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DRM More Important Than Life or Security?
An anonymous reader writes "Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker has an interesting writeup regarding how copyright holders are still having serious objections to the built in exceptions of the DMCA even when it might threaten lives or national security. From the article: 'One would have thought they'd make awfully sure that a DRM measure didn't threaten critical infrastructure or endanger lives, before they deployed that measure. But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives.'"
They never have. Perhaps the biggest role of the corporations that belong to the organizations mentioned in TFA is to act as a middleman. Today they add almost no value to the economic equation. That means they're basically parasites. Parasites that, in this case, don't give a fuck about the host (the public) they prey upon.
As long as they get theirs, that's all that matters to them. And they will do everything in their considerable power to make sure that remains the case. They embody everything that is wrong with modern crony capitalism.
It's long past time for them to die.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
What you really need to keep in mind when talking about this is that the groundwork is already laid. The DMCA is law. What is being argued over now is the details of what types of media should be covered by exemptions. If you think that you are fighting over consumer rights, the DMCA is doing laps around you.
copyright infringement is already grounds for heftier punishment than some crimes against physical inviolability. What did you expect? He who pays the politician makes the laws.
Systems which are considered mission critical or whose loss/damage/downtime could endanger human life fall into a category of their own. This category tends to have failsafe design safeguards built from the ground up.
There is a reason air traffic control systems don't run Windows XP.
For the same reason, I expect such systems would have a large sign hanging off the front of them saying "Do NOT use this system for playing your new Britney CD".
I accept the argument he is making, however I believe the scenario is unlikely.
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
"One day, a scorpion looked around at the mountain where he lived and decided that he wanted a change. So he set out on a journey through the forests and hills. He climbed over rocks and under vines and kept going until he reached a river.
The river was wide and swift, and the scorpion stopped to reconsider the situation. He couldn't see any way across. So he ran upriver and then checked downriver, all the while thinking that he might have to turn back.
Suddenly, he saw a frog sitting in the rushes by the bank of the stream on the other side of the river. He decided to ask the frog for help getting across the stream.
"Hellooo Mr. Frog!" called the scorpion across the water, "Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?"
"Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you wont try to kill me?" asked the frog hesitantly.
"Because," the scorpion replied, "If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!"
Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. "What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!"
"This is true," agreed the scorpion, "But then I wouldn't be able to get to the other side of the river!"
"Alright then...how do I know you wont just wait till we get to the other side and THEN kill me?" said the frog.
"Ahh...," crooned the scorpion, "Because you see, once you've taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!"
So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. He swam over to the bank and settled himself near the mud to pick up his passenger. The scorpion crawled onto the frog's back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog's soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. The muddy water swirled around them, but the frog stayed near the surface so the scorpion would not drown. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream, his flippers paddling wildly against the current.
Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.
"You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?"
The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog's back.
"I could not help myself. It is my nature."
This is a story often told in psychology classes. To understand the immutable nature of something is vital. There is no point intellectualising, making excuses and analysis, sometimes something just is what it is.
For humanity it is necessary to recognise the intrinsic nature of capitalism . It is an unfettered force which puts the value of money and profit above life itself. There are too many examples and stories from reality which prove this time and again that we would be fools to ignore this force. Unless we take steps to moderate the present capitalist system a few unlucky people will be left sitting on a vast pile of gold upon the smoking remains of a planet .
But I'd rather see DRM and DMCA gone!
Practically anybody who's ever released anything into the world is a copyright holder, most of them just aren't that anal about users using their work.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The terrorists have open-sourced their WMDs, and the DRM on your BRR (Big Red Button) has expired. I've called an emergency meeting with Linus Torvald.
This all comes down to money and the fact that so many people are very very greedy.
/. readers know that providing specifications and helping people to tinker with a product usually helps the company in the long run. It is very sad to see that
Corporations fear that if they don't do everything to protect their precious products
from tampering, they'll lose some serious money.
We
this whole DRM thing has blurred the vision of so many managers out there and they
just can't get it that by making non-restricted products you help yourself. *sigh*
First you wedge in the "critical for life" exceptions and before you know it people will argue that voting machines should be open source.
While there is not an iota of love inside me for copyright holders, both the poster and the blogger are trying to stir up reader's emotions by their choice of phrases.
The poster says "DRM more important than life or security" and the blogger's headline reads "Future DRM might threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives."
I read the article that is linked to, and from what I could decipher of the legal wording from the RIAA is that they're afraid that until someone clearly defines "privacy or security" or even "threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives", they don't want to commit anything.
