The problem is that CSS is a Trade Secret. What this means is that it is an essential part of their business that no one else is allowed to use. That sounds very similar to a patent, except in one very pertinent area: a patent is registered, and enters public domain after a certain amount of time.
No, it's not that similar to a patent. With a patent, no one is allowed to produce/use the patented device, period. With a trade secret, unless you steal the secret from the company, it's legal to use. That means reverse engineering, or even blind luck, is perfectly acceptable.
The legal ramifications are that when you have a trade secret, you have responsibility for protecting it. Once someone reverse-engineers it out of your product, the cat is out of the bag (and many other cliches), even in a legal sense. If the reverse-engineering was legal and legitimate, the trade secret is no longer.
AFAIK, the only argument for the reverse engineering being illegitimate is the license agreement. I hope the idea that you can protect any trade secret from reverse engineering simply by forcing all consumers to agree not to do so is seen as bogus.
This is one major reason that I oppose the DMCA.
Yes, even if they lost trade secret protection, they could still continue the claim of DMCA violations, in which trade secrecy has no bearing.
As for the watermarking, you can either ignore it (your MP3 will still play)
The watermark is not intended to keep you from playing the audio, it's intended to discourage distribution in the first place by making the purchaser of the SDMI music traceable. Of course, people could buy SDMI music with stolen credit cards and distribute that, but they'll probably just buy the CD and rip that. CDs are not going to be phased out anytime soon.
What makes you think that people putting this stuff out over Gnutella or Freenet will in any fashion be using a credit card or bank account that can be traced back to them? Were you SDMI suppporters born this stupid or what?
He didn't say he supported the SDMI or thought it would work, I think he was just frustated with all the people who are thinking that watermarking encrypts the song.
But then again, it could be feasibly possible to add thousands of different watermarks, making it impossible to tell who pirated it.
Only if the watermarks you put in in correspond to actual people. I assume that the watermarks will be some sort of ID number, not your name in ASCII, so you won't know which numbers have actually been assigned. I you just make up watermarks at random, you'd probably have no better chance of making one that corresponds to a person than if you made up credit card numbers at random.
Re:Code as free speech? It won't hold up....
on
NYT On DeCSS Case
·
· Score: 1
If code were to be protected as free speech, and law is implemented in code, that opens the door for unjust and unethical laws to be passed (written) and subsequently protected by the first amendment.
Think about this for a second. Laws in this country are written in English. Unlike code, there has never been any question that English writing is protected by the First Amendment. And yet...laws are struck down all the time.
See, unconstitional laws are passed all the time. I don't think there's even any mechanism to force them to be removed from the books, even if they are ruled unconstitutional. However, it is illegal to enforce an unconstitional law, because enforcement is not speech.
Hello? This is the IETF, not the government. Itrace would only be implemented by people setting it up on routers they own or operate. Some people seem to be under the impression that because the government cannot infringe on their free speech or privacy, their ISP must let them do whatever they want.
This will help prevent things similar to the attack on kuro5hin.
I thought the attack or kuro5hin involved flooding the submission queue. Since submissions are presumably made using TCP connections, they can't be made using spoofed IP addresses, so itrace would not be helpful.
Oh, and Napster isn't being shutdown, they're just being asked to not allow the sharing of commercial music... Simple greps will take care of that...
Actually, IIRC, the plaintiffs have stated that they are unable to provide Napster with a comprehensive list of the music they hold copyright to. I don't know if this is still true, but if it is, it seems wrong to force Napster to shutdown in such a roundabout way, since the only way to avoid a shutdown would be to have a comprehensive list of music the plaintiffs hold copyright on.
Interestingly, Judge Marilyn Patel, who issued this injunction, is the same judge that ruled that source code is speech when Bernstein challenged the encryption export restrictions a few years back. See this EFF press release.
I believe it is generally the case that plaintiffs must post bond before an injunction can be issued, so that the defendants will receive compensation for damages if the injunction is not upheld. IANAL.
