouble of overloading operator== for all the different data types of the fields in the author class, which would create even more problems if you had more than one field of the same type...you see the problem? Too much work.
The Second Amendment Sisters
Finding God in a Dog
I think Lessig got it right to point out the importance of keeping the focus on "Progress". As we have seen with firms like Intel and Microsoft, IP can be used to slow progress.
So, we want laws that support progress, but at the same time leave enough freedom for the authors to make a profit with their findings. (They should at least be able to get their invested money back.) Where should the line between the need of protection of the authors rights and the wish for progress from the public be drawn?
In my opinion that line was drawn at the right place, but the latest changes indicate that big businesses push successfully to change the "balance" (Lessig got that right as well) to their favor. Is there a way to influence this trend without having lots of money? I don't really believe that many politicians listen to intelligent remarks from normal citizens. So, what is the way to get heard without using illegal means?
Alright. Back that up. Just what exactly is wrong with the PDF format? What better alternatives do you propose, and why are they better? It seems to be a nice enough substitute for PostScript in Apple's new rendering model.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I think an interesting question to pose is "what should intellectual property law protect?" If you consider that part of the call for strong law is the protection of indiviguals who take longer to develop their idea then say a monolithic entity with 10,000 code writers, it seems to be a duble edged sword. Do we protect more, and potentially limit the speed of development (not as many free minds have the right to work with previous ideas?) or do we free up restriction and face an even larger potential that smaller vendors will be beaten out by larger organizations because they can not protect their ideas from companies that have larger amounts of resources to thow at the idea once it becomes knows?
I run a fairly successful (free) auction site. Yesterday, I had a voicemail left on my machine at work from the Director of Legal Affairs for Universal Records.
When I called to speak with him, and played a little phone-tag, he brought up the concern that a user had posted bootlegged Godsmack recordings, on CD-R's, on my site. Godsmack's management was not pleased with this and voiced their concern to Universal Records.
The representative I spoke with seemed understanding and realized that I am an individual operating a free, non-profit website with no intention to exploit intellectual property ownership. I explained that all I could do was review the auction in question and notify him of any decisions or actions that were made after I weighed his concern.
I reviewed the auction, which the seller had clearly explained in the item's description, was a compilation of bootlegs and songs that were not commercially available by the artist and that, as such, there was no financial impact on the artists themselves. You do not need to be a lawyer (and I am not one) to realize that this is most likely still very wrong. Bootlegging is, generally, a bad thing. And making money off it is probably almost always illegal.
Still, my concern was not for my own legal well-being, as the site clearly states that items being sold are the sole responsibility of the person posting them and all concerns should be addressed directly with that person. My concern was, in fact, how and what precident I would be setting for the future of my site and its users.
My final decision was to notify the seller of the situation, leave the auction up, put a notice on the auction item itself that the record company and Godsmack's management had concerns regarding this and as such, it was no longer available, should not be bid upon, and for all intents and purposes, the item should be considered not to exist. The auction page itself remained, until the seller willingly deleted it, for information purposes.
I notified Universal Records immediately of the decision I had made and received an email confirmation. They seem to have found my handling of the issue acceptable.
Now, my understanding is that even if these bootlegs were, somehow, legitimate and legal, I would have been required to remove/ban the auction until it could be proven that the item was acceptable to sell. Simply by someone claiming a wrong done, I would be required to behave and proceed with the assumption that, until proven otherwise, a wrong had been done. Is this correct? To what extent does this reach?
On a side note, during my conversation with the Universal Records lawyer, he said that (paraphrasing) "Our only concern is that our artists and their management feel damaged by material being exploited to make money which they should have control over." To which I replied, "I completely agree that it is wrong for someone to exploit an artist and their work for monitary gain without respect to the artist and ownership of their material."
Obviously, I was making a slight risk at agitating a lawyer with lots of financial backing by a very large corporation, but I thought it deserved to be said -- and how many chances do you get to tell a major record label what you think of their treatment of artists? I think it had to be done, or I'd be forever kicking myself for missing the opppertunity.
His response? He was silent, long enough for me to have to pose an inquisitive "...hello?" before the conversation continued.
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
Lawrence Lessig == smart is not a statement. Lawrence Lessig == smart could yield either a true or false boolean value. either Lawrence Lessig == smart or Lawrence Lessig smart. If Hemos thinks that Lawrence Lessig IS smart, he should have told us so with: Lawrence Lessig = smart But before this, tell me what programming language accepts spaces in variable names. -S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
As we move farther and farther into the Digital Age(C), it becomes apparent that current copyright laws simply will no longer be appropriate, or even relevant. Unfortunately, the large corporations that have made huge sums of money off of their IP will fight the death or metamorphosis of copyright all the way to their graves. There just isn't any solution that will appeal to all sides of the issue. Maybe it'll be a wake up call for some companies to change their business model for survival in a completely different culture.
---------
"There's no swimming in the heavy water, no playing in the acid rain.
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
That's like saying that this post isn't owned by me because a keyboard and Linus' keyboard driver and Marc's Netscape made it.
;-).
I just meant that the only true artform is the original form in which the art was created. If the art was first created through a keyboard, and if the keyboard did not modify it, the art is still mine. Otherwise, the keyboard would surrender all IP rights or else pay me royalties
Thus, you do own your own digital artwork: the artform requires the use of certain tools. However, the art of a program isn't in the binary, it's in the source.
|/usr/games/fortune
In light of this article, I think it's a pertinent time to repeat the meme:
No copyright has expired in this country since the end of World War 2.
When the copyrights expire sometime around 2008, Congress will most likely vote to re-extend them again. Unlike what the Founders intended, entire generations can be born and die without seeing a copyright expire. A whole generation with no access to a "common pool of knowledge," but plenty of opportunity to be harassed by corporatist police state goons (e.g. 15 year-olds in Scandinavia).
Unhappy? Kill your television.
It's not Capitalism that's to blame, it's our overly-zealous greed coupled with media whoring. People don't need SUV's but hey, that's what all the cool kids are driving. If folks were not so materialistic, if all the Religious Right actually LIVED peaceful and generous lives, if we weren't so sucked in by the flash and splash on television, and yes, if the government was taken back by the people, away from corporations with twisted agendas, America could really be cool. ;-)
I rambled a bit there but the point I'm trying to make is that we may be a bit f*cked up at the moment, but I believe we'd do better fixing what we've got than trying to switch over to a socialist/facist/whatever system.
By the way, Dolfy, what'd you think of "Schindler's List"?
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Burris
Since the ideas of intellectual property, copyright law, and the U.S. patent system first came about, a lot has changed. Methodological concepts have become as valuable as machine designs once were-- the design for a new type of cog or a better steam engine was conceptual, but it had specific mechanical specs. Concepts such as (for instance) one-click shopping are also conceptual, but the applications are much more varied due to the very nature of the medium in which they're applicable. You don't need to buy the parts and weld and build and test and hand your sponsors a lump of metal before going into mass produciton; mass production is cutting and pasting, or copying, or making available for download. You can try more things. One of the most obvious results of this is that new technologies mutate and evolve at a much faster rate. Ten years ago, hyperlinking was patented by IBM, but today it's an integral part of an entire breed of technologies. This kind of proliferation would not have been possible had that patent been enforced. The original concept of the patent was supposed to be a limited right that would create an incentive for authors to produce, and that "after a short interval," as Justice Joseph Story put it, what was produced would pass to the "full possession and enjoyment" of the public "without restraint." Not a restriction on proliferating or elaborating on the idea, but incentive to spread the idea in the first place.
