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Sklyarov, Bunner (DVD CCA) Hearings Thursday
"Sklyarov is represented by Joseph Burton; Bunner is represented by the First Amendment Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF Sklyarov/Bunner media release has time and location information for this hearing, too. Both hearings will be open to the public; please dress nicely if you attend. You can probably attend both, because the Sklyarov hearing should be over before the Bunner hearing starts. The Federal court (N.Dist.Cal.), for the Sklyarov case, is on the 5th floor, 280 South 1st Street; the State appellate court (6th App. Dist. Ct.), for the DVD CCA case, is at 333 West Santa Clara Street, Suite 1060."
Interestingly enough, the Washington Post ran an editorial knocking (if not actually blasting) the DMCA, with Sklyarov the example of what's wrong with the thing. Jerry Pournelle's column in Byte takes a slightly different tack, but raises the same troubling questions. (Thanks to fredistheking and SgtChairebourne for the links.)
What, me worry?
If music, videos, games are pirated all the time, at some time there will be no more music, videos or games.
Do you really think that? Are you saying that there are no artists who enjoy playing music just for fun? Are there no writers who write stories becuase they love making worlds come to life? No game designers who just want to create some fun and/or bragging right for thier friends?
Honestly, I think the absolute best possble thing for the creative fields would be if the corporate element just vanished. Sure you wouldn't see nationally-known artists making millions in front of 50,000 seat auditoriums, but is that how you want to appreciate music?
I would seriously prefer local groups, making realistic money (money like a school teacher would make), playing good, interesting, original music to the current sludge that comes out of the entertainment machine.
Fame and money is not a right. It is a strange abboration that somehow grew out of the machine-like corperate quest for money. Just look around at the real world. You don't see world-renound lecturers shouting out scathing political commentaries to hords of screaming fans who paid $139 for a seat. You don't see scientists mobbed by teenagers when they step out of thier stretched limos.
It would not be a terrible thing is the score was evened out a little.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Hope that this at least alters the DMCA.
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I think that we're very lucky that newspapers like the Washington Post are actually taking the time to point out to readers what precisely is happening, and what's wrong with it. We're extremely fortunate that this hasn't turned into another Kevin Mitnick scenario (read: "RUSSIAN HACKER THREATENS DIGITAL COPYRIGHTS: speaks at evil hacker convention and corrupts America's youth!)
As someone else on this thread pointed out, intellectual property/copyright/patent laws have never been this stringent. In traditional copyright law, a certain degree of copying and piracy is expected. I remember that my friends in high school were basically a tiny, living Napster server. Mix tapes for everyone. And let's not forget the fact that sometimes one needs to photocopy newspapers, books, magazines, etc. for school or personal research. .
The big irony here is that the first DMCA arrest wasn't someone running a massive piracy ring. It was a foreign national who came to speak about the scientific ramnifications of a technology. It was not in the public interest to arrest Sklyarov. I can't think of any way to argue that it is.
In many ways, this reflects the current political culture in the US, and the direction it's developing in. We've been rapidly developing a legal system that shoots first (and doesn't always ask questions later). Knee-jerk reactions and "tough on (X)" legislation is pretty much the rule, and becoming moreso by the day. There's a general atmosphere of political apathy and helplessness among those I know, largely because these things are becoming more and more blindingly obvious (and harder to stop).
Lawmakers have traditionally been pretty conservative regarding print copyright legislation. It wasn't until I was in high school that Kinko's started posting that they weren't responsible for copyright infringement. It's only really been in the last 10 years that the US Govt. has come down so incredibly hard on these sorts of violations, and largely in the name of corporate interests at that.
The next 10 years are going to be interesting. I encourage those of you in the United States to write some letters, make some phone calls, and send some e-mail. If you've got cash to burn, donate to the appropriate causes and/or lobby.
T3/Dev
Not every art form can be reproduced by four guys in a garage!
I work in the anime industry; good example. Anime -is- a corporate art form. Large companies employ vast numbers of artists in a collective endeavor to produce a single finished product, adhering more-or-less to a very limited number of creative visions. This isn't like music, where a garage band can sound better than a touring rock group, or like software, where an agglomeration of independent workers can evolve a working code base. It -would not exist- if it wasn't somebody's job to make it.