Nowhere does it imply that they said DRM is "more important than life or privacy" but merely that "till you can define privacy, security etc., we don't want to commit".
Based on their track record, the Copyright Office will likely do what is asked by these corporations. However, I'm curious as to why? What does the Copyright Office gain by not putting in these safeguards? Who do they answer to? Are these corporations truly funding them? I know little about the Copyright Office mentioned in this article.
Wouldn't the designers of any system entrusted to protect the lives of others automatically reject DRM as an elemnent of that system if it could prove to be a point of failure?
I am not a system engineer, but I don't see how DRM would ever be considered in a system of this nature. I would expect that a lot of the components used in such systems would either be highly modified/customized off the shelf components or custom made.
This position is not surprising. I imagine that *any* relaxations of the DMCA itself or its' interpretations would get an immediate rejection reaction from the copyright industry.
These aren't (in most cases) individual people with copyrights, these are a group of companies and corporations that profit from the current status-quo of copyright law.
Nothing new in a bunch of corporations trying to protect and increase their profits, morality and fairness be damned, nor the politicians with their hands out and a vote up for the highest bidder. That's just the way we got here.
A practical, workable, reasonably fair and minimally-destructive method for changing the above scenario? Now, *that* would be new and exciting!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
and money is not...
If this gets voted in their favor, wouldn't they then be liable for damages incurred from their disruptive technology? Let's say that a new The Cure CD brings down a machine at a telco and then someone wasn't able to call 911. We have already seen that, if you 'Crunch Box' a whole area code, then you are responsible for losses incurred on account of the downed lines.
Wouldn't this open the makers up for litigation given that this was the intended use of their product?
They're terrorists too! Send them off to Gitmo, I say.
Some people also seriously suggest using Linux for medical devices. I mean come on, it's still a pretty buggy toy-OS.
But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives.
Since when have 'they' cared about human lives over profits? Just look at all the war profiteers today.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
MY interest is my security and safety.
THEIR interest is the security and protection of their property.
I get to decide which hardware I buy and use. So MY interest will be the one deciding which hardware will be sold.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Tell him (or her) that one day he (or she) might be in hospital, with a computer-controlled machine irradiating his (or her) cancer and trying to save his (or her) life.
There must be 'free' machines that the engineers and doctors can be confident will behave according to design and prescription.
I can't give legal advice, or medical advice, not being a lawyer or doctor. But I can give engineering advice.
It was originally designed to protect the artists but now it also benefits the labels and other big business. Now that big business has money at stake, it's like sharks in the water. They aren't looking for protection, they aren't looking to make sure they get a fair shake. They're already getting their due and they want more, more, MORE! However much they get is simply not enough. Every concession they are given only motivataes them to fight harder for MORE. Their apetite knows no bounds. It does no good to give into them because they'll only shut up for a few months and then be right back asking for more.
I realize money is their only motivator, but somehow it still amazes me how brazen and shameless they are when they are trying to squeeze more money out of the consumer. It's gone so far beyond reasonable that they simply have no ground to stand on when trying to justify their demands. I think everyone has gotten tired of them crying about the starving artists. When you look back at all the concessions that have already been given, it doesn't take a genius to realize the artists never benefited from those concessions.
Why should we believe they will ever benefit from more concessions?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Next stupid question?
...are you liable for any crap that happens because your software is buggy? Standard EULA, summary, "Whatever happens to you because you're dumb enough to use our software, SUCKS BEING YOU!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Some of the people who want this technology (most of them in fact, I'd guess) are people who do literally value money more than life itself. They're the type who haven't learned what Cal Hockley did when he tried to buy a place on one of the lifeboats during the sinking of the Titanic; namely, that money isn't some kind of miraculous cure-all that can make them completely impervious to problems.
So yeah...Money to them is more important than anything else. More important than longevity, more important than having edible food or breathable air, more important than people. (Including, if they were honest, their own loved ones)
Reminds me of a businessman I heard about once who was interviewed about the cancer risk from mobile phone use. He said that even if there was a risk of brain cancer from using a mobile phone, he still would, because it was too important for, you guessed it, making money.
That's the type of mentality we're dealing with here...the type that thinks that having money is literally more important than being alive to spend it.