...and it is also beginning to reach copies that are not "fixed in a tangible medium;" take, for instance, the recently e-published-only novels and e-released-only albums; though they might not be fixed in a tangible medium, they still seem to be suceptible to copyright laws.
Another result of this is the fact that the "thing" that is being protected has become an idea, not actually a "thing" at all. At most tangible, it is a process or method; at least tangible it might be innovative concepts for which the originator should not go unrecognized. Copyright is no longer restricted to "maps, charts and books." It reaches anything "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." It no longer regulates only publishers; it reaches anyone who makes a "copy."
Perhaps the IP laws, copyright laws, and patent system need an overhaul. Well, certainly they need an overhaul. The emphasis needs to be returned to innovation and progress, and the periods of protection need to be shortened. A serious dialogue is a good start. Getting the government to change things takes a long time. What can we do in the mean time?
Do something about world hunger. Click here
... that the government has taken the interests of business over the interest of technological advancement. The whole thing certainly resembles the patent problem.
Unfortunately, right now we (the USA) as a country judge ourselves based upon our economy. The 1790's weren't the time that we draw most from - we draw more from the industrial economy of the 1920's.
What Mr. Lessig said very eloquently is perfectly applicable to the 1790's. It's not to the 1920's, the time of the economy of the nation being the only priority. Except that our economy is now based on information - most of it entertainment information, but information nonetheless. It's the old "Mickey Mouse's copyright is expiring-let's extend the copyright term" situation.
It took major politics to bring workers rights up as an issue in the 1920's. Unfortunately no polititian wants to touch the copyright and patent issues - because what both parties stand for is money. There is no major political party concerned with issues of copyrights. (Does anybody know Mr. Nader's position on copyright law?)
In this situation, the consitution is an outmoded model. Instead consider the suffering worker of the 1920's as the model - except we don't suffer physically, only intellectually.
...based solely on the name of the poster of that comment.
Next thread please.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Although it's a huge infringment on our rights, legislation like this can only help the free software community.
If people are given a choice between software that truly belongs to them which they have full control over and being led around on a leash by corporate interests that have goals other than their own, they'll pick freedom every time. Free software will take off because it will become the only way people can get what they really want and need. Projects like KDE and Gnome are coming along to the point where switching from other OS's is an extremely viable solution.
That said, it's sad to see developments like this. When it comes down to it, it's greed and powermongering at it's worst.
BBK
Let's see PDF uses that damn compression protocol that isn't open(when they made pdf format there were 60 open types out there, did they use one? nooooo...) and PDF is marketed as a ONE WAY format... read only for your customers.. it was never ever marketed or intended as a document format. Postscript was. Sorry, but PS and PDF are different.. uncompress it and do a diff. you will not find much that is easily compared (other than the text)
And we can look at another factor.. unless you run linux or pay through the nose for Adobe software you cannot get the pdf distiller to create this "wondourous" format. otherwise it would be found everywhere other than the big corperate sites.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The endless extensions to the rights and protections granted to the holders of intellectual property are, especially in their most recent incarnations, nothing short of astounding. No reasonable person can defend the actions of the few, large players in the "Intellectual Property Industry" (another thing the framers never could have conceived of) in transparently prolonging the life of the Mickey Mouse franchise. The DMCA is the current pinnacle of the efforts to coopt the creative by corporate interests; a law which is, in form and function, an anathema to artists (of any dicipline) and their audience alike.
Society is not peppered with man-as-island "artists" and "authors" and "coders," who spin out delicate and frail inventions from ivory towers, desperate for protection from marauding information pirates. We are intimately dependent on one another, on our ideas, our dreams, our goals; each of us fuels the others work as citizens, as thinkers, as creators of new ideas, new art, new programs (an art in itself, certainly). The unprecedented progress we have witnessed in the last century is unquestonably operating in spite of the growing trend toward brutal protection of intellectual property, in a vacuum of both understanding and enforcement. This intellectual growth could not have happened under the culture that is being created today, and a balanced intellectual property doctrine wisely recognizes the necessity of all ideas to mature into the public domain, and ignores the natural ecology of ideas at the extreme peril of those who would live under it.
As a programmer, it is easy for me to follow the news, watch the lawsuits, and reach direct, immediate, and objective conclusions about the impact of intellectual property (especially software patents) on our discipline and the world that it serves. The peril to innovation of the current intellectual property law, and our interpretations of it regarding software, is so obvious that it has spurred a phenomenal and almost unexplainable social phenomenon: free software. But it goes way beyond software, and it's easy to infer how much real damage "overly strong" intellectual property law is doing to our economy among "solution-oriented" disciplines, and this doesn't stop short of harm to our more personal lives in "softer" industries like music, literature, etc.
We have now a very small group of capitalists who have grown very fat by exploiting, and then expanding, the weaknesses of our intellectual property laws. They will naturally stop at nothing to preserve their effortless wealth; they have no interest in creating a healthy society: their only interest is their own success. Of course, in a democracy, their absurdly small minority should be drowned out by the balance of the citizenry. Everyone's interests should be represented, to insure that no one's self-interest foils a fair government in presiding over a healthy society.
Of course, you can do ABC news polls out the wazoo, and you will find numbers that lead politicians pandering greedily to the IP interests. Most American's can't be bothered to think about these issues, even as the quality of their lives are silently eroded by the forces at work. But, for this, I can't do more than to simply quote a very smart man, who once observed:
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands... The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.
The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."
-Albert Einstein
We're on the road to Tycho.
The brief (in pdf) is here.
With the advent of personal computing and the ability of anyone to make virtually free copies of any piece of information the supply of any piece of information will always match the demand.
Amen! Digital information is a commodity, end of story. People need to understand that this is a property of the new medium which we've found: the Internet. The corporations are the people who would profit from others' (or their own) misunderstanding of this. Nobody ever profited from twisting the laws of supply and demand in the physical world, unless they turned the quick buck and dumped ship. With infinite supply, a new business model needs to be found, instead of claiming that the existing architechture is sufficient. IP touches on this especially in the software and entertainment industries--an author's work is his own, yes, but once released into the new medium, it will obey those laws, not the author's idea of what should happen.
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
I don't have a lot of problems with the PDF format per se, but the Acrobat Reader is sorely lacking. For starters, the keyboard controls are counterintuitive. Try hitting page up or page down to move through a document. I do it every time, then smack myself on the forehead and say "wups, shoulda used control-3 instead!" Now click the "Makes the visible width of the current page fit inside the window" button (I kid you not, that's the tool tip) and press the keystroke combination that advances one screen at a time, not one page at a time. That's right, there is no such keystroke combination. The icons don't make a lot of sense, to me anyway. Just check out the ones which have tool tips of "Displays only the page," "Displays both bookmarks and the page," and "Displays both thumbnails and the page" on the left side of the toolbar. Try dragging the mouse over some text in the viewer to select it for pasting to your word processor or notepad. Notice how you can only select entire words? Finally, why does the readme file delivered with my version (3.01 for Windoze) come in WRITE format and not PDF?
never ask a question you don't want to know the answer to
Would it really be so bad if Walt Disney, Co. lost their copyright protections to Mickey & Co? Sure, we'd start seeing Mickey pop up in all sorts of unexpected places, and Disney might suffer harm because of this. But economics is not a zero-zum game. Were Disney to be terminally damaged by this and soon thereafter be relegated to the nostalgia bin, there would be another entertainment conglomerate to rise in its place.
