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MS Calls On Kids to Stop Thought Thieves
theodp writes "Microsoft is calling all UK kids aged 14-17 to enter its Thought Thieves Competition. Remember kids, finalists must agree to formally license all intellectual property rights in their film on terms acceptable to Microsoft. And don't forget to download your free Thought Thieves Poster!"
should include "unless you're like microsoft or something and you just basically steal other people's ideas and profit exponentially from them... then i wouldn't mind if one or two people below poverty level stole my IP." ;)
This is reminiscent of the brainwashing of kids in the Youth League in Orwell's 1984.
Can minors legally sign away their rights here in the UK? Seems a bit odd.
Now, if only they'd use PDF here, like every other company in the world, perhaps they would look more professional.
(Then again, when they can publish figures like these, who cares whether they look professional or not?)
Currently in my mind i am breaking a hell of alot of copyright laws. . .
. .. Way to go microsoft ..
.
Songs that get stuck in my head , many many ideas , Songs i remember
I occasionaly hum a tune thats most likely copyrighted
I have an idea that may already be patent.
When you start labeling copyright/patent infringment Thought theft then your walking on a really dodgy line. it really does sound incredibly facist
We should be teaching children to share and help others , instead we are teaching them suspicion and greed
I really hope alot of kids send MS vidios depicting facist states Abusing its citizens in some cyber punk future where your thoughts are monitored
as it was the first thing that came to my mind when i heard thought thieves
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
All I can say is wow. Considering MS is the biggest stealer of ideas in history, the multiple levels of irony in this article make that Alanis Morissette song (or more precisely the fact that the song isn't ironic at all) pale in comparison. This can't be real. Would Microsoft be this dumb? Nah, I don't believe it. Good hoax though...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
The school yard is Microsoft's patch. They have been dealing their product to minors in an attempt to get them hooked for life for some time now. They won the last turf war and things have been settled for a while now, but there are some new kids on the block and Microdick is going for the hit.
This is going to get ugly.
Not to troll or anything, but I wonder if Stack could have used a software patent to prevent that?
Maybe there's something to this whole idea of patenting software after all. Sure, the way software patents are being used now is ridiculous, but that doesn't mean the entire concept is rotten.
This is the M.O. of slimy corporations and politicians everywhere--they are basically lying to people through their gross simplification of complex issues (see 'pirates are bad'), misuse of language (this competition), and outright lying (too many examples to mention).
What's next? 'Find the hidden pirate treasure on your parent's computer? '
This made me think about the childrens thought police games and later real life actions:
...
"A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought- criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!'
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought."
"With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother -- it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally used -- had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police."
It's good that I don't have children..
I bet the person who suggested this was a disgruntled employee with a malicious sense of irony and a very low opinion of how well read his managers are. Kudos to him for getting Microsoft to quote Orwell!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
How about this, "One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today." 112,003 high school students were surveyed, that doesn't seem like too small a population to me.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I was thinking of:
Starts with black screen and text fades in reading "Imaging working for hundreds of hours..."
Screen fades to a coder sitting at a linux box with the sudo source code on the screen. Screen fades back to black.
Text fades in "Finally completing it". Screen fades to display of coder falling back with a sigh of relief. Screen fades to black.
Text fades in "Giving it away for Free".
Screen fades to linux machine running Firefox uploading sudo to sourceforge.
Screen fades to black and fades in text "15 years later... " Text fades out, fades in picture of Slashdot story of MS patenting sudo, story of MS trying to patent the internet again, story of Amazon one click patent. Screen fades to black, fades in text "Only to be told YOU could be sued because companies have "stolen" your idea and patented it." Screen fades to black and fades in text "No software patents. No monopolies on ideas."
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
The license agreement in the article says that competitors must license all their IP rights and also "waive all moral rights".
My understanding of this last phrase is that they give up their right under UK law to be named as the author of the film. So Microsoft could pass off the film as their own production, without mentioning the real author.
Of course it's not theft if you sign your rights away voluntarily.
Someone should set up an alternative contest to make a film about why sharing ideas is a good thing. Even if this turns out to be a hoax, this positive competition would be cool anyway.
:) If someone is willing to do the org work, I'd be happy to put up the £2000 (donations might increase that sum and/or reduce my share). The project would need a good website and would need to have the same deadline as the MSFT competition (July 1st). Ideally the effort should tie in with the Creative Commons group UK and possibly Software Freedom Day.
£2000 is not that much, we can match that
OK, I've opened my big mouth now. Anyone else?
...because I'm sure I'm not the first person to "think" that this is the most ridiculous marketing rubish Microsoft has pushed this week.
I wonder who's got the prior art on stupid ideas; perhaps they should sue Microsoft.
I just hope kids remain indifferent enough that they don't buy into this. What's unfortunate is that I think - if they get to these kids early enough - they'll change their attitudes for life.
I had the same worry up until a few years ago. I was on a bus in London and some kids wanted to tag the bus. However, Britain being the camera society that it is they would have been caught on film.
