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Secret Kazaa Documents Revealed in Court
Dan Warne writes "A fascinating range of Kazaa's internal documents were revealed in Federal Court in the ongoing court case against the Australian-based company today. One extraordinary philosophical manifesto by the company's chief technical officer showed that he was aware that Kazaa's activities were a huge legal risk. He also feared being 'out-innovated' by other P2P programs that didn't come bundled with adware. "if consumers can connect to FT (as well as Gnutella 2, eDonkey and Bittorrent) and it has no ads or adware then it would seem a good choice," Philip Morle says in the his manifesto. The documents are full of all sorts of other admissions-that-you'd-be-crazy-to-put-on-paper like how Kazaa employees "hate" installing the Kazaa Media Desktop on their machines because all the bundled adware slows your machine down and can hijack your web browser."
well that says it all...
Kazaa contains Spyware! Lock up your daughterboards!!!
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
If you go to Kazaa right now, however, you'll note that they say that there's no spyware bundled with the software. Thanks, but no thanks...I'm sticking with bittorrent and Winmx.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
With regard to forcing their spiteful employees using their own products, KaZaa ain't no preacher for the general populace.
Never write anything in a letter, e-mail, diary, memo or any other quotable medium that you don't want the other guys lawyer holding up in court.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Posted with Mozilla...
just incase of the slashdot effect:
The Sale of Kazaa
Team Sharman came to court today with a strategic shift in direction: the revolution would now be a secret.
Their legal team presented a draft set of undertakings designed to suppress non-confidential documents from the media. It could have been a great plan if the Judge didn't think it was so crap, and with no supporting evidence for the basis of claim to confidentiality, Judge Wilcox swept away the majority of the claims for confidentiality by Altnet and Sharman.
There were 30 Altnet documents and four Sharman documents they didn't want publicised. We'll go through the Sharman documents today, and the Altnet documents later in the week.
The first item for discussion here at the Daily Dispatch is a 28 page contract between Kazaa B.V and Sharman, titled: Agreement for the Sale and Purchase of the Business and certain Assets of Kazaa B.V.
Buried within the most standard legal contract that makes you want to stab your eyeballs out, are the following nuggets of information.
When Kazaa's original Dutch owners got the jitters from pending US litigation by the music industry, the company was sold to Sharman for 600,000 Euros (about $1 million) to be paid in three installments. The purchase price included all company assets for the provision of p2p enabled software (which includes advertisement space for display advertising) to let users search and download files from other users.
Plus, all business and registered intellectual property rights, confidential information (defined as processes, methods, formulae, financial data, customer and supplier lists, marketing information, test results and reports, project reports, testing procedures, development manuals, training manuals, market forecasts, sales targets and stats, price sensitive information, research reports, business development reports), and all Internet domain names.
Bored yet? The sale took place in the Amsterdam offices of Van Doome at De Lairessestraat, and following the sale, Kazaa BV would have to change its name. Sharman was indemnified against all debts and liabilities and blah blah blah standard contract stuff. All employees were sacked after the sale (nice). Kazaa B.V ensured there was no Trade Union agreements or disputes in place at the time of sale. If there was, the leftie bastards would understand anyway, because every revolution starts a bit nasty. Of course, today Sharman enjoys the full support of a devoted staff that would never be treated so shoddily by their benevolent bosses if there were cause to up and move from a jurisdiction under legal duress. It's a revolution, it's Us against Them, it's Mabo, it's the vibe of the thing.
The Sales Agreement further confirms that when all employees were sacked, there was no way anyone could come back and haunt them to "assert any moral right in respect of any Business Intellectual Property Right." And if they did, then Zenstrom and Friis would be stung for it, not Sharman. So I'm guessing all employees were made to sign a contract as thick and dense as this one to make sure they kept quiet.
The original owners, Niklas "Skype" Zennstrom and Janus Friis were forbidden from competing with Sharman in any way for 3 years.
The deal was to be kept secret and not announced without the written consent of Sharman. The Sales Agreement was construed in accordance with the laws of England and subject to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts.
There were two clauses that seemed a bit odd. Under Schedule 3 of Vendor Warranties is the subheading Litigation. Clause 5.1 says:
Save as disclosed in the Litigation Letter, the Vendor (Kazaa B.V) is not a plaintiff or defendant in or otherwise a party to any litigation relating to the Business, which are in progress or threatened in writing or pending against the Vendor. So far as the Vendor is aware, no governmental or official investigation or inquiry concerning the Vendor is in progress or pending.
Th
I can't see that this is going to blow major holes in Kazaa's legal defense, although I do think they'll lose anyway.
I don't think Kazaa's argument was ever that they "didn't know" about all the illegal P2P traffic they were generating. Surely their argument is the old "Common Carrier" one, where they aren't responsible for anything Kazaa transports and responsibility is shifted to the software user? Maybe I've misunderstood, feel free to correct me.
Now, this is clearly embarrassing for the company, and the CTO especially, but I can't see that it's of much legal importance. Everyone knows about Kazaa and spyware by now, don't they/
apterous.org
People would prefer programs without adware? What a stunning concept. At what point did "manifesto" replace "common sense"?
But there sure are boatful of "bloat"-ware galores!!!
That maybe this chap wasn't -entirely- on side with the business strategy of the company.
To me this sounds like a techy complaining that the business is subverting the idea. In many cases this is because the techy doesn't understand the business model, but here it sounds more as if the business didn't understand the market.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
When your own employees hate installing the very software of their employeer you know its a recipe for disaster. With those kinds of feelings flowing around the office its suprising the documents werent 'leaked' earlier. For some odd reason I don't see anybody coming to Kazaa's defense in court now like Napster saw when they were up on the chopping block.
Which is not to excuse his spyware-infested piece of crap. But where ever business memo must be written in such a way that you csn't tell the truth because it might be used against you in a court of law, your have a big problem with your tort system.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I'm still amazed that the people in charge of companies like Sharman, etc. think that chocking their software full of crap programs that infect and make peoples' pcs run poorly (to say the least) is the correct way to go. I guess it just shows that in the end, a proper p2p program needs to be open sourced. It seems the only way we'll get something people will want (want is emphasized) to use. It takes real people to make software to be used by real people I guess.
Ubuntu, the way linux should be.
Try Ubuntu FREE! --
"We HATE to install our own software" - HA HA HA HA
i think that is technically called cumeuppence!!
"stick that up your arse Tony Greg" - The 12th Man.
It's hard to take the word of someone who is stating incorrect information.
Skype is created by the original developers of Kazaa, but the original developers did not include any spyware/adware in KaZaa. The spyware/adware was added to Kazaa after it was sold to Sharman.
People still use Kazaa? Just switch to SoulSeek, much better.
There are 2 types of people in the world, those who find that stupid binary joke funny, and those who don't.
Marathon Cigarette CEO: "The guy has collected every single item in our gift catalog; you have to smoke 90,000 packs. Let's face it, the guy should be dead by now!"
