I'm not apple fanboy, but explain again how having a phone that will have a touchscreen like the iPhone and an online music store like iTunes is supposed to give Microsoft an "edge" over Apple.
Hulu is for people who DO sit in front of the computer. You're not their target. They've got other services targeted to you (cable, satellite, broadcast). Strangely enough, your post is actually supporting Hulu's decision.
Even if they can't block it, they can definitely sue it. And with the recent ruling that allowed the author of Glider to be held responsible for criminal copyright violations for every instance of people using his software to break the WoW terms of service, I would not want to be fighting that fight.
Please god, no. I already curse my iPod Touch frequently enough when it decides how to rotate the screen for me. For example, ever try web surfing while lying down? What I wouldn't give for a "lock screen orientation" button.
Hold your knee for a minute. Yes, there are some people to whom your comments apply. But let's be intellectually honest here - this is not a "most American sentiment", in that it's not specific to America.
Throughout human history, banishment has always been a severe punishment. This is because it cuts you off from you friends, family, job and other societal supports. The only cases where it isn't something to be feared is when the place you are being banished from is a hellhole, and even then if you can't take family with you it may still be undesirable. On top of all this, there is an aspect of public humiliation when a society as a whole tells you they do not want you.
I know a guy who has been, in effect, banished from India for the last ten years due to immigration problems. If he leaves the US, he has to start his whole immigration process over. I suppose the only thing keeping him here is the economic opportunities (he's a waiter at a restaurant - a struggling restaurant at that). For him, being "banished" from India to the US is quite a hardship. You could replace "the US" with Canada, the UK, France, Japan, Russia, etc. and it would be just as true.
So if you're being honest, you will admit that banishment is indeed a punishment given that you aren't being banished from an extremely troubled country.
Now, as to whether it's realistic in this day and age, I don't necessarily agree. You would need to work out an "exile exchange program" with other countries so you could swap exiles. So then you're getting rid of your undesirable only by accepting someone else's. While it might still be a punishment to the exile, it won't necessarily help society with their crime problems. As such, I would say it's probably not effective.
Perfect example of them not making up facts but following the existing ones. "Vegetable" is not a scientific term (well, not for plants). It is a traditional term like "bug." They looked at the pre-existing evidence and did not make up anything new. I only wish most other cases were this easy.
Science by contrast normally comes with error bars
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. For example, while there may some uncertainty in individual facts, accepted science is that life evolved on this planet from bacteria to the life we say today, with several very well known steps in between. There's no error bar for that. Similarly with other facts like sodium plus chlorine equals salt. Again, black and white.
Now, if you come in to criminal court and try to convict someone based on a theory that DOES have some significant error bars, it's just not going to fly.
I do have some reservations about the preponderance of doubt standard in civil court. But I think in general, it works as well as the science does that is presented as evidence.
But again, my points stand. 1) The way the court acted isn't anything new. 2) We don't have any better way to decide disputes that concern scientific evidence.
And I could add: 3) Courts (in the US, at least) tend to favor a "lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack" approach such that they don't decide scientific fact, they simply decide if you've proven your case. In criminal cases, this is the whole "innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" idea. You don't ever prove someone innocent, you just fail to make the case that they are guilty. In civil case, this is by preponderance of evidence, meaning that the court simply rules that one side is more likely right than the other based on the evidence. Neither of these are truly cases of black and white.
Where have you been? Courts have always not only made medical decisions, but ones in various other areas of science, too, when there is a dispute. What exactly do you think forensics are, anyway? They do the same things courts have always done - rely on expert witnesses. As soon as you come up with a better way to correctly solve disputes involving factual claims, please do let the world know.
MOUSEBENDER: It's not much of an API, is it? WENSLEYDALE: Finest in the industry, sir. MOUSEBENDER: Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please. WENSLEYDALE: Well, it's so clean, sir. MOUSEBENDER: It's certainly uncontaminated by developers.
Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I truly hope that this judge's interpretation of "gameplay experience" as being a copyrightable work controlled by terms of service is overturned at a higher level. I agree about the whole 2+2=5 comment, but I feel that it is the JUDGE has come up with this erroneous bit of arithmetic. It happens from time to time.
Again, though, you're talking a matter of interpretation, not of the letter of the law. Compare this with how Lexmark's DMCA case was struck down. They developed software to prevent other software other toner refills from being used in their products.
Furthermore, the court noted that even if these programs were copyrightable, SCC's copying of protected portions of the work would likely still enjoy fair use protections, because the courts have ruled that "fair use doctrine preserves public access to the ideas and functional elements embedded in copyrighted computer software programs." Additionally, while the court ruled that the Toner Loading Program is not copyrightable, it agreed that the Printer Engine Program was a copyrighted work. However, the argument that SCC's Smartek chip provided unauthorized access to the Printer Engine Program was dismissed on the basis that it was the consumers' purchase of the printer that established such access, and the program in question was freely available to read electronically in memory. SCC's actions thus constitute a legal replacement of Lexmark's Toner Loading Program.