My point? That the "overly strong" copyright laws that exist today are actually weaking our economy. For certain, these copyright laws are benefiting the status quo: Disney, Seagrams, etc. But by putting up legislative barriers to innovation such as these, companies are protected from having to compete in the arena of ideas. Further, I have a very hard time with the idea of almost perpetual protection for cartoon characters, jingles, and pop horror films. There are always the so-called "experts" who frighten Congresscritters with their gloom-and-doom predictions were Mickey to go into the public domain. I hardly believe the world economy would crash. We'd just start seeing more Mickey, and probably in ways that Disney doesn't like. That is not a bad thing.
- Rev.There's a difference between using PDF or PostScript as a rendering model and as a file format. As a file format, my major complaint is that it is heavily optimized for printing nicely at the expense of usability when reading it on a computer; for example page breaks, having no control over font sizes, usually being forced to have the document fill the screen to avoid horizontal scrolling. HTML is far better for online material.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
The article is exactly correct to draw attention to the language and supporting commentary on Article I. A balance needs to exist between the producers of Intellectual Property's needs to acheive some return on their investment which allows them to produce more Intellectual Property in the future, and in exchange for this "limited" period of protection the public has the right to use this IP without restrictions upon expiration of copyright. A good law, a balanced law, and locked into the Constitution itself.
Congress does not care. Copyright law is just yet another aspect of the Constitution being illegally circumvented by crooked politicians to save the nation from crime and itself, while bending over for law enforcement and industry.
The people have no say, for the most part they are sheep who only care that they have cable television and beer. The Constitution is just a old piece of parchment to play fun legal games and reinterpret the meaning of key words and intents, of course without consulting those pesky "Fedralist Papers" that would prevent such circumvention.
Copyright law, gun control, taxes, mineral/water rights, patent protections, privacy, state vs. federal powers. The entire bill of rights has been augmented with tens of thousands of laws and 'findings' expanding federal control all over areas deemed sancrosanct in that pesky old Constitution.
It will get far worse before it gets any better.
Would the words "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" rule out the net in the first place? A stream of electrons isn't exactly "tangible". And the data isn't tied to any particular storage medium (I can store an MP3 by etching it in a rock if I want...will they then outlaw copying of rocks?).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Hey-shouldn't we be flaming you for voicing a valid argument that isn't popular?
Capitalism...it has struck me that there's no fighting capitalism at this point. It's more of a law of nature in our society. But it's clear that our legislators have very little interest in protecting consumers or extending their rights.
But there's a very good reason for that. They know that the government in which they are involvded is painfully dated. They know that it's going to be consumers that end their rule, when they realize that every dollar they spend is a vote, and it's become a more important vote than the one they make in the polls.
The real problem, if there is one, is that the public doesn't realize that they are the ones paying the bills for these huge companies. They may be big, but there's no company and no industry that can stand if they're publicly unpopular. That's why they're so eager to control the media. Informed consumers are the enemy of the status quo. That's why I wince every time I go into a CompUSA, or Best Buy and I see the help treating a customer as a mark.
If you want to make political change happen, make it happen with your wallet. Forget the ballot-that vote has been sold long ago.
More than anyone, that would be the French. However, none of the Allied nations is clear of responsibility in regards to the excessive punishment of Germany after WWI. But that doesn't absolve Germany for WWII either. There was a lot of poverty all over during the Great Depression.
-- 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.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
It sounds to me a lot like what RMS has been saying all along.
I know this is a bit offtopic (and applies to the US) , but My problem with the DMCA is not how much it gives the copyright holder, nor what it takes from the consumer.
I hate what it takes from the thief.
See, it has measures that seek to take away the ability to steal, not just to make it illegal. They say the encryption is illegal to break, and it's illegal to show others how to break it. Next, having a debugger will be illegal because it gives us the abity to figure out the encryption and so break it. (okay maybe an exageration) This is bad. Now, don't take me wrong here, I don't want to live in a crime ridden world. But there is a reason that we have a right to a jury of our peers.. That reason is that only people like us can judge us guilty of a crime. Even people who have admittedly killed other people have been let free, judged to have extenuating circumstance, or other reason to do so. Ever hear of self defence?
So If the ability to kill is taken from me, what do I do when a person who has figured out how to retain that ability triess to kill me? Die, I guess.
No, I don't think that people should or could pirate DVDs for self defence. No, I don't think that copying DVDs is tantamount to murder. I simply think that you can make it illegal for me to do something, and punish me for doing it, but you should NOT be able to take away my ability to do so.
See, a all-encompasing law can not pertain to every case. A body of peers will help to keep the law applied fairly (well, it should, but let's assume it does for now). So let me keep my ability to steal. Just punish me for doing so after the fact, okay?
Murder is illegal, but a kitchen knife is not. Copying DVDs is illegal, but the decryption software is not... oops. At least I can tell others where to get the decryption software... right?
Btw: what happens when thinking about circumventing copy protection is outlawed, and circumventing the 'anti-Bad Thought device' is illegal? Should our ability to think bad things go too? Don't laugh, 600 years ago the idea of sending a message instantly to the other side of the planet would have gotten you laughed at or killed.... there was no other side of the planet, let alone the message part. Yet here I am, doing it.
Like sqlrob asked, please post a reference we can use in getting this through to folks.. This is the kind of awkward question that should be asked by our representatives when the debate comes around again if not before - and if they dont ask it, then we should be asking THEM why not when they come up for re-election! Corporations and PACs can buy publicity and spin, they cant buy our votes - the only way to ensure a politician represents us is to convince them that to do otherwise would be political suicide....
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
OK, I understand that when I take this particular sequence of numbers and feed it as input to a particular decoding program, out comes the latest Brittany Spears or whatever. So what? If I take it and feed it to Word, out comes a file of text. (It's gibberish. But then again, a lot of what is produced with Word is gibberish.)
It's not at all hard to imagine a program that takes an MP3 file and produces a pretty picture ... maybe a histogram or something. At that point, can you argue that the MP3 is uniquely a representation of the Brittany Spears song? Maybe I want it for some other purpose. Do I really believe that digitizations has completely undermined the entire basis of intellectual "property"? Actually, yes, but I don't expect the system to fall. This nagging inconsistency at its root might, however, force a rationalization sometime soon, wherein the social contract is reviewed and amended in the full light of day rather than (metaphorically) hidden in the cover of darkness.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
1) Not everyone who questions the current state of patents, copyrights, and IP, is out to steal such. Saying "what a minute, is this a good idea" does not make one a criminal.
2) Current copyright laws are not necessarily what the US founders had in mind. And then he goes on to show why I thinks that way.
The US patent system, and the UK's as well, was explicitly set up to spread learning in the population. The Statute of Anne in 1710, which gave the rights to works to the authors as opposied to the printers-publishers, has the title 'an act for the encouragement of learning . . .'. It took until 1774 for the House of Lords to fight off the publishers' fighting of the Statute and to "affirm the public domain created by the 1710 statute by denying common law claims to the perpetual protection of intellectual property"
Before the late 1500s there wasn't much of anything like IP. There were some granted patents, which tended to run for 5 years or less. The response of IP holders to easier copying has been to push the period of ownership out further and further, which doesn't really address the problem of copying IP. Of course, neither does running around trading files and shouting "Music should be free".
Some of the push for longer term IP came from Europe, where establish wealthy families and companies wanted to maintain control longer. The result has been that the the longer terms have spread to the US, where control of IP has left the actual creators and ended up in the hands of large organizations. It's worth the trouble of getting copyright to go for life+70, if it means that the company that actually controls the IP can now make money off of it for 100+years. Corporations can live "forever", people don't.
while to an extent i agree that copyright laws in this country are stronger than necessary, many /. ers seem to be of the opinion that these laws are basically the equivalent of pure evil. i realize that, in making my next statement, i am also failing to provide the "plan" that i'd like to see suggested, but: if i am going to be inundated with discussion about copyright law (on either side of the argument) i would at least like to hear some constructive ideas about how to make our present situation better...criticism of the establishment's current system is valuable and productive, to a point, then it becomes annoying and perhaps even childish.
