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Copy Protection a Crime Against Humanity
Trevalyx writes "An article over at Wired looks into the relation between copy protection and the reality of a rational amount of 'wiggle room' that is typically provided by the legal system. It's a topic covered often on Slashdot, but it's still a good read. Should be accompanied by a visit to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for your Daily Dose of Defending Digital Freedom." The article does a good job of giving examples of legal leeway that's granted every day.
This is a bit of a stretch.
Insert witty sig here.
And sold, and bought again. Including legal leeway. Money makes the world go round (c)
Copy Protection Is a Crime
...against humanity. Society is based on bending the rules.
By David Weinberger
Digital rights management sounds unobjectionable on paper: Consumers purchase certain rights to use creative works and are prevented from violating those rights. Who could balk at that except the pirates? Fair is fair, right? Well, no.
In reality, our legal system usually leaves us wiggle room. What's fair in one case won't be in another - and only human judgment can discern the difference. As we write the rules of use into software and hardware, we are also rewriting the rules we live by as a society, without anyone first bothering to ask if that's OK.
The problem starts with the fact that digital content can be copied - perfectly - from one machine to another. This has led the recording and movie industries to push for digital rights management schemes. Buy a one-time right to play the latest hit song or movie, and DRM could prevent you from playing it twice.
Of course, to exercise such exquisite control over content, DRM requires deep changes to all parts of the equation - the hardware, the operating system, and the content itself. Sure enough, some in Congress recently pushed the FCC to add a "broadcast flag" to content which digital hardware would be required to honor. DRM is barreling down the pike.
The usual criticism is that the scheme gives too much power to copyright holders. But there's a deeper problem: Perfect enforcement of rules is by its nature unfair. For contrast, consider how imperfectly rules are applied in the real world.
If your lease stipulates that you can't paint without explicit permission from your landlord, you will nevertheless patch up the scratches made by your yappy little dog on the bottom of the front door. If the high-priced industry analyst's report warns you on every page against duplicating, you'll still hand out at your weekly sales meeting copies of a page with a relevant chart. You'd snicker at the very suggestion of doing otherwise.
But why? The analyst report is stamped 'DO NOT PHOTOCOPY', and the bit in your lease about not painting really couldn't be any clearer. We chuckle because we all understand that before the law there's leeway - the true bedrock of human relationships. Sure, we rely on rules to decide the hard cases, but the rest of the time we cut one another a whole lot of slack. We have to. That's the only way we humans can manage to share a world. Otherwise, we'd be at one another's throats all the time - or, more exactly, our lawyers would be at each other's throats.
Yet we're on the verge of instituting digital rights management. What do computers do best? Obey rules. What do they do worst? Allow latitude. Why? Because computers don't know when to look the other way.
We're screwed. Not because we MP3 cowboys and cowgirls will not have to pay for content we've been "stealing." No, we're screwed because we're undercutting the basis of our shared intellectual and creative lives. For us to talk, argue, try out ideas, tear down and build up thoughts, assimilate and appropriate concepts - heck, just to be together in public - we have to grant all sorts of leeway. That's how ideas breed, how cultures get built. If any public space needs plenty of light, air, and room to play, it's the marketplace of ideas.
There are times when rules need to be imposed within that marketplace, whether they're international laws against bootleg CDs or the right of someone to sue for libel. But the fact that sometimes we resort to rules shouldn't lead us to think that they are the norm. In fact, leeway is the default and rules are the exception.
Fairness means knowing when to make exceptions. After all, applying rules equally is easy. Any bureaucrat can do it. It's far harder to know when to bend or even ignore the rules. That requires being sensitive to individual needs, understanding the larger context, balancing competing values, and forgiving transgressions when appropriate.
I love how shit gets twisted like this.
With all of the bullshit going on the world today, the real world, copy protection is a "crime against humanity"?
Give me a fucking break.
The author did a great job of describing why I personally am against DRM and strict copy protection schemes. I could never really put my fears into words before, but I have to say the article(sp) hit it right on the head. He's axactly right :)
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Including SCO (with M$ dollars, that is)
Hitler killing 6 million Jews and 4 million non-Jews is a "crime against humanity".
I would say this is more like withholding culture from the masses.
Vonal Declosion
Should be accompanied by a visit to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for your Daily Dose of Defending Digital Freedom."
Oooohh! It's the leader! All hail the leader. Look! I found a bean shaped like the leader. I'll put it with the others...
Not that I don't agree with at least some of what these groups represent, but sheesh! certainly not all of what they say, and I certainly don't need a "daily dose" of any argument if it is based on logic, morality, fairness, precedent, or other healthy systems we use to judge these matters. To suggest otherwise is to imply that their ideas would fade without heavy reinforcement.
Great truths don't need daily reinforcement. They are either self evident or emerge as truths on their own when we stray from them. You can draw your own conclusions from the fact that most major religions reinforce on a weekly basis.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Excuse me to nitpick but shouldn't that be
Copy PREVENTION rather than Copy PROTECTION?
Copy Protection a Crime Against Humanity
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday May 30, @01:17AM
from the cutting-some-slack dept.
Trevalyx writes "An article over at Wired looks into the relation between copy protection and the reality of a rational amount of 'wiggle room' that is typically provided by the legal system. It's a topic covered often on Slashdot, but it's still a good read. Should be accompanied by a visit to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for your Daily Dose of Defending Digital Freedom." The article does a good job of giving examples of legal leeway that's granted every day.
They will need something catchier than 'DDDDF' for it to take off with the masses.
That's some really awesome reasoning. Nobody takes some laws seriously, so we should apply that mentality to other laws we object to, and your obligation to obey the laws is relative only to the seriousness of the "crime" committed. I'll let somebody else go on about the issue of moral relativism, but this guy really sounds like he wants to justify his mp3 collection.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
Flash forward 50 years in the future
//snaps out of daydreaming.. fighting for the resistance.. sweeeet
In the past, wars were fought over oil and other precious resources. Today the war is fought over media rights, and the rights to control and supress that same media as decided by the megalomanic corporations. The Rebellion Army is a minor threat, but is enlisting more and more recruits all in the name of digital freedom. The war has been bloody, the war has been long - but the corporations refuses to release it's iron grip..
The author rambles without actually making a definite point. But isn't that what most of these rambling articles do?
If copy protection (and prevention as is indirectly implied) of an intangible object is a crime, what about tangible objects? I should be able to apply his concept to music and movies sold in stores.
Problem is, that would result in a state of anarchy. Sort of contradicts his idea of a thriving society, doesn't it?
DRM is a perfect solution for an imperfect world - A solution that ignores the fact that people are, by our very nature, unlikely to stick exactly to rules. Grey exists because we don't like black and white as the only two choices, and because we're quite capable of defining our own middle ground.
Until we can develop computers that are able to do the kind of fuzzy matching that the human brain does naturally, turning control of creativity over to them is fraught with risk. All it takes is an incorrect statement somewhere in the source, or the confluence of a couple of seemingly benign factors, and suddenly you can't watch that DVD you just bought - But you can't take it back because you broke the seal on the packaging.
The thing the article doesn't go into is the "analogue hole". Human creativity is very good at working around restrictions. We designed ladders to reach high places, and windows because it's nice to be able to see out without letting the weather in.
They can DRM CDs all they want - I've got a DiscMan with optical out, and a soundcard with optical in. Sure, I'll have to do it manually, but I can still make perfect digital copies of whatever CDs I own. Similarly, people will find ways around this "broadcast flag", even if it's just going back to VHS and a capture card. Old hardware's not just going to disappear.
Finally, as much as xxAA would love to, they don't control the legislative process in other countries. Until they do, there's nothing they can do to make companies build DRM-compliant devices for other markets. Some of them will probably deliberately ensure their devices aren't DRM-compliant, if they've got some marketroids with a clue. How do you stop people importing "un-broken" hardware?
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
Okay, I've seen all the first posts about how crimes against humanity only applying to crazed mad dictators with axes to grind...but really, isn't the current trend of law just prelimenary for more of the same? People dismiss speeding laws as irrelevant almost every day, lives are lost, but how many people seriously consider abdicating their ability to excede those limits every day? Most of us probably don't know anyone who even might be a terrorist, but we'd probably put our foot down if the government decided to screen each and everyone in the country "just in case". The same applies to any law, maybe especially intellectual property laws because they're restricting the loose quality of ideas. Fair use, public domain, censorship...I suppose they're not exactly in league of mass murder. Swing them on a rope enough though, and you've got a dandy oppression.
Imagaine a beowulf cluster of copy protection lawsuits!
I've got a stack of photocopies of 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' that I made on the company Xerox machine after hours - who wants one?
Methinks David Weinberger needs to exercise judgement over where we exercise judgement. While the big brother lockdown that the RIAA and MPAA envision is an absolutist absurdity, so is his vision of people bending the rules to the point of absurdity.
I'm sorry, I just don't buy his reasoning that the DRM technology and laws are bad because they don't allow selective misinterpretation of them. He's really arguing that they're OK as long as they're not really enforced.
DRM technology and laws ARE crimes against humanity (sure, there are degrees of crimes against humanity) because they put gross profit opportunity ahead of the benefits to the commons. We're all better off if reasonable profits are protected and ideas are open and shared, than if Disney continues to make Megapoltroons indefiniteley off of Steamboat Willie while everything is locked down.
think about a world without the need for money... is it possible? surely a monetary system isnt needed to encourage technological progress.
anyway this wont happen especially when the people with the money dont want to lose their power so mod this as somewhat offtopic.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
In case of Slashdotting (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 30, @01:30AM (#6074088)
Copy Protection a Crime Against Humanity
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday May 30, @01:17AM
from the cutting-some-slack dept.
Trevalyx writes "An article over at Wired looks into the relation between copy protection and the reality of a rational amount of 'wiggle room' that is typically provided by the legal system. It's a topic covered often on Slashdot, but it's still a good read. Should be accompanied by a visit to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for your Daily Dose of Defending Digital Freedom." The article does a good job of giving examples of legal leeway that's granted every day.