Two of the girls staged an argument on the stairs and blocked the view of the camera. The boy sneaked up behind them and tagged the stairs. Even though it was an act of vandalism it revived my faith in human nature and I had a Jurassic Park like moment "life will always find a way". Yeah, I think the kids will be fine...
I don't think anyone would like to steal my thoughts. I would like to get rid of them myself...
Say you spend an hour talking about the tenets of free speech, and how the freedom to criticize elected officials is guaranteed by the Constitution. Then the student goes home and watches an hour of TV news, pumping fear-stories about "There is a website publishing pictures that could help terrorists attack us!" (cryptome.org) and "One website claims that the Microsoft software you use could be insecure and get you infected with a virus! What?! These people must be crazy!" (slashdot.org).
Maybe they run a story about how a group of people dared - dared, since questioning the government is now officially unAmerican - to confront Republican Senator Bill Frist while he was parked illegally, buying shoes next to a known Democratic lobbying organization's headquarters. And it's the protestors who are being criticized, nevermind the fact that the Senator is parked illegally, or that he chose to shop right next to his opponents' HQ. No, the story is that "poor Bill Frist got protested." Damned "liberal" media again!
Or they show video footage of people in a "Free Speech Zone," with a subtle comment about how those protestors are really are getting riled up, maybe they're violent, thank God they're caged up inside the chain-link fence of the "Free Speech Zone." And that video clip of people in a "Free Speech Zone" negates what you tried to impart to your students, the fact that the entire United States of America is a free speech zone, that the term "Free Speech Zone" didn't come about until the Bush administration, and that you don't necessarily need a permit to assemble peaceably.
Perspectives can be altered. Easily. Especially in younger minds. I hope that by age 17, most Americans have developed enough critical thinking skills to make their own determinations, but at 14, I'd bet that most teens base their decisions upon what their parents say and what they've learned to be the "popular opinion." And popular opinions don't come from the History Teacher.
I'm not a teacher by profession (though I'm happy to impart knowledge about any topic with which I'm familiar, anytime, to anyone, of any age) - I don't have it in me to do that day in and day out - but I have enormous amounts of respect for those who are.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
No it doesn't, the Godwin Point is only reached when comparing to nazis ... your oponents in a discussion. /. lurkers) to nazis, nor did he directly compare MS guys to nazis, his post therefore doesn't qualify as "reaching the godwin point".
GP compared MS propaganda to nazi's, he didn't compare YOU (or pro-MS
The godwin point is reached when you're so out of arguments that you have to rely on the worst ad-hominem attacks (comparing your oponents to the worst kind of suckers ever) to try to make a point...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Donate free food here
The Junior Anti-Thoughtcrime League or maybe just Thinkpoljugend? How about BSA (Bill's SturmAbteilung) Jugend?
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
A farm truck pulls up outside of your kid's school, chock full of football size pods, and school administrators hand them out to the little children. Then, they walk them into the gymnasium, where they are told to lie down with their pod for a nap.
when they wake up, they're obedient, EULA-ized little drones, and in the podding process, have divulged their little grade school p2p supernodes.
I'm seriously wondering if we can turn this around on them. If I were to make a film and make it available publically under some form of open content license at the same time as submitting it to MS, would they be able to revoke the license on the copies already distributed? If they could, wouldn't it demonstrate that their own EULA's are just as easily revoked?
I love the title "Thought Thieves" though. I'm actually very tempted to make a film with that title now, although I don't know if it'd be approved of by the judges...
As a soon-to-be history teacher in germany (certainly you'd agree that I should be going the extra mile to make sure my pupils "get it right", right?), I'd like to ask you a question:
How, exactly, does your infallible way of teaching kids critical thinking work? As fas as I've seen that is amongst the most difficult things to do, because it requires effort on the kids part and most kids, like most adults, shun that, if at all possible... So, please, enlighten me.
Or was that just wishful thinking? Then I'd have to say, STFU.
I just added "Thought Thieves" to Wikipedia. Add what you will to it!
Ar they much, if any, smaller? PDF has pretty good compression. I just zipped a few random PDFs and they were less than 1% smaller than the original. Possibly it's to fuck with non-Windows users, or Google which indexes PDFs on the web. But it does indicate a rapprochement with Adobe; also the new OTF font format, which combines Adobe's Type 1 and the MS/Apple Truetype. I've heard installing recent Adobe apps (Acrobat 7) requires IE to be present. All a bit disturbing.
"Microsoft starts a competition "MS Calls On Kids to Stop Thought Thieves" . Hundreds of kids spend creative effort and time to make up plots to market microsoft's intellectual property ideas and to develop them into finished movie clips. 1 of those kid wins 2000 pounds worth of audio- and video equipment. A dozen or more of them became finalists and signed the rights to their hard work away and didn't get anything in return. The other hundreds still have, for free, provided microsoft marketing with plentiful of ideas to further their own business' cause.* Stop those thought thieves!" This plot is hereby released into the public domain. Feel encouraged to use it if you like. * Wich cause includes working together with the big phonographic industry labels and mpaa, to lobby politicians to ever more skew copyright and other intellectual law away from the original idea of maximum public benefit towards maximum control and profit for the established big entertainment industry corporations. The extension of the duration of copyright is an example of this. It took mental wealth away from the general public which won't be able to freely use and distribute old works which their creators have long been paid for. Software Patents, which are monopoly rights on mathematic and logic and often trivial, are even worse in that they can block the independent creation and distribution of intellectual wealth. One reason microsoft is still reluctant to use them against OSS is, that doing so would likely destroy any chance that might still exist of getting them legislated into the EU.