"we'd all love to see the plan" --- John Lennon
Isn't it funny though that moderators thought the troll was interesting?
A.H.
"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things."
There was a lot of poverty all over during the Great Depression
Of course, if the bloody Weimar Republic didn't make themselves impotent, then Adolf Hitler wouldn't've had the power to do what he did. A bloodless coup d' etat is still that: an overthrow of an exisiting government.
As copy rights have grown longer than the average life span (the article gices examples of 144 years in some cases.)
Could a constitutional chalenge be mounted based on the fact that current copy right terms don't meet the stated intent of "limited times". Can "limited times." last longer than living memory?
I don't know about the politics of American constitutional law, but "reasonableness" is often sighted in Candian Supreme court rulings.
-Peace
Dave
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Acrobat's "page" metaphor is obnoxious when you are using a computer, which has no concept of such silly things. PDF basically sucks unless you print it. Higher resolutions are not always the solution -- even at 1280x1024 on a 19" monitor, some PDF's are inaccessible. MHTML strikes a better balance than PDF, because it's just HTML with embedded graphics (OK, all the files are just gzipped together), so it renders nicely on screen, and generally comes out quite nice when printed. There are already HTML facilities for font embedding, so it's just a question of getting support for it in your browser. This is the same format that HTML mail uses, so you probably have an application that can handle it already. There are no excuses for PDF. The reason it exists is that marketing/advertising departments are slaves to Adobe, much more so than IT departments are to Microsoft.
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Ummmm, that would be digital.
>Now, if the word processor manufacturers would
>get off their butts and let the software >read/write Postscript... this would be a true >cross-platform, program indipendant,
GAK! Um no, this is a BadIdea(tm).
To review, Postscript is a NP complete language. That is - it isn't just a document description language (e.g. PDF) it's a full FREAKING language.
E.g. a document can also be a virus. And this isn't like the whole Outlook mess, where a virus script is passed around. Thedocument itself (or a piece of clipart, etc etc) would be the virus.
There is a reason why NeXT machines had a setting for 'Display EPS Securely', and the same reason that Apple has ditched PS for PDF.
"The text is available on my Web site, Mr. Warnock. In a PDF file.
Adobe Systems has sued Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig for violating the Digital Copyright Act (UCITA). Press reporters quote Adobe Chariman John Warnock saying ,"Just because some commie pinko teaches at Harvard doesn't mean he can go around violating the lawful agreement he entered into by using our product." Questioned further in the incedent Mr Warnock further explained that the Harvard Professor had maligned Adobe Systems and Himself in an online editorial. When asked about UCITA violating Mr Lessig's free speech rights Warnock replied, "This ain't about free speech. Its about responsible speech and following the law."
Mr. Lessig couldn't immediaetly be reached for comment, but one of his students reported his comments when the he was served a Court Summons during a class. The student though he heard the professor mutter, "What, the truck?" but he wan't certain.
I'm wondering what people think about this article, from The New Republic:
http://www.tnr.com/061900/lessig061900. html
Briefly, Lawrence Lessig argues that the Clinton administration's
regulatory inaction during AT&T's acquisition of MediaOne will have
dire consequences for the future of the Net. Among them:
1) "Customers accessing the Internet through cable will have no guaranteed
choice of ISPs. Instead, the cable company will pick the ISP.
Rather than allow consumer choice among scores of providers offering
broadband Internet service, the cable company will permit just a few
ISPs of its own selection."
2) "... cable companies [will] design the next generation of the Internet
on the model of the old telephone system--in which the network owner,
by dint of choosing the ISP, gets to control the kind of content and
use the network will allow. "
Thoughts?
Back when capitalism was first concieved as an economic system, it was stipulated that the market would be driven by informed consumers, who would vote with their money for the best product at the best price and everything would click along nicely. What we have now is uninformed consumers blindly plopping down their money for shoddy goods that they really don't need. You're absolutely right in your analysis otherwise though.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I really wish I could remember where I read this so I could point at it. Maybe it's time for me to wander back through some of the IP/copyright articles in the /. archives.
I'd disagree. While most graphic designers (who do the design work for marketing/advertising) are dependent on Adobe tools (and Macs), the reason they go with PDF format is that they can control *exactly* what you see, nothing else gives them that control. Of course, PDF is less usable for the consumer, but marketeers value control more than they value what the consumer really wants...
...when he tried to urinate in its mouth, as a stoopid schoolboy's wager.
While I understand what you're trying to say, and I sympathise with your position, the elemental root of the problem is the association between "software" and "product".
Software isn't a manufacturing industry, it's a service industry. Programmers are more akin to mechanics than to assembly line workers.
Doesn't it seem odd to you to attempt to sell anything that costs nothing to duplicate, is easily duplicated, and easily distributed once duplicated? It's as flawed an idea as, say, basing one's national currency on blank white 8.5x11 inch paper.
Or in other words "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well, then don't do that!"
Of course, the common complaint against this idea is "I'm a programmer! How do I feed my kids if I can't sell software?" And the answer is - most programmers don't work in the for-sale software industry as it sits today! The vast majority are employed by banks, hospitals, manufacturing companies, and so on as in-house problem solvers. The for-sale software provider is (statistically speaking) a minor player, and a bit of an abberation.
If you are a for-sale software programmer, and you are losing sales to "pirates" (I actually prefer the term "librarians" myself) well, it's YOU who are shoveling your money out the door. Why do that?
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Check out his letter to Bill Gates (If this has been linked to on /. before I am not surprised- but I have not seen it yet...) Letter to Bill
The back button on my browser is broken... so I would appreciate it if everyone would put a "target=new" into their link
Kuro5hin.org is now having a discussion on the death of copyright, started because of a discussion on the Freenet mailing list. What if Freenet really took off and copyright became unenforcable? What would happen to artists?
If we've learned one thing from reading JonKatz, its this:
You can't generalize what the framers of the Constitution believed 200+ years ago to how we should interpret it today!
Remember, Jefferson believed that the US would remain a nation of independent farmers. He didn't believe in foreign policy or the advancement of technology and never saw industrialization on the horizon. He also believed in an extremely strict interpretation of the constitution. Something that went out the window, say, less that 10 years after it was written! He was extremely short-sighted - but not wrong - its just the US evolved into the complete opposite of what he expected.
Thus, why are we looking to the dead white male framers of the constitution as a guide to how we should behave today? So the framers never intended strong IP law? They also acknowledged the existence of slavery, and prohibited women to vote. It was a very different era...
Most of lessig's argument is bullshit. What ole TJ said 200+ years ago has no bearing on whats going on today. I hate to appear to bash the Constitution like this, but the reality is that the Constitution today is not used at all like it was originally intended (especially by TJ).
I hate to see lawyers decide how technology should work. Especially with regards to software.
The comment about things like PDF readers being integrated into the OS shows how misguided he is. Anyone who has done any work on OS's knows that that kind of functionality does not belong in an modern OS (despite what MS would say - IE, hint hint).
Its fine that he doesn't understand this - he's a lawyer, not a computer scientist. But he does have a lot to say (and some power) in the technology world, which, frankly, frightens me. Its politicians and lawyers that allow us to end with such wonderful pieces of legislation as the DMCA.