Even on the micro scale... I know my job can be reproduced by somebody working with a home computer, especially because I use more or less the same tools they would. But I also know that the hobbyists out there don't -do- as good of a job as I do, simply because I'm paid to sit here and put the time in, and they aren't. Even the most dedicated otaku start to glaze over after the fifth subtitling pass.
I'm not saying that the DMCA is a good law. Heck, we don't even -use- CSS if the licensors let us get away without it. But not everybody producing good art is looking for fame; some of us just want a paycheck, so we can spend our time making art and not flipping burgers. They have to get paid too!
Remember, though, who is responsible for all that garbage. What drives the "artists" to produce the junk you hear over the radio? What could motivate them to keep up what they probably know is immoral and wrong. What could prossibly turn a business into a government? The only force powerful enough to do that is stupid people in large numbers.
Are you kidding? The public loves that trash! Eating it by the repititive record is pure bliss for the public! The "artists" have listened to their audience well, and the uncreative shouting they call music is what they want. It's simple supply and demand: the public wants trash and the artists give them trash.
Keep in mind that a national market means national competition. Garage bands that actually put creatitivity and pasion into their music just don't have that same formula that the "artists" do. They get trampled. Their fight is hopeless -- the public's made up its mind.
The problem with things like complex science and politics is that they just are as entertaining as hearing someone shout "fuck you" for five minutes times fifteen songs on a CD. If people were interested in scientific development, there would be demand and therefor money in science. If people cared about politics, there would be demand for good politicians there too. If people were interested in education as personally as they are interested in their music, teachers would be making easially over one hundred thousand dollars per year. But, there's no demand, so there's no money.
To even out the score, you either have to raise the intelligence level of the public, or use communism. Good luck with the former, and the latter has yet to be implemented correctly among humans because of the former.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Andrew Bunner first became aware of DeCSS on October 26, 1999 through a
discussion on the news website slashdot.org.
So someone learned something from this site!
sulli
RTFJ.
No, it will get modded down because it's entirely off-topic.
And apparently it's stupid for people to think they can follow the law which specifically allows for certain exceptions such as interoperability (DeCSS), and it's absolutely stupid for people to follow the law in their home country, then get picked up in another country where they followed the local law while they were there, but something legal they did while in their home country is illegal to do in the other country (Skylarov). You are right on one thing however: Following the law and expecting to not get jailed when you happen to annoy somebody with lots of money appears to not be the way things work.
This one's too easy. Niggers to the back of the bus, the law is there for you to respect. I'm your Lord and I have conjugal rights to your wife, the law is there for you to respect. Your religion is against the law and the punishment is death, the law is there for you to respect. The fact is that some laws do not deserve respect, and these laws should be changed or stricken.
No, copyright laws (at least in the U.S.) encourage the production of arts and science by establishing limited monopolies on their reproduction, whereas in a free market there would be less incentive to produce. Some artists and scientists can make a living off this limited monopoly, others cannot, others don't need it, but establishing a source of income is the effect, not the cause, of copyright, and the copyright is not a protection but a grant from the government.
True that I have no right to steal intellectual property, but offtopic as stealing IP has nothing to do with watching a DVD that I legally purchased on my FreeBSD-based DVD player, or printing a portion of an E-Book that I legally purchased to read on the bus to work/school. Circumventing protection is still legal in the U.S. as long as one does not tell anyone how to do it, and that is legal almost everywhere else.
First this is an exaggeration, as I don't think there have been enough trials for there to be 99%. Also, few of the computing free speech trials have been against open sourcers, and I can think of none against any open sourcer who was prominent before the trial started (save Randall Schwartz's case, which was less about free speech and more about office politics).