I got from the article. That there are always acceptions and computers are crummy when it comes to those.. lets say you have to reinstall your operating system. But now your libary won't play.. DOesn't that suck.. Or lets say you don't have a net connection to make sure the cd you just bought isn't a copy... IN short DRM just causes more problems then it solves..
If your lease stipulates that you can't paint without explicit permission from your landlord, you will nevertheless patch up the scratches made by your yappy little dog on the bottom of the front door. If the high-priced industry analyst's report warns you on every page against duplicating, you'll still hand out at your weekly sales meeting copies of a page with a relevant chart. You'd snicker at the very suggestion of doing otherwise.
The high priced report is high priced because your company is paying for it. So its not a big deal to photocopy it and give it to people in your company. That might go against the letter of the law, but not the spirit. Try passing it out for free to your friend who works for the competition who doesn't subscribe to said report, and see who gets you first, the analyst firm or your boss (assuming they know about it of course).
The painting your house example doesn't even qualify here. File sharing of copyrighted material happening today is akin to someone creating an exact replica of a house thats up for rent and living in it rent free. Doesn't harm the landlord? Yes it does, cos now he/she/it will never get any rent. So logically, its akin to squatting. I live in NYC, and I've seen people try squatting the best they can, but I don't see much leeway given by the law there.
I do not support the RIAA, MPAA or any other Association of Assholes, and no, I don't deny using P2P networks in a manner that would violate the spirit of the law; but lets not get hypocritical here. Its stealing, and we (meaning us folk who do use P2P) need to see it as that. I am frankly surprised to see so many posts that try to portray it as otherwise on Slashdot. I would've thought that programmers and other techies who sell ideas for a living would've respected the rights of others that do the same to protect their livelihood.
The debate over copyright is the debate over the merits of a system of artificial scarcity. It costs virtually nothing to send a song over the Internet compared to shipping it via a physical medium -- CD.
The battles being fought here and now raise very important questions for our society. How much of what we create should be deemed personal property? To many, the very concept of "Intellectual Property" (Intellectual Robbery?) is absurd, due to there being no cost of distribution for an idea. This is summarized in the cliche idiom "information wants to be free".
But, what value does this artificial monopoly on an idea give to us? It obviously costs something in time and money to create ideas and technologies. Has anyone done a scientific study comparing the creativity levels of countries with differing copyright systems? I'd love to see one done, as its results could shed light on the (non-)benefits given by extending copyright terms.
"Copy Protection" is a lovely euphamism that hides the true nature of the technology. That is, robbing the public domain for the benefit of a single entity or person. It's a benefit to the few at the expense of the many. Its effects have already been taken to their logical extremes in many articles and posts (such as the article in question), so I won't go into them here.
Someday, scarcity for physical objects will be reduced to the level that we see for "intellectual property" on the Internet. That is, the cost of producing cars, gadgets, and MP3 players will be next to nothing. Will we battle over patents then just as we battle over copyright now? Will a future MIAA (Manufacturer Industry Association of America) sue dozens of college students for $96B because they "printed out" a copy of a new gadget?
Already, in genomics, the cost of discovering the function of a gene in the human genome confers upon the discoverer a monopoly on its use in drugs and treatments. This allows research firms to plant flags on the genes in our bodies, and charge whatever licensing fees they could imagine for their use. Even if the cost of the retrovirus to be distributed into our bodies to flip this genomic "switch" is virtually nothing, we will end up paying thousands of dollars per treatment, not just to fund the development of new therapies, but to line the pockets of the company's shareholders. In essence, we are turning our own bodies into a natural resource to be raped and pillaged by corporate interests, at the expense of the poor and less-fortunate of the world. We uphold these injustices with patents and law, humanely defending the inhumane capitalism which drives the pharmaseutical industry.
Someday we may see copy protection for gene therapy. What if a company found a way to control the ability of your body to propogate the benefits of a genomic treatment? What if your cells could not reproduce the gene after X cell generations, and you had to go back and pay for another treatment to continue seeing the benefits? Such a situation is not much different from the plight of AIDS sufferers, whose lives depend on a stream of artificially expensive, but lifesaving drugs.
I believe the copyright and copy-protection battles of today merely foreshadow a larger and more fundamental battle to come, one that will see the current government monopolies confered by Patents and Copyright turned on their heads.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Isn't it ironic that this article about 'copyright protection a crime against humanity' is showing up in Wired, which is owned by Microsoft? Hello Palladium.
www.google.com
...IMHO to fight increasingly draconian DRM measures, is to simply continue proving that they WON'T WORK. If the end user is able play back the media in question even once, then it must also be possible to copy it. Granted, it may take a certain level of sophistication to get a *perfect* copy, but it can be done.
OTOH, if a not-so-perfect copy is all that's needed, most anyone can manage that. Witness the bootleg recordings of movies made with camcorders that get distributed all over the net, sometimes even before the official release date. Or the sealed-in-the-discman demo cds that people have managed to copy, sometimes by just cutting the headphone line and attaching it to a line-in jack.
I don't know when it will happen, but someday the media producers have to wake up and realize that DRM only costs them money for imagined protection, and in some cases -- when DRM doesn't allow legitimate playback -- hurts the very markets they are trying to cultivate.
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OK, sure fine... whatever you say it correct. You go have fun now with your +5 Funny mod.
Nope, not iTunes. And definitely not some POS p2p spyware app laden with crappy rips. But free nontheless... (say it with me) usenet.
The other day I burned a CD for my cousin to listen to on his way to work. He bought a CD player for his car that plays MP3 discs despite the fact he rarely uses the net and probably doesn't even know how to spell usenet. He's into country but I make it my mission to widen people's horizons - the CD has music from the US, Sweden, Mexico, Russia, the UK, and even Egypt - all brought to him, via me, via USENET.
I'm working on "remastering" a few rock concerts that were sent to me (in a box of CDRs) by way of a friend of a friend in germany. See, the US hardly ever has live concert shows any more - but "rockpalast" is, so far as I know, still running. So, soon as I am happy with the results I'll commit these shows to MPEG2 streams and share'em with the world - most likely on DVD, since uploading even one would take me weeks online. What those broadband equipped friends do with this "data," however, is beyond my control.
I have several CDs worth of live SNL music performances (as well as a few favorite skits) that were ripped from my direcTV tivo. The quality is typical sucky direcTV, but let's face it: that's about as good as you're gonna get nowdays, and it's still (arguably) better than VHS. I also have pretty much every video PJ harvey has made - again, thanks to rips I made from my tivo when M2 was having its "women in rock" week.
All real world examples illustrate just exactly why most of this is irrelevant. I used to be pretty zealous about these legislations, but frankly I jsut don't care any more. Why? Because there's nothing at all stopping your fave garage band from producing their own release and getting exposure via the internet. (In fact, I've downloaded several this way and still have a few of these "underground" releases in my collection because they were actually GOOD.) There's also little (ie pretty much nothing except bandwidth or time) to stop me from ripping my fave music and sharing it with the world - or to prevent me from sharing my collection of SNL skits and music vids - in fact, I've shared Cdds with several friends.
None of these laws matter because they relate only to commerce. Sure, a few folks have put them to the test (and more power to them) by intentionally breaking the law and then taking the case to court. But for the "average user" (or even the "power user") who isn't an activist or a business owner, the laws mean pretty much nothing. They didn't stop the worldwide digital release of the new Matrix, they didn't stop me from recording countless hours of TV via my PC - nor could they.
I don't support these new "corporate legislations," nor do I support most publishers (no magazines, no pay tv, never listen to radio and watch TV only until I get so fed up with commercials I close the damn window on my desktop to bask in the silence.) Yet I'm still (again, arguably) better informed than most people I know because "most people" let Dan Rather spoon feed them their only news each day and probably have never even heard of WIRED or /. My music collection is more diverse than it's ever been in my entire 40 years of life (and I was pretty "out there" even in the 70's). I have hours and hours of various TV shows, movies, and music videos. And even if we woke up tomorrow and all media (including TV) was digital and had these "broadcast flags" and watermarks, you know it would be only a matter of days before workarounds were spread across the world. In the meantime the greater audience wouldhave been alienated and the proverbial other shoe would, no doubt, fall.
Flush the toliet, we have reached new lows.
What utter crap.
What ever happened to "the letter of the Law vs. the Spirit of the Law"? How hard can you squeeze a yellow light and not draw blood?
It's all based on a personnal observation on the ticket writer. If the "officer" thinks you pushed that yellow light to the point that it bleeds, then you are guilty, no matter how much time or money you spend in court.
You have no way to dispute it,no "instant replay".
In this case, DRM will know that you have already viewed/listened to that data.
Hello Mr. Orwell.
What ever happened to that "American Spirit"?
In 40 years or so there will be replicators where all you will need is a carbon block and some [pirated] scripts and you can make whatever you want through the glory of nanotechnology. What will they do regarding copyright, copy protection etc. then? Outlaw replicators? Will corperations and law restrict us from advancing in technology/quality of life? Personally, I think we'll have to move into more of a socialistic/non-capitalistic society.
Is pretty simple. I don't want to buy rights to watch a movie once. Oh, I want to watch it again? Shit... now I have to relicence / rerent my movie. I have to pay more, and it's more of a hassle. So many of you say that if people don't like it, they won't buy it. You all know that's bullshit. I don't like windows all that much. I mean, it's ok, but guess what? I had to buy a copy for school. Is that terrible? No, not really... Is being forced to rent a movie for each vewing all that bad? No... but I still don't want to have to...
And it goes along the lines of renting cabin. I set off to rent a cabin the other day. Everyone kept asking me how many people were staying there. I said "The cabin says it sleeps 6. I want to rent the cabin. How much?" And come to find out I have to pay based on how many people sleep there..... It's still just one cabin... I get the whole thing... I still don't get it. Is that 20$ a person for the water bill? The electricity? I don't think so. It's for their pockets.