There is a tug of war between media corporations and the end users. The media companies would have us believe that they are protecting the artists' rights with DRM. Let us not forget that the main goal of a company is to make money for the shareholders, and that doesn't necessary include the artists who create the content. Was the world a worse place when digital media didn't exist? I don't think so. But then the audio CD was invented and media corporations made a lot more money without thinking that a disc that interacts with a computer is so much easier to copy, not only by them but by users, too. The world is being shaped by this ongoing "bat and moth" fight and it will be interesting to see what comes out of it. Personally, I would never purchase songs or videos that I cannot copy, or convert to any digital format I wish, or send a copy of to my friends. The perfect model is the printed book: I can carry it with me wherever I go, lent it to a friend, and (photo)copy parts of it no questions asked -- no proprietary, patented, DRM-protected device required. And I know that most of my friends think just like me.
Ultimately, money is more important than anything - to most people.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I might be forced at work, but there DRM harms my employer, not me (directly). And its his job to make sure we can still be productive despite DRM infested soft- and hardware.
At home, nobody can force me to do what I don't want.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Alex and I asked the Copyright Office for an exemption allowing users to remove from their computers certain DRM software that causes security and privacy harm.
they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives.
Excuse me, but I never knew the copyright office could change the law.
They're asking the wrong branch of government. The copyright office is part of the Library of Congress, it keeps records and acts in an advisory capacity to Congress. I'd be very surprised if the copyright office had the power to grant exemptions to a law Congress has passed and the President has signed.
Copyrights and their exemptions are codified in Title 17 of the US Code. Pretty sure the copyright office cannot rewrite any of this. I may be wrong.
Fuck you, you murderous, bigoted sack of pig shit. Should we slaughter the citizens of whatever dumbass nation you call home when a couple people there have stupid opinions? It's scumbag monsters like you that have to be wiped from this Earth. If you really wanted to help the world, you'd slit your wrists as soon as you can.
You're confusing individual copyright holders with the middlemen that some of them are tied to. Big difference.
Take comic strips for example. The vast majority of new comic strips (within the last 15 years), have artists that own their own copyrights. (That didn't used to be the case).
If you're saying the middle men don't add anything to the equation, well, that's wrong too. They do... it's just they don't add as much as they THINK they do.
Again, comic strips... The syndicates that 50% of the sale. The other 50% goes to the author.
Is that worth it? In this day and age on the web, hell no. In the past, when individual salesmen had to go around selling to each paper (and, yes, some still do that), then that's arguably with the "worth it" category, since that's how the newspaper business works.
Some of the copyright holders are corporations themselves, which paid the salaries of the folks that wrote the software for the months/years it took to write that software. If you're saying THAT'S unfair.... well....
This is self-obvious really, such ideology is a fundamental principle of Capitalism.
Take the situation in the USA. Trillions of dollars is being spent on roads and oil pipelines, often predominantly for wealthy corporations (with government grants increasing) while the Health service is falling to pieces especially for the moderately-poor (and having even more government funding cut).
The idea is of course that in the long run this will allow for even better Health Services (and all the rest) in the future although this is subject to A LOT of debate by a lot of clever people with good points for both sides of the argument.
But the simple fact is - Corporate interests nearly always take preference in a capitalist democratic system. So it is silly to look at one small specific part of the system and blame them for not wanting to receive government help to make profit even if it is at the expense of everyone else. We just have to hope that profit means they produce something of value in the future.
Up to this point, the "content industries" have only been able to participate in the rather boring white-collar branch of criminality. They merely want to join their brethren in the automotive, chemical, and oil industries in the murder and mayhem branches.
When people believe that those EULAs are valid, they will abstain from filing a suit, thinking they either agreed and thus have no right to sue or thinking they can't win against a company with more funds than dear god himself.
So, goal accomplished.
Should someone dare to threaten to sue, they'll dump some bucks on him (change money for the corp, but a lot for the individual) in exchange for his silence.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Whoa, folks, what are we saying? One way of looking at this is that the government is asking the recording industry to give up its "rights" to save lives and to strengthen homeland security. Tell me... If the government asked you to give up something that was legally yours (say, protection from random wiretappings) when there are "severe doubts" about whether it threatens critical infrastructure or lives? (And don't say I'm pulling this out of nowhere -- more police powers can make it easier to catch criminals who want to kill folks.)
I'm not in favor of DRM, but we can't just pull out the "it risks lives" card whenever we want to. A major part of American philosophy is that we allow people and organizations to maintain certain rights even if there's a chance that someone may die indirectly as a result.
I really hope that fifteen people reply with thorough explanations of why I'm wrong here, because I really don't want the **AA to be right...
RJNo, I'm not. In the vast majority of cases, the copyright holder is the middleman. Most people who do creative work do so for someone else. The creator doesn't retain the copyright, the person they're doing the work for does.