Of the major such cases I can recall at the moment, the Communications Decency Act (later repealed) outlawed all obscenity on the Internet (meaning I wouldn't be able to tell you to fuck off for your stupid post without being fined and/or arrested); the Church of Scientology was suing people who had distributed its copyrighted documents after the Church had publicly and under oath denied certain things about its organization that the documents proved to be true, making the knowledge in the documents a matter of public interest. Whether the public interest outweighed the copyright is a matter of opinion, as courts in Scandinavia decided for the public interest while courts on the Continent decided for copyright; Skala and Janssen produced an essay on the form and quality of Cyber Patrol's product, along with tools that would allow an owner of Cyber Patrol to access the list of websites that are blocked, an index that by judicial precedent is not a copyrightable work. The judge in his decision against the two declared that they were trying to start a second Nazi Holocaust, so no danger of partiality here; Felton, a professor who had to sue to get a paper released without being sued himself; and DeCSS and Sklyarov; And in various ridiculous domain name cases, the undercurrent in the ones that draw outrage is that somebody registers a domain which is either a common word, their name, or a trademark of their company, and they get sued out of it by someone else with deep pockets who usually either already has a domain name and/or risks no confusion by the existance of the other name. Only one (Scientology) case of these involved a genuine infringement of copyright, and in that case the infringers who saw the work as having no value did not want free stuff, but wanted the information contained in the documents to be public knowledge because they saw a danger to the public in not having the knowledge.
Mitnick, Napster and MP3.com don't count because they're not about free speech. Kevin Mitnick was a crook who was the first defendant in the history of the United States to be denied a bail hearing. In addition, the prosecuting attorneys heavily inflated the damages they claimed he had caused to ridiculous levels by claiming the development cost of producing programs he had copied as the cost incurred by his copying them, after others had already copied and distributed the same software. In the Napster case the company contributed to copyright infringement by advertising its service as a place to get free files. During trial, the RIAA alleged and the judge appeared to believe that Napster was itself making copies of the music files, while in reality files are copied from one user to another an Napster only keeps an index of filenames and users. Furthermore, Napster has shown good faith by removing users who illegally provide files that someone else has copyright for whenever they have been asked to do so. MP3.com was distributing copies of music without a license because they were too dumb to understand copyright laws, which is pretty open and shut.
Sounds like that open source movement you're deriding in the first paragraph.
Agreed, but offtopic.
That's what Johansen, LiViD, and their DeCSS supporters did. That's what Skala and Janssen did. That's what Felton did. Skylarov made his own information, but chose to sell it rather than give it away. All have been sued, threatened with suit, jailed, or threatened with jail time for doing what you recommend. That's why people are concerned for their rights, and that's why you are offtopic.
Hobby or not, you would be surprised at how anal people will get over detail when something is their baby, their pride and joy.
The people who do it because they love to are the type of people I'd rather have making the music I listen to, writting the books I read, the programs I use, building the house I live in (yes, believe it or not, some people (myself included) love physical 'labour'), fixing my car, or doing anything for me.
Note the number of books titled 'The Joy of _____' and the severe lack of books titled 'How to Make Money doing ______'. (On a side note, notice the number of spam letters that are about 'How to Make Money doing...' and the lack of 'The Joy of doing...' spams)
People who view it as work are the ones I'll avoid. A good hobbyist/employee does his work for the love and joy of doing it. A good creator loves to create, so he/she creates. They do not create because they feel the need for money. They will put more into a creation then anyone who views their job as work.
These people view the job as the benificial part, and the money as a nice bonus.
This is not to say if you get paid, you will not do a good job. If you can find a job you love, and don't view as work, then more power to you. You're in the right field for yourself.
And this does not break down around what you may consider menial jobs, such as a janitor. I've met janitors who love their jobs. In high school there was a janitor who loved being around the kids (And he wasn't a pedophile, what's this world coming to?!). He didn't want to teach, he just loved the atmosphere, the people, and loved doing the job. I used to think this was very strange, until I grew up. I got a job I love doing and though some may think someone programming their routers or ensuring the server they keep their work on keeps their work as a lower life form (I don't know, you may not think of people like that, some do, not accusing you of anything), I quite enjoy it (Especially seeing the people who do think of me as a lower life form begin to weep when all their hard work is gone, because some strange bug (triggered by something he did of course) wiped out his home directory. (Miraculously every other users home directory was left unscathed. I'm a spiteful bastard.)) I enjoy my job. I fix computers for free for some people. It's not so they owe me something, it's not to show off my 'k-rad skillz', sometimes it's because she's hot but... I just love to solve the problem and make it work once again. These people pay me back however or not, doesn't matter to me.
In short, if you love doing something, you'll do it very well. If you do it very well, you will be well compensated for it, both monetarily, and more importantly, spiritually.
For a good time call www.sawkie.com