In the future we'll live in a world where we will pay each time we watch a movie or listen to a song. We'll pay for each pasanger we give a ride to in the car we rented for the weekend. We'll pay based on the number of people staying in the cabin regaurdless of the fact that we rent the whole thing. It goes on and on. Hell, some of that happens now.
It's all about people making money for free. Does it cost the recording company ANYTHING if I watch their movie twice? No. Does it cost the cabin owners more if I have an extra person over? $1.00 in water if they take a shower maybe.. Does it cost the car rental company more if I give a friend a lift? Wear and tear? $1.00 maybe?
It's comming, and nothing we can do will stop it. I'm just going to sit back and enjoy my right to bitch until that's gone too.
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
The author makes the point that most rules are meant to be bent, but DRM is wrong because it doesn't allow any flexibility. Well, he's wrong. Personally, I'm not in favor of DRM. However, I think in order to have an open debate on the subject, we need to be honest, and avoid ridiculous hyperbole.
Aside from his poor taste in word choice, the author makes the flawed fundamental assumption that all works will employ DRM in the strictest terms. This, I'm quite sure, will not be the case. There will be some recording that come with limitations like "this can only be played once, on a tuesday between 12:14 and 12:18," and that sucks, but that will be the exception rather than the rule. Leeway can be programmed in, too. I use iTunes and the Apple Music store. I can buy a song once, and then copy it to my other authorized computers and my iPod, and burn it on a CD. That's reasonable. However, I can't make a million copies and send them to everybody on the internet. That's reasonable, too. I think that passes the authors "snicker test."
Look, if you don't like the terms of use on the product, you don't have to buy it. Crimes against humanity? So, we have some kind of inalienable right to listen to the latest Britney Spears blather, and DRM infringes upon this right? Since when do you have a right to any piece of information somebody else creates?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Wiggle room- the right to endlessly litigate 'cause those gray areas of law have dollar signs written all over them.
Given a choice, I'd prefer strict, principled laws. There should be no ambiguities ("Help me god, I'm hallucinating again") where law is concerned. I would like to know I'm well within my rights to copy a file, and not have to rely on 'wiggle room'.
The problem with DRM is that there is no choice.
which is lawyerese for "don't sweat the small stuff".
Try to imagine a world in which every detail of every law were perfectly and literally enforced. Imagine going to prison because you didn't file a change of address with the Selective Service when you moved. Imagine getting a ticket every time you switched on your turn signal 199 feet from an intersection instead of 200 feet.
There's an old bit of engineering wisdom that says that systems with loose tolerances tend to be more reliable. A Mickey Mouse watch with some slop in the gears will keep running if a little dust gets in, an expensive precision chronometer may not. Societies seem to work the same way, which is why we have laws full of words like "reasonable" and "prudent".
"justify his mp3 collection" -- OK, good example. Dunno about the author, but my MP3 collection consists entirely of imports from purchased CDs and has never gone anywhere except my iPod. In a world where "fair use" is defined by common sense and/or judges, this works. My interests and the interests of the royalty collectors are satisfied. In a DRM world, some bureaucratic twit of a computer might have prevented me from listening in my car.
Here's a thought. All the IP laws are a form of market regulation. Businesses are all "regulation is bad". So, why don't we get rid of copyright, trademarks and patents just so big business can have the totally unregulated market they so desire?
...un-broken hardware will be illegal soon enough. I wish I was joking, but within the next few years I can see large restrictions being placed on even "consumer-level" technology.
I've noticed posts already criticising the article. Shame on them. They all cry about copy protection, then when real good material is presented they throw insults at it. This article is about the ethics of copy protection, not about money. There is too much speak of money when it comes to issues such as these. Too many fail to realize that money should not be the priority. Money can not and should not answer all questions. If you applied this reasoning to everything, then you would be supporting slavery, murder, terrorism, and many other bad things. For example, if I dodged the entire issue of human rights and when straight to money talk, then I could show slavery was necessary. I don't believe in slavery though, and I'm sure most here don't either. Yet, when you speak in terms of money, many evils prevail. There isn't any clear violation of ethics when it comes to copy protection, because when anyone talks about it, it comes down to money almost everytime. Ever take money out of the picture when it comes to issues such as these? You'll be surprised at what you find. In fact, slavery was bad economically no matter how it seemed when spoken in terms of money. This was not evident to those who owned slaves. Equality is more powerful than anyone can imagine. The closer we have come to it, the more prosperous we have become. Copy protection is something those that own IP believe in and those who aren't educated well enough on the subject. Many will disagree with me, but imagine this. Those that said the world was round, the ones that said there was no devil inside the insane, or the ones against slavery were considered crazy themselves at the time. Today we call many of these people attempting to prevent more IP protection and possibly turn it around communists, hippies, or simply people who want everything for free. I guess the world is flat after all.
Question everything.
Here's one I expect to come up. Viruses that hack the DRM bits on common media files. Some turn them on, to annoy people with legit homemade files, some turn them off, to annoy media companies. I'd imagine both will seem funny enough to some hackers to produce several.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
All this is technically possible today. Drivers of big trucks have had their performance monitored at that level of detail for a few years now.
A decade ago, people would have objected. But today? It could happen. It might be applied first to teenagers, the elderly, and people with lousy driving records. Who could object to that?
It might not be a Government mandate, either. Insurance companies might insist on it.
Most 'major' religions require tithing, which may be the real reason behind the weekly meets, not so much the brain rinsing.
Your dis'ing o' daily doses o' er'wise self-evident truths overlooks the fact that not everyone has learned them yet, thus the need for constant comment therein.
What cloaked agenda lurks in the mind of the man with such missive. Pray said agenda be his, and his alone, for if it be not of this world, nor his soul, the learning may be the end.
Meanwhile, new markets would likely open up in these machines that do the house replicating. And there aren't many house that heat themselves, and even those that do still need power for the niceties the residents have likely become used to. So, while "landlords" might have a hard time the power industry would probably make more money than ever, given this explosion in new homes. Slums could be virtually wished away, since nice new homes could be replicated far easier than the effort that would be required to repair the old ones. Hell, the old rundown parts of town would probably take on new value since people with means would place even greater value on having "originals" - homes not produced by factory replicators, but built instead of good ol' human labor. the factory housing market would be so devalued that millions of "laborers" swinging hammers would be put out of work; cheap factory housing would become essentially worthless overnight. But this would alsa have the effect of making even higher quality "originals" more affordable to the middle class. So the people who had to sleep under bridges could now have homes; those who would have had to work a lifetime to get a small home in the city could now spend the money that would have gone to rent and mortgages on something else - like maybe original works of art, or high quality furniture instead of the crap from the factory that breaks down in a year.
It would put a serious hurt on real estate values - but only for a while, and in the meantime look at all the benefits that might come from it. Publishers may say they're in danger, but look at the facts: the Matrix sequel still made hundreds of Millions so far and the franchise will likely make Billions before it's all done. The sale of recorded music may be taking a nosedive, but there's still Billions more being made in that industry every year. When they complain about losing money they're lying - what they mean is we're not getting all the money we want. Well, fucking tough: give me all the money I want first, and then we'll talk.
This is the battle being fought by the publishers: they see the value of some of their product draining into the sewer, and they're pouring Billions into lobbying for legislation to protect them from the inevitable. Instead of trying to outrun the other campers, they're still trying to stare down the bear.
The joke is, as always, on them - because, so long as they do this, the end really is inevitable. Might as well let'em spend that money - because, as the saying goes: you can't take it with you.
The visitors explain that they have ended war on their planet by turning over civil authority to robots which are programmed to recognise violence and automatically come to the defense of the victim of any violent crime. They explain that they have turned over said authority to the robots in such a way that they cannot reclaim that authority.
Turned off by the idea of giving up control, our leaders rejected the visitors' proposal to bring the robots to Earth. In the end, the visitor leaves with a stern warning that humanity spreading war into interplanetary space would result in the Earth being reduced to a burning cinder.
Not only are we missing a -1, Stupid mod tool, we are also missing a -1, bad grammar mod tool.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Let's reserve words like "crime against humanity" to places where it is in context.
There is no likeness between screwing around with technology in an attempt to stop copying and the killing/torturing of someone for no reason greater than not liking the way he/she looks.
)2:erocS( gnittodhsalS fo esac nI ,92 yaM yadsruhT no drawoC suomynonA yb
,03 yaM yadirF no laeNyobwoC yb detsoP .tped kcals-emos-gnittuc eht morf .yad yreve detnarg s'taht yaweel lagel fo selpmaxe gnivig fo boj doog a seod elc .daer doog a llits s'ti tub , .metsys lagel eht yb dedivorp yllacipyt s
,92 yaM yadsruhT no drawoC suomynonA yb ,03 yaM yadirF no drawoC suomynonA yb
,03 yaM yadirF no laeNyobwoC yb detsoP .tped kcals-emos-gnittuc eht morf .yad yreve detnarg s'taht yaweel lagel fo selpmaxe gnivig fo boj doog a seod elc .daer doog a llits s'ti tub , .metsys lagel eht yb dedivorp yllacipyt s
)8804706#( MP03:01@
ytinamuH tsniagA emirC a noitcetorP ypoC
MA71:10@
itra ehT ".modeerF latigiD gnidnefeD fo esoD yliaD ruoy rof noitadnuoF reitnorF
cinortcelE eht ot tisiv a yb deinapmocca eb dluohS
todhsalS no netfo derevoc cipot a s'tI
i taht 'moor elggiw' fo tnuoma lanoitar a fo ytilaer eht dna noitcetorp ypoc nee
wteb noitaler eht otni skool deriW ta revo elcitra nA" setirw xylaverT
] sihT ot ylpeR [
)2:erocS( elcitra dias fo rorrim a si ereH:eR
)2614706#( MP94:01@
)0:erocS( gnittodhsalS fo esac nI
)8804706#( MA03:10@
ytinamuH tsniagA emirC a noitcetorP ypoC
MA71:10@
itra ehT ".modeerF latigiD gnidnefeD fo esoD yliaD ruoy rof noitadnuoF reitnorF
cinortcelE eht ot tisiv a yb deinapmocca eb dluohS
todhsalS no netfo derevoc cipot a s'tI
i taht 'moor elggiw' fo tnuoma lanoitar a fo ytilaer eht dna noitcetorp ypoc nee
wteb noitaler eht otni skool deriW ta revo elcitra nA" setirw xylaverT
the market will have the right response....
...that's what we heard at the beginning of the MS vs. USG trials, too. Still waiting for the 'right response' to show signs of life, however.
I'm more for the 'Everyone to the castle!!...pitchforks in the middle of the night and let's kill the blut'ee munster!' type of response, m'self...
Don't like being "forced" to lease the latest Britney Spears collection? Fine! Spread your musical wings and discover the world outside the pop star of the month club.
Sheesh. Once upon a time (and not so long ago) people sat on the porch together, played and sang. They made their own music! Imagine!
Long answer:
Until you actually have citizens being executed or imprisoned for their entire lives for infringing on an author's copyright, it's not a crime against humanity. The current execution of the ??AAs' desires to enforce copyright restrictions may be ill-conceived, unjust, or downright stupid, but it's a gigantic leap from there to "crime against humanity." Call it a "prelimenary [sic]" step if you wish, but you've still got a long way to go before you get to real atrocity.
Kozy Gory in WWII was a crime against humanity. The killing fields in Cambodia were crimes against humanity. The cannibalism and atrocities in Idi Amin's regime were crimes against humanity. The U.S. government's treatment of blacks and American Indians was a crime against humanity. Fining a w4r3z d00d or .mp3 hoarder, no matter how unjust, is most definitely not a crime against humanity.
It's this sort of dilution of language that leads to people crying "1984" and "police state" every time they think the gubmint is doing them an injustice. Here's a quick-and-dirty litmus test: go out to a big publice place, and tell a bunch of strangers that you think your government is a totalitarian fascist police state. If you get arrested that night and executed for making the statement, you're in a police state. If you get nothing more than strange looks, you're not.
They that would sacrifice their
meow
Directly from the mouth of a horse named: SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION (WASHINGTON, D.C. 20549)
...
...
Check out Commission file number: 0-29911:
"On AugustÂ26, 2002, Caldera International,ÂInc. announced that it would change its name to The SCO Group,ÂInc. ("SCO") pending stockholder approval. The name change is in response to the strong brand recognition related to the SCO OpenServer and SCO UNIXWare product lines that has been created over the last several years.
The Company has an arrangement with Novell, Inc. ("Novell") in which it acts as an administrative agent in the collection of royalties for customers who deploy SVRx technology. Under the agency agreement, the Company collects all customer payments and remits 95 percent of the collected funds to Novell and retains 5 percent as an administrative fee. The Company records the 5 percent administrative fee as revenue in its consolidated statements of operations. The accompanying October 31, 2002 and 2001 consolidated balance sheets reflect the amounts collected related to this agency agreement but not yet remitted to Novell of $1,428,000 and $1,894,000, respectively, as restricted cash and royalty payable to Novell. The October 31, 2001 balances were reclassified from cash and equivalents and other royalties payable to conform to the current year presentation."
Well, in this case it may be had to fight for intellectual property.
..it seems to be saying what I believe: that the law should be a means to an end, not and end unto itself. or.. no harm, no foul. Blinding following the rules is why bad things happen.
(a) Murder
(b) Extermination
(c) Enslavement
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law
(f) Torture
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court
(i) Enforced disappearance of persons
(j) The crime of apartheid
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
None of these really seem to fit the RIAA trying to stop me copying Metallica CDs.
Actually, some leeway was finally given last summer when eleven Lower East Side squats were legitimized by the city. Not exactly a Fair Use doctrine for real estate, but certainly a step in the right direction.
I own CDs, 8tracks, vinyl cassettes.
.mp3 was too good a copy. So do I share metalica music? FUCK NO!!! They don't want me too, I disagree with their politics, and hell... I won't do them the favor. Any prior Metalic material has been donated to goodwill.
I play them in winamp, all of them, cause they are mine, I bought them, they are mine. I play them from home, I play them via http, I play them when ever I feel the need. This does not make me a criminal. Fuck no!
Try finding a 78rpm player, then try downsampling 1:1.7333 and playing an MP3. Which is cheeper? Does this make me a criminal? Fuck no! You can't buy 78s. Can't be replaced, kiss my ass.
I have traded mp3s on napster, rare stuff mostly, shit you can't buy. I've had the bands contact me and say, "cool, you can't buy this shit". RIAA issue, hardly, not shit they control. The only request was that I put in their website in the material, notice of copyright. Does this make me a criminal. FUCK NO!
I thought about trading Metalica, based under the assumption they wanted you too. It was their policy that fans copied their material on to cassettes so others can listen and hear their music. But they changed their mind...
http://www.arm.com/news/TrustZone270503
If something is copy-protected well enough, then it will never become available to the PD. Imagine modern scholars trying to brute-force the 128-bit-IDEA encryption on Shakespeare's Macbeth. (Assuming they were licensed to use the IDEA patent, of course. ;-) (Have they had enough time, or would we need a few more universe-ages?)
If it doesn't reach PD, then when can the progress happen? It can't be built upon by the population at large, unless -- do you really think it makes sense that I should purchase a license to build upon "Steamboat Willy"? (Whoever thought that up, is dead and he got the 28 years that he expected. His incentive was fulfulled.) And while I know they are probably out there on the MAME-warez sites, I remember there are many C64 games that I don't have today not just because I got bored with them, but because they were inconvenient to take into the future. Would any of that stuff still be around in 2073 when it falls into PD, without the w4r3zd00dz? Funny: I bought Doom from ID and it wasn't copy-protected at all, but I know Romero's beautiful WADs will still be around in 2083, and no help from the w4r3zd00dz will be necessary. Little Johnny will find the files on grandpa's old file server, because grandpa was able to maintain continuous storage and migrate data, even though he never interfered with ID's rightful monopoly. And Grandpa learned from history so that's why there weren't any more Library-of-Alexandria-like incidents.
Wow, think of it: that great level, E1M3, will still be in people's minds a century from now. I really believe that. People will still see it and it will be an almost "real" place. The ideosphere was permanently enlarged. The arts were promoted. I won't kid anyone; I think the w4r3zd00dz might end up being responsible for that, but ID's decision to not use copy-protection is what guaranteed it.
If there are restrictions on access, then the very purpose of copyright has been subverted. It's a trade secret, not a published work. If it's copy-protected, then the progress of the arts and sciences is not being promoted.
And that's ok -- nobody should, of course, be required by society to act so altruisticly, because we are free men and not servants of some dystopian collectivist society, and we live for our own desires. But there are consequences that go with not working with Us. If it's copy-protected, then We should not extend copyright-protection to it. Society offered the creator a deal and the creator declined and decided to market his effort a different way. Fair enough. I think that's probably foolish, but it's his call to make.
But people who claim the privileges (monopoly) and yet reject the associated obligations (ease of data migration, format conversion, etc), are dishonest and not acting in good faith. Those who try to get such Free Lunches should, IMHO, be treated to "special" standards of respect or consideration, that are different than the treatment extended to decent folk. Their kind should not be encouraged. And remember that true Law is not set by those people in Washington, but by We The People. You can subvert my government, but you can't subvert me. Whitewash and social-engineer and bribe and play your games, but the ethical principles from which decisions are made, remain immutable.
And so I choose for the reality to be: copyright exists .. in situations where it is appropriate. The use of copy-protection influences my judgement of that situation. Catch up, Washington.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Thanfully the abillity to have read only access to the human brain is multi millenia away.
Not to mention the ability to alter that.
Hopefully we'll realise the stupidity of IP laws before it is possable to enforece that from inside your brain.
"Sorry but the knowladge you have is the IP of 'Big knowladge Inc' I don't care if you are just a deep thinker and came up with this all on your own. It's our property and you can't have it unless you pony up. So fork it over or subject to a labotomy at your expense"
When knowladge is property corprations deside what we can or can't know.
I don't actually exist.
WTF??? Has wired.com become anime'd?????
Copy protections only have effect for entertainment consumers living in welfare societies. Such entertainment products or services are by no means necessary for our everyday life and thus cannot be even in same context with crimes against humanity.
/. guy, but the real problem are DCMA-like laws meant to enforce copy protections, which create potential threats against on-line privacy and freedom of speech.
Yes, copy protection creates some artificial limits for receiving information, but that effect is not very significant as long as information availability in non-electronic formats (like newspapers) is not somehow (for example by goverment or by some media cartel) limited. This can change sometime in future if the paper will eventually disappear, but that will still take at least many decades, even if it will finally happen. We have to remember that today many people are still living without personal computers.
Now don't get me wrong: I hate copy protections as much as an average
The point is: the existence of copy protections alone is not any real problem, the laws enforcing them are.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
It is rather overstating it. It's a crime against consumer rights that's for damn sure, but humanity? Gimme a break. Sensationalist wording if ever there was.
Until such time as DRM leads to massive loss of life, I think saying it's a crime against humanity is overstating it considerably. Like a small papercut on your finger being called "a massive deep gaping wound".
Es ist kaum ein "Verbrechen gegen Menschlichkeit", obwohl der Artikel einige gute Punkte bildet. Es ist wie das Ernennen eines elektronischen Richters zu einem Versuch.
Klatu... barradha...Niktho.
Niktho. Klatu said for you to 'bring marshmallows'...
The point really should have been that just because I _might_ break the law (or violate the copyright, or whatever) doesn't mean that I should be prevented from a legal action because it could lead to lawbreaking (or copying for fair use).
But isn't this what hacking is all about? The system is stupidly inflexible, so we must use our extreme ninja coder skillz in order to make information free.
When I read the Wired article, I was most struck by how novel the concept was to me. Sure I'd heard that rules are made to be broken, but my lifetime experience has always been that the system is unfair and will punish you if you fsck it the wrong way. The main advantage with the digital world is that it has been easy to determine what the rules are and operate such that you don't bump in to them very often.
I like the fact that my iPod says "don't steal music", but stores all the music in a nice file structure on the device. All I need to do is mount up the pod and cp files wherever I want them to go.
Interestingly, economic and accounting systems were introduced in order to provide structure for humans so that they could better manipulate the social world around them. Somewhere along the lines people figured out how to hijack the education and enforcement systems in order to metamanipulate the system for their own benefit. Code and later Internet are the new pure social structure. It is only a matter of time before they too are corrupted.
What will be next?
Let us not dwell only with all the negative aspects. Mandating buildt-in copy-prevention in all electronic devices will also have a lot of practical applications.
If for instance you could build a radar-beacon for your car that broad-cast such a copy-protection signal. The A/D converter in the trafic control radar would recognize the copy-protection signal and dutyfully shut down ;-).
When enemy radar is locking on your plane, no problem - you just send them a request to shut down and all the missiles will fall out of the sky.
Go to a televised ball-game and bring a poster with a no-copy watermark. All the TV-cameras would stop working while they panned over your part of the benches.
That the recording industry can suggest to mandate such functionality can only be a proof that they have no technical insight. General purpose computers can by default do signal processing. If you make them in a way so they cannot do signal processing - they are no longer general purpose computers.
In order to sell any kind of content to a customer you have to eventually present it to the customer in a form that can be perceived by her. If something can be picked up by a human being it can also be picked up by a machine. Live with it.
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/uk.cfm?id=596242003
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Trouble is, if you buy a DVD or perhaps even a CD, sooner or later it's going to end up as a coaster either through nornal wear and tear or as a result of faulty manufacture and degradation. Common sense and decency dictates that you should be able to secure the content in case of this contingency, but the RIAA et al are neither sensible nor decent.
Let's say that we (the humanity) accepts DRM as something common and normal... within 50 years or so DRM would become *standard*, one would not be able to think that having access to media: books, music, video, algorithms, etc. can be done without using DRM.
The result, in the future the humanity would have lost its freedom to media (someone stole it). Copyrights are not intended to remove freedom from the public but to provide an incentive to authors.
Imagine a the following scene:
- what are you going to do this weekend?
- I am going to listen to singer X? It's great, I just need to pay 25$ to "Music Forever" everytime that I want to listen to it, other services are more expensive and do not allow you to listen to it with other people.
Cheers.
Yes, you fucking well can have something for nothing. It happens all the time; I can throw some seed in the garden - ignore them completely - and in a few months still have watermelons. I can walk outside, hold my mouth open to the sky in a rainstorm and drink all the fresh water I care to catch. I breath, and no one charges me for the air. I think, and no one questions my thoughts.
These rights of commerce are not inalienable, and are not moral. When it comes down to you trying to charge me for something as free as air or water just because you, at one time, drank from the same well then it's become time for you to leave the island.
This was a tragic lost to the civilized world, and possily lots of Homer's other works were destroyed never to be seen again, not to speak of of the astrometery of Ptolemy and Eratosthenes.
o ph y/philosop8.htm used to get the spelling correct]
l ]
Eratosthenes, who i've always been a personal fan of, is credited with measuring the earth with a stick, or rather, by making measurments of the shadows cast at noon on a stick between Alexandria and Syene. No rockets, no computers, simple geometry established, assuming the earth was a perfect sphere, he determined represented 1/50th of a circle. Using modern mesurements, that's 500 miles * 50 = 25,000 miles (mental reference from scientific american sited verivied on the web) Pretty useful for people like Columbus, oh but wait.. we lost alot of our useful navagation knowlege cause it was burnt. Guess it wasn't christrian enough for Emperor Theodosius of Rome.
[http://www.planetarybiology.com/science_philos
There are so many other scientists, artists, pholophiers from this era. Hell Galileo wrote his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Principal Systems of the World" was published in about 1632, which chalanged Aristotle's geocentric view, something debated by atleast Aristarchus of Samos circa 230 BC or so. Who else might have published works who's theories can be proven by modern day methods.
[http://bell.lib.umn.edu/map/PTO/WRITE/erat.htm
Now would you consider this act a crime against humanity. Lost wealth of knowlege leading to the fall of knowlege it self?
---
Now... can we compair private libraries of books and music by users of P2P networks to the Library of Alexandria, a center of civilized thought? Could be, because for the first time in history distance has become obsolete. What survived from this era are not what could be considered the holy grail of wisdom, but literal scraps of information scattered from a varity of sources, not employed researchers or librarians, but something close to our amature collectors.
If it wasn't for this new Eutopia, I wouldn't have been able to find Eratosthenes's experiment, and been able to reproduce it, for the benifit of my nieces and nephews. A simple experiment over 2000 years ago that shows someone good evidence of the fact that they live on a planet.
While some would agrue that music and movies are not a human right. This is true. Got to make a living, we do presently have an industry, stuff costs money. Ok.. great! But DRM threatenes to permit the loss of works. At present i'm willing to pay for a CD... to play for my self and a friend. If I really like it, i'll keep the CD for 5 years, 10 years, and until I am dead. Someone who is curious about me, my life, like at the dawn of the 21st century might be at a loss if no one can obtain the right anymore. While you may think a obscure mixed metaphore like "the way the beach is kissed by the sea, poluted now but in our hearts still clean" {Insane Jane in a tribute to Pete Townshend) is important enough to preserve... but what about the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, or Einstein. With DRM... if the companies who published their work digitaly no longer exist, how can we access it.
We no longer need a natural disaster, global war, nor fanatical zeliot oh a quest for our welfare in the afterlife in order to drive this planet into another dark age. All we need are hard core encryption schemes, criminal penalities for circumventing them, and the loss of ability to lock them, a loss by some site on the net shutting down after declairing bankrupsy.
This isn't about depriving copyright holders of their rights to publish their works, nor about our distaste for an established system of enterprise. This is about standing at the edge of a new dark age where we stand to loose countless millenia of history, and a responciblity we have to the human race, and so long as we continue to permit these actions we are as guility as those responcible for the loss of the library of Alexandria.
Moraly it's wrong, their for it must be politicly correct.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I support short-term copy protection but think it would be nice if it expired after about 5 years or so.
When software is brand new, the copy protection is usually only slightly annoying, such as having to have the CD of a game in the drive. But once your computer has gone through a few generations of upgrades and your OS has gone through a few of its own generations, will you even be able to run your programs anymore due to the copy protection not being compatible with your new stuff?
A somewhat extreme example is on my old Apple ][. I have a few relatively obscure copy protected educational programs on 5.25" disk. As far as I know, no one has ever cracked these disks and I would like to be able to convert them to disk images so I can back them up to CD-ROM and use them with an Apple ][ emulator. But since they are copy protected and since it's not worth it to learn how to crack these super old disks, I am stuck. All I can think of is that copy protection has killed these programs.
The moral of the story is... get cracks for all your software that you want to be able to run in 5 years from now. It's the sad reality of the situation.
So ya, I support short-term copy protection but in a perfect world, it would just happily expire after a few years.
It's more like a small fungal infection in your sinuses that is going to eat your face and then your brain if you don't treat it.
It won't work because most people couldn't care less about sound quality.
Follow me...
On Kazaa, I've given up because the pops, clicks, encoding are all *horrible*.
On the widely touted iTunes service, people are ranting that 128kb AAC "sounds just like the CD". It doesn't. Not horrible, but maybe cassette deck quality at best.
People are happy as long as scratchy music comes out of the speaker.
So what would you do... the flag would say "play at 32kb mono"? That would probably be good enough for 50% of consumers.
"the Australian Aborigines respected the work of authors and musicians as being akin to physical property"
Bull-shit Bullshit Bull-shit.
Just saying it doesn't make it so.
Bullshit.
"The intent of copyright is to protect the right of a content creator to determine how and when something is copied."
Is to encourage wider dissemination of ideas.
Copyright does not confer ownership. In fact philosophically, it is understood that once an idea is released to the public, it's there forever. The "idea" belongs to the world, the author gets to profit from it.
Don't like it? Then don't release it. Simple.
We do not live in a world of 0s and 1s. Computers do. That is why DRM is a bad idea.
I have a large problem with this concept that is behind a lot of our current thinking about why copying is wrong. Whenever I have a conversation with someone about copyright, I get the argument: The guy worked hard to produce X, he deserves to be recompensed. This is a very strange concept. Nobody has a 'right' to profit from anything they do (unless this is stipulated in a contract of some kind, and then it really isn't an inherent right like these people are trying to make out). If I put in a lot of hard work to create the most beautiful music/art/whatever, but nobody buys, I can't say I have a right to profit from these works. Profit is mostly good fortune, definitely not a case of the most deserving case profits most. I think that much of the world's (IMHO broken) views on copyright stem from this one.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
'Article' was actually right, but 'exactly' takes an 'e.' Anyway, I was disappointed with the article myself. The real question is whether companies should be allowed to refuse to sell material to consumers who refuse to give up their fair use rights. The point that Lessig hammers home is that they should not. I'm not saying that it doesn't make any difference whether companies try enforce agreements that include the sacrifice of fair use rights by contract or by code, as Lessig would put it---building the enforcement mechanism into code means that enforcement of lousy contracts will be much stricter. But even though this is of some importance, it is still really secondary.
This post is dedicated to all of those
DRM will only work if people actually want the content and actively consume it. I can't speak for everyone else, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a copy-protected CD (I haven't bought a CD since the first red book-breaking disc came out). However, I'm not going to steal it either. Essentially, the more they protect it, the less I want it.
Put copy protection on your CDs? Fuck you, I don't want anything you sell. Use that Palladium thing to put copy protection on your analyst's report? Fuck you, I won't use your services.
Hell, here goes a big Fuck you to anyone who can't respect that I am a rational person and assumes that I am incapable of following the law (if there even is one).
You can't quote from the Bible (Koran, Torah, whatever,) its copyright.
You can't quote from Shakespeare, its copyright. (Guttenberg project to the contrary, check the verbiage on the scripts of movies. Shakespeare is 0wn3d by the MPAA studios.)
You can't use text books in your course material. They're copyright.
And if you're not a member of some xxAA the only thing you'll be able to do is consume and pay. And they'll pay themselves too, but its just shifting from one pocket to another, that doesn't hurt quite as much.
And forget about sites like
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"Meanwhile, Homer falls asleep at the wheel of his truck and finds out that truckers have a scam going; they have an auto-driver that drives the truck for them. Other truckers warn him not to blab about it...or else."
e rv let/showid-146/epid-1505/
http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageS
I claim prior art on this idea.
..... I naively assumed manufacturers might offer a promotion whereby you could send in some used cassettes and get a free one.
.....
Way back in the 1980s, as a young lad barely out of short trousers, I had the idea to mount a small permanent magnet downstream of the drive spindle/roller assembly in a Walkman-style cassette. This would allow the content to be listened just once. The original intention was to use it for computer games: a programme would be loaded from cassette to format a floppy, then the game itself would be read from tape and stored on the disk. Afterward you had a blank tape
But I never did much with the idea because it was, frankly, crap. It was simply too easy to defeat, besides being error-prone.
It sounds as though this kind of thing would be illegal in mainland Europe anyway, with their strict recycling laws
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
where cooking tips get moderated "interesting" and "insightful."
"News for chefs. Stuff that spatters!"
It comes down to a simple thought: Sure, I'd love it if everyone who wanted my creative output would pay for it, but enough will, even without a draconian copyright solution, or at least they'll pay for my surrounding knowledge.
Regardless, copyright to protect an idea is silly. If I have an idea, and you have an idea, we both still have an idea. Excellent how it works like that. Even better, since I'm me, I get to keep having ideas.
The intelligent and creative minority have nothing to fear from free exchange of ideas.
... but power and the thirst after power. Money is only an easy way we found to have an "absolute & relative" measure for that power. By nature human is "greedy", to acumulate enough ressource for its descendant, and there is never enough. Bottom line, if it wasn't money it would be something else. But by nature this is this exchange of power which makes up the relationship between people, and not the form it takes.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This was modded funny, but I'm thinking that if enough people were hit by such a virus, the masses might finally get annoyed enough to rise up against the Gesta^H^H^H^H^HCongress and the SS^H^HMicrosoft and demand that their fair use rights be restored.
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
Laws aren't absolute, they are design (imperfectly by people) and revised to serve their purpose. But more than often, the laws themselves do not ultimately serve their intended purpose. In the case of DRM related laws, there is quite a observable gap between the actual implementation of the laws and their intended purpose. When that happens and enough people see it, you will get the relaxation of the laws as common sense takes over. For example, the purposes of copyright laws are quite clear, they are created to ensure that artists are properly and fairly compensated for their work so they can keeping producing more art. However, the current laws seems to be doing neither, they seem to over-compensate the distributors ( Record labels.. etc) and giving them too much control over what type of art gets distributed. The digital medium was suppose to change that, distribution is now commonplace and the masses have become more in control of the expression of art. The distributors see that, and are using the excuse of piracy to tightened DRM laws beyond common sense. The public simply let loose and breathed a little.
Let's try another gendonkey whaddayacallit.
Imagine a DRM scheme where you had the option to force any "access device" to communicate with your server at loveandwhitemakeup.badpoetry.net before it can decrypt and display your work. The server will send back a token, allowing the work to be viewed.
As per the initial experiment, you decide your old poetry is too bad to inflict upon society. So you go to your server and set it to reject all authentication requests. Boom. Now nobody can ever read you bad poetry again. Since all you ever granted anyone was a revokable "license" to view the work, this is perfectly legal.
Or imagine that the copyright finally runs out on your book. By then, of course, it will be "life of the author plus 300 years, with an optional 200 year extension, but I digress. Now everyone can trade your bad poetry as they see fit, right? Nope. Somebody, somewhere, decided it wasn't worth the effort to keep the authentication scheme functioning, and shut down loveandwhitemakeup.badpoetry.net as soon as the copyright expired. Why should they bother, since they can no longer make a profit off supporting it?
This is the sort of scheme many in the content industry want: absolutely secure formats, where the copyright holder has complete and irrevocable control over distribution. The ability to stop publishing a work is fine. But these schemes might ensure that nothing can ever reach the public domain, and that would be a travesty.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
*uniform* throughout the United States
I guess that makes the graduated income tax -a tax applied most unequally revolving around over a zillion definitions of what and where income "is" that no one honest or sane could truthlly say they understood completely- illegal then....whoops, it's "de law" enforced by state sponsored terrorism basically.
The US government-or should I say organized criminal cartel or junta- does whatever it wants to do, the constitution has nothing to do with it anymore, nor do the english language words used in the constitution have any basis in what they call "the law". You can go through it paragraph by paragraph, use websters first dictionary as a guide-the only true reference over what the words as originally written really meant, and find obvious exceptions that are "enforced" on people. In particular,all of our born-with rights. 180 degrees from that concept now, whatever the guys with guns and so called "legal authority" say is theirs, is theirs. It was a decent attempt,had some geat promise, the implementation has turned into a disaster. What we have now is called a power and money accumulation centered fascist dictatorship. Those with the most corporate~money and political bribery ties call the shots, it's pretty obvious.
"Copyright" has been turned into de facto "forever". The trends are definetly past a single human life span, that means "forever" for current innovators to use and build from previous works for further development unimpeded. The big players want it that way, so it happened. What used to be "legal" just an historical short time ago is now most "illegal", not only with copyrights, but with a lot of human endeavors. You would be semi hard pressed to come up with any normal human day to day activity now that doesn't have a corporgovernmental "you must get our permission to do it or else you are considered a criminal" clause sneaked in there someplace, even it is a layer or two from the surface.
+1 funny
--you are correct in your analysis of the UN and most of it's actions. The REASON is that the UN was extremely based on the stalinist-brand "communist" model, although that isn't a fair way to really label it, it's the closest you can get at readily that most people could grasp easily. Most of the heavy lifting on it, the design and implementation, that continues to this day, was done by stalinists.
And sad to say, I was way past formal schooling before I ever found that out, and to this day, I would venture to say most of the planet still doesn't know that, although the historical documents and people involved are all there to research.
By definition of default, this would mean that leeway is granted because we don't know what to do in a given situation. Does this mean that knowing what to do can be bad under certain circumstances?
In my dictionary, there's no instance of "default" listed with the meaning "standard". Why is it always used like this?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I know that there are problems with how the music industry behaves when I am artificially prevented from ripping a CD I've purchased. But the article tells us that the cause of these problems is that software is too good at enforcing the law.
I say it's not good enough at enforcing the laws. Remember, the Fair Use clause of the copyright explicitly protects and makes legal much of what overzealous DRM prevents. The problem with DRM is really twofold:
These problems are nothing a free market shouldn't be able to combat. If a photocopier prevented me from photocopying any printed sheet with a copyright notice embedded, I would buy a different photocopier. If it could magically distinguish between an infringement and an instance of Fair Use perfectly and do it conveniently enough that I never knew the difference, I would have no problem using it. Thus there is motivation for the manufacturer to assure that any DRM included protects my rights as well as they copyright holders'.
That motivation doesn't exist in a monopolistic (or more accuratley oligopolistic) competition; if all the manufacturers are jacking me, I've got nowhere else to turn.
So I place all the blame with the Federal Trade Commission and the Powers That Be for allowing it to become increasingly irrelevant in protecting and promoting free market competition.
The problem is not with our laws, is not with the lack of altruism in the RIAA, and is not with a lack of "legal wiggle-room." No wiggling is necessary when the law explicitly permits something. The problem is with the collusion of the major record companies.
I am starting to feel that copy protection should not be a crime. On the other hand, breaking it should remain within fair use rights. A company should be able to sell a product however they want. I don't have to buy it. But once I obtain it fairly, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, including (modding|disassembling|copying|ripping|burning|usi ng as a coaster).
The way copyrights are set up, the creator gets legal protection from copying for a time period in exchange for giving up ownership on the work and giving it to the public after the same period.
This is a contract where BOTH sides have to uphold it -- the governments by ensuring that there are laws giving the creator legal protection during the protected period, and the creator by giving up any ownership, allowing "fair use", and ensuring that the product is handed over to the public at the end of the protection.
What's happening is that the creators are not keeping their part of the bargain anymore. They want to reap the benefits of the legal protection while NOT handing the creation over to the public when they're supposed to. Measures are put in place that makes it impossible for the public to take ownership. That's not what the copyright laws are meant for. It can be argued that by implementing measures to prevent fair use and future ownership transfer to the public, the creator has completely forfeited his part of the deal, and thus should enjoy NONE of the benefits -- i.e. the works become fair game.
Whoever wants to sell their creation can do so without using the copyright system. There's other options, like license agreements and end user contracts that can be used instead of copyright and release to the public. A creator can also choose NOT to publish, in which case ownership is retained forever.
As for the right to destroy your own works -- yes, an artist has that right, but NOT after releasing the works to the public under copyright protection! By doing so and reaping the benefits of copy protection, the author no longer can void the part where the works WILL become public domain after the copyright expires.
Or, more seriously, how can you have servers distributing your DRM-protected content if all hardware will refuse to transmit that content due to a broadcast flag?
There will be machines that ignore the broadcast flag. There have to be, or the content companies can't distribute over the Internet. (Or if there's another option besides this, tell me.) But somehow, it still must be possible to transmit massive numbers of copies of DRM-protected content.
Since I wrote this little piece of text, I am a copyright holder. And, as a copyright holder, it's my right to have access to machines that ignore the broadcast flag. I want machines as powerful as those.
If there's a gaping hole in this logic, please tell me, because this whole broadcast-flag-enforced-by-hardware thing doesn't make sense to me since the copyright industry will need to have machines that transmit crippled content like that.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Before you release your poems to the public, you have full control over them. You can change them, throw them away, whatever. But when you publish them, you're saying "public, look at my work, and if it's good, buy it so I may profit." At that point, you bring the rest of society into the equation, and your work becomes the joint property of everyone who's life it affects. Copyright law was written so you could have the privilege (it's not a right) of profiting off your work by giving you a monopoly on it for a limited time. Make no mistake, you may be able to profit off if it exclusively, but it belongs to the world.
c-hack.com |
Today's news on Reuters includes a story about the settlement between AOL and Microsoft and that:
It continues on with the following observation:
Why does AOL need Microsoft if it can peddle Linux boxen... which is getting increasingly easer every day????
Add to all this that a number of folks are working on using crypto tech for attaching video monitors and hard drives.
Reasonable colclusion: there is a good possibility that Microsoft (and/or AOL) may be developing a filesystem and hardware spec that could eliminate the ability to make copies of one's own files even on the same machine!
Now that Case is out of the AOL loop and since Time Warner and AOL are welded together, AOL has more interest in protecting copyrights that it did before. Could it be that Microsoft and AOL will team up to make little lock boxen that THEY control for every user's personal digital media?
The ultimate saving grace from this is that one can (and we will) easily pull a Seinfield move and copy media from its analog value... which is no worse than 8 years ago when we were all still using audio and video casettes. Those digitized analog copies will be tough to trace and will be free from encumberances... and they will be digital!
File sharing of second-analog-generation music and movies will become the norm and remain rampant for ever.
The minority that HAS to have access to the advanced features of DVDs and such will have to get the real thing.
If everyone did like you, the artists would scarcely get paid. It would hurt the musicians pretty badly, and the film makers even worse. In the end your music collection would again grow less diverse, and worse, our entire culture would lose freshness and diversity.
I therefore think your actions are morally wrong, and should (at least partly) be illegal.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
The point is, no analyst would even think about suing a company for reproducing his or her "intellectual property" for a company meeting. But computers may or may not be able to see the distinction. All they know is that they've been given uncopyable material and asked to copy it.
The house painting example wasn't supposed to be an analogy, which is why your revision of the analogy is--to be blunt--so bad. So I'm not going to play by your rules. The point is, the rule is written into your lease to prevent you from trying to do major remodeling on the landlord's property, but no human would ever make the judgment that a bit of touch up paint would get you in trouble. If a computer were in charge of ensuring compliance with the lease, much unnecessary difficulty would ensue.
If there is any analogy between the painting example and the copyright debate, it should be an analogy of function. That is, find some action which is technically illegal, but shouldn't bother the copyright holder if he or she found out. For example, mixing a CD for your girlfriend, or using a song for a junior high's video yearbook. These would be analogous to the painting example.
There are many people who frown on wholesale copyright violation, and I think you would find the author of the article among them. But the rules now being put in place--and strictly enforced--are a huge disservice to consumers.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Instead, digital media, e.g., software, music, video, are on par with ideas: copying and distributing them increases their value and does not diminish existing copies. With cheap storage and fast networks, the cost of production is nearly 0.
And this is where Weinberger's article resonates for me. I think we are dealing with a tension between the rules and a subconscious desire to "do the right thing". I claim that everyone, deep down, feels that they *should* share with their friends, especially when the cost of production is nil. On the other hand, such sharing is illegal. It's time to come up with a new model for the creation and funding of digital media.
In the meantime, the record companies, to give one example, are still trying to promote a model that acts like producing each and every CD is like pressing a new piece of vinyl: costly and requiring uncommon facilities and machinery.
Today, digital media contains most of its value in the "R&D" or development stage, and production is just a button-push. Of course marketing still adds value, but P2P networks are moving toward making even that segment as irrelevant and off-point and production.
Before you starts the France bashing, as far as i cant ell, the LEGAL definition of a cult is having a congregation of X member , and a church is above X member. Thus Moon and scientology started as a cult, but ended by sheer number as being considered legally as the Moon church and Scientology Church. (Church being considered a definition here , not a type of building). I can't recall what X is, but it is somewhere between 1K people and 10K people.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
We have 3 people in the last hundred years that have killed more than 1 million people. Or at least, 3 that come immediately to mind.
Hitler killed 4 million Jews in WWII.
Stalin killed 20 million Russians.
Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people in Cambodia in the 1970s.
Yale has a genocide site devoted to this, though it's interesting that they include Hitler and Pol Pot, but not Stalin. Hmm. I guess ethnic purges count, but political purges don't.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
As a full time tech and a lover of media, I have the typical MP3 collection. Its of my own stuff since I like higher quality than 128 bit. I have nontechnical friends slowly getting into the act. They don't create content because they just don't know how...
If distros of UNIX were made standard user friendly, and applications for music, video, and games were made friendly too, they would make there machines into set top boxes. Half of the nontechnical people I know have unused boxen, and all they really use there main machines for is music and Internet.
If you get a large portion of the population using stored digital media, they will consistantly break the rules to use it in maners they see fit. -i.e. most people speed sometimes.- it would make all DRM laws moot. First people wouldn't stand for it, and it would be impossible to apply the law to an average case.
So all you geeks out there here is the challenge: Get applications and OSs that an average tv user could pop into the CD carrige of an old PC and it would do Internet and music at the end. Call it a rememberable name, and wait a year. If the untechnical masses can learn MP3 and Napster they could learn this.
And before you say that this isn't possible, remember, a few years ago MP3s were the exlusively geek domain, and the recording industry wanted them gone!
Just my two cents.
Rememebr how the DVD format was hacked, and how the regional lockouts were too?
Heh. No, the real point is this: The only people who were effected by this were people who were in the position to do 2 things: 1) copy DVD's. 2) Try to watch DVD's from other countries.
Neither of these things apply to Joe Six pack, who probably hasn't even sold his VRC yet.
Microsoft has trained people into believing that technical stuff just doesn't work about half the time. Someone tries to copy a DVD and the VCR tape is full of static. Huh. Weird. Next.
Turn that around and sell someone a CD that DOESN'T WORK ON THEIR COMPUTER, or a DVD that EXPIRES regardless of whether you've watched it or not, and people will get pissed. True full-blown DRM will hit that 90% of the population that doesn't understand any of this junk, and the only bit that will penetrate won't be security, it won't be IP rights, it will be THEY'RE RIPPING ME OFF.
It will be interesting to watch.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The argument isn't very persuasive, first of all. What the hell is he talking about? "Tee-hee, people should just look the other way, because some laws were meant to be broken, tee-hee." Moron.
If a law is constantly broken, one has to look at the law. Is it a fair law? Does it reflect reality? Is it enforcable? Does it hurt more people than it helps, or does it help more people than it hurts?
The problems with modern IP laws are simple:
1) They don't reflect reality. People are patenting vague thoughts and unrealized inventions, and being alowed to hold the patents forever.
2) They aren't enforcable. Information moves so fast these days, there is no way to control it without moving to MASSIVE DRM, which seems unworkable.
3) They aren't fair. If you BUY something you should have rights regarding it.
4) They hurt 99% and help 1%, who happen to be so rich it's absurd.
These are the reasons DRM sucks, not because it violates some imaginary principle regarding laws that are "meant to be broken."
Just my opinion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Yeah, man. The lameness filter is fucking skewed. Pretty soon you won't be able to say anything worthwhile. You will actually have to use a drop-down selection box to choose from a variety of allowed phrases and hope that you can get your opinion across using those limited phrases. Of course, if your opinion differs from the majority, you will be modded into oblivion. In that case, don't even bother trying to post. FUCK SLASHDOT.
alwas interesting to read: http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/philosophy/right-to-read .html
Okay, silly, but do you really want to live in a world where you can't break the law? Replace your ideas for mob rule (I speed. I also pay the tickets)? It effectively crushes the very concept of dissent. And with DRM... I am currently purchasing a "bootlegged" CD directly from the band because the record label will not reissue the CD. This is how absurd the whole copyright thing has become. Can you bootleg your own work?
Thanks for the link.
And, although it may at least partially negate one of my points, in another way, it supports it... What level of ignoring normal traffic rules seems acceptible in a medical emergency? Running stop signs and red lights with no one coming, sure. Speeding a tad, sure. 109mph? Apparently not, although I suppose, on an open straight streatch of highway, possibly not all that unreasonable.
But just one more example of why laws must remain fuzzy, rather than algorithmic.
There is no such thing as "strong DRM". It is an impossibility, an oxymoron. It cannot exist, by definition. Digital Restriction Mechanisms (or, if you prefer, the misleading "Digital Rights Management" systems) are the most demonstrably basic of the solutions requiring absolute trust in a client to enforce said digital restrictions - and the trusted client problem is, simply put, that you can never trust a client completely under the control of an adversary.
...so can someone please tell the damn companies who buy into this shit because the PHBs believe they can buy - sorry, licence - an impossible product?
The best you can do is to try to separate the client into parts, and have only parts of the client actually under the control of an adversary, by placing the others on a remote server for example - the drawback is, that by doing this you necessarily split the system into two or more distinct clients, at least one of which is, potentially, entirely under the control of an adversary and therefore cannot be trusted to obey the security policy with any data it gets, including keys - the only tenable restriction in this situation is an all-or-nothing, can-or-can't protocol, and the only secure answer the DRM can give is no, all the time, rendering it absolutely 100% useless.
The only "defence" against that is to try to guess if you can trust the client (which is an arms race that has already been won), and the more expensive/harder you make it to compromise a client, the more dedicated will be the adversaries that manage to do so (making it more likely that the clients capable of violating the security protocol will, in fact, do so, and do so with wild abandon).
All DRM is snake oil - it is simply bullshit. It makes a promise it can never keep - is logically incapable of keeping.
And as the snake oil merchants inevitably add more hoops to try to enhance the security of something that is 100% pure doomed from the start (and, more importantly, to enhance the percieved value of their DRM over that of their competitors'), the inconvenience and complaints will always be to, and from, the legitimate users - the criminals are already using cracked versions or acquiring sources, sometimes equal, sometimes inferior, often superior, that are completely free of such infernal devices.
We've learned this lesson already. We learned it in the 80s and 90s. We watched copy protection wither and die because it produced excessive inconvenience to the legitimate users, and the majority of companies give up on it because of (A) said inconvenience and the customers' reactions, and (B) the effect it didn't have on the widespread availability of pirated versions (the major effect was, it seemed, to drive the pirates' quality up), but it never really went entirely out of fashion because the snake oil merchants realised that there was too much money to be made from continuing to peddle it, under this new name, DRM.
Meanwhile, people like me crack the shit and work to render it entirely ineffectual even when, eventually, rampant stupidity drives it into even more widespread use. I guess it gives us the chance to solve some interesting puzzles, and marvel (occasionally) over human near-genius exploiting human stupidity, but it also pisses a lot of your customers off - and despite the RIAA's latest line on consumer relations, that ain't a great way to sell something...
Walking the walk, eh? Pesonally, I'd probably be "Discordian" too if Eris wore a funny calico hat. I think the Goddess of Chaos should. Sewing discord is fun, but not as much fun as calico. I dig calico.
I used to be a narrator for bad mimes. (wright)
Judge Dredd and his partner Judge Hershey patrol the streets and shoot it out with bad guys, and Dredd arrests Fergie for being in the apartment of some outlaws Dredd has just killed.
"But I had only been there five minutes!" Fergie cries.
"You could have jumped out of the window" intones Dredd.
"Forty floors up? That would be suicide!" responds an incredulous Fergie.
"But it's legal," says Dredd.
This is why my next car will be 1967 Microbus. Fuck the black box technologies in the newer cars.
It's fairly complex, and there's a lot of involved topics, everything from agenda 21 efforts (really spooky from property rights angles and the ability to work and live as one chooses), to who was what in the korean war, to global disarmament, especially from the potential "little guy" victims of rogue governments, to the use of "food as a weapon" to force countries to aquiesce to various demands. And on and on. Although it *appears* to be somewhat US based, it was really way more stalinist russian based and designed. You need to really take a hard look at the history of the thing, the players, the wordings. There's even some layers above that, with very old big banking money,and creating conflicts for profits, but that might take you some time to get to it, to see it. Like I said, really involved.
Lately, the past few years, you could see how, with my reference to the parent post above mine, the UN basically ignores mass slaughter in some areas, whereas in other areas it seems "interested", like where there's "oil" and who will own and administer it. More than a bit suspicious to me. More than a bit. Their gestalt over all goal is to subjugate nations and peoples,to make them sub servient to the UN (and some controlling factions above that) in all matters, to make people lose soverignty, even nations, so we have this global government deal, complete with supreme rulers, no jury trials,dictates and edicts far removed from "the people" that these edicts apply to, and things of that nature, a stalinist model, centralised top to down heavy handedness(I know that isn't extremely and specifically accurate, but I hope it's descriptive enough for conversational purposes and also considering the time period during which the UN was formed) following the bulk of the major players interest who were there with its creation and had a major influence in it's setup and early administration and to how things just got done. Wheels within wheels within wheels. You can spend a long time on it obviously. Here is one page that lays it out very simply,some of the more gross generalities anyway, and will give you enough references to go a-googling further if you are so inclined:
http://www.etherzone.com/2002/stang101102.shtml
Personally, I think the *concept* of a UN-like thing has some merit, but this particular implementation of it is flawed in a lot of areas. I think nations need a forum where they can meet and hash things out, that seems reasonable. Oh, hmm, things like I would like to see global voluntary reduction and elimination of WMD. *Voluntary*, because everyone would agree it might be a good idea. I don't have any problem with things like working towards a cleaner planet, and more energy efficiency, better food and health care, etc,and less dictatorships, etc, I just don't think this exact method they have and a lot of their stated agendas jibe with the notion of the basic human right of personal freedom, identity, and soverignty. You don't get rid of dictatorships by making even huger dictatorships for example. It is TOO top heavy in goals, and from where I sit, the bigger the government, the more extreme into command and control it gets. Human nature, the lure of power, megalomania sets in. Always happens unfortunately. It seems to be the case with all governments,in all historical examples, so I must reluctantly "vote" a preference away from an absolute planetary government at this time.
When humans have evolved enough socially to deal with the size governments they have NOW without major screwing up, then perhaps another try at it. I think right now it needs to be knocked down a peg or two, along with such other command and control entities as the IMF/world bank loan shark bait and switchers, certain of the international arms merchants corporations, and the energy and food and pharmco monopolists, let alone any semblance of old styled forced-imperalism. Those are even a further tangential, but I hope this one reference URL is enough to at least partially answer your question. Searching will get you really a LOT of other good pages.
BTW, one of the better places to go digging with gopher is back in the obscure UN dusty cyber basements.
"DRM gives the author control. Not society.
;)"
so where you say, illegaly transfer OUR knowledge and OUR works of art...
you really mean someone else's against their will.
for if it were their will they would allow it.
NO! not at all. they do not own the knowledge, (they have it, but once you learn it, you have it too, and it is then just as much yours as theirs) and only own the physical works of art. You can't own a song. nobody can. In order to own something, that something has to be in your control. Just try to hold a song in your hand. You can't. You can hold a COPY of a song, on a cd, hard drive, sheet of paper etc. You can even hold the instructions to make a song. But a song is made of sound, you can't 'own' that. Novels are made of words, you can't hold a word in your hand. Inventions are made of ideas, they can only be in brains, and once it is in your brain, it is as much yours aas anyone elses.
What can be owned is the COPYRIGHT to a song, or novel, the PATENT of an invention. And just what is a copyright (or patent)? It is a temporary priveledge granted by the government. Not a right.
So, by copying (even illegaly) a work, am I illegally tranfering someone elses knowledge? No! it is still where I left it, IN THEIR HEAD! I never touched their knowledge. (or for that matter any knowledge, unless I thought about what I was copying) All I have done is violate a copyright. NOTHING ELSE!
Please get over the oxymoronic phrase Intelectual Property. literally speaking, it refers to living brains, and nothing else. In the sense that it is usually used, intelectual property IS NOT PROPERTY AT ALL, it is just a temporary right to win a lawsuit against someone making a copy of something without your permission. To make it illegal to break techie ways of making it hard to to copy without permission is so totally outside the realm that copyrights etc. were first put in it is not even funny.
As for the 'if it were their will they would allow it?' Probably not! How many DRM systems have such a backdoor to allow a DRMed thingy to be copied by the copyright holder? I don't think so. at best they could give you another copy, but only if they gave a non DRMed copy to you could permession let you copy it!
They do it all the time!! Haaha! *snicker*
:)
Look out your window, I'll bet just about anything that is just what you see!!!!
Haaaaahaahahaaaaa!
not laughing?, oh you don't get it. here let me help. do you see a building?, a house maby?
(every time someone buys a new house, or builds one for themselves they do exactally that)
... I think there's a huge, verifiable example that disputes your point, and sort of proves mine. Russia. Russia was on a centralised system that used a graduated tax, they switched a few years ago to a flat tax, and now their economy is finally struggling out of the doldrums again. I cannot recall even reading one article that praised the older system and advocated them switching back to it. I am forgetting the rate right now but I believe it's 13%, but don't quote me. Just about every big economist who's written on it says it's a success, along with a lot of the "man in the street" interviews I have read. I am sure you can find a lot of data on this with a normal google news and web search.
...piece of crap. It's broken, that tax kernel is a disaster, it needs to be chucked out, something else a lot simpler and fairer over all put in. And government needs to stay inside a budget, having peoples grandchildren that aren't even born yet having a "debt" they owe from past bungling, inefficiency, etc, by the government is just INSANE, and it's criminal, it just is. It's just plain old fashioned *wrong*.
The graduated income tax, with it's millions of obscure little exceptions and whatnot, is a freaking disaster in this nation. You simply MUST have seen those examples where they have a competition, using good accountants and tax lawyers and even IRS employees, they give them a set of theoretical data to work from, none of them arrive at the same tax figures. That's a failure, that's an economic segfault. It's designed just wrong, it's too big, too complicated, too stupid, too expensive, wastes millions of man hours a year in unnecessary busy work. Millions and millions of unnecessary man hours of work. I'll tell you an anecdotal situation,an example of how flawed it is, relevant to my family. I have a family member who for 6 months had TWO different IRS offices insisting they "owed" this sum of money. BOTH the offices where threatening arrest, confiscation, etc. BOTH the offices had totally different figures. NEITHER office would talk to the other office, not even with in person visits to both offices, which caused lost work and expense, hauling all the paperwork to stick in their faces. they refused to even talk to each other, but both offices were 'correct" and were threatening. What would you do? This is an example state sponsored TERRORISM if you ask me, or is being threatened with arrest and bankruptcy, etc considered a "good thing" now? Eventually, FINALLY, with expensive lawyers that were never needed in the first place, the two offices decided to communicate with each other and stop the harassment, and what was "owed" turned out to be a lot less than both those bureaucratic bufoonery attempts claimed in the first place. And this is not an isolated case, every congressional investigation into the IRS has resulted in tip of the iceberg scandals and inefficiency and outright criminality on their parts. I remember seeing when they had to have some of their own employees have disgusies so they could testify before congress and not suffer retribution. I'd call that a failure, not a success. With a flat tax, or a VAT, or a return to more import/export excise taxes, anything else but this montrosity that is the graduated tax, with it's millions of lines of obscure code,this would never had happened. Nor would it happen with millions of other people, nor would 9/10ths of their tax bureaucracy be needed, we could eleiminate a large and costly segment out of government, quite easily.
Please to google for articles on russias success they are enjoying now since switching over to a flat tax, you might find it interesting. I understand the original rationale behind the graduated income tax, I ALSO now when it was first implemented that something like 98% of the population still paid zero federal taxes directly. It's grown over the years and generations to a complete bloated