Slashdot Mirror
Europe To Block ACTA Disconnect Provisions
superglaze writes "The European Commission is 'not supporting and will not accept' any attempt to have ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) force countries to disconnect people for downloading copyrighted material, a spokesman for the new EU trade commissioner has said. All the signs are that the new commission, which took office earlier this month, intends to take a hard-line stance against US proposals for a filesharing-related disconnection system. 'Three strikes' is allowed in EU countries, but not mandated by the European government itself, and it looks like the new administration wants to keep it that way. From trade commission spokesman John Clancy, quoted in ZDNet UK's article: '[Ac ta] has never been about pursuing infringements by an individual who has a couple of pirated songs on their music player. For several years, the debate has been about what is "commercial scale" [piracy]. EU legislation has left it to each country to define what a commercial scale is and this flexibility should be kept in ACTA.'"
... but there's really now way all these countries are going to agree on everything these treaties propose. Some portions may even be contrary to a country's current laws, let alone their culture's mindset or philosophy.
OK, here you go:
Big Corporation: Open Source is bad for everyone.
Open Source Advocate: No, monopolies are bad for everyone.
BC: Open Source leads to piracy.
OSA: No, monopolies lead to piracy.
BC: It's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
OSA: No, it's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
Hopefully that will save us about 50 posts in this thread.
Big Corporation: We use the best tool for the job, be it a free tool or a pay for use one.
Open Source Advocate: No, you should always use open source.
BC: No, sometimes commercial apps are better than the free alternative.
OSA: No, use OSS all the time, no matter what!
BC: It's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
OSA: No, it's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
This is more what I see here on slashdot. Somewhere in the middle is the common ground.
Sent from your iPad.
Most imaginary piracy is of US imaginary products. The EU has far less to lose in terms of jobs and tax revenue - i.e. swill for the Brussels trough - than the US.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
http://digg.com/tech_news/Bill_Gates_Piracy_Confession
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Hopefully, if I am accused: and eventually exonerated it will result in a civil suit against the accusee where the lawyers get rich as usual and I get a pittance. Enough of those costs is called a "feedback" mechanism. Something that appears to only be in favor of one party right now: corporations.
Shh.
Actually, most of the time the best tool for the job is open-source. They care about price, you know.
Also, people need to proselytize, or else OSS gets nowhere.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
Jeff Raikes, head of the company's business group, said at a recent investor conference that while the company is against piracy, if you are going to pirate software, it hopes you pirate Microsoft software. --- http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070312/165448.shtml
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
No, companies don't really care if they need to pay a few hundred to get the programmer Visual Studio and increase his productivity by 1500% instead of using the free Dev-C++.
Same thing as most companies working with graphics aren't shy to buy Photoshop instead of frustrating their workers with GIMP.
All this means is that international lobbying doesn't have a nice easy single point they can go to in order to get similar laws to be enacted in all EU member states.
Being as there is no EU-wide proposal to explicitly ban member states from imposing internet disconnection, it follows that the lobbyists will talk to individual countries instead.
Despite this, the UK takes a line that typically follows the US one. Our govt sees no problem in disconnecting users without anything like a 'trial'.
Somewhere in the middle is the common ground.
The common ground may be what's politically realistic in the short term, that's just a given. Best solution is usually something else however. In the case of IP, it would involve aiming to modify laws. In my opinion, restricting the validity of IP would be a good start compromise.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Big Corporation: have a nice entertaining trip with our lobbyists while you think about our point of view
Open Source Advocate: Hey! Wait!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Let he who is without copyright infringement cast the first takedown notice.
Big Corporation: Open Source is bad for everyone.
Open Source Advocate: No, monopolies are bad for everyone.
Politician: Open source is good for the poor! It's free! Think of the children!
Big Corporation: Damn.
