Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Archives, Leak, Fanfilm
Alacritech settles litigation with MSFT and BRCM An anonymous reader writes "Alacritech, Microsoft Corporation and Broadcom Corporation today announced that they have entered into agreements that settle all outstanding disputes between Alacritech and Microsoft, as well as provide Microsoft and Broadcom access to Alacritech's patent portfolio relating to scalable networking. (Previously mentioned on Slashdot here and here.)"
Sir, you have no right to read about your rights. Hobart writes "Richard Stallman has just posted on his personal website a request for his readers to 'Don't Buy Harry Potter Books,' and offered to leak the plot - in protest of the Canadian Supreme Court ruling forbidding the purchasers from reading the books they paid for. A memorable quote in the Times article says '...There is no human right to read.'"
Don'tcha think felony is a bit strong for a few button presses? ZombyHero writes "In a follow-up to a previous story, the 13 high school students from Kutztown, PA charged with felony computer trespassing for violating district usage policy are fighting back. They've hired lawyers have begun talking with the Assistant DA. As a former student of the school, I know that the district is used to getting its way. Hopefully this will knock them down a few notches."
Starship Exeter flies again! An anonymous reader writes "There's a new episode of Starship Exeter, a fan-made feature set in the original series Star Trek universe. The new episode, The Tressaurian Intersection, follows on from The Savage Empire, which was featured on Slashdot before. This time it's better than ever... better than the original series, in fact! You can watch the entire episode online."
Treasure hunts, commence. We've posted quite a few interesting applications for Google's mapping service; now phauly writes "I created an Animated Google Map (with some gnus and mozillas attacking Microsoft office) using Google Maps API. I think it would be easy to create real playable Games on Google Maps. For sharing ideas (and implementations!) I created the Games on Google Maps wiki page. For now some ideas are: risk, freeciv, freecraft, car races on real maps! Feel free to edit the page suggesting/revising/implementing ideas."
Should this guy have a right to erase his past creations?
Not any more. Semantics aside, it was publicly broadcast at the time. The world doesn't work like Outlook and its "Recall Message" feature, as much as you would appear to wish it did. People create history as they go through life.... or would you prefer some 1984-esque alternative?
Perhaps he should have lived by the old axiom of "Never say something that you wouldn't want repeated in court."
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
You know, as much as the community complains about /. spelling problems, when you see this printed as the headline in a newspaper article:
it's a sad, sad day.
Your right to forget your past ends at my mind. No one has the right to make other people forget things.
This is not a new problem.
When someone puts up a website... That is their property. Nobody has a right to take a snapshot of it, store it, or recreate it.
Um, do you realise that just by visiting a webpage, a copy of it is transferred from the server to your computer, and then cached by your browser? That amounts to taking a snapshot of it, storing it, and, if you use your back button, recreating it.
A more legitimate question would be if people such as Google or archive.org are allowed to redistribute content it finds on sites, which is what it does by showing you its cached versions of those sites.
You're viewing a website like a poster that you put up on your front door. Of course, a year later you have the right to take that down, and no one should be allowed to forcably place that back on your door.
But the web doesn't work that way. When I put up a website, I'm not putting up a poster; I'm setting up a news stand and handing out copies to everyone who walks by. Do I have a right to take back all of those papers I handed out, and disallow every person who took one from showing it to somebody else?
The case against the wayback machine is particularly interesting here, as it shows the internet's natural route-around-censorship/deletion (through things like the google cache, and archive.org) being contested by those who hold the copyrights on said material. Its been long acknowledged that storing people's websites indefinitely is something that could place mirror/cache hosters in a legal grey area, but it seems that most knowledgeable internet publishers have come to accept that their content will be archive & stored and place safeguards accordingly (like approval-to-publish CMS systems and in-house content review).
Business websites are perhaps a special case, as to me their public front represents almost a brochure of their services, with advertising text and relevant numbers. I don't really see why data like that being historically available (as it would be in any other format) is such a big problem, especially for a trademark dispute.
Business Voyeur
This reminds me of the movie "Basic Instinct", with Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone (the movie where she shows her twat). Anyways, some lesbian-homo weirdo group, in protest that the movie makes lesbians look like werdios, decided to leak the ending. They group had people go to movie theaters and talk about the ending of the movie, while people waited in line to buy the tickets.
What does this have to do with anything? I didn't see any mention of RMS trying to force the plotline down people's throats before they had a chance to read the book. I'm pretty sure RMS isn't gonna harass you while you wait in line for the next Harry Potter book.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
When you publish, that's it - you cannot retract what you put in public for others to read.