And for most individual creative endeavors, the copyright isn't owned by the creator, it's owned by the publisher. The assignment of copyright to the publisher has become a condition of getting paid at all.
No, in the general case the copyright holder and the middleman are one and the same.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
They say that those you will trade freedom for security deserve neither... Wonder what happens to those who will give up freedom and security at the same time?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
There's only one way out of DRM now. Someone needs to write a virus that can endanger lives and have it be protected under DRM. Time to make those people in washington really think if they want to have it on their heads that they allowed something like this to go on for this long. Yes, I know its very inhumane, but better the example be early on than later.
Given the reality of the US Navy running "windows for warships" I'm not convinced that there is much to prevent some DRM scheme mucking it up.
DRM is the act of a producer to make reproduction of their creation difficult. I don't see a problem with this any more than by putting a lock on my front door. In essence DRM a way of enforcing a contract to control the use of their product. Are "consumers" entitled to a digital creation on their own terms? If a consumer doesn't like the terms of transaction - then I suggest they have the choice of not buying it.
I also applaud DRM as it is a first step of moving away from government copyrights. Copyrights were an early tool to restrict reproduction of content. DRM is technological way to active the same end - one that doesn't require the courts to enforce.
Now the proper objection is to the DMCA - which among other things makes reversing engineering of encryption illegal. The fact that someone encrypts a message in no way should restrict my freedom to attempt to decrypt it. If they want to maintain their message private - then they need to create better encryption and/or find ways to restrict who receives the message - not use government to protect it.
Clearly the combination of DRM and DMCA is evil - but the evilness comes from DMCA not DRM.
Free Me! (http://www.freeme.org/)
We can thank a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing extension to 100 years, infinitely renewable. Maybe with Roberts as Chief Justice we'll get sensible rulings. Just don't wake up Ruth Bader-Meinhof Ginsburg.
See, conservatives aren't so hard to understand. You just have to start thinking for yourself.
I don't think it is a problem of people that hold copyrights in general.
But the description does ring true of any corporation. As made clear in the film "The Corporation", they act like psychopaths unable to either tell the difference between right and wrong, or give a damn about it when they do.
You know someone is cool when their comments have the kitchen sink (Friend, Fan, Friend of a Friend, and Foe of a Friend tags) beside their nick.
grub
Capitalism and socialism are both means-oriented philosophies. That is, the means by which an end is achieved is considered more important than the end in itself. {This goes against the Principle of Equivalence, which states that "all means to the same end are equally valid"; its corollary is "means that are not equally valid serve different ends".}
.....
To a capitalist or a socialist, obeying orders -- even if the intended aim is not achieved -- is considered more important than achieving aims.
If a high-ranking officer orders an NCO to lead troops to their certain death, but the NCO thinks on his feet and at the last minute finds a way to save the lives of his men and take the ground, he will be court-martialled and executed for gross insubordination. If the NCO instead leads his men to their death, he will be hailed posthumously as a hero, and the deaths recorded as tragic but necessary. Their deaths will not be considered the fault of the NCO for obeying orders, nor the HRO for issuing the orders, but the fault of the Enemy.
It would be better for an entire city's worth of innocent civilians to die in screaming agony, than for the law to be broken. If the law says property is more important than life, then property is more important than life. In fact, US law is quite explicit that is is OK to kill a human being in order to protect {real, physical} property. {UK law stops just shy of this. In some parts of Continental Europe, a shopkeeper must actually allow a hungry person to shoplift food, or face penalties.} Killing to protect false, "intellectual property" is surely the next logical extension of this principle. The DMCA is there to protect intellectual property, which is considered equal to physical property and thus to be protected from harmful pirates. Any damage done in the name of protecting intellectual property is surely the fault of the pirates against whom that property was being defended, and not the fault of the defenders.
That's the means-oriented view, anyway. If you take a more ends-oriented view like the filthy libertarians {disliked equally both by capitalists, for their perverse ideas about how some things can be more important than money, and by socialists for their ideas about the individual [individuals are an unhealthy concept] as an extreme case of a minority [minorities are to be protected]} then you probably think it is a little strange
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
What does the Copyright Office gain by not putting in these safeguards?
They get... a BRAND NEW CAR!
Are these corporations truly funding them?
No, they just go golfing together, at their townhouse, take anything from the fridge... if you feel lonely, just call this number, we have a tab, don't worry...
You can't take the sky from me...
Yes, it is more important. Billions of dollars are at stake here, and the artists, and label execs have mouths to feed. If you think that it isnt worth a few live in danger for all those lives that they represent, then you are simply not human. they need money to live, so this issue is nopt exactly clear cut.....
*ahem*......
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
and this is news how ? ;)
fsck 'em, nationalize their product and stop the debate.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Two opposite sides of the same idiotic coin.
In an unprecedented move, well-known terrorist Osama Bin Laden filed lawsuit in a federal court against the United States government for violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. In a press statement released by Al Qaeda this afternoon, Bin Laden alleges the infringement to have occured in the bomb defusal in the White House last week. Citing the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, Bin Laden notes that the bomb squad allegedly circumvented access controls designed to prevent illegal copies of the bomb ignition software.
"We're hoping that this lawsuit will yield considerable damages and provide an injunction that will prevent future attempts to defuse bombs.", Bin Laden states from his cave "It's the only way to stop piracy."
There's pieces of critical infrastructure being ran with Windows XP on the machines impacting it. Just because the electric utility won't kill somene outright if the power fails, it's still going to mess up a bunch of things if it gets fubared by a virus or viral DRM- even to the point of messing up the air traffic control setup when it runs out of power.
Could it happen? Yes. It very much can.
Would it happen? I don't want to find out the hard way.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Maybe a good solution to the copyright problem that you hinted at there is to not allow corporations/organisations/whatever to own a copyright on something. Only the original creator(s) of the work should get a copyright. Sure, people could license their copyrights to their company/whatever in a style similar to the Creative Commons Attribution license, but if an unspecific group of people were unable to own a copyright, the problems would slowly fix themselves.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I'm really not trying to troll, but I'm feeling very tired and read only about two third of the article (which is more than alot of people who post I presume) and there's something I couldn't figure out, maybe because of the two reasons invoked above, how DRM supposed to "threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives" and who believes it does?
You just got troll'd!
...something is bothering you when it pops up everywhere you turn. The public needs to be more aware of the lasting implications of the DMCA. It should be a household word. Last evening i was flipping through the channels and it happened to stop on "Wheel-Of-Fortune", it was time for the prize puzzle, 3 consonants and one vowel. The lady choose D-M-C-A. She solved the puzzle and i don't even remember what it was. All i remember was her choice of letters. It stuck in my head. If this keeps up the future will not belong to us, but to corporations and those that govern. My 2 cents.
Eg. a bum on the street doesn't suddenly gain the right to take products from a food packed supermarket just because he's starving to death.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
If you're the RIAA, you stop at the point where you've shot the user for failing to buy the product you offered to sell them.
Well, shot them, gored their remains and thrown a Molotov into the crib of their infant daughter.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Homer: "Take a look at your beloved candidates, they're nothing but hideous space reptiles!" (unmasks them)
Kang: "Yes, it's true, we're evil aliens, but there's nothing you can do about it. It's a two-party system! You'll have to vote for one of us!"
Guy in Crowd: "Well I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate!"
Kang: "Go ahead, throw your vote away! Hahahahahaha"
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Why does anything that requires DRM going to show up on critical systems? Why do you need to shoev that music CD into your Nuclear monitoring system?
Or am I missing something?
Look out, pal, it's the cops and they know the kinds of pictures you've been taking of the neighborhood kids.
Maybe not XP, but it's widely known that a Win2K server caused massive problems in 2004 in Los Angeles
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&hs=0pj&safe=off &client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q =LA+Air+Traffic+Pile+up+caused+by+Microsoft&spell= 1
The only thing worse than idiots who a design a safety-of-flight critical system using a Microsoft operating system, whose click-thru license obsolves the vendor of any responsibility if it's used as a component of any life-critical application, is the management process that approves such a bone-headed design!
For those who don't remember the incident, it stemmed from the fact that someone forgot to manually reboot the server running the ATC system before a critical 32-bit timer overran/wrapped. And yes, the procedures put in place for the system, developed by the Harris Corporation, called for the server to be rebooted as it approached 49 days of uptime.
Only when dealing with a government entity can a company meet the letter of a contract and still deliver an obviously flawed system. "Hey, the user manual we developed for you explicitly states you need to reboot the server before 49 days of uptime. We met the contract requirement. Ergo, not our problem!"
----
RULES DURING A YELLING MATCH
rule 3.2 = Because of confidence, the louder one is the one telling the truth, even when both have made up everything they know.
rule 3.3 = Because of thoughtfulness, the quieter one is the one telling the truth, even when both have made up everything they know.
----
They would be a social virus, extremely contagious. Too bad I'm not certain if one of them is a woman, I'd love to call them a mad cow.
But I don't live in that country, I get my news from the Daily Show, love USA hamburgers and hate USA car salesmen. Pick one, decide it's 100% of my entire being, then judge me.
How many trees do you own? How much oxygen do you use without paying? So, what your saying is that you just willy nilly go around getting stuff for free. Unless you own enough plant life to support your breathing habit, you simply stop breathing, or you start paying for all of your oxygen, makeing the statement of "And a lot of people just want shit for free." as a way of insulting those who don't believe in copyright is simply hypocritical.
Lets face it, at least oxygen is a tangable item. If I take it and use it, you no longer have access to it.
the kinda people who the word applies to have been so bad for so long that the word now carries a negative connotation all by itself. You don't call someone you like a "copyright holder" anymore then you call them a "Politician". You use artist, or Statesman, or something along those lines.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"RIAA Wants You DEAD!"
"Recording industry kills off clientele"
or "DRM Fatal" (or at least "DRM harmful to health")?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
And I said "maybe Roberts." If he turns out conservative, it'll be the first conservative act for Shrub.
And there are lots of conservatives in the Democratic Party, except that ABCCBSCNNNBC don't ever let them on the air. The only Democrats that get airtime are the Carl Levin/Al Sharpton/Charlie Rangel/Louie Farakhan types.
> Why does anything that requires DRM going to show up on critical systems?
Sooner or later, someone is going to make a medical device or control system that uses hard crypto to protect its firmware. The device will pass acceptance testing and then fail in the field, maybe where something couldn't be started or shut down due to some cryptographically controlled key that failed.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Wrong...
t mln ux+has+fewer+flaws/2100-1002_3-5489804.html
Linux has fewer bugs per 1000 lines of code than any rival.
http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,66022,00.h
http://news.com.com/Security+research+suggests+Li
etc...
What you're describing is a work for hire. In a work for hire, the person who is creating the creative work is not paying to produce it and is taking none of the financial risk of producing it. The "middleman" he's working for is doing all that. It's pretty obvious in most of those cases that the copyright should indeed go to the "middleman." The creator is hedging by trading ownership of the copyright for a secure salary or contract payment. If I were so confident that the software I create would sell, I would quit my job, start up my own company, and own the copyright to my own software. Instead, I join a company, they pay me regardless of the success of my software coding (more or less), and they get the copyright.
The exception is the music industry, which has lobbied and finangled copyright law so they can own the copyright while the artists pay for creating the work. The artists pay for creating the music (production costs come out of the artists' cut of the artists' royalties), yet the studios own the copyright.
Wasn't this on /. just a few months ago?
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
Well, maybe he should.
What a strange world we live in where we let people starve to death...
This week's US News & World Report reports that US companies spend more on tort legislation than on R&D. Yeah I think we have our priorities screwed up.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
I disagree with you on that. I don't think work for hire clauses are ever fair. Sure, they're taking on financial risk. But if it weren't for the creator, there'd be nothing to invest in. The most that should be allowed is a very limited time (less than 5 years, probably less than 2 years) exclusive distribution right.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Although you missed the most important monopoly of all in this case: copyright. There's nothing inherent in "capitalism" that says the person who comes up with a particular string of bits first is entitled to sue anyone else who makes a copy without permission. Capitalist notions of property don't apply to numbers, sounds, patterns, or ideas.
Copyright is a case of the government interfering with capitalism for the benefit of certain businesses. In a pure capitalist system, anyone could print a book with any words in it, or sell a CD with any music on it, without needing permission from any third party; authors and musicians could still make money, but they'd do it by charging up front for the act of creating, rather than for copies.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
You are correct by this, which is what makes me feel so sick.
I don't understand why it is that I can see the illogic of this, yet others, for whatever reason, cannot. Many so-called people seem to have no qualms about killing another individual (or even a group), yet these self-same persons are fearful of (or abhor) their own death. It is like these people lack the ability to project their subjective viewpoint into objective space. They are quite literally unable to "put themselves into the other person's shoes", so to speak.
Yet this is considered "basic humanity"? Does that mean - because I can see where if I don't want to die and I don't want someone to kill me and that thus, someone else may not want me to kill them - that I do not possess "basic humanity", that I am therefore somehow less than human? Is it more human to be irrational and emotional, rather than rational and logical? If so, then why do we (as a whole) refuse to accept we are nothing more or better than animals? Surely animals tend more toward the "irrational" and "emotional" (better known as "instinctual"), than reason.