Mr J. Smith was quoted as saying, "Gosh, yessir, I did build the frame for the constitution, but I sure didn't think it was such a big deal, just a simple wooden frame with a little string to hang it on a wall... now I find everyone talking about The Framer like I wrote the thing..."
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
That was a district court decision in Eldred v. Reno. It is scheduled for hearings in from of the circuit court of appeals in July. There is more information on the OpenLaw site.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Thank you. Your reply just proved my point.
Evidently you have never taken a course in computer science.
Computers store configurations of electrons. These configurations correspond to 'on' and 'off' states. That is all. If you wish to interpret that as a binary number, that is your interpretation. A computer has no concept of 'number'. If you choose to interpret as text, you can do that too. Or you can even interpret the on/off states as a Britney Spears mp3.
IANAL, but I know copyright does not only apply to text. It applies to any form of recorded human expression. And those on/off states are certainly human expression.
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
My GeForce, Modem, NIC, burner, CDROM and Monitor all came with their own drivers FROM THE MANUFACTURER. Are you saying M$ should have supplied those too?
Anyway you have the patches for 95 to have USB support so use 'em. If that isn't "viable" perhaps you should look at another O/S...Hmm..how about Linux? It seems to be the fav. of M$ bashing Zealots. USB for Linux
Perhaps you can purchase some common sense with the "auto +3 for bashing M$" karma. Just because a product doesn't have exactly what you want doesn't mean they are using copyright to control you. If that were the case, any s/w you pay for to get an upgrade or added feature would be immoral in your world.
--Clay
By the time you submit the code it will horribly obselete.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Lessig's article is about the pragmatic motivations for IP policy; the reader posts are volleying on the same foundation. What about basic property rights? If I create an IP product, be it a song, program or article, should I not have full property rights? Why should this basic right be abrogated in the case of corporations?
The Constitution is a fabulous piece of work, but the artificial provision for patents is incongruous and infuriating. Instead of contextualizing IP as a human right (like press, speech, religion, etc.), the Framers prop it up using "promotion of progress." This is clearly a collectivist argument. What we need is a dialogue about the precise nature of property rights; the policy details would be easy to codify thereafter.
Perhaps, the Slashdot community cares about rights as long as they apply to the masses -- how sad.
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring epicurean ***
Image if when you brought a peice of property in your town, that you continued to own it even after you died and nobody could use it. The United States would become a vacant gost town. IP ownership is the same. There are millions of scientific research articles in musty libraries and nobody is allowed to put them in a database, except for a few of the largest ones(which you have to pay for). Why? Because these journals 'own' the articles, and it is not economically viable for them to digitize them, and this information just fades away....
love is just extroverted narcissism
You're right
it SHOULD work both ways.
the big problem there is that the the government already blew that out the window by allowing CORPORATIONS to exist at all!
that french term, coined by Joseph Smith, means LEAVE ALONE.
as you say, the government leaves business alone, and that *should* work.
but by allowing HUGE MONSTROSITIES to behave as INDIVIDUALS, we've created a NIGHTMARE!
"capitalism" isn't the problem, as capitalism DOES NOT EQUAL "corporatism."
what i'm trying to say is that corporations are unnaturally created and fostered by "business law" and that corporatism FLIES IN THE FACE of the laisez faire concept.
check out what robert anton wilson has to say about that.
is when slashdot equates your name to 'smart'. What an ego trip that must be :)
Which is unconstitutional. Article 1, Section 9. No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Well, it should be. The Supreme Court stupidly held that that only applied to criminal law, not civil law, back in 1789. Schmucks. The Sonny Bono act would have been unconstitutional. And, frankly, should still be. See here.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
It's not an all-or-nothing deal though. We already have socialist aspects integrated...like socialized health care and education and some socialized, or at least heaviliy regulated and hand-picked, industry. We don't have to "switch over". We *can* fix what we've got by introducing some common sense reform...instead of having knee-jerk reactions that imaginary "socialism" and "communism" will turn our country into some fascist tyrannical police state. It's all so tired and stupid.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
...that anarchists write FAQ's to guide each other?
...that they form required participatory committees?
Sure sounds like organized government to me.
If you really want to get technical, you could argue that it's capitalism that actually sparks the greed in the first place -- so now we've gone full circle, and it's capitalism's fault again.
I'm not very good at explaining the whole deal, but there is a good (huge) FAQ at:
http://www.anarchism.ca/faq
The date is, coincidentally enough, just prior to when Mickey Mouse cartoons started.
Heh.... I was just going to say "What do you think the chances are of any Disney work ever passing into the public domain?"
---
((rant mode on)those F-ing required HU/SS electives... BOREING!!! who assigns "required electives" anyway, what an oxymoron. The least they could have done if I HAD to take non-CS classes is let me take PS chemistry or physics electives. But NOOOOO You *HAVE* to put up with that humanities/social science (heh "social science" there's another oxymoron) crap. sigh... no wonder our educational system is going down the toilet. At least *I* got my BSCS while it still is a *CS* degree and means something. ok well, (rant mode off))
But one of the primiary tenants of the socialist philosophy, as I recall, is the establishment of the socialist state by means of a violent overthrow of democratic society. And subsequently any private property WOULD be siezed by the government and redistributed as it saw fit. "The socialist manifesto", or something it was called. Supposedly, it was written by the guy who invented socialism in the first place.
Hardly sounded like "never dreaming of taking away private property or outlawing democratic elections" when I had to sit through it. Oh, and was this professor EVER a socialist. He went out of his way to make it sound like a "workers paradise" or some nonsence like that. God that class was torture.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
{ why(Lessig.trustgovernment)==true } ??? It is government that creates and enforces copyright laws, after all. Lessig wants the same people that WROTE the laws to somehow SAVE us from them. Lessig is an old-school statist;he is determined that government 'have a role' for the sake of having a role;the idea of government as anachronism is utter heresy to him. This is a war of technologies -- the best copy-protection technologies vs. the best cracking technology. To the cunning, the spoils!
PDF is meant for printing mostly, as for otherwise if done correctly it looks quite nice. If you have a large document that you need on the web and need to be printable a pdf is the only reliable way to go, no browserism to worry about. Slaves to adobe? Considering quark beats adobe on the publishing end in numbers i think that statement is a little off.
I've used adobe products for a logn time now, why? Because they do the job well and i know how to use them.
There is one other thing, with a pdf you can lock it so no one else can mess with it, try that with an html page.
this space for rent
As a file format, my major complaint is that it is heavily optimized for printing nicely at the expense of usability when reading it on a computer; for example page breaks, having no control over font sizes, usually being forced to have the document fill the screen to avoid horizontal scrolling.
Acrobat was created before the web took hold as being a way that people using different sets of applications could exchange data using a higher common denominator than ASCII text.
The disadvantages that you speak of are actually advantages to others. Designers can send fully formatted files to one another and printers and know that each recipient is looking the same exact thing.
If 2 scholars were coloaborating across the internet, one using Windows and one using Linux, they could note things to one another such as "the 3rd word on the 14th line of the 28th page needs to be changed". That statement means absolutely nothing with web pages because they render differently depending on platform, browser, and the available fonts on a system.
HTML and PDF's both have their advantages and disadvantages. I HOPE that HTML doesn't ever get extended to the point that it tries to compete with PDF as a file format. It'd add way too much overhead to our browsers, which would only lead to a buggier internet experience.
it means nuture the capitalist
:-)
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Because it [idea] is not property. Sharing an idea does not reduce it, as does a piece of land or a box of chocolates. Ideas belong to the creator until they are revealed in any form. Then they belong to the world. However, to offer encouragment for you to share your idea, we (the people) have granted an artificial monopoly over that idea for a limited time. Intellectual Property is a misnomer. Ideas never were, are not, and never will be property, though some might attempt to have the law view them as such. Presently, though the law gives FAR too much license to the copyright holder, ideas are still not property under the law.
