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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.)
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!"
For decades the dominant media-marketriod elite
have been carefully cultivating the western mind. We have been taught that shiny, colorful, noisy things are good. We have slowly developed a powerful, salivating passion for these things. It is more important for us to buy the latest CDs, the trediest clothes, the fastest cars, at an easy 1000%-10000% markup over thier cost to produce than it is to pay the rent, or buy groceries. It is a far graver misfortune to our minds to miss one "very special" episode of Friends than it is to miss out on a national election.
Considering all the coaxing, training, and brainwashing that they have given us, it is any wonder that we feel perfectly justified in getting out hands on that sweet, sweet intellectual property by any means?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
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.