Okay, so we fought the Nazis for the right to have a capitalist society whose successful members strive to do everything the Nazis wanted to do to the human race.
Successful capitalists strive to have entire ethnic groups systematically murdered in concentration camps? Your exaggeration is obnoxiously insulting.
Genetic manipulation run amok will allow certain people to be decidedly superior than other people. You have a choice -- genomics or equality.
Are you under some sort of delusion that people are genetically equal now?
One of the key differences is that with abortion, you don't have a human being who's life you affected. The aborted embryo never becomes a human being. OTOH, the altered embryo DOES become a human being, one able to look back and say "Why did you do this to me? What or who would I have been had you not done this?" What if your genetic manipulation has some terrible, unintended consequence?
However, children have always been able to look back and question the decisions their parents made when they raised them. For one obvious example, "why didn't you ever spend time with me as a kid?" Parents already have substantial power over how their children turn out. Allowing them to make decisions about their children's environment can have an impact on their children's lives, just like genetic engineering would.
If we continue acting like animals, determined to get any advantage we can get over our fellows, then there's a good chance we'll all perish -- in designer plagues, in unforseen genetic damage, or in good old fashioned caste warfare. Aren't just just as remiss as a parent if your meddling insures that they and their world die in a bloody conflict?
Designer plagues are only vaguely connected to getting genetic engineering for one's kids, and I fail to see how the latter will cause the former.
Unforseen genetic damage will obviously not cause us all to perish unless we do something stupid like ensure genetic engineering is available for everyone. This is actually a good argument in favor of letting the rich use it on their own children first: it gives society a free batch of guinea pigs.
As for caste warfare, I think that genetic engineering would only provide a marginal increase to the already huge gap between the poorest nations and the richest nations. That gap is a problem unrelated to genetic engineering. As for intra-national conflict, I find it unlikely in the extreme that class warfare would erupt in regions like Europe and the US where people could afford genetic engineering, because the minimum standard of living is already so high. People don't care that others can afford extravagance as long as they are reasonably well off themselves.
One of the major tenants of western democracy is equality. Don't try to tell me that you're more equal than others.
No, one of the major tenets of western democracy is equality before the law, not unqualified equality. If unqualified equality were so important, we should presumably embark on a genetic engineering project to make everyone identical.
I'd also like to point out that if a society in which parents were successfully prevented from giving their children an advantage were to last for an extremely long time, parents' natural affection for their children would be eliminated or reduced, as there would be no reproductive advantage in it. I guess the society would have to use genetic engineering to prevent that.
Sadly, we already do. Some of it is hidden, but we definately pay that much. The straight-up income tax is (I believe) 28% at its lowest. Throw in social security (15% paid by me, 15% by my employer = 30% at least according to my econ book (NOT TO MENTION that I will get jack for all this wasted money!)) and you've got over 50% taxation. That stinks.
Taxation is high, but not as high as you seem to think. The straight income tax is 15% (not 28%) at its lowest, but if you don't pay on income below a certain amount. Social Security is split 50-50 between employers and employees, but it's a total of 15% (7.5% each).
Give me a break. If it's not worth fifteen minutes of your time to look over a statement that's presumably in the several hundred dollar range, you shouldn't have a credit card.
Can't the above be argued as my personal interpretations of said persons?
No, because you made factual allegations. Whether or not the person is satanic or a pedophile is not a matter of your personal opinion. There are various defenses to slander. Read this page if you're interested. I read it because it was linked to from eBay's page about feedback removal. IANAL.
When I'm not sworn in, I'm perfectly allowed to shout 'so-and-so is a satanic pedophiliac of a faggot' in Times Square, and he can do nothing to stop me.
Same principle as if I wished to call Mr. Clinton a 'fucking communist nigger,' -- I'd be doing something perfectly legal, despite the fact that Mr. Clinton hasn't gotten some for a while now, that he isn't really a commie, and that he isn't black, even if he thinks he is.
Actually, those would be slander. If you ruin someone's reputation by falsely accusing them of pedophilia, you can be sued and they will very likely win. You have a little more leeway with Clinton, since he's a public figure, but it would still be slander if it had malicious intent.