The problem is that a polymer created by a research team of thousands using million dollar research labs and million dollar steel plants, that cost 23 million dollars to design, falls under the same protections as what the executives at Amazon.com came up with during a power lunch.
Maybe the length of the patent should be variable to the expense involved. If I can prove that I spent a million dollars coming up with an idea, the government might grant me a 25 year patent, while an idea resulting from a much less expensive process might only get a 2 or 3 year patent.
Or, hell, maybe all patents should last only as long as the company has not recouped the research costs.
Crap. None of this is enforcable. Ditch the patent system.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Please...
The "people" you're referring to are only a small subset of the people on the planet -- most of them would be slashdot readers too.
Give a choice between software they can pay for that is easy to use and software that is free, but unknown to the mainstream, a majority of people (i.e. the mainstream people) will choose the prior because it will seem like there only choice! Nevermnd if you explained to them about the political and philosophical advantages of free software they'd stare at you with a glazed look.
The day that free software is packaged, marketed and igven shelf-space like pay-for software is the day your statement will reach a wider audience.
Here's a neat trick for defending copyright: place a copy (if it's digital, a CDROM is preferable) in an envelope, seal it, and mail it to yourself. When you receive it, don't open it, but instead keep it in a safe place. The time stamp added by the post office is considered legal evidence of the date as long as the envelope remains sealed!
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
however, i am not convinced that even your(irrelevent) examples themselves are correct. if Snell had written a book containing his Law and you printed copies of it, he could have prosecuted you. he couldnt have stopped you using the Law, and perhaps if you just copied the statement of the Law it would be allowed under fair-use... but his actual expression of it is copyrightable.
of course you cannot copyright a single number, in the same way you cannot copyright a word. But when your combination of numbers/words gets to be a certain size (sufficient to express an idea that is uniquely yours, i presume), you can enforce copyright over it.
there's no point debating this, because computer code is (mostly) not numbers, it is not laws of nature... it is CPU instructions, written text, sampled sound, drawn graphics, all of which are covered by copyright laws.
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
Often the readme files give tips if you're having problems getting the software to work. If you were having a problem even starting Acrobat Reader, then having a README only in pdf would be rather useless.
Thanks for filling in the details here. As soon as I posted my comment, I realized that I wasn't even sure if it was the Supreme Court or one of the lower courts that made that ruling.
Every November we have an opportunity to change the way the US Government works by casting our votes for various elected officials. Yet time and time again we go and same the crooks back to office. NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE THIS WAY. By re-electing these officials we giving them a pat on the back and saying good job every time. If you do not like the laws which are passed then vote to change them. If you do not, then you have no right to compain!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In a true lassiez faire system it is up to the corporations to protect their own IP. If they cannot, then that's their problem, not the government's.
Most corporations are like fat sheep that have grown lazy under the protection of the shepherd (the government). If the shepherd leaves then the corporations would be eaten alive by the wolves in the free market. Find that hard to believe? Without governmental protection of IP, most music, movie and software companies would die within a few years of the revokation of the IP laws.
Wrong. Sorry, thanks for playing.
If Di$ney's copyrights were to expire, we would not see Mickey poping up everywhere. Mickey is not covered by copyright, he is covered by trademark. And as long as Di$ney defends the trademark, and has it in use, they will continue to hold it. Copyright only covers the movies Mickey was in. So, should the copyrights fail, we could distribute "Steamboat Willy" to our hearts content, but we couldn't use Mickey's image in anything we created without infringing upon Di$ney's trademark.
This is all the more reason that the arguements that "we must extend copyright so that our characters won't show up in porn." don't wash.
www.eFax.com are spammers
"It's worse than that. Almost nothing has expired since 1923" ". . . Come look at the milk in my refrigerator!"
Even sour cream has an expiration date, but a once its under a copyright, it and its dead author will never cease to expire and become free again.
Fair use is the clause that says it's OK for you to photocopy several pages out of a book you own to bring along on a trip. It's OK for you to make a mix tape of your CD's. It's OK for you to print out that article you read online because you want to read it on the john. You can do all of these things now, perfectly legally, for no cost, and without writing anyone a letter, turning over your credit card number or Social Security number or home phone. All of this is possible partly because our Government had the wisdom to carve out a place for reasonable use, and partly because it's awfully hard to sucessfully enforce restrictions on these behaviors.
In a copyright-enforcing digital world, potentially none of those things are true. As someone above mentioned with shrinkwrap licenses, in the digital world, they can easily write code to prevent you from copying, printing, or reading a work twice in the same day. You can be charged for every time you listen to an album. You can be prevented from copying a short section to add to your journal. And, perhaps most ominously, you can be required to submit personal identification every time you do one of these activities.
For an example, check out eBrary, a site implementing software to charge you a quarter to highlight and copy text, or print it.
It is time for every regular poster and reader at /. to run for office. We can all run in mass against one another and flood the precincts with like-minded people, at least in respect to eliminating the abuse of patents and copyrights to the detriment of our children.
/. karma measurement for each candidate is the lead story on CNN?
Everyone of us is qualified, assuming of course you are an American citizen. We need to put software developers in Congress. How do we do that? By each one of us trying to get there. We are so much smarter, in some cases so much richer, and some of us even better "networked/connected" than these hand-out grabbing sycophants that we get to select from on election day.
Any one out there interested in having an election where the
"She said, 'You are not as dumb as you look.' I replied, 'Thank you.'"
Blockquoth the poster:
I can only assume either (a) I am being more obfuscated than usual or (b) you're not reading the actual posts. Here is the contention: A computer file is a collection of bits, in that it is recorded as a series of binary states (one being designated "on" or 1, and the other as "off" or 0). Every file has a definite start and a definite end. You can therefore string the bits together, with the start bit being the least significant and so on. Taken togather, that string of bits becomes a binary number. That's the connection that was being made.Concrete example: Let's take the following "picture" and encode it. My picture is simply a crude letter L, as follows:
Now, we'll encode that as four pixels, meaning we really have or, assuming "X" is the on state, I'll assume our tiny encoder (gPEG?) takes the upper left corner as the first bit and then proceeds left-to-right and then top-to-bottom. Our gPEG would then consist of the following bits in a file: This is sort of significance-reversed (although that isn't terribly relevant). I can view this as the binary number 1101, or the base ten number 13. My "picture" is really just a number. Of course, the gPEG conversion would allow me to reverse the transformation and produce a picture. But another program (gNOTE?) could instead read this as a sequence of pulses to the speaker in my computer, making a little ditty.Same file, different interpretation. It's just a number, and what you do with the number determines what it means. In that sense -- admittedly, as my original subject line indicated, a radical sense -- the file itself is not copyrightable, because it is just a number. Sure, playing it through the gPEG makes it a picture, but playing it through gNOTE makes it a sound.
Hypothetical: I take a CD which I own and rip a track to MP3. I take the MP3 file and, using a specially-written program, interpret the data as pixel hues for a PNG. Perhaps, if the original MP3 happens to have especially nice behavior, the picture that comes out is aesthetically pleasing. (It'd have to be an abstract thing, of course.) If I then sell the PNG, am I violating copyright?