Lawyer: "I'm not putting you on the stand."
J
Bear in mind that these aren't the Halloween Documents. The article, for those who refuse to RTFA, is basically a summary of the documents- not the documents themselves. They don't say "we're selling a product which we know is poisoning people's computers", that's sort of implied across the board. But they still don't come right out and say it.
One nice thing about any devious plots. People always have to write them down to either keep their lies straight, or to justify it somehow to themselves.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Also
Yeah right, like that's going to happen.Me lost me cookie at the disco.
I don't know the answer, but I guess I'm more qualified to answer than many because I've been coding one on and off for the past three years. I guess the answer is it's hard work. You're also not "following head lights", as even the eDonkey clones do. And the programming is not easy - with C language it's socket programming, which means all kinds of strange things can come over the network which have to be defensively coded against, and since you're using multiple sockets that means threading. And it takes a lot of code to just get a decent app, never mind cool bells and whistles. One reason mine is GPL is, aside from liking the GPL, this is my first big software project so I don't feel I'm at a level where I can sell my code yet. I've also borrowed GPL code from a program called gnut which helped. I would borrow from one called GTK-Gnutella but it's so big and complex it's hard to directly borrow from.
Of course there are exceptions - Gnutella (although AOL/TW killed the eponymous one, leaving only the protocol clones), and Bittorrent. With the Gnutella protocol, Limewire and Bearshare are commercial companies, but they agree on an open protocol, which they share with some free clients (like mine).
There are so many innovations possible - Bittorrent is one of the recent ones - it built on what Edonkey did, allowing hundreds of megs of files to be transferred, except with Bittorrent, it added speed to the picture. So because Bittorrent exists, people now have a better chance of getting ISOs of Linux distros, Indymedia videos or whatnot. It's such a cool area I wonder why the propietary folks so often beat the free ones in terms of innovation. I guess it's a wash now with who innovates more. And also, with sockets, trheading and protocols that obsolete older versions as time goes on (ay de mi!), it takes so long to get a decent app together that innovation seems a long way off.
I suppose another reason is the RIAA/MPAA is suing p2p developers left and right - that might explain why people are hanging back somewhat. It's unfortunate this fear is stifling p2p innovation. In many ways it seems ridiculous to me - on BBSs in the 1980s you had a file section and a message board system. Sometimes you didn't even have a message board - just a file section. People have been trading and sharing files on computers for decades, all of a sudden such communal practices are tainted, with accusations flying on Slashdot on how people use p2p to break some new laws that the big corporations passed recently in Washington DC that protected their soi disant intellectual property. It's ridiculous - there were normal BBSs and warez BBSs back then, just as there is an equivalent nowadays on the Internet. It would be insane for US-legal (for now) things such as sharing ISOs or Indymedia videos is crushed by the evil capitalist bourgeois corporations.
At the risk of inflaming passions, ANY OS is only as secure as its user. With a little common sense and attention to detail, it is relatively easy to keep a Windows XP installation spyware/malware/virus free.
It's even easier in the workplace where XP can be locked down on the security front.
A lot of tech companies use it to describe th practice of using their own products in house. That's also where to discover many of the problems that infuriate customers.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
<grumpiness size="extreme" style="curmudgeonly">
If Kazaa goes down, there could well be a flood of low-quality Britney_Spears_naked111.mpg traders and leeches coming onto the good p2p systems. I don't think I want that.
It'll be like AOL day all over again.
Support Kazaa -- or America's highschoolers will be trading on your network!
</grumpiness>
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Skype is created by the original developers of Kazaa, but the original developers did not include any spyware/adware in KaZaa.
You're right, they just sold it to people who did. That doesn't sound like the kind of person I'd trust.
just incase of the slashdot effect:
Thanks, but mirrordot has it. "The old ways are burning in the fires of industry," you might say.
WHAT? Are you blind?
I said "blind and deaf." And yet, you must have read it as "blind or deaf."
They are in essence, still deaf, and in need of assistance with telephone communication efforts.
I truly hope you don't work in the programming field for a mission critical systems, particularly of critical logic decision making (gosh, we lost so many space missions, ships, airplane, and cars to this kind of simple mistakes).
(sigh) Dang Slashdot newbies.
If you install Kazaa while running MS Antispyware, do you still get the adware installed?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I am feeling a bit optimistic today, but I would rather that everyone write everything down. That way, the scumbags will be obvious and you can get a more honest view of things. It is like saying "don't be evil" as opposed to "don't leave a paper trail proving you are evil"
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Haven't secret government documents appeared on Kazaa? ;)
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
1) People install Kazaa because they want to pirate music, pictures, video and software from the Internet
2) Kazaa puts spyware crap in their product
3) Users think this is unfair
4) Kazaa is in court because of what they did
Am I crazy? Is there someone out there forcing people to install Kazaa? How many people were installing it for legit legal use?
You don't want spyware crap? Don't install shady programs.
This is like sueing a drug addict because he let you share his needle and you contracted HIV. I really don't get what all the fuss is about.
Didn't they try transfering their ownership to some pseudo-sovereign island that is at maybe twelve feet above high tide? Or am I getting them mixed up with another of those flash-in-the-pan P2P companies?
Ha.
I'd say I'm far from stupid - not a genius of course, but I do enough knowledge to administrate Unix and Windows systems, and write software. Yet I can't keep a Windows box spyware and virus free, unless that's specifically my objective.
I mean, it's certainly possible, if what you aim for is a spyware free box. Yes, I can use vmware, every virus and spyware scanner, try to make sure everything I install is 100% safe, and perhaps get a clean and hopefully useful box out of it. But no normal user does that, myself included. I'm certainly fairly paranoid and won't install random crap from the net, but nice looking useful tools can have spyware too.
If you want a real example, here's one. Go to this Azureus page. Well, actually that's not the Azureus page. It's a page that some jerks set up where you download spyware. The real page is on SourceForge.
The cost of forgetting to look with a critical eye at the fake page is to have your system infected with all kinds of crap that will then pretty hard to remove. And it's pretty hard, mind you. I could fairly easily have fallen for it, if I hadn't seen the official one before and wondered why they changed their design so much. Normal users don't run strings(1) on suspicious executables and google for information, though.
Now, you could argue that this kind of thing applies to Linux as well. True. However, there's a critical difference: On any sane Linux distribution, the official release of Azureus will be a package. And if the user downloads the software on their own, it'd be installed in their home directory. At least, while running under your account such crap is limited in what it can do, and has it much harder to wedge into your system as to make it hard to remove.
Now this market for programs and media implies that there is a product or service, and in this case the product is in the form of copies of programs and media. The big hitch is of course that the cost of production is mostly in design, ie., producing the first copy. This is of course the biggest stumbling block intellectually for folks because they neglect to consider that often this design costs money which is then often recouped via sales of the published copies.
The right to exclusively produce published copies is otherwise known as intellectual property.
you mean there's someone out there still using Kazaa?
It's not possible if you use IE, however.
Not only that, but it takes a bit more than "common sense and attention to detail". It's fairly evident sometimes when an app has malware bundled, but installing it might be worth it if you can just wipe it out later. The spyware is getting on there, just the same.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
But where ever business memo must be written in such a way that you csn't tell the truth because it might be used against you in a court of law, your have a big problem with your tort system.
Replace tort system with business practices. Now your statement makes more sense.
IOW, the problem is not in the tort system: if the truth is bad enough to get one in trouble then that is the real issue.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Some people, simply put, don't give a rat's ass about "correct" or about damage done. They only care about making money. Period.
If it weren't explicitly illegal, they'd even poison a town's water supply just for some money. Not an exaggeration: companies dumped toxic stuff into rivers right until the law forced them to stop. Or into the air. And even then, every time someone told them to use filters, there was endless moaning and bitching and lobbying about it.
Spam, tele-marketting, link-spam, spyware, etc, are just a symptom of the same thing: if it makes money and it's not illegal, hell yeah. Let's pollute and destroy another resource.
There was an interview with a link-spammer on The Register this week. Dunno, I found it surrealistic how the guy basically had _zero_ morals. Not even an "eh, it's wrong, but I need the money" kinda attitude. Nope. The general tone all over was along the lines of "who the damn has time to care about collateral damage? It makes money and it's not illegal. Period. If you have a problem with it, tough shit. Sucks to be you."
Basically it's the same with spyware. These people don't care, that's all. As long as it makes them a buck and isn't explicitly illegal, they'll clog your computer without thinking twice. If it was possible and made them a buck, they'd even make that computer explode without thinking twice.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You've gone over every line of the source code you use? All of it? The entire kernel, all the drivers, all the utilities, all the apps and so on? You've checked carefully, to ensure that there's no backdoors spread across a number of functions (you can have some thigns that are innocent and harmless on their own, that work together to do something bad)?
Are you also sure about your compiler, have you checked it? Not the source I mean, but do you know that the binary is a faithful reproduction of the source? The problem with a compiler, is that you compile it with an old version of itself. What if it has a backdoor that exists only in binary form, never in the source, but propagates on compile (see http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/)?
There's nothing about OSS that inherantly protects you. This is espically true since I'm guessing indeed you have NOT done the audit I described. Few people have the programming skills necessary to do so in a useful way and even fewer have the mountain of free time it takes. Rather, you are taking it on faith that others have audited the software you use, done a good job when doing so, and have spoken the truth and been heard if a problem was found.
A more realistic way to check to see if the software is all above board, and one that works equally well on closde source software, is to check the install. By that I mean log everything that is added, modified, or deleted. Then, when running the software, look for anomalous behaviour, like loading modules it shouldn't, trying to establish network connections, spawning other processes, etc. If you do that correctly, it's not hard to tell if something is acting evil or comes with stuff that does. It's also something that you could realisticly spend the time to do for all the programs you use.
Even then, I doubt you'd bother unless you are super paranoid. I'm sure you generally trust that others have looked in to it, and you'd have heard about it if there were problems. I personally only check the install and operation of a program that I find suspicious. Retail software, OSS, and 99% of downloads I don't bother since experience shows that there's nothing to worry about. I take on faith that there's nothing bad in there, and if there is one of my cleaner tools will catch it soon enough.
But my point here isn't to attack OSS, if that's what you are thinking, just to point out that this warm, fuzzy feeling that many people get from the openess is a false sense of security. They think because the code is open, and able to be checked, it means that there's nothing bad in there. Well, that's probably true, but only in the same way it's probably true that if you buy retail software it's also free of malware. Neither is a gaurentee of anything, and since 99.999% (or more) of people aren't actually using the openness to do their own audit, it's a false sense of security.
Basically, when you get down to it, you can never be sure there isn't something lurking there, unknown to the general population. The only way you could feel confident is if you wrote your own assembler from machine code, your own basic OS and compiler from that, audited every line of code in the OS, compiler and apps you were going to run, and then proceeded to build them 100% from source using your own tools. Even then, you still might miss something. Remember: We find holes in software all the time, we call them bugs or exploits, meaning they weren't intended by the developers. This happens even to OSS, even to major peices of OSS that have been looked at thousands of times over. Sometimes, you just miss things.
And none of these exploits were trying to be sneaky or hide on purpose.
I'm not trying to say grab the AFDB and trust no one, that's pretty stupid clearly. I'm just pointing out that you should put the same amount of stock in OSS you haven't audited as in CSS you can't. Consider the source, and if it's suspicious, do a checked install, and have programs setup to watch how it runs. With 30 minutes of work you can generally tell if it's safe or not.
Get a grip, really. Some Dutch company hires people to write code for them, then sells said code to Sherman. Sherman includes spyware. Now, the same blokes who wrote the Kazaa code go on to get hired to produce Skype. Still with me? Now, explain how the programmers are at fault and Skype should therefore not be trusted.
Although analogies are false by definition, it does sound as if you could be held responsible for your former employer's choice regarding to whom they sell the company's products or assets.
To what lengths are you willing to go to preserve "Intellectual Property rights"? Only more and more draconian laws and technological measures (DRM, NGSCB) are able to hold back the tide of information freedom. You're talking about restricting information here, and the obvious benefit free flow of information can bring society.
It is obvious by looking at the mediocre content available today, it is mostly generated, not for the love of art, but for money and dreams of riches. Why should we encourage that??
Um, wherever putting details about your business model down on paper would result in serious legal liability, you have a big problem with your business model. Yes? The problem with Enron wasn't that they might get caught, it was that they used fundamentally dishonest accounting practices -- whether they wrote those practices down or not.
I have no problem with talking about tort reform, but the idea that trial lawyers are "running" anyone's economy is ludicrous. It's ludicrous on the same level that "trial lawyers are jacking up our medical expenses" is a ludicrous overstatement of the effect of malpractice suits.
Behind your post lies the assumption that basically anything goes for businesses, as long as they don't get held accountable for their unsavory actions. I'll take a balanced economy, thanks. Regulation of industry for the public interest, checks and balances in the legal system... It's all radical communism by you, I'm sure, but I'll choose it all the same.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
"Intellectual property"
Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as "intellectual property"---a term that also includes patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law. These laws have so little in common, and differ so much, that it is ill-advised to generalize about them. It is best to talk specifically about "copyright," or about "patents," or about "trademarks."
The term "intellectual property" carries a hidden assumption---that the way to think about all these disparate issues is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our ideas of physical property.
When it comes to copying, this analogy disregards the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be.
To avoid the bias and confusion of this term, it is best to make a firm decision not to speak or even think in terms of "intellectual property".
The hypocrisy of calling these powers "rights" is starting to make WIPO embarassed.
From: Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding
So-called "IP-Rights" are also rebutted in the article Tragedy of the Commons. From Wikipedia:
In Hardin's article, the Commons is a shared plot of grassland used by all livestock farmers in a village. Each farmer keeps adding more livestock to graze on the Commons, because it costs him nothing to do so. In a few years, the soil is depleted by overgrazing, the Commons becomes unusable, and the village perishes.
The cause of any tragedy of the commons is that when individuals use a public good, they do not bear the entire cost of their actions. If each seeks to maximize individual utility, he ignores the costs borne by others. This is an example of an externality. The best (non-cooperative) short-term strategy for an individual is to try to exploit more than his or her share of public resources. Assuming a majority of individuals follow this strategy, the theory goes, the public resource gets overexploited.
The tragedy of the commons is a source of intense controversy, precisely because it is unclear whether individuals will or will not follow the overexploitation strategy in any given situation.
A short example: Why should Disney have eternal monopoly on Mickey Mouse, when Disney benefit extremely much from folklore-tales like: Snow-white and the 7 dwarves, Alice in Wonderland, Pochahontas, etc?
In this case, Disney benefit from the Commons, without contributing back. This is so-called "IP-rights" in a nutshell: They take away from the Public Domain, without contributing back.
"Evaluation versions" are the software equivalent of "trying the shoes on"
Ah, but you're leaving out that the current shoes will attach suckers to your feet and start stealing your precious fluids. Often, the suckers remain even long after you remove the shoes.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
What's the difference between a tainted or trojen package or .exe installer?
I'd argue it is equally easy to compromise a system if the user does not exercise due dilligence, where due dilligence is something more than clicking Yes or Ok to dismiss a dialog box.
Secondly, you do realise Windows has accounts, permissions and privleges, yes? Certainly, Win98 had horrible flaws with respect to such, but, honestly, it's 2005, and those sorts of justifications to knock the modern, fully patched XP systems are bloody trifling.
NB: I'm not a Microsoft fan - I've used *nix at work and Win32 at home since the early 90's enough to know all the tripe and annoyances of both, but it's so old hat to see posts vadim_t's moderated Informative, when they are any thing but.
Your eMule vs. BT comment is pure nonsense.
The reason BT is "faster" than eMule is that BT only concentrates on one file at a time. So everyone's on that file. With eMule, people are sharing and downloading loads of files at a time.
In reality, BT doesn't make your pipe fatter. It just downloads one file instead of several.
Why the hell is the parent +5 informative? It's completely inaccurate (in the statement that Kazaa and Skype are owned by the same company. If you are wise enough to know that Kazaa was coded by the same people as Skype, you should know enough to realize that the guys who coded Kazaa did not put spyware in -- someone else did.
Skype is not owned by Sharman Networks. Skype was coded by the same people who designed Kazaa, say it with me now, befooooooore it was sold to Sharman, and Shaaaarman added the spy/mal/adware.
I've used Skype for 6 months, and there is nothing bad in it. If you are too paranoid to use it, well, it's your loss. I just would rather not have a company that is actually honest and providing an excellent product be associated with the current Kazaa.
I trust Skype enough to have given their company around 500 USD over the course of this time in using their service, and using my credit card at that!
Enough with the Skype idiocy!
there is no such thing as an internal (or secret) document.
think of that before you write ANYTHING.
Intellectual property is similar to any other sort of property, ie., ownership.
Not really. First we need to work out precisely what the supposed property is. But even then, we need to carefully look at the law to see whether the claims of ownership are justified. If the rights one holds over the 'property' are too limited, one is hardly an owner of it.
society of course will support mechanisms that allow for rewarding media producers
Of course, that's not even slightly accurate. Copyright and patent are not intended to reward authors or inventors. Trademarks are not intended to reward persons engaged in commerce. Trade secret law is not intended to reward their holders.
The right to exclusively produce published copies is otherwise known as intellectual property.
No, that is merely a subset of copyright. The term intellectual property typically refers to a lumping together of a number of totally unrelated bodies of law -- copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and a few other minor things, e.g. publicity law.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
...apparently the rumored 'slashdot effect' has nothing to do with it after all:
...
The Sale of Kazaa
Team Sharman came to court today with a strategic shift in direction: the revolution would now be a secret.
Their legal team presented a draft set of undertakings designed to suppress non-confidential documents from the media. It could have been a great plan if the Judge didn't think it was so crap, and with no supporting evidence for the basis of claim to confidentiality, Judge Wilcox swept away the majority of the claims for confidentiality by Altnet and Sharman.
Sorry, but few brave sites don't make difference to me. Theyll be shut down soon enought, no matter how they laugh. riaa will simply force peers stop peering with their ISP. money can do a lot thnings
... whole mechanics of torrent download is made to ensure that .torrent file you gout somewhere so you are sure you are loading legal/ilegal material thus noone can spit out "i didnt know what i was downloading, thus im incocent" bullshit
And torrent was MADE with intention distribute LEGAL material
1] Host (Trackes) is easily indetificable and shut down should someone wish to do it thus killing all donwloads
2] File is verified upon downloading and you download using
3] there is zero privacy a no attempts to hide users are viable.
thus making it perfect for distros etc, but impractical for illegal stuff
Y know, greatest offensive on whole torrent sites is for me that it devalues torrent as legal way to distribute files and that IT GOES AGAINST WISHES AND INTENTIONS OF ITS CREATOR (sorry for caps, but its important)
thus based on above i as avid downloaders and p2per say that illegal torrents are dying, are destined to die and should die
--- this is to damned ot now
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
A dead give away that Azureus.org isn't legit is that EVERY link on their page tries to install their software. What scares me is I'm sure a lot of people aren't experienced/ intelligent enough to catch that.
You'd really think, wouldn't you, that if your employees hate your product your customers might too?
Oh, right. They're just stupid kids intent on killing off the music industry throught their own needs for immediate gratification.
This CEO is not someone I'd ever hire to run my company.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
... so if you sell your car to some idiot who goes and holds up a bank and uses the car as a get away vehicle are you somehow responsible?
Matthew
Intellectual property is similar to any other sort of property, ie., ownership.
Nah, it's very different. It is a temporary monopoly granted by the government. Ownership doesn't have an expiration date.
With other property, you own the object. I can't take the object from you (without your permission), but I can copy it without affecting or lessening your possession in any way. The only value of intellectual "property" lies in its artificial monopoly.
I mean, they wouldn't be very good spies if they just told you where they were.
Covert!
Who today uses Kazaa for file transfers, as opposed to Shareaza? Kazaa is infested with fake files (as I've been told... *whistles innocently*), viruses, leechers who don't share a thing, etc etc.
Shareaza, on the other hand...
Well if you say so, I'll just go back to giving AT&T assloads of money each wek to make international calls. Oh wait, no I won't.
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
On, indeed, this one is quite evident.
But it's still not that hard to fall for it. I mean, I don't check every link on each site I visit, and I'm sure that neither do you. Finding that page, and clicking the download link without looking at anything else is a very simple mistake to make even for somebody with great knowledge. And they could perfectly choose to be more subtle, too.
Not really. First we need to work out precisely what the supposed property is. But even then, we need to carefully look at the law to see whether the claims of ownership are justified. If the rights one holds over the 'property' are too limited, one is hardly an owner of it.
There really isn't that much argument amongst lawmakers about this when it comes to copyright, the right to publish seems to be the "property" most generally accepted. I can agree that patents aren't as clear here, but in general, the right to use the patented "invention" belongs to the inventor. Again, its a property right, "the right to use." Trademarks once again are a creation, and the rights to use the trademark belong to the creator. Obviously, creators can and do transfer these rights, but its their right to transfer, because in each case, these rights are treated as property.
Its the entire reason for the term "intellectual property", that is, the concepts involved are dealt with as property. If I produce a song, my property is the right to publish this song for life + 70 (?). If I produce a patented invention, my property is the exclusive use of this patent for a fixed term of time.
Granted, its not like me owning a rock, but if you need something as easy to perceive of as a rock, then you don't need to be considering these issues to begin with.
society of course will support mechanisms that allow for rewarding media producers
Of course, that's not even slightly accurate. Copyright and patent are not intended to reward authors or inventors. Trademarks are not intended to reward persons engaged in commerce. Trade secret law is not intended to reward their holders.
If you're going to make stuff up, debating won't be very productive ;-)
Look, you can either accept what society intends with these laws, ie., allow intellectual creations into the marketplace as creations of value, or you can live on the fringe and essentially convince no one of anything. As much as I dislike stuff like the "one click patent", I can only be persuasive if I understand why these laws exist to begin with, ie., to reward the efforts of people's work. When you and RMS decide to ignore society's need to have mechanisms to encourage work in the intellectual domain, you will simply be invited to the sidelines as idealistic hippies and thats not my decision, thats just the way it is.
I dunno... They DO have links everywhere to download their software, but the word "Azureus" doesn't appear once on their startpage. Not once. The only reference to Azureus is in the title "Azureus.org". Plenty of references to Mp3s and downloadw, though.
Even if its now 2005, it does not mean I wasn't the holder of the patent in 1940-1960. You can't change the past.
With other property, you own the object. I can't take the object from you (without your permission), but I can copy it without affecting or lessening your possession in any way. The only value of intellectual "property" lies in its artificial monopoly.
If you publish or use without my permission, I have lost the exclusive right granted by the concept of intellectual property. Why buy a book from me when they can get it from you?
I am suprised there isint an option or key that the employees could use to install the app without putting the malware on their machine. Also, why would the employees need to install this software? Surely not for testing...?
There really isn't that much argument amongst lawmakers about this when it comes to copyright, the right to publish seems to be the "property" most generally accepted. I can agree that patents aren't as clear here, but in general, the right to use the patented "invention" belongs to the inventor. Again, its a property right, "the right to use." Trademarks once again are a creation, and the rights to use the trademark belong to the creator. Obviously, creators can and do transfer these rights, but its their right to transfer, because in each case, these rights are treated as property.
;-)
This is incorrect.
Copyrights, first of all, do not include a right to publish; rather, there is only a right to exclude others from various enumerated activities. Also, publication has not been enumerated since the old 1909 Act. The current law provides for exclusive rights of reproduction, and of distribution, but these can stand on their own, rather than having to be combined as might be expected in the case of publication. At any rate, none of the exclusive rights is treated materially differently than the others.
Patents, similarly, are perfectly clear, but are also not what you think. Patent holders have no right whatsoever to practice their invention -- they only have the right to prevent other people from doing so. This crops up very frequently in the patent field where person A has an invention and person B invents an improvement to that invention, and A cannot use B's improvement, and B cannot use his own improvement due to it being dominated by A's invention.
And of course, there are trademarks, which are not a right to use a mark, but are a right to exclude others from using that mark -- where it would confuse customers (and in some cases unfairly draw upon the goodwill that has been invested into the mark). They are not property in any way, but merely a way of both protecting the public from being misled in the marketplace, and of protecting the goodwill of the public as to the source of goods or services. Trademark rights never belong to the creator of the mark, but rather to he that uses the mark in commerce. Failure to actively use a mark, and use it properly, can result in it being lost, again in order to protect the public and he in whom goodwill exists, whether he's the creator or not. Trademarks are also notoriously difficult to transfer; the safest way is by selling the business entirely. Doing it wrong can make things very difficult all around, and jeopardize the survival of the mark.
Its the entire reason for the term "intellectual property", that is, the concepts involved are dealt with as property.
Except that they're not. I'm pleased that at least you aren't making the really ridiculous claim that the subject matter of copyrights, patents, etc. are property. But it's still disputed with regards to the rights themselves. After all, they're chock full of exceptions often applicable to the world, have origins entirely seperate and much more recent than traditional forms of property, and most notably, tend to expire at arbitrary times set by the government without raising takings issues. In many many ways, these rights are better viewed as the products of a social policy that are merely temporary, useful monopolies. But not property.
If you're going to make stuff up, debating won't be very productive
I'm making up nothing.
Copyrights are intended to benefit the public by promoting the progress of science. Patents are intended to benefit the public by promoting the progress of the useful arts. Trademarks, as already pointed out, are intended to benefit the public by preventing customer confusion. Trade secrets (and trademark dilution) are basically aspects of the law of unfair competition. The idea is that some things that might go on in business are harmful to everyone and should be regulated (e.g. industrial espionage) but this hardly makes them property; it merely limits the means by which the same r
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Haha, you have no feet left to shoot yourself in!
If you are either good or lucky, you can't be both.
The entire idea of the company's "privacy" being raked over the coals is such classic poetic justice! I hope they feel as violated as the user's they exploited.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Its no wonder people argue on slashdot :-D
No. And besides which, that wouldn't.
We certainly cannot compel people to create or invent. But if they do so freely, there is no absolute requirement that they be rewarded for it. After all, people often engage in labor to no useful end. Whether any reward is given by the public should be measured by whether that reward serves the public interest.
To put it another way: people often say that people will not invent, for example, unless there is some potential reward, because inventors are self-interested.
Well the public is self-interested too. It should not grant a reward at a cost to itself unless it benefits more by doing so than it would if it did not.
I'm certainly not against the idea of copyright or patent or any of these things. I'm only concerned with how it is implemented, and therefore how well it serves the public interest.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It's like reading Nazi-authored documents taken from the Nurnberg trial. Anybody else thought this way? No, really.
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
Thats my point. The reasoning behind IP law is to encourage creation of IP. This doesn't mean that IP will not be created without opportunity for reward but clearly some IP costs money and society still wants it produced. If society didn't think that rewarding work would encourage that same work then why protect IP in the first place?
This doesn't mean that every law makes sense to me, it does mean that I understand why "intellectual property" exists as a concept and why I believe these laws serve a purpose.
People love to jump on the argument that theres no different between "The Matrix" on DVD and a random string of bytes on that same DVD, but in reality, one has a huge budget invested in producing the master copy and the other one doesn't. The question is, how do we encourage the kind of society that invests effort into producing things (or intangible streams of desireable bytes) that we want? We set up legal structures to allow an opportunity for rewarding these efforts.
Obviously I can be sniped for all sorts of invalid legal typing, but at least I'm not mystified on why society has decided on having laws supporting the concept of intellectual property.
Clever signature text goes here.
It looks Wrong. No OSS page ive ever seen looks like that. It looks too much like one of those stupid "search engines"...
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
going to Boulder, Colorado and remedy that?
This comment inspired by whois.com .
Option 1
kazaa lite is like the holy grail of windows p2p clients. If you search near and far then you just might be able to get your hands on this piece of p2p goodness.
Option 2
grab giFT! This is the most amazing p2p client I've come across because you can install modules that allow it to connect to all the p2p networks! gnutella, fast track and others at the click of the mouse!
Is your company using Linux? You could be at legal risk to a SCO lawsuit. Collect personal data on your customers? You could be at legal risk if that data gets hacked. Run a bungee jumping business? Legal risk. It doesn't say "he was aware they were performing illegal activities", it says he was aware of a risk. That is simply awareness that a) there was a real chance a lawsuit would be filed against them, and b) there was a non-trivial chance that, if sued, they would lose. Risk awareness does not imply guilt.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
The reasoning behind IP law is to encourage creation of IP.
No, that's a fatally overbroad statement, and incorrect anyway.
I mean, the purpose of trademark law is absolutely not to encourage the creation of more trademarks. It is, again, to protect customers from being misled as to the source of goods or services. It's basically like the laws that mandate lists of ingredients on food products. Where ingredients are truthfully listed, customers will be able to know what's in the things they're eating. Where a trademark indicates that all marked goods come from one place, with whatever degree of quality that place has, customers won't be misled.
What you're really thinking of, I bet, are patents and copyrights, which are really among the least numerous and least financially important of forms of 'IP.' But even there, you're still wrong.
Yes, one of the purposes of patents and copyrights is to encourage the creation of inventions and works. But another, equally important purpose is to have those inventions and works to be unencumbered. Where it is unencumbered, it can be used to the maximum extent possible, for the least possible cost. This means having works enter the public domain immediately, or at least as soon as possible. And it means that the exclusive rights should be as minimal in scope as possible.
People love to jump on the argument that theres no different between "The Matrix" on DVD and a random string of bytes on that same DVD
Maybe so, but I'm not one of those.
how do we encourage the kind of society that invests effort into producing things (or intangible streams of desireable bytes) that we want?
Again, not good enough. Getting things that we want requires them to be useful to us. If I have to pay for a copy of a book, it is less useful to me than one that is free. If I cannot make and give away copies of a book, it is less useful to me than one that I can. If I cannot write a sequel to a book, then it is less useful to me than one that I can.
Freedom to use the things we want is necessary, or else why the hell do we want these things in the first place? Just to admire them from afar?
Ideally we would have the maximum possible production of inventions and works, and no restrictions at all on them.
What we make do with is to get as close to that as possible by trying to get as much production of inventions and works as we can while having the fewest restrictions placed upon us. It is a balancing act, and the point at which the balance is optimal is determined by reference to the public interest.
at least I'm not mystified on why society has decided on having laws supporting the concept of intellectual property.
I'm not mystified. I just don't think you have even defined what you mean by intellectual property, I don't think it is property, and I think that there are many different reasons for each of the various doctrines that have been clumsily lumped together under the 'IP' label. I think that there are perfectly good underlying reasons for these bodies of law, but that they don't mesh with much of the law as it is implemented now, and that you haven't gotten all that close to identifying those reasons.
Remember: I'm in favor of copyrights, patents, tradmarks, trade secrets, etc. But I'm upset about the specific implementation of these things. Your misinformation about why we have these laws at all only serves to keep our screwed up implementations. Better consideration of the policies behind these laws would, I think, produce better laws.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
What may die is the big sites like Suprnova and similar. Those are easy to find and shut down.
.torrent files with your friends.
But there's nothing stopping you from putting up your own tracker (without WWW frontend) and just share the
Besides, no-one would know what Bittorrent is if it wasn't for the "warez" feeds. So I guess Bram Cohen will just have to take that with the fame.
People install a crappy software to download music and movies illegal, now the big criminal is on court becuase he sells poor drugs with bad quality to green-heads of his town. Totally crazy! Let's move on people............
I know how to find a few things, I'm sure some of you know how to find others. Between all of us we warn each other. Thus why we all know Kazaa is bundled with Adware.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
When people did the automatic update, the internet was up in arms that they didn't have the option to uncheck "Install spyware please", which they only get in the clean first install. So unchecking the default install is available, unchecking the default update +spywareinstall is not.
Just a word of warning to those of you interested in this software.
For context, click Parent.
If it weren't for Kazaa, there would be no Kazaa Lite, one of the most convenient filesharing apps around.
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
Bullshit.
The updater just runs the new installation exe.
You see the same screens as if you were installing for the first time, including the accept/refuse page.
Reverse it yourself and see.
But yes, I'll concede, that we do not directly reward trademark artists, they are usually hired by companies interested in establishing their branding image, etc...
Yes, one of the purposes of patents and copyrights is to encourage the creation of inventions and works. But another, equally important purpose is to have those inventions and works to be unencumbered. Where it is unencumbered, it can be used to the maximum extent possible, for the least possible cost. This means having works enter the public domain immediately, or at least as soon as possible. And it means that the exclusive rights should be as minimal in scope as possible.
Easily dismissed. For one, you need to have the works themselves before they can be unencumbered. Secondly, and more clearly, society has demonstrated a distinct disinterest in much entering the public domain at all. Much of the most obsolete of copyrighted materials seems to be safely tied up in company archives.
I'm also sure you can bring up any number of historical references demonstrating the importance of produced art entering the public domain as soon as possible, but it still remains that the produced works are initially protected as a motivation to their creators.
While its true that some truly great works were produced as an act of selfless love of the arts, much of the world runs on mundane creations by us poor working slobs with rent to pay and stomachs to fill.
Again, not good enough. Getting things that we want requires them to be useful to us. If I have to pay for a copy of a book, it is less useful to me than one that is free. If I cannot make and give away copies of a book, it is less useful to me than one that I can. If I cannot write a sequel to a book, then it is less useful to me than one that I can.
I find books that I pay for more useful then the ones I get for free on average. The books that I pay for are just nicer, more informative on average then the ones that I get for free, because the paid for books simply are produced by folks with more resources on average because of course, those folks get paid ;-)
But again, you for some reason that I cannot understand are arguing against renumeration to the people or companies producing the intellectual property to be protected. If you somehow could produce a successful argument on why you should punish creators of intellectual property or even let others punish creators of intellectual property then I could then at least understand the root of your argument. Remember, society wants these intangible goods to be produced. And for much of todays products and their extremely brief periods of usefulness, the public domain is pretty well irrelevent.