Open Source Advocate: Well..... (shrug)..... whatever works. Open source is good for the children! Free Ubuntu or Puppy Linux for everyone! Goto www.freeubuntu.com or www.freepuppy.com for your free computer OS.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Something is wrong with the way we keep using the phrase "downloading copyrighted material" like it implies something illegal is going on.
The Linux kernel is copyrighted. Me downloading it is not illegal.
If I buy a book for my Kindle and download it, that's not illegal either.
But they are examples of downloading copyrighted material.
There needs to be a language adjustment such that we use "illegally downloading copyrighted material" instead.
While you're right, that isn't really the reason in most cases. Else, explain to me the success of SAP, which lowered productivity and increased overhead in most companies it was employed in.
The reason why commercial software is successful is simply that software is not bought by the people who use it the most. Software, like pretty much anything in a large company, is bought by some sort of "buy crap" department, who does often not have any idea what exactly they're doing. They're responsible for buying car spare parts, printing paper, office furniture, computer hardware, cleaning detergents and of course software. Even assuming they know what they're doing in one area (9 out of 10 times NOT, because their expertise is in business administration, for good reason), they will be out of their league most time when they're tasked with buying something.
So they will go for brand names. You can't go wrong with Photoshop because everyone uses it and so you can argue the expense if someone comes and complains. Same applies to Windows and VS. It's used in other big companies and while it may not be the "100% right tool", it also won't be the wrong tool. It's not something you will be questioned about.
Buying "commercial brands" is a way to cover your ass for the "buy crap" department. They don't buy it because it's the right decision, they buy it because it's almost certainly not the wrong one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I live in Sao Paulo, in a middle class neighborhood where the law sort of works, work in a cyber cafe. I have had policemen, who can barely double click an icon, walk in insinuating they will confiscate everything because there is pirate software. They are often paid to go away, they want money. A cybercafe owner told me he once had all hard drives of the place confiscated for months, because they found a few mp3 files on hard drives. Been to places where downloading *all* mp3 files is banned. All access to CD burners or pendrives is blocked out of fear of the copyright police. Cybercafes typically have no software at all on workstations, only duly-licensed windows xp, costing half a month's pay for the typical worker, and OpenOffice. Nothing else. So what I see is, copyright law results in driving access to digital information underground. Linux is rare in private-run cybercafe's, because of ActiveX, MSN messenger, and user culture hooked on ms-windows. Government-sponsored net cafes do run linux, and are full, mostly because they are free, but there are not many of those. Cybercafes on the outskirts of town, poorer neighborhoods, have all kinds of software, all pirated. everything in these places is pirated, the net connection, the electricity, even the land usually has no title. Result --- piracy = free intelectual property = low costs = competitive advantage. Go China!
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
It's not even that.
I was for while the CTO of a large company. Never again, but that's another story. You often have no choice but to buy their crap. Even if you know that some OSS tool would do the trick better, easier and of course cheaper. Nobody wants change in their office world. They are already used to the previous version of whatever you get to buy. So whatever change you plan to employ will be met with utmost resistance, on all levels, from your CEO to the post office grunt. Even if the change meant they'd have to trade their wash board for a washer/dryer combo that fills itself, they'd complain that there is no wash board so they have no idea how to use it.
You can now either use a lot of effort to overcome that resistance (which sometimes borders on sabotage) and risk being the scapegoat should the tinyest bit go wrong, or just rubberstamp the purchase of the next version of the (maybe even inferior) tool you had for the last 20 years, which will cause at least as many headaches but nobody will complain about that.
Be honest! Which one will you choose?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I would not call Ubuntu "just as good as Windows 7" for the same reason that I would not call a pry bar "just as good as a hammer." They are similar and can both be used for hammering nails in and pulling nails out, but the pry bar is better at prying nails out (and a bunch of other things) but a hammer is still better and hamming nails in.
If you tell somebody that Ubuntu is just as good as Windows, the person will expect Ubuntu to be just as good as Windows at every single thing he did with Windows, and will end up thinking Ubuntu sucks.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I imagine most warez groups will be quite insulted to have their work branded as counterfeiting... Counterfeit goods are typically cheap (often inferior) copies which are falsely sold as originals...
Warez on the other hand, at least the kind you download, is quite clearly labelled as warez and often branded by the group who ripped it, and is usually a superior product to the original work as the warez copies have drm schemes and other nasties removed.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The war on terror has always been in Europe, it was just a secret...
If a programmers productivity goes up 1500% because you switched editors/IDE's, maybe the company should consider hiring better programmers.
Only 15 times? Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least. Yes, programmer productivity can vary by an order of magnitude, but I've personally seen a team of 7 engineers get more done with Linux than 40+ could do with Windows.
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year. I, however, work in a company where anyone who *can't* write 10k+ per year is at serious risk of getting fired. Here, the difference between editors really can make or break your career. And yes, there is a tremendous difference in the amount of work you can get done with an editor which supports mouse-driven copy/paste, and one that does not. Most people assume editor choice is a matter of preference. Most people don't keep track of their productivity metrics. I, however, do, and I've seen a dramatic difference in the amount of work I'm able to get done. It's not so much that I can't do my job in other editors, but rather, that other editors force an inefficient working paradigm on the user. Consider the difference between someone working in Emacs who has to open a different shell window and grep through header files, vs. an IDE that automatically cross-references the source tree and displays the definitions as the user browses the file. Both coders will get code written, but the second will get it done much faster than the first, all other things being equal.
Granted, a poor programmer won't be made great by a great IDE, but a good programmer with professional ethics is going to insist on having the tools needed to do the job in the most efficient manner. It's not whining to ask for the proper tools; rather, it's foolish to expect good results when one uses the wrong tool for the job. It's not 1970 anymore, and the days of programmers ruling the roost are long gone. Business now expects *everything* to be faster-cheaper-better, and you can't deliver that writing code with ed.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I personally would go with the pry bar. You never know when there will be a resonance cascade.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
Goto www.freeubuntu.com or www.freepuppy.com for your free computer OS.
Damn! I was really hoping that www.freepuppy.com was a real site. What a letdown.
A few months ago, I saw a cute sign in a store warning visitors that unaccompanied children would be given an espresso and a free puppy.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
To the US media industry, piracy is anything that does not make them money. Making your own YouTube video. That's piracy. Using open source software: piracy. In the Demolition Man future even a snug with the misses will be piracy if you don't use their DRMed interface gadget (which pay on a per use and per monthly basis).
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
Open Source leads to free software for society, which is a public good. It's the equivalent of charity.
Piracy undermines the ability of software developers to create the software that the public wants to use. The long term consequences is to deprive the public of software by undermining the engines that create it.
While it would be nice to believe that open-source would step in to fill the nitch left by piracy-bankrupted companies, I have a hard time believing that open-source, through volunteer effort, would create the variety and quality of software produced by the closed-source software businesses. Can anyone honestly claim that the video game industry would have anywhere near the quality and variety that it does if it was purely an open source effort? Would anything similar to WOW, Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead 2, Modern Warfare, etc, etc exist? I strongly doubt it. Yeah, I know open-source advocates are going to hate this post. If you want to disagree with me, then you should first run this mental test: think of the top one hundred closed-source games and compare their quality and depth to the top one hundred open-source games (preferably ones that aren't clones of closed-source ones).
It will be nice when the day comes when open source has taken over and all of this will be a moot point.
Not likely. We should note that, as Bruce Perens and others pointed out the the open-source court decision story the other day, for open-source software to stay open and available requires that it be copyrighted (and/or patented), and accompanied by the right license that's been vetted by knowledgeable lawyers. Corporations like to treat open source as public domain, which permits them to make their own claim for it, sue you for infringement, and bankrupt you with legal expenses.
Of course, the idea of disconnecting people "for downloading copyrighted material", as the summary puts it, has its own built-in threat to all of us. Note, for example, the slashdot correctly places at the bottom of discussion pages: "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster." This is literally correct in the US, the EU, and most other countries. Everything you're reading here is copyrighted. This message is copyrighted by me, by default, since I didn't explicitly declare it to be public domain.
You don't have written permission from me or anyone else to download this message or any other message on the page you're reading. So according to the proposed rule, you should be disconnected for unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material. Pretty much everything on every web page is copyrighted, with very few exceptions for quotes of ancient text that's out of copyright. So the proposed rule simply says that anyone using the Internet can legally be disconnected at any time by anyone in power. The charge of downloading copyrighted material will always be trivially true, unless the "copyrighted by default" law is repealed (or "fair use" is radically expanded and enforced).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The following excerpts of text are taken from a person's comments in a (then) ongoing discussion in comments section of a CNN news piece about digital 'piracy'. The guy
was arguing with copyright activists and shills, and have made innumerable good points to the ultimate end of silencing almost the most shrill shill. i have taken the
liberty of gathering his comments, and i will be posting it on discussion in slashdot in relevant subjects, so that it will help many people who are having difficulties
in understanding how flawed the copyright business and intellectual property is, and how little sympathy one should have for those perpetrating and enforcing them.
These comments are krehator's comments. they are listed in a last to first fashion, the first comments being at the bottom of the text, and the last comment he made being
on top (directly below
==
The truth anti-pirates don't want anyone to believe? I'll use myself as an example. I have been a pirate for decades. I know more about pirating and the facts behind it
than any of the anti-pirates on this sound-off who spew fallacies without any experience.
I download and share movies, software, and rarely music. I'm not a big music fan but I will admit that music is highly pirated. I have no interest in pirated books and
honestly have never witnessesed a big demand for it, outside of students in college. Plus, there is a lot of free material on the Internet which is better. I also use a
lot of freeware "open source" software, because it is quickly becoming better than commercial products.
I support freeware and open source and I do donate to those causes because they EARN my loyalty. Every Operating Systems I have installed is legal. I use Linux
distributions on many of my computers, instead of Windows, because only computer dummies pay for faulty products! Microsoft should be sued for knowingly selling faulty
products. However, according to anti-pirates, businesses are allowed to do that. Only people must live up to moral standards. Wait a minute......aren't businesses
operated by people? Hmmmmm.
Anyway,
I pirate (directly through me) approximately 100 gigabytes of mixed data each month. It varies depending on what is out there. I don't get it from torrents, P2P, or web
sites. Those are not the most reliable, secure, fastest, or primary routes. Those are distractions for novice computer users and the media looking for a story. The
primary routes for pirated data cannot be stopped. Copy protection is not designed to stop hardcore pirates. It is meant to stop the Average Joe from easily sharing with
his friend. A lot of pirating work is done to enable the Average Joe, who then initiates a wave of sharing. Look, some things are true even if you don't want to believe
it.
The deeper inner workings of the pirate community are secured better than the launch codes for missile silos. The people getting caught are low level people who get
replaced in minutes. Anti-pirates have no idea what they are talking about when they try to uncover the real pirate world or describe our motivations. They are akin to
cavemen describing an airplane as an "evil hungry fire bird". Most of what anti-pirates and the industry tells the media and consumers is smoke and mirrors to defend
their own greedy immorality. Pirates get labeled as evil, while greedy and dishonest companies play victim. "oh poor us, we can only make 1 billion dollars this year".
Shyeah, that wins support from consumers and small businesses living on a real budget (laugh).
Of all the data I download per month, 80% is not even for me, and will never be used by me. It is shared with others like me who may or may not value what I have. Of the
20% that interests me, only a very small portion will be deemed as worthy of keeping, after being thoroughly tested. I may find a single good program out of a 1,000 I
download. If that program is superb, and provides m
Read radical news here
> mouse-driven copy/paste
If that's how you rack up 10k lines of code then it's surely all shite, of the really smelly variety.
> someone working in Emacs
In our shop the emacen are also the top performers... by miles. Not having to take one hand of the keyboard all the time is a major time saver.
Oh, and beyond the IDEs... one word, valgrind. Open, free... and has improved our code to the point where we have literally saved millions of dollars in hardware cost... we quite simply did not have to buy more gear just to grow our business... and virtually all of the crappy code that was identified was the product of cut-n-paste zombies working away on VS as if they were filling out a form rather than crafting a system.
>>>This is more what I see here on slashdot. Somewhere in the middle is the common ground.
Yes middle ground is better. I like to use the commercial Windows OS because it is the "default" OS that everyone uses and very well-supported (I'm still using Windows 98!). But I use open-source for everything else because I'm too cheap to open my wallet, and don't see the need to buy software when OSS alternatives are "good enough" for web browsing, word processing, movie watching, and so on.
trivia -
My first word processor was RUNscript typed out of a magazine. It wasn't pretty but it was good enough for book reports. I later upgraded to GEOSwrite and all my teachers were amazed by the pretty fonts. "Is this from a Macintosh?" "No Mrs. Johns... it's from a $500 computer* called a Commodore 64." "Wow that's a lot cheaper than the $4000 I spent on my Mac." Ahhhh... nostalgia. :-)
*
* $200 for the computer plus $300 for the floppy drive
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
At no point in your rambling, barely coherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered proper formatting. Everyone in this thread is now angrier for having scrolled through it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Only 15 times? Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least.
Indeed Visual Studio is orders of magnitude better than edlin, which is orders of magnitude better than flipping dip switches on the front panel.
These are clearly relevant comparisons.
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year. I, however, work in a company where anyone who *can't* write 10k+ per year is at serious risk of getting fired.
I think they meant written and fully debugged, like 1000 lines of good code a year. I've also heard 20 lines a day of fully debugged code a day, which sounds more reasonable.
Personally, I'd run screaming from any job that looked at how many lines of code I've written as a measure of my worth as an employee, rather than how much I get done regardless of the amount of lines of code it took.
And yes, there is a tremendous difference in the amount of work you can get done with an editor which supports mouse-driven copy/paste, and one that does not.
LOL, that's a good one.
Consider the difference between someone working in Emacs who has to open a different shell window and grep through header files
That's funny, I use emacs, and I just hit ^C-s-g to see definitions. Can't remember the last time I had to grep.
Business now expects *everything* to be faster-cheaper-better, and you can't deliver that writing code with ed.
Yeah, I can see how given a choice between Visual Studio and ed you'd go with Visual Studio. That is a decision I agree with 100%.
But seriously, VC is a fine IDE. The difference between it and other fine IDEs is not an order of magnitude.
The enemies of Democracy are
Actually, I'm working at home right now, so nobody but my ISP (and the NSA and google ;-) can see what I'm doing online. It's becoming fairly common for companies to save IT expenses by having everyone who can work at home. It's sorta like a return to the bad old days of "cottage industry", where most people work at home and are responsible for all their expenses, but the megacorps that control the "market" are in charge^Wcontrol of the distribution of goods (and profits).
I do have a few demos on my home machine's web server of the fun things that can be done to you by a site you visit if you have javascript enabled. I tend to visit unknown sites with firefox, where I have NoScript and a few other blockers installed.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I was always trying to push hard against such musical chairs rotations. The argument that usually sealed the deal was that people are people and will try to stay in contact with collegues they like. The 1% productivity push because you move A closer to B because he needs the resource B provides more than C who he switched offices with is nulled the moment he goes two floors down for his coffee break to hang out with his old buddies.
And considering that people made more coffee breaks than trips to the printer (yes, it was a government job, how could you tell?)...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.