PROCEED WITH CAUTION: If you say "yes", you are saying that encoding an MP3 entitles someone to ownership of a number ... allowing that someone to sue a different artist, expressing himself/herself in a different way (say, PNG), were to create an image whose binary representation happened to match the MP3. Given that, I'd rush out and artificially create MP3s that happen to be the binary strings 0 (easy), 1, 10, 11, 100, etc. And then I'd own most of mathematics.
Also blockquoth the poster:
No, a file is none of these until interpreted by a given algorithm. A tape recording is physically different from a book, which is physically different from a painting. But digitize them, strip them of their associated extension, and suddenly they are indistinguishable. If a file doesn't end in MP3, how do you know it's a song?I know you won't agree but that's OK -- you're just wrong. The system is fundamentally flawed, because it does rest upon a fallacy; i.e., that songs, books, articles, pictures, etc. have physically meaningful distinctions in the digital domain. They don't -- they are each just a number -- and therefore the system creaks and groans and (I believe) ultimately crashes.
Eventually the IP system will Blue Screen of Death . What happenms next will be extremely interesting.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
>an entirely different story.
They're not effective because they use totally the wrong approach. I can become a well-rounded individual on my own WITHOUT sitting through the rantings of some clueless ivory-tower type about how how evil capitalism and democracy are.
HU/SS classes use the "this is how I think, therefore this is how you should think. Now memorize and regurgitate it" approach. So that's what you do memorize his rantings, regurgitate them onto the exam papers, and forget the entire horrible expierence when the semester's over.
Real classes, OTOH, such as the CS/PS/MA series give you problems that require thought. They teach you how to solve problems. They require you to exercise your brain. Therefore the knowledge is retained.
The difference between the "ranting zealot" and "challanging taskmaster" approaches to education is why, while the author of the "socialist Manifesto" escaped me till you replied; I can still knock out the pseudocode for Cohen-Sutherland or UNIX Quicksort in a few minutes, and have them functional in C shortly thereafter.
Mabye SOME people CAN just photographiclly remember all of the random spewings of clueless old geezers. I, usually have to have to THINK about something to retain it past finals time, however.
OTOH... You want well rounded? Well, hundred year old politics is definately NOT by forte. Wanna talk history of Ska music, and the influence of first and second wave bands on the current third wave and ska-core bands? How bout the evolution of punk rock/straight edge/anti-racist action culture? Or perhaps vulcanology? Or underwater sound propagation? Fun with pyrotechnics? The merits of Rollerblade in-lines vs. Oxygens or Bladerunners? Or, speaking of Blade Runners, classic and modern SciFi? Or plate tectonics (well, perhaps that should fall under vulcanology (my next vacation is to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.))?
Or if you MUST talk politics, how 'bout modern, relevant stuff; like DMCA issues? Or the Fed's idiotic "war on drugs" where armed robbers, rapists, and other violent criminals are being set free to make room in the jails for durg offenders with mandatory minimum sentences? Or perhaps the archaic and barbaric death penalty and the people about to be executed despite many discrepancies in the trial evidence? Or why I won't shop at the gap, and why I won't buy nike shoes or exxon gas?
There's plenty intresting of stuff to be "well rounded" about without obsessing about a proven-wrong 100-year old dead crackpot.
>The group involved, however, wasn't to be a
>totalitarian regime e.g. Stalin's, but rather
>all of the working class, in a free society.
Ah, but that's the kicker isn't it... Socialism, as it has been practiced in every socialist regeim that existed, HAS been a brutal, oppressive, police state. Take your pick: USSR, China, Cuba, N Korea, N Vietman, Cambodia, etc... So what is "real" socialism... The theoretical ideas of a long dead philosopher; or the actual fruits of his work, as it has been put into existance?
>worker's paradise, since the worker would not
>be owned by corporations, but rather the
>corporations by the workers.
Well, lets see... Last I checked, I don't live in a socialist country (Limbaugh-esque rantings about the "People's Republic of Kalifornia" notwithstanding) and yet, I, and all of my co-workers, have these papers in our bottom-left drawers that say "Option Grant" on them...
>propaganda spewed about socialism and
>communism in the U.S.
>Luckily, many European countries haven't been
>infected with McCarthy's nonsense, and Reagan's
>witch hunts,
Well, they DID threaten to destroy the US you know... does "We will bury you" ring a bell? AND there's the little matter of the conquest of half of Europe, and the threats to take the other half, right after we...
(and before you jump on me being US-centric, I KNOW the US was not alone, and that England was just as important, if not moreso. I *AM* a CS major after all, And I would be majorly remiss to not know where Alan Turing was from. If you can find a copy of "The Ultra Secret" by F.W. Winterbotham, you should read it. It's a fascinating first hand look at the exploits of Bletchley Park.)
...fought the largest war in history to stop the nazis from doing the same thing. Such would be described by PR types as a BAD THING(tm) if you want people to have a good impression of you.
Oh, and there is the little matter of the cuban "revolution" and pointing nuclear missiles at us from 90 miles, right in the perfect position for a no-warning "decapitation" strike. The Berlin blockade and Berlin wall, and the Afghanastan invasion are also not very good ways to convince people that you're "peaceful socialists" trying to bring about a "workers' paradise".
Now, McCarthy was, of course, inexcusable. A cliche to the tune of "when you obsess about your enemy you become like that enemy" comes to mind. And I'm not familiar with any "witchhunts" under Reagan. But I can sure understand the concern. There we had the largest military power in the world promising our annhilation; and they were happily gobbling up big parts of the rest of the world as stepping stones towards that goal. Not exactly something that *wouldn't* engender a good deal of distrust, and yea... outright paranoia.
But remember... just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're NOT out to get you.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
To be honest, I'm not really a uber-IP enthusiast so I might not be the best person to reply to this, but I'll give it a go anyway. What I'm enthusiastic about is doing more of what is important to me and for others to have the same opportunities. Now, some of the things that are important to me depend on the creativity of others - I'm a student and spent a lot of time digesting the ideas of others in books, I also enjoy reading Slashdot. The people whose creative energy went into these books and Slashdot needed some incentive to employ their energies in this way. For some, that incentive may have been public spiritedness, the respect of others, and for others it may have been some financial reward.
It is clear that not all incentives for creativity are financial and not all financial ones depend on IP. I don't dispute this. But it is equally clear that there are some cases of where the creativity of others could provide something useful and important to me but for the people cable of provide the required creativity, there exists no sufficient incentive to do so. Assigning intellectual property rights can provide the required incentive. The authors of the books I read receive royalties, the designers the processor in the PC I am reading Slashdot on can patent their design. So, the books get written and the computers built: I can develop my own idea from the ones in the books and the comments on Slashdot that I read.
So it seems plausible that IP has indirectly helped me develop my ideas and had a positive rather than chilling effect on my learning.
Is this what you consider the atrocious proposal to be or is this what you mean by a balanced intellectual property doctrine . If it is the balanced doctrine, then what exactly is the atrocious proposal and what is the difference between the two?
Copyright is just a law. As such it can be enforced, unenforced, repealed, left alone, or strengthened.
Technological measures which attempt to preserve copyright. Those can be broken.
The choice tends to be between Republicrat Crook Foo and Republicrat Crook Bar. If crooks are the only candidates, how do we vote the crooks out?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I like what Lessig writes. I was 1st introduced to him via /. Many moons ago, /. featured the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. If you don't understand what this means then I suggest that you search the web to figure this out.
Anyway, I'm out of here. I'm going on vacation. If you see me post when I'm on vacation, then you know that I'm one sick puppy.