OK, so some business you buy services from (your ISP), is doing something you don't like (using the RBL). If you want them not to use the RBL, and they still use the RBL, switch to a different ISP. Not all ISPs use the RBL, because no one is forcing them to. You cannot force your ISP to provide you with the exact service you want. Vote with your wallet, get a different ISP.
I would be much happier clicking on "NO" in a confirmation email than on the first spam.
You shouldn't have to click NO. The whole point of confirmation e-mails is that you can't get on the list unless you specifically respond to the confirmation request.
Unfortunately there are also ISP's (like freeserve in the UK who assume that anybody running an MTA must be a spammer and have their entire IP address space in MAPS except for their servers. I don't think MAPS should allow this sort of overkill.
MAPS has three separate lists. One of these is a list of dial-up users' IP addresses. They are not on the same list as people who have actually been found sending spam. Not all ISPs block the dial-up list, but some do, as is their right.
Of course, it *IS* a common arrogance for our legal system to presume that it has domain outside its jurisdiction (certian OTHER DeCSS-related actions, in Norway, for example, come to mind).
The copyrights of one nation are recognized by another nation under the Berne convention, a treaty which the United States signed in 1985. Again, under the Constitution, treaties have the effect of federal law. Norway, as a signatory to the treaty (much earlier than us!), has to recognize our copyrights just as we promised to recognize theirs.
There was never any possible claim of copyright infringement in the DeCSS case. In that case, hackers reverse engineered some DVD playback software and created software to decrypt CSS encrypted CDs. The only possible illegality alleged against DeCSS were violations of the provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act that prohibited most distribution of devices that performed unauthorized decryption of copyrighted works, clearly irrelevant in Norway, and trade secret violations (because the click-through license of the DVD software in question prohibited reverse engineering).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that CSS is a Trade Secret. What this means is that it is an essential part of their business that no one else is allowed to use. That sounds very similar to a patent, except in one very pertinent area: a patent is registered, and enters public domain after a certain amount of time.
No, it's not that similar to a patent. With a patent, no one is allowed to produce/use the patented device, period. With a trade secret, unless you steal the secret from the company, it's legal to use. That means reverse engineering, or even blind luck, is perfectly acceptable.
The legal ramifications are that when you have a trade secret, you have responsibility for protecting it. Once someone reverse-engineers it out of your product, the cat is out of the bag (and many other cliches), even in a legal sense. If the reverse-engineering was legal and legitimate, the trade secret is no longer.
AFAIK, the only argument for the reverse engineering being illegitimate is the license agreement. I hope the idea that you can protect any trade secret from reverse engineering simply by forcing all consumers to agree not to do so is seen as bogus.
This is one major reason that I oppose the DMCA.
Yes, even if they lost trade secret protection, they could still continue the claim of DMCA violations, in which trade secrecy has no bearing.
IANAL
As for the watermarking, you can either ignore it (your MP3 will still play)
The watermark is not intended to keep you from playing the audio, it's intended to discourage distribution in the first place by making the purchaser of the SDMI music traceable. Of course, people could buy SDMI music with stolen credit cards and distribute that, but they'll probably just buy the CD and rip that. CDs are not going to be phased out anytime soon.
What makes you think that people putting this stuff out over Gnutella or Freenet will in any fashion be using a credit card or bank account that can be traced back to them? Were you SDMI suppporters born this stupid or what?
He didn't say he supported the SDMI or thought it would work, I think he was just frustated with all the people who are thinking that watermarking encrypts the song.
But then again, it could be feasibly possible to add thousands of different watermarks, making it impossible to tell who pirated it.
Only if the watermarks you put in in correspond to actual people. I assume that the watermarks will be some sort of ID number, not your name in ASCII, so you won't know which numbers have actually been assigned. I you just make up watermarks at random, you'd probably have no better chance of making one that corresponds to a person than if you made up credit card numbers at random.
If code were to be protected as free speech, and law is implemented in code, that opens the door for unjust and unethical laws to be passed (written) and subsequently protected by the first amendment.
Think about this for a second. Laws in this country are written in English. Unlike code, there has never been any question that English writing is protected by the First Amendment. And yet...laws are struck down all the time.
See, unconstitional laws are passed all the time. I don't think there's even any mechanism to force them to be removed from the books, even if they are ruled unconstitutional. However, it is illegal to enforce an unconstitional law, because enforcement is not speech.
IANAL
It's the crazy ideas that change the world.
Yes, some crazy ideas change the world. Others simply fail miserably, as I predict this one will.
Hello? This is the IETF, not the government. Itrace would only be implemented by people setting it up on routers they own or operate. Some people seem to be under the impression that because the government cannot infringe on their free speech or privacy, their ISP must let them do whatever they want.
This will help prevent things similar to the attack on kuro5hin.
I thought the attack or kuro5hin involved flooding the submission queue. Since submissions are presumably made using TCP connections, they can't be made using spoofed IP addresses, so itrace would not be helpful.
This is the exact type of question they won't be anwsering in this interview, unless the answer starts out "I can neither confirm nor deny..."
Oh, and Napster isn't being shutdown, they're just being asked to not allow the sharing of commercial music... Simple greps will take care of that...
Actually, IIRC, the plaintiffs have stated that they are unable to provide Napster with a comprehensive list of the music they hold copyright to. I don't know if this is still true, but if it is, it seems wrong to force Napster to shutdown in such a roundabout way, since the only way to avoid a shutdown would be to have a comprehensive list of music the plaintiffs hold copyright on.
Interestingly, Judge Marilyn Patel, who issued this injunction, is the same judge that ruled that source code is speech when Bernstein challenged the encryption export restrictions a few years back. See this EFF press release.
See this post.
I believe it is generally the case that plaintiffs must post bond before an injunction can be issued, so that the defendants will receive compensation for damages if the injunction is not upheld. IANAL.
Okay, so we fought the Nazis for the right to have a capitalist society whose successful members strive to do everything the Nazis wanted to do to the human race.
Successful capitalists strive to have entire ethnic groups systematically murdered in concentration camps? Your exaggeration is obnoxiously insulting.
Genetic manipulation run amok will allow certain people to be decidedly superior than other people. You have a choice -- genomics or equality.
Are you under some sort of delusion that people are genetically equal now?
One of the key differences is that with abortion, you don't have a human being who's life you affected. The aborted embryo never becomes a human being. OTOH, the altered embryo DOES become a human being, one able to look back and say "Why did you do this to me? What or who would I have been had you not done this?" What if your genetic manipulation has some terrible, unintended consequence?
However, children have always been able to look back and question the decisions their parents made when they raised them. For one obvious example, "why didn't you ever spend time with me as a kid?" Parents already have substantial power over how their children turn out. Allowing them to make decisions about their children's environment can have an impact on their children's lives, just like genetic engineering would.
If we continue acting like animals, determined to get any advantage we can get over our fellows, then there's a good chance we'll all perish -- in designer plagues, in unforseen genetic damage, or in good old fashioned caste warfare. Aren't just just as remiss as a parent if your meddling insures that they and their world die in a bloody conflict?
Designer plagues are only vaguely connected to getting genetic engineering for one's kids, and I fail to see how the latter will cause the former.
Unforseen genetic damage will obviously not cause us all to perish unless we do something stupid like ensure genetic engineering is available for everyone. This is actually a good argument in favor of letting the rich use it on their own children first: it gives society a free batch of guinea pigs.
As for caste warfare, I think that genetic engineering would only provide a marginal increase to the already huge gap between the poorest nations and the richest nations. That gap is a problem unrelated to genetic engineering. As for intra-national conflict, I find it unlikely in the extreme that class warfare would erupt in regions like Europe and the US where people could afford genetic engineering, because the minimum standard of living is already so high. People don't care that others can afford extravagance as long as they are reasonably well off themselves.