Why not give Microsoft exactly what they are asking for?
A little movie about a small company that comes out with some cool new technology, and wants to give it out for free because they feel it will better mankind. A few months after its out it is quite popular in its niche and they are doing well from their ideas, they get a letter from a big company "Letigisoft" saying they infringed on a software patent of theirs. Our heros don't have much money for a legal defense, so they scramble. They know they can't keep their product functional and remove the infringing bit, they can't charge license fees, or afford legal costs. Plus, the patent claims being made are obviously very questionable, but they don't have the legal resources to prove that. Any attempt to go about against "Letigisoft" burries them in paperwork, and onerous disclosure requests that expose all their company's ideas to Letigisoft. So they end up with no choice but the close up shop. A year later "Letigisoft" develops a similar product and charges a lot for it.
So do something like that with nice production values so the judges will have to watch it. Let it develop slowly, so at first you might not realize that its such a David getting crushed by Goliath sort of thing. Make them all confortable by giving them exactly what they want.
Big companies who want all this IP fascism have to realize that they need to be careful what they ask for, because it works both ways, and they just might get what they want.
> Saying "blah, blah, blah Godwin's Law blah blah blah" does not invalidate that view or end the useful discussion thread.
Oh, I would argue it ends the usefulness of the discussion thread. Or at least diminishes it greatly. But I'll invoke it here too -- the Nazi comparison is ludicrous. The 1984 comparisons are spot-on though, so let's run with it. I propose from now on, that we make a portamentau of Microsoft's new term: thoughttheft.
As in, "thoughttheft doubleplusungood".
But really, there's no need -- they're aiming this catchy term at school-age kids. They don't need our help in ridiculing empty slogans. Anyone remember "just say no"?
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Wrong!
1984 words are about rewriting the past.
What better way to rewrite the past than changing the meaning of the word "thought thieves" to mean the opposite.
This is a lose-lose situation. I don't like either young vandals or police states. I'd rather have a society where people were happy, creative, intelligent and honest and where the idea of a surveillance camera was completely alien and ridiculous to everyone.
Furthermore, you should realise that a police state is interested in silencing the dissenters, not vandals. The NYC police would rather have the whole city vandalized by illiterate morons with "FUCK" and "KILL NIGGERS" sigs or pointless graffiti than have someone use his bike to print anti-Bush messages on the sidewalks.
Similarly, the proles in 1984 had certain freedoms precisely because they were harmless and could not use these freedoms for anything.
Right now the CCTV cameras in London may not intended to stop crime, but when they are used to stop free thought, free meetings and free expression, gangs and vandals will probably be the last on the minds of the government.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
When I was in high school (5 years ago or so), I took sociology.
For a project we had to conduct a survey of 100 people.
My particular survey consisted of a page with symbols on them, with a space below for writing what they stood for.
Amongst others, included was the star of david, a pentagram, and a swastika.
There was a frightening amount of people who associated the star of david with satan, or the devil.
However, every single person associated the swastika with hitler or nazis.
Admittedly, it wasn't the most scientific test, and it was conducted in texas.
Draw your own conclusions.
Do you really believe most teenagers have even heard of 1984?
Many of them will have studied it in school, and those who haven't will likely learn of it, and perhaps read it, later. In college, for example.
I wonder which kids will see the connection most powerfully: Those who read 1984 before seeing the campaign, or those who read it after.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This has been a lifelong battle for Bill Gates. His war with the "free"software community and their bad attitude towards his stuff goes all the way back to his beginnings. His first or one of his first products was a BASIC interpreter. At the time there was a "free" interpreter called Tiny Basic and when Gates started selling his BASIC people started sharing their copies of his BASIC as though it deserved the same treatment as Tiny Basic. Bill got on the stump and accused a lot of people of being thieves. The "free" software community is a lifetime recurring lifetime nightmare for him. Can you picture him screaming in his sleep when IBM first announced support for Linux.
Some idiot always bring up the car theft thing in regards to software piracy, and it's COMPLETE horseshit. That IS THEFT. Depriving someone of their rightful property. Copying software is COPYRIGHT VIOLATION.
God you people are full of shit.
As for laws being fair for both rich and poor... You obviously haven't been paying attention. Justice goes to those who can afford the best lawyers. Hence a certain football player who happens to be a murderer is a free man.
Slashdot really needs a "-1, Fucktard" moderation for folks like you.
Can someone tell me what original idea M$ ever came up with?
MS-DOS? - No
SQL-Server? - No
GUI OS? - No
Word Processors? - No
Email? - No
Browsers? - No
Compression, encryption, multimedia? - No, no, no
Maybe MS Access. Can't think of another desktop dbms. Of course access is for boneheads so thats an idea I wish they had kept to themselves.