There is no inherent problem with PDF as a file format given its intended use, which is to permit the exact replication of formatted documents, including all fonts and layout. The original purpose of PDF was to permit the transfer of print-ready files from one machine to another, ensuring layout fidelity. Hence its use in IRS forms and other government documents, which are often machine read and thus require that the position of fields on a page be regular. PDF as a file format has not adequately been extended to account for the unique capabilities of online or dynamically-driven content, and this is a weakness some would find. Frankly, though, that's why there are multiple file formats; each format is supposed to do its one job as perfectly as possible.
Also, just as a point of information, in this offtopic thread, PDF is a superset of PostScript; the PDF specification includes all of PostScript Level 3, and is in some senses the logical progression of the PostScript language.
The original copyright terms of 14 years seemed entirely appropriate. They give authors and creators more than enough time to be amply rewarded.
But, absent a legislative remedy, we need a social one, one everybody can adopt. And that's actually not that hard: just avoid using or referring to proprietary artifacts, images, and symbols as much as possible. Avoiding reliance on such proprietary cultural artifacts has many advantages, foremost that the non-proprietary alternatives usually don't come bundled with an agenda to make you or your kids buy more or eat more. And the destiny of the non-proprietary cultural artifacts is determined ultimately by its users.
So, say "no" to Power Rangers, Disney, and Microsoft software. Arabian Nights, Greek Mythology, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and GNU Software are better, more interesting alternatives anyway.
Capitalism as an econmonic system has existed since the beginning of writing. There are price records for ancient Sumerian and Assyrian markets that date back to around 2500 BC (or close if I remember the dates of the first records found near the northern part of the Tigres) The offical economies were fixed price barter economies. independent monitary mediums did not exist until coins were used in Lydia around 900 BC. The price records show inflation due to declining supply of certain goods, something that should not happen in a fixed price economy. The capitalistic law of supply and demand is the basis for EVERY economic system in history. I hate to break it to you, but that is how the evidence we have shows it. You should note that I am not at all advocating pure capitalism as a political structure as Ayn Rand does.
Socialism is an old European tradition. GB Shaw, Oscar Wilde (champagne socialism), the Fabian movement, to name just a few English varities. Strangely, France has a socialist Prime Minister now, as does the UK. In theory anyway.
I think the US dictionary must have it's own defenition of socialism.
IP would be nothing without TCP and UDP!
And let's not forget that ICMP plays a substantial role in debugging network configurations.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who understand unary, and those who don't.
A string of letters can, by definition, be copyrighted or trademarked, because a string of letters is essentially a text. But numbers cannot be copyrighted, by those same copyright definitions. You can copyright "Coca-cola", but you cannot copyright "1274-8986". Digitised media are in essence just a huge number. What, technically, is the difference between "1" and "123 093 709 145 680 134 673 136 130 086 690 634 635 523 582 853 816 966 418 116 669 924 147"? Nothing. Sure, the latter, when put through some kind of decoder (ASCII, Wave, MP3, MPEG, JPEG, foo, bar, baz) you might get something else, like a bit of text, a bit of music, or a picture.
As a little mind test: If you encode the DeCSS source code... How can anybody see that that string of ones and zeroes is just that? It might just as well be a bunch of garbage...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
Standard USB drivers are hardly what I would call foriegn hardware to them, all hardware is 3rd party, as M$ is a software maker, and USB is supported, they just don't put the drivers on the site because they want you to buy the CDROM, anything else stupid that you're going to say? Sorry, but if you're going to start a flame war, bring it on.
Eh...
"Lawrence Lessig == smart."
.{redmist}.
Call me a nitpick, but == is for comparing/defining numerical values...not strings (at least in Perl).
-------------------------------------------------
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I thought that the Berne Convention had harmonised most country's copyright rules. Here in the UK, the copyright timer only starts after the author's death. So a work is still in copyright while the author (or artist) is still alive and for a period (it used to be 50 years, but I think it is now longer) after his/her death. Is the USA different?
First of all, the post I'm replying to is not a troll. Off-topic perhaps, but not a troll. Now I'll give the moderators another hint - moderation is primarily meant to rate a post on how relevant it is to the conversation, if it is interesting, off-topic, or whatever. See how I attached "[OT]" to the subject? That means I'm basically self-moderating my post, pointing out to people that if they don't want to read something not related directly to the coversataion, to not bother reading this, thereby getting rid of the need for moderation. So don't waste your points on me.
:-) It would return TRUE (a non-zero number) if Lawrence Lessig is, in fact, smart, or FALSE (zero) if he is not. This is a valid statement in the same way that this:
... which is basically an if statement which doesn't do anything if it is not true (but you're too lazy to write out the whole if statement. :-)
Second of all, "Lawrence Lessig == smart" is a perfectly valid expression (in C at least, provided you ignore the space
1;
Is a valid statement. It doesn't actually DO anything, but the compiler couldn't give a rat's ass. They're useful in things like this:
Lawrence_Lessig == smart ? give_him_money() : 1;
--
What about Postscript ? Isn't PDF just a bastardized/extended version of good old PostScript ? (Granted Adobe owns that too but still..)
UPS Sucks
Not that I'm complaining, since, if the Europeans did have real socialist governments, they would have long since launched into another dark age.
From my quick scan of certain portions of the PDF SDK, you should be able to create a PDF document without the use of Distiller. Although, I would expect this would quickly get complicated, but not over everyone on /.'s head.
However, I would like to see an Open Portable Document Standard similar to PDF, or see PDF become an open standard. Just to get it out from under the control of Adobe, since it can be such a powerful format. My entire department is switching to PDF (from hardcopy) for document distribution world-wide.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
You could have at least found a different link, there's about a thousand copies of this letter on the web.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
funny that you should cry "copycat" on a post about freedom of information...no?
I'm not taking legal action, and I'm not attempting to have this post removed or anything else silly...
I'm just poiting out that it has been discussed before.
Thanks for making me look like the Karma Whoring Fool I am though.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
Then why do hardware manufacturers only make drivers for (some versions of) Microsoft Windows, and sometimes for MacOS, and conveniently forget BeOS, OS/2, Linux, UNIX, Solaris, BSD and so on?
:)
I do partly agree with you, but there are two sides of the issue... On one side, it's the OS manufacturer's responsibility to make their OS interface with all hardware, and on the other side, it's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to make their hardware interface with all operating systems. The problem is that currently they are measuring by two standards. Hardware manufacturers happily provide drivers for Microsoft Windows, because if they didn't, their hardware wouldn't sell, but then they conveniently forget the alternative operating systems, causing the alternatives to drop out of the competition with Microsoft because they simply don't support the latest and greatest hardware, and that IS what most computer geeky people want: the latest and greatest hardware to run the latest and greatest games. The PC has turned into a game console.
Now, I'm not saying Linux should be turned into a game console, quite the contrary, but that's definitely a market Linux will never be able to compete for. Linux should go after servers and office workstations. Leave the gaming to Microsoft. They're damn good at that, and you'd never be able to compete there anyway, at least not within the foreseeable future.
Okay, I kinda drifted away there, but I hope you get my point. Don't get me wrong, I do see your point, I just choose to disagree with it
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
... that was basically what I was trying to say, but you expressed it in a much more eloquent way.
I share your opinion completely, and I'm a little surprised to see the confusion between socialism, communism, as well as the negative connotations surrounding both around here. Dismissing ideas and opinions as undemocratic, totalitarian or even fascist to avoid discussing them thoroughly is a very dangerous habit, and I sincerely hope it's not an "american thing" but rather one of ignorance.
Social justice is a noble goal, be it in the form of a manifesto or whatever...
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds