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."
Isn't that what dupes are for?
Or do we need patents on website content? Copywrites? Or can we trust people to not steal?
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?
I'll give one more example. A woman who is 26 years old has 2 kids, and no skills. She got knocked up by a bum. Now she is working in a grocery store, as a check out clerk for $7 an hour, not enough to feed and cloth her family.
She starts up a website where she gets naked. She is making good money, and she manages to make enough to get a nicer place to live, feed her kids, and go to college. A couple years later, she takes down the website. She has a good job. But someone decides to put the content back up. Her kids are now 13 years old. Her employeer also knows how to use google. Should people judge her based on who she used to be, what she did to survive within a specific context of existance?
If someone wants to put up a website, they have that right. But it appears that people don't have a right to remove their content from circulation. That is the problem.
The great thing about life is people can change, they can move away to a new community, they can start over. The internet in some ways is making that impossible. It is like jobs that do credit checks, to work as a secretary they want to know how much money you owe, and if you paid it off on time.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
To make a quick correction to the Slashback, you can't yet watch the whole 2nd Starship Exeter film online; they are releasing it one act a week starting with the teaser two weeks ago, and both last weeks and this weeks this weekend (due to some lost footage).
Anways, judging from the teaser, Exeter has improved by leaps and bounds from episode one. Being frank, the it takes great effort for me sit through episode one of Starship Exeter (or the first episode of New Voyages for that matter). However, this episode is written by Dennis Bailey, who wrote an episode of The Next Generation (Tin Man, with Gumtu the space snail), and has actual CG effects (as opposed to an AMT model and horrendously bad play-dough dinosaur, not to mention the acting greatly improving.
And I guess I'll throw in a plug for my other favourite TOS fan film. The next Star Trek: New Voyages episodes will be written by two Deep Space Nine writers (Jack Trevino and Ethan Calk), and the one after that by D.C. Fontana, who wrote 11 original series episodes, six Next Generations, not to mention a load of other great TV show episodes. The fourth episode will also guest star Walter Koenig, whose name is very familier to anybody who has read this far.
I predict the next few years will see a load of flood of fan films on the net, with some of them possibly even being good.
-Clinton
This is not a new problem.
It was not the "Canadian Supreme Court" that made this ruling, it was the Supreme Court of British Columbia, according to the link new report. I know foreign geography is tough for Americans. It does make a difference - I am virtually certain that the injunction would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada if it was ever taken that far.
Remember that phrase, you're going to hear it a lot.
The crime that was committed was unauthorized distribution by the store selling the books. Copyright owners do not have any authority over you reading a book, only copying it. But they want that authority. And "no right to read" is the phrase they will use to get it.
I think I liked the old universe better. You know, the one where Richard Stallman seemed like a nut with crazy predictions of the future?
The enemies of Democracy are