Why can I see this (and I realize I am by no means alone in this, but that we are a very small minority)? Why must I see this? It is a curse I and others hold. Sometimes I wish to rid myself of it, knowing I cannot. I also know that I would be the lesser for it should that happen.
Society seems to drill into its members that rationalism and logic are to be frowned upon, and beaten out. Should you continue to tread this path, you will be ostracized. You will be ridiculed. Society then upholds greatness in irrationality. The insanity is that society at the same time (societal cognitive dissonance?) knows it cannot live without the rational and the logical, for both concepts are needed in order for society to exist - technology, education, food production, art, etc - cannot exist without some form of rationalism and logic. Without rationalism and logic, we would be mere animals.
This is somehow surpressed and made to appear to be wrong, though, when it comes to killing one another. Insanity.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
No, this is more like edible plants are patented and he has to break the law to grow some carrots by and for himself.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
in the case of your analogy, the DMCA equivalent would be that the store would now be encased in a chamber that made it impossible for the bum to throw a rock throught the window, and then everyone who goes to said store would also be forced to walk through a metal detector and security clearance station where national ID cards are checked.
In order to be certified for mission critical use, you also have to use certified technicians/parts, etc. And it's not like a non-certified tech is going to break out a signal analyzer and start working the bits back to source code to determine what is going wrong in the field.
These things are supposed to operate a black boxes... no one is supposed to tinker inside them. If it breaks, replace it with a new one... As long as it is certified to do the same job and connect the same way in the same system, I doubt anyone cares about the internals.
As for your contention of what happens when the DRM breaks, that seems to me to be the same as what happens if any other part of the device breaks. ie, That's part of certification. What are the failure scenarios? How does it behave in failure scenarios? What does the watch dog do when things freak out? How operational is it without the broken components, etc...
I still don't see a problem with DRM in mission critical apps. Heck, given certification requirements, this might even be a good use of DRM... to cryptographically sign components to ensure that only certified parts are used.
I don't really know the field, so I could be off... but that's my impression. Anyone disabuse me?
Note: This in no way goes towards DRM being at all proper for use in my music. I don't believe the public is educated enough about the licenses involved in purchasing DRMd music to be able to accept the agreements, so it should default to "I should be able to play any music I pay for on any device I choose..."
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
I disagree with you on that. I don't think work for hire clauses are ever fair.
In a free market that's between the business and the person considering the contract. Third parties, such as yourself, don't have any call interfering in the process in a pseudo-parental fasion. You *don't* know any better than the person who's actually being offered the contract; you aren't any wiser or smarter, nor do you have the right to strip others of the ability to make the decision for themselves.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Be the biggest asshole you can possibly be to everyone around you at all times. Helping people hurts them. Hurting people helps them. Never feel shame. And always wrap yourself in a cloak of smug self-righteous virtue, even while you're kicking some poor helpless slob in the teeth.
It's a really good philosophy for sociopaths.
Linux also has more COCKS UP YOUR ASS than any rival!
It's not a life-or-death matter, but I won't use certain software that requires a dongle, or that is tied to a specific piece of hardware. I'm thinking specifically of software like Cubase. In twenty, or fifty years, I don't want to be locked out of my creative works just because a company is out of business or because a certain machine is not available. If I've preserved a copy of the software and copies of my data (MY responsibility), I want to be able to use it in whatever emulated system is available. Hard crypto on the copy protect system will make that impossible, and ultimately, will abridge my copyrights in order to protect someone else's. I refuse to do business with anyone who plays that game.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
There is not, and never has been, a free market. Arguments about the characteristics of this mythical beast are in the same category as arguments about whether unicorns have beards. (Medieval depictions usually show them. This doesn't say anything about actual, as opposed to fictitious, unicorns. Some argue that the unicorn was based around tales of rhinoceros..but a rhinoceros isn't a unicorn.)
I could equally well argue that in a free market there could be no exchange of money, as money is a fiat currency, but only an exchange of actual valuables. There isn't a genuine free market to look at so you could prove me wrong.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Breach Of Contract".
If you signed a contract that doesn't specify that it terminates at a particular time, then you can't just arbitrarily cancel it because you realize you should have asked for more money. You will find yourself paying damages as a result of lost profit, damaged reputation, things like that -- and maybe a hefty punitive fine that equates to "We're charging you all this money as a lesson to not do that again".
i am a soviet space shuttle
Gotcha... well that takes it right out of "Mission Critical" ratings then... different discussion. With Life/Death systems, it becomes a legislative issue. With Business Critical systems, the management in charge needs to clearly factor in the risk of not being able to run software later. If something is live key/date based, and you have to restore to an older state in 6 years due to some Document Retention/Legal requirement, you might just be hosed. It becomes a value/risk decision, not a legislative decision.
> Gotcha... well that takes it right out of "Mission Critical" ratings then...
If you say so, but I'm one of those hotheaded liberals who thinks that Constitutional Rights are on the very short list of things worth fighting and dying for... So when something stands between me and the copyright control of my creative works, I do tend to look at it as a life or death issue -- death of the person unfortunate enough to try to abridge my rights that is.
I really do see the copy protection issue in this way. My copyrights are of at least equal importance to the software publishing company's copyrights, and ought to be elevated (since I'm a person, and they are a corporation). So protecting their software (for example) is swinging their fist, but my nose (my own control of my media) is in the way.
The whole copyright/copy protection/distribution argument is usually on the wrong end of the telescope for me -- I'm seeing it all from the point of view of the copyright holder who wants distribution, not from the media corporation who wants protection, or from the consumer who wants to be able to copy and distribute things without regard to the control of others.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
So, you're saying Linux has really bloated code with lots of excess lines that contribute nothing to functionality (and thus bugs)?
Any metric that involves "lines of code" is automatically suspect, simple because a "line of code" is a highly variable unit. Such metrics are useful at best to comparing one version of one product to itself. Comparisons between different products, much less different companies or fields or languages, are likely to be garbage.
That's what you think.
Once upon a time money was no object and ATC systems were designed and built as one-off systems with rediculous levels of both quality and redundancy. In the last 15-20 years, however, the bean counters and engineers have realized that the price/performance curve gets very steep at some point, beyond which you add a lot of cost for no appreciable benefit. Modern ATC system design takes this into account, and divides the work into chunks that can be processed in parallel using commodity hardware. It's just like the shift from monolithic mainframes to clusters for high-performance computing.
Heterogenous networks are also typically safer as a single design flaw (in hardware or software) won't kill everything at once.
The introduction of WinNT machines into ATC was initially done to *increase* safety by providing an easily deployed backup system for the aging monoliths. Yes, the Windows OS has a lot of problems, but in a sufficiently large/parallel system you can work around them. Over the last 10 years, the people writing ATC software for the Windows platform have acquired a lot of experience and there are a lot of situations where people are comfortable using Windows-based systems as the front-line solution.
The problem with "IP" is that we have two choices. 1) Ideas are property, and are owned by the creator of that idea, and 2) Ideas are not property, and no one ownes them. Now, if number 2 is correct, then copyright is a travisty. If number 1 is correct, then people should be stopped from using other peoples property without permission. Since I have yet to see a single idea that is not built on another persons "property", the whole idea of "IP" becomes hypocritical. Apparently we just picked a date, and decided to rob everybody with "IP" that predates that date.
Here is a solution: Every piece of "IP" should have to be researched so that permission can be granted from those who the new "IP" stole old "IP" from. This should also be required of the old "IP" for older "IP". If the owners of the root ideas in a piece of "IP" cannot be located, then the owners of the new "IP" sould loose all rights to enforce their "IP".
"Providing the appropriate environment is the most challenging part of keeping scorpions. The proper heat and humidity is vital in preventing problems. Emperors can be kept alone or in groups. If keeping more than one, a larger tank will be necessary, and a good rule of thumb is to have at least a couple more hiding spots than you have scorpions so they can each have their "space."" - Scorpions as Pets
Reduce, reuse, cycle
I noticed quite a long time ago that some are positively obsessed with their DRMs and other such copy protection concepts. They are just positively terrified a few people will make copies and cost them a few cents. It's not so much that DRM comes first as it is that their money comes first, even before the lives of others. They've become so greedy that they watch pennies, but, if you're always watching the pennies the bigger bills start to slip away. Maybe someday someone will figure it out, but, unfortunately, it usually just makes them worse since they see themselves with less and immediately assume a few more pennies they weren't watching hard enough must have slipped off. These people sicken me.
The US (and other countries) voting systems allowed negative votes.
So if you dislike a particular candidate, and don't really care about the others, then you can vote _against_ the candidate. Which counts as a minus one to the candidate's vote total.
The candidate with the most positive or least negative score wins.
With the current system if you dislike a particular candidate you can't vote +1 to all the rest.
And even if you could, I argue that allowing negative votes is more satisfying because it provides for a scenario where a candidate you dislike can end up having negative votes (even if she/he wins!).