Furthermore while you should be allowed to no longer present what you like, for research needs I absolutly think that anyone who is capabile of doing so shoudl be able to store and re-present data you have publically published.
To go back to your example, lets say years later that woman (or that man) runs for president. Would you (as a citizen) want that hidden or want a clean vetting of a persons past details?
Now lets take this another way. Say you can make whatever you publish disappear. So then is it OK for news sites or blogs to change what they had published in the past, while disallowing anyone to make note of there being a change and what the old content was?
If you plan to do embarrassing things, don't do them in public. people need to be RESPONSIBLE for past actions. I said some dumb things on Usenet when I was younger in college (incidentally usenet archives are why we'll never see a technically oriented gen-Xer in a high-ranking public position) but I just have to deal with whatever happens as a result of past actions.
Personally I think the site in question falls into the category of historical recording, and I think is important. If it can't store anything we are all screwed from the standpoint of having any accurate history of out time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can't erase the memories of others, no matter how hard you try. Unless you invent one of those MiB flashing thingies, of course.
And if you try to erase past wrongdoing, we generally call that a "cover up" and it may in some circumstances be illegal, depending on just what was done.
Sorry; you'll have to find some other way to hide from your past. The purpose of copyright is NOT to allow you to do any such thing.
Would it not be considered absurd if an author, asserting some sort of "moral right" to later burn all the copies of their own books, taking them from library collections? That's effectively what's happening here, it's just that they gave away copies of the book for free instead of for a fee, and that they're etherial in nature, rather than having the work automatically fixed to a tangible medium when it was given away.
Besides, you're a hypocrite in suggesting it. I grant you NO right to read this post and rescind any you thought you had (yes, it was nice of me to inform you near the very bottom of the post, just to illustrate how silly ex post facto recissions are). You'd better also clear your browser cache (it's infringing my copyright just now), not to mention the cache on any caching proxies between the two of us. And don't tell me you don't have any idea whether or not there are any, much less any control over them. God forbid copyright restrictions, a legally fictitious form of "property" already, suffer any sort of rationality here in regards to what one can reasonably demand of another.
(C) 2005, Electronic Freedom Foundation (No, I don't work for them, but because I, the author, put this here, the copyright should vest with them instead of me.)
And if I later wish to eat these words? Well, too bad. And our humans laws, quite frankly, are powerless to change or stop that fact of life, however much hubris we might invest into writing them.
When a woman poses for Playboy, does she have the right to censor herself out of back issues?
Yeah, it sucks, but you can't magic yourself out of every situation on the internet any more than you can in physical reality.
And also, federal employees, i.e. TSA employees, aren't required to listen to RMS's speech either under the constitution. TSA security is there to enforce security, not put up with his bs. If he thinks TSA procedures are wrong, or doesn't like the conduct of a particular agent, arguing with the agent isn't going to solve anything. He should try exercising his "free speech" in a court room, and see how long before they throw him out after he fails to obey the judge telling him to shut up.
Vote for Pedro
there is handicap parking places in front of a skating rink
And just where should the handicapped park if they want to go skating?
You still own copyright to anything you create. You may not be able to force other people to delete their copies (if they legitimately obtained them from you), but you can certainly stop them from distributing your content.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Boycotting the book and movie will clearly have the desired effect. The author and her publisher put this silly publicity stunt together, and if it backfires by not making them as much money as they hoped, they won't do it again. Or they will, but they will send the word down the chain of supply that court cases resulting in bad publicity will not get you "preferred vendor status" or whatever.
If you are boycotting, you have to boycott the economic engine that is driving the whole thing.
For example, say there is a college kid who really likes beer and porn. He likes it so much, he sets up a website that becomes popular, it lists different beers, and reviews porn. One drunken night, this college kid uses his cell phone to take a couple low resolution pictures of himself having sex, and he puts it up.
A few years pass, somehow he graduates and starts looking for work. Someone tells him that his website comes up when googled, and that might not be the best thing when it comes for finding work.
So the guy pulls the plug. beerandporn dot com dies. Or did it? It seems others liked his hobby as well, and downloaded all the content, and started hosting it. Problem is, google now links to these new sites, with his face and work for the world to see.
Should this guy have a right to erase his past creations?
No, he shouldn't. If we're ever going to get over judging each other for such stupid bullshit when most of us have done something comperable or worse, the first thing we need is to have them all out in the open.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You know, the one where Richard Stallman seemed like a nut with crazy predictions of the future?
The keyword is "seemed." Unfortunately, despite his often colorful opinions, he's also usually correct.
I know this is Canada and all, but things like this remind me of the phrase, "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."