One of the major tenants of western democracy is equality. Don't try to tell me that you're more equal than others.
No, one of the major tenets of western democracy is equality before the law, not unqualified equality. If unqualified equality were so important, we should presumably embark on a genetic engineering project to make everyone identical.
I'd also like to point out that if a society in which parents were successfully prevented from giving their children an advantage were to last for an extremely long time, parents' natural affection for their children would be eliminated or reduced, as there would be no reproductive advantage in it. I guess the society would have to use genetic engineering to prevent that.
Sadly, we already do. Some of it is hidden, but we definately pay that much. The straight-up income tax is (I believe) 28% at its lowest. Throw in social security (15% paid by me, 15% by my employer = 30% at least according to my econ book (NOT TO MENTION that I will get jack for all this wasted money!)) and you've got over 50% taxation. That stinks.
Taxation is high, but not as high as you seem to think. The straight income tax is 15% (not 28%) at its lowest, but if you don't pay on income below a certain amount. Social Security is split 50-50 between employers and employees, but it's a total of 15% (7.5% each).
Give me a break. If it's not worth fifteen minutes of your time to look over a statement that's presumably in the several hundred dollar range, you shouldn't have a credit card.
Can't the above be argued as my personal interpretations of said persons?
No, because you made factual allegations. Whether or not the person is satanic or a pedophile is not a matter of your personal opinion. There are various defenses to slander. Read this page if you're interested. I read it because it was linked to from eBay's page about feedback removal. IANAL.
When I'm not sworn in, I'm perfectly allowed to shout 'so-and-so is a satanic pedophiliac of a faggot' in Times Square, and he can do nothing to stop me.
Same principle as if I wished to call Mr. Clinton a 'fucking communist nigger,' -- I'd be doing something perfectly legal, despite the fact that Mr. Clinton hasn't gotten some for a while now, that he isn't really a commie, and that he isn't black, even if he thinks he is.
Actually, those would be slander. If you ruin someone's reputation by falsely accusing them of pedophilia, you can be sued and they will very likely win. You have a little more leeway with Clinton, since he's a public figure, but it would still be slander if it had malicious intent.
OK, so some business you buy services from (your ISP), is doing something you don't like (using the RBL). If you want them not to use the RBL, and they still use the RBL, switch to a different ISP. Not all ISPs use the RBL, because no one is forcing them to. You cannot force your ISP to provide you with the exact service you want. Vote with your wallet, get a different ISP.
Um...you probably didn't get any mail from them because they hadn't yet been taken off the RBL.
I would be much happier clicking on "NO" in a confirmation email than on the first spam.
You shouldn't have to click NO. The whole point of confirmation e-mails is that you can't get on the list unless you specifically respond to the confirmation request.
Unfortunately there are also ISP's (like freeserve in the UK who assume that anybody running an MTA must be a spammer and have their entire IP address space in MAPS except for their servers. I don't think MAPS should allow this sort of overkill.
MAPS has three separate lists. One of these is a list of dial-up users' IP addresses. They are not on the same list as people who have actually been found sending spam. Not all ISPs block the dial-up list, but some do, as is their right.
Of course, it *IS* a common arrogance for our legal system to presume that it has domain outside its jurisdiction (certian OTHER DeCSS-related actions, in Norway, for example, come to mind).
The copyrights of one nation are recognized by another nation under the Berne convention, a treaty which the United States signed in 1985. Again, under the Constitution, treaties have the effect of federal law. Norway, as a signatory to the treaty (much earlier than us!), has to recognize our copyrights just as we promised to recognize theirs.
There was never any possible claim of copyright infringement in the DeCSS case. In that case, hackers reverse engineered some DVD playback software and created software to decrypt CSS encrypted CDs. The only possible illegality alleged against DeCSS were violations of the provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act that prohibited most distribution of devices that performed unauthorized decryption of copyrighted works, clearly irrelevant in Norway, and trade secret violations (because the click-through license of the DVD software in question prohibited reverse engineering).