Emphasis mine. This really does seem a pretty direct parallel. The main difference I see here is in the printer being a piece of hardware and WoW being software only. However, it could be strongly argued that the consumer purchases the WoW software (just like it purchases a printer with driver software) and only pays the monthly fee for continued access.
The Warden client should never have been considered copyrightable, unless you think the Lexmark case is a bad decision. As it stands, they're not really in sync.
But again, you kept making it out as black and white and acting like I wasn't agreeing with the law. I hope at least I've shown that the law is far from black and white and a good percentage of it is opinion. Some people expressing their opinion just happen to wear long black robes.
I understand where you're coming from. But I think the court made the wrong decision. Glider simply is NOT a tool for making illegal copies of WoW. To decide any other way is incorrect. Yes, in my opinion, but then when you come down to it, unless it's written to address the specific situation, it's always someones opinion.
Glider is not a tool for making illegal copies. If you didn't buy WoW and don't pay your subscription fees, Glider won't do anything for you. Therefore it is a huge stretch to say it is a violation of a law addressing illegal copying of software. Glider is, however, a tool for making copies of WoW which violate the terms of service. Now, if you're going to stretch the interpretation so that the word "copy" applies to any program copying the bits, how is Glider any different than a file copy utility I might create? Oh, that's right, my file copy (probably) doesn't violate anyone's terms of service.
If you can point to the specific place in the DMCA that addresses this very situation without an interpretation by a judge, please do. I do not believe it is there.
It's not really so much of a "spread out" problem. It's a problem of SCALE. Any time you scale a project up orders of magnitude, you get problems. It's the same problem with large corporations and bureaucracies. You run out of smart people and aren't able to be part of the hiring process. You also turn into a faceless entity, so the employees have very little stake in the success of the operation anymore and have zero loyalty. Everything has cost overruns and delays because nobody is around and empowered to make smart decisions. It all turns into a giant charlie foxtrot, and that's even assuming you don't have some bad eggs intentionally swindling the operation.
This seems like the perfect use for print on demand, if only the infrastructure was already there. Maybe they can team up with the dying newspaper and magazine industry to make this happen.
I have less than no sympathy for the botters. May they lose everything in-game, and make room for players.
Ditto. Unfortunately, this precedent allows developers to say that when you break the ToS, you are subject not only to terms of the contract (which are quite limited to losing all your stuff and not getting your money back for the product), but to terms that were never in the contract. This precedent says you are now a pirate, and are subject to the same criminal penalties as someone who downloaded the game off of bittorrent. This isn't a slippery slope, this is the bottom of the slope already.
Take for example some of the hidden nuggets in the Vista license: The first thing they show is that you're now allowed to publish.NET benchmarks unless you follow Microsoft rules. Imagine breaking that, and now being subject to criminal penalties under the DMCA. Or if you wrote a program that does benchmarking that allows you to use settings other than the ones Microsoft approves of - you're now going to suffer the same criminal penalties as this Glider guy for creating and distributing a "circumvention device." The penalties? $150,000 every time someone uses your software.
Or a recent 2000/XP service pack EULA that said you allow Windows Media Player to auto-update. What happens when you put a firewall in front of the box an intentionally block the MS ip addresses? You break the contract, you're an infringer, please see the judge.
Or how about the XP license?
Except as otherwise permitted by the NetMeeting, Remote Assistance, and Remote Desktop features described below, you may not use the Product to permit any Device to use, access, display, or run other executable software residing on the Workstation Computer, nor may you permit any Device to use, access, display, or run the Product or Product's user interface, unless the Device has a separate license for the Product
In other words, no VNC. Use it and guess what? Criminal.
Furthermore, there are plenty of pages and apps that let you turn on disabled features of Windows. One is the Event ID 4226 Patcher that lets you change the number of TCP connections allowed on Windows. This is something that violates the EULA. Hope you didn't download and install it, because you're now a criminal. Of course, you're better off than the guy who wrote it. With as many people that use it around the world, I think he owes about eleventy billion dollars.
Yeah, about that. There are these things called license agreements, they're kind of like contracts, which are a sort of legal instrument, that is maybe, like, thousands of years old.
As I said in another comment, the problem is that they're not using contract law (which would be what license agreements fall under), they're using copyright law. They're saying if someone breaks the ToS, they're now a pirate and are subject to all the criminal penalties of copyright law. If someone helps another person break the ToS, that helping person is now a superpirate (not as cool as it sounds), subject to even harsher criminal penalties.
Some of us just happen to think that maybe this is going a little overboard for helping someone cheat on a video game.
The problem with your argument is that contract law isn't what is the problem here. By breaking the terms of the ToS, under their contract with him Blizzard can only cut off his service and keep his money. They can't fine him $150,000 "per act of infringement", as is the case with the DMCA. If you read the article, they're moving beyond contract law and saying violating the terms of service makes you a copyright infringer, subject to copyright law:
Blizzard argued, and Judge Campbell agreed, that when users violated the World of Warcraft EULA, they no longer had a license to play the game and were therefore guilty of copyright infringement. As Siy noted in a blog post last year, Blizzard's theory, if taken literally, would mean that violating any of the rules in the EULA and Terms of Service, such as choosing a screen name that didn't meet Blizzard's guidelines, would be an act of copyright infringement. And distributing software that helps users infringe copyright itself constitutes secondary copyright infringement, which could expose MDY to copyright law's draconian "statutory damages" of $150,000 per act of infringement. The law gives aggrieved parties to contract disputes much less potent powers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not apple fanboy, but explain again how having a phone that will have a touchscreen like the iPhone and an online music store like iTunes is supposed to give Microsoft an "edge" over Apple.