The norm in human commerce is trade. Gifts surely happen (linux, tsunami aid), but for the most part, folks work to eat.
... don't squeeze the Sharman.
Who here actually uses Kazaa? No not 'lite or another cracked client but the actual original Kazaa client? I think I tried it once about 3-4 years ago, fact is, only idiots are using Kazaa (i was young and foolish), lesser idiots use Kazaa Lite Resurrection, and really you should be using something else as a primary P2P client or network.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I again have to disagree here. On a superficial level I do have to grant that trademarks are to reduce confusion, but the big picture still rules here, brands are simply identification of who to reward.
;-)
Are you kidding? Really, there is no one versed in this field that disputes the primacy of protecting customers. The reason we have trademarks is that if anyone could, for example bottle something called coca-cola, then how would you know what you were getting? It might be what you expected, it might be a different flavor of cola altogether. Quality would vary all over the place because there would be no single source for it, and you couldn't easily determine the quality of what you were getting if it were only identified in that generic fashion.
But yes, I'll concede, that we do not directly reward trademark artists, they are usually hired by companies interested in establishing their branding image, etc...
Again, a trademark -- which is most often just a word or two, not a logo -- is something that is granted to the person that actively uses it in commerce. Not the person that comes up with it. If you never sell goods under a brand, you have zip.
For one, you need to have the works themselves before they can be unencumbered.
Sure. Which is why ideally, we'd see all the works get produced, and they'd never be encumbered to begin with. Where there has to be some encumberance, that incurs a cost on the public. The greater the encumberance, the greater the cost. Not all works are worth a given cost, and there is a finite amount of encumberance that can be provided before we end up worse off overall than if we didn't even have a system to begin with.
Secondly, and more clearly, society has demonstrated a distinct disinterest in much entering the public domain at all. Much of the most obsolete of copyrighted materials seems to be safely tied up in company archives.
Maybe so. Of course, I would argue that the absurd scope and terms of copyright these days has so removed the public domain from society that that's rather artificial. And that furthermore, one of the many values of the public domain is to provide a source of works for later derivative works to be based upon, and that the public is greatly interested in these as well.
Plus of course, aside from ephemeral works that never deserved copyright to begin with, lots of copyrighted materials are available elsewhere but is less useful than it could be by not being in the public domain.
it still remains that the produced works are initially protected as a motivation to their creators.
But only in order to serve the public interest. Not for their own sake.
While its true that some truly great works were produced as an act of selfless love of the arts, much of the world runs on mundane creations by us poor working slobs with rent to pay and stomachs to fill.
Yes, I'm aware of that. In fact, I've been one of those sorts of artists. And it makes artists easy for the public to exploit -- even a very small copyright would produce a huge number of works that otherwise wouldn't be created. But copyright rapidly falls into a problem of diminishing returns for the public, which is why we need to keep it short.
I find books that I pay for more useful then the ones I get for free on average. The books that I pay for are just nicer, more informative on average then the ones that I get for free, because the paid for books simply are produced by folks with more resources on average because of course, those folks get paid
And those books are great -- and they fall into the public domain, and they're still typically still just as useful. It's fairly rare for books to fall out of date. So if it's ever good, it'll usually stay good.
you for some reason that I cannot understand are arguing against renumeration to the people or companies producing the intellectual property to be protected
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Good example, however, any page that has sections called
HOME MOVIES MUSIC TV SHOWS SUPPORT CONTACT US FAQ GET ACCESS MEMBER LOGIN
makes me a little suspicious. It also has an ad to mp3downloadhq, and a flash demo. Fishy.
Not that I'm inmune to such trickery,but countless times I have arrived to false pages with such sections.
I almost fall when suprnova.org was still up, and I arrived to suprnova.com and suprnova.tk. Suprnova has sections like I mentioned before, so it was easier. However, now suprnova.tk is selling ringtones (fishy), and suprnova.com is talking about "registering". Fishy.
Someday, they will get slightly more intelligent, and I will bite.
I believe part of the problem is that you're a lawyer (as says in your post) and by virtue of which, you've lost all connection to the simple nuts and bolts of holding a regular job and making a living. You're in a world of high minded rhetoric that seems to be forgetting the day to day basics of what makes society tick. You talk about benefitting society, yet you as a professional member of the legal practice fails to understand even the basic unit of societal participation, ie., work for wage. The "public domain", while culturally important in a very long term view, has zilch to do with the current firestorm of the IP debate, zero day warez and trading of pop media.
Its just as bad in the software world, look at some of the crazy arguments RMS makes. I don't really know how to change the ivory towers of academia, although I recommend that such folks at least consider a course in economics to appreciate how the world runs outside of their narrow view of things. Once you get the hang of societies in general, you can consider tangling how market economies work and how the importance of information in general has necessitated viewing intangible products as valid units of production.
What all of you grand theorists and information anarchists fail to realise is the size of the information economy and its importance in todays marketplace. But then again, you don't have to, you by virtue of your legal profession, and RMS by virtue of his bits and bytes orientation simply get lost in the details and paradoxically, casually muse about the grand scheme of things, and however this process comes about in yalls minds, completely forget the basics.
You're getting blindsided by software, which is highly unusual in how rapidly it ages. And even then, there is a thriving emulation scene working with some of the oldest software they can get their hands on.
Your forgetting that its the most transient IP of all, zero day software and media that is at the center of the storm and has zilch to do with the public domain. I'll hazard a guess that nobody in congress gives the public domain any thought at all.
All proponents of IP have won this debate because of its importance to the business of making a living. Since nobody wants to get off their high horses and bring some sanity to the debate, we have nutcases like RMS posing as some stoned saint and families bankrupted by outrageous judgements for the RIAA because nobody cares to give ground. We either have the info-anarchists with no care for the economy, no respect for the working folks, or the coldblooded capitalists with no care for individuals and again no respect for the working folk. In the US at least, the anarchists have lost.
In principle you're probably correct. But society likes this new information economy and no amount of grand semantic debates is going to change that. The next time someone tells you that information wants to be free, ask them for their credit card number.
I believe part of the problem is that you're a lawyer (as says in your post) and by virtue of which, you've lost all connection to the simple nuts and bolts of holding a regular job and making a living.
First, lawyering is a regular job. Mostly it's looking stuff up, and then writing it down. Day to day lawyering may be interesting to lawyers (often within practice areas -- I would be bored silly if I had to work on tax law all damn day), but it's not courtroom theater or anything. Your impression of lawyers is probably based on what you see on TV or in the movies, and it really isn't like that at all.
Second, prior to going to law school, I was an artist, I supported myself entirely for several years as an artist, and I still dabble in my copious free time. I got interested in law -- copyright law mostly, which is now my specialty -- while I was an artist, and after informally studying it on my own for a while, I came to the realization that it is basically intended to further the public interest as I have already set forth, and I found plenty of confirmation of this in the statutes, caselaw, and literature.
how market economies work
Well, bear in mind that with regards to copyright -- which seems to be the narrow area we've focused in on -- there was pretty much a total market failure. Right now we don't have a healthy market in creative works. All we've got are a lot of small monopolies at best, sometimes these monopolies are associated together.
The public domain is where the market shines: everyone competes on how efficiently they can get works out to the market. But of course, the market screws up royally when it comes to creating original works; it manages some, but not many. It's pretty good with derivative works, though, and of course maximizes the public interest in unencumberance of the works that there are. In order to tweak the natural state of affairs more to our liking, we regulate the market heavily with copyright.
The next time someone tells you that information wants to be free, ask them for their credit card number.
You do realize, right, that that turn of phrase really only makes sense as an observation. I.e. that information has a natural tendancy to spread, much like water seeks its own level only means that it flows downhill.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
As long as enough white-hats have scanned the code, it doesn't matter how many black-hats look at it. The whole point in Open Source is that it is inherently secure.
The uber-paranoid (and Gentoo users) can read the code of something to check it before compiling their own binaries, the less paranoid can trust their distribution packagers to have done so, or trust the scanning eyes or threat of scanning eyes from an unknown number of "net randoms" to have had the same effect.
Kazaa assure us that their stuff is ridgy-didge, secure and clean but the only way we can know for sure is by using a disassembler (illegal in some places) and a lot of patience.
One method is much easier than the other, and one method has proven to be considerably more effective in practice than the other.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Whats wrong with the market that we can blame on ip law?
The public domain is where the market shines: everyone competes on how efficiently they can get works out to the market. But of course, the market screws up royally when it comes to creating original works; it manages some, but not many. It's pretty good with derivative works, though, and of course maximizes the public interest in unencumberance of the works that there are. In order to tweak the natural state of affairs more to our liking, we regulate the market heavily with copyright.
Why can't these times with the best distribution system the world has ever seen be a boon to creativity? Why do intellectual property considerations need to put a damper on this?
How does copyright "regulate" the market?
I agree that some of todays law is pretty miserable, but I'm not seeing support for eliminating intellectual property law. Theres plenty of movies being made, DVD's aren't really that oppresive a medium, and if you don't like RIAA sponsored music, go hunt for the millions of self published out there. Folks are finding a happy medium with copyright, many musicians happily choose a creative commons variant and happily jam on. Folks can record their own music and self publish for almost nothing. I've known young musicians that are having a go, they're knowledgeable about copyright, they like to sell cds and have no use for info anarchy or unrepentent copying of their work.
If you want to talk about a stunted marketplace, I'll happily spend my time talking about many more problems than copyright, as a matter of fact, to lay any blame on intellectual property to explain away poor marketplace performance is to just let big business and big government off the hook. But yeah, I know thats an easy choice to make nowadays.
You do realize, right, that that turn of phrase really only makes sense as an observation. I.e. that information has a natural tendancy to spread, much like water seeks its own level only means that it flows downhill.
You'll have to demonstrate that information is not an entirely artificial construct for me to buy that it "has a natural tendancy" to do anything.
Yet another example of how everyone needs complete access to a sound machine that produces the wah-wah sound on-command from anywhere.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Whats wrong with the market that we can blame on ip law?
The problem is that we aren't seeing the efficiencies of the market. Any given creative work is, having been produced, a commodity. Anyone can make it the second or nth time. Yet we don't see commodity pricing and availability.
The reason for that is, in the inverse, when we do have an unregulated market, we see that the natural state of things is to have comparatively few original works created. Since we wanted more of these than the market produced (and we regard the lack of them as yet another failure of the market) we put in monopolies. You don't see monopolies on commodities in your average healthy market.
Why can't these times with the best distribution system the world has ever seen be a boon to creativity? Why do intellectual property considerations need to put a damper on this?
I don't think I understand what you're saying here. Can you rephrase it? But I suspect that you are identifying the issue of why copyright holders aren't using the net more. I also wonder about this.
I agree that some of todays law is pretty miserable, but I'm not seeing support for eliminating intellectual property law.
Who's talking about eliminating it?
First, we seem to mostly be concentrating on copyright here -- if you acknowledge that there even is a thing called IP law (which I do not, as I feel it is a deliberately confusing term with no real utility), then you need to remember that copyright is only one subset of it.
But even then, we're not talking about eliminating copyright. Just remembering that public concerns are paramount and that in the likely event that the law does not promote the public interest as much as possible, that it should be reformed in whatever ways will.
I personally suspect that reducing the scope of copyright in various ways will improve the satisfaction of the public interest, but I'm open to arguments that we would all be better off going the other way, or whatnot.
Abolishing copyright law is something that would only be a good idea in the unlikely event that any possible copyright law would harm the public more than the complete lack of one would. I don't think we're anywhere near that. And I think you're being disingenious in raising it given that I have not been suggesting it.
Theres plenty of movies being made
And again that's not good enough. I want the balance of movies being made, and movies being in the public domain, that best satisfies the public interest. Neither extreme is as good as a point somewhere in the middle.
You've got to accept that there are other good things in the world besides creation. What good is creation when the work is locked up?
Folks are finding a happy medium with copyright,
And I merely think there is a happier one. If I'm right that there is a happier medium, why would you possibly oppose that? Even if the happier medium also involved fewer works being created, it would still, by definition be happier. You're not against happiness, are you?
You'll have to demonstrate that information is not an entirely artificial construct for me to buy that it "has a natural tendancy" to do anything.
If you inform me as to any piece of information, I inherently retain it. I cannot return it, or forget it on demand. And I can quite easily reproduce it further without your awareness or ability to prevent it. Information naturally spreads.
Why you think that artificiality is relevant is beyond me. Toothpaste naturally can't go back in the tube, but it isn't found in nature. So what? We're talking about typical behavior, not origins. And I think you're bright enough to know this.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Fantastic program as far as I'm concerned, have been using it for ages... first when it was just free but closed source, and now when it's become Open Source.
Have a try... it support 4 P2P networks: EDonkey2000, Gnutella, Gnutella2 and BitTorrent.
It can be grabbed at www.shareaza.com
You do realize that by watching a purchased DVD in Linux "GOES AGAINST WISHES AND INTENTIONS OF ITS CREATOR". The same if you purchase and rip a DVD to remove the PUOs (unskippable parts) or modify your DVD player to be region free and ignore PUOs.
You do realize, right, that that turn of phrase really only makes sense as an observation. I.e. that information has a natural tendancy to spread, much like water seeks its own level only means that it flows downhill.
Apparently he does not. It is scary how many people even on slashdot interpret that phrase to mean something more like "I want all information to be free. As in beer." The phrase is not even saying that information cannot be controlled, just that in the long run it can be exceedingly difficult to do so. That there is something inherently different about information as compared to other "goods".
Stephenson, in his "In the Beginning was the Command Line" does a good job of explaining the problem with trying to sell bits as if they were something more tangible and less reproducible. That should be required reading for folks who don't grok "information wants to be free".
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
You warez'ers will rationalize anything!