Well there you go, Simpsons and House broadcast. What, you think they expect EVERY person to watch EVERY show? They'd like it, sure.
Hulu is for people who DO sit in front of the computer. You're not their target. They've got other services targeted to you (cable, satellite, broadcast). Strangely enough, your post is actually supporting Hulu's decision.
Even if they can't block it, they can definitely sue it. And with the recent ruling that allowed the author of Glider to be held responsible for criminal copyright violations for every instance of people using his software to break the WoW terms of service, I would not want to be fighting that fight.
Getting it for free through work takes a bit of the edge off the frustration.
Problem is, I want it portrait mode. Basically, just like I'd read it standing up.
Please god, no. I already curse my iPod Touch frequently enough when it decides how to rotate the screen for me. For example, ever try web surfing while lying down? What I wouldn't give for a "lock screen orientation" button.
Hold your knee for a minute. Yes, there are some people to whom your comments apply. But let's be intellectually honest here - this is not a "most American sentiment", in that it's not specific to America.
Throughout human history, banishment has always been a severe punishment. This is because it cuts you off from you friends, family, job and other societal supports. The only cases where it isn't something to be feared is when the place you are being banished from is a hellhole, and even then if you can't take family with you it may still be undesirable. On top of all this, there is an aspect of public humiliation when a society as a whole tells you they do not want you.
I know a guy who has been, in effect, banished from India for the last ten years due to immigration problems. If he leaves the US, he has to start his whole immigration process over. I suppose the only thing keeping him here is the economic opportunities (he's a waiter at a restaurant - a struggling restaurant at that). For him, being "banished" from India to the US is quite a hardship. You could replace "the US" with Canada, the UK, France, Japan, Russia, etc. and it would be just as true.
So if you're being honest, you will admit that banishment is indeed a punishment given that you aren't being banished from an extremely troubled country.
Now, as to whether it's realistic in this day and age, I don't necessarily agree. You would need to work out an "exile exchange program" with other countries so you could swap exiles. So then you're getting rid of your undesirable only by accepting someone else's. While it might still be a punishment to the exile, it won't necessarily help society with their crime problems. As such, I would say it's probably not effective.
Looking at the pinout, it also carries analog video and audio. Firewire is for only six pins out of the 30.
And as well all know, that was the exact moment the American civilization tumbled into chaos, never to rise again.
Perfect example of them not making up facts but following the existing ones. "Vegetable" is not a scientific term (well, not for plants). It is a traditional term like "bug." They looked at the pre-existing evidence and did not make up anything new. I only wish most other cases were this easy.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. For example, while there may some uncertainty in individual facts, accepted science is that life evolved on this planet from bacteria to the life we say today, with several very well known steps in between. There's no error bar for that. Similarly with other facts like sodium plus chlorine equals salt. Again, black and white.
Now, if you come in to criminal court and try to convict someone based on a theory that DOES have some significant error bars, it's just not going to fly.
I do have some reservations about the preponderance of doubt standard in civil court. But I think in general, it works as well as the science does that is presented as evidence.
But again, my points stand.
1) The way the court acted isn't anything new.
2) We don't have any better way to decide disputes that concern scientific evidence.
And I could add:
3) Courts (in the US, at least) tend to favor a "lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack" approach such that they don't decide scientific fact, they simply decide if you've proven your case. In criminal cases, this is the whole "innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" idea. You don't ever prove someone innocent, you just fail to make the case that they are guilty. In civil case, this is by preponderance of evidence, meaning that the court simply rules that one side is more likely right than the other based on the evidence. Neither of these are truly cases of black and white.
Where have you been? Courts have always not only made medical decisions, but ones in various other areas of science, too, when there is a dispute. What exactly do you think forensics are, anyway? They do the same things courts have always done - rely on expert witnesses. As soon as you come up with a better way to correctly solve disputes involving factual claims, please do let the world know.
MOUSEBENDER: It's not much of an API, is it?
WENSLEYDALE: Finest in the industry, sir.
MOUSEBENDER: Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.
WENSLEYDALE: Well, it's so clean, sir.
MOUSEBENDER: It's certainly uncontaminated by developers.
...they're really not going to like it when they find out about my running Harry Potter through the Bork Bork Bork! filter.
Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I truly hope that this judge's interpretation of "gameplay experience" as being a copyrightable work controlled by terms of service is overturned at a higher level. I agree about the whole 2+2=5 comment, but I feel that it is the JUDGE has come up with this erroneous bit of arithmetic. It happens from time to time.
Again, though, you're talking a matter of interpretation, not of the letter of the law. Compare this with how Lexmark's DMCA case was struck down. They developed software to prevent other software other toner refills from being used in their products.
Emphasis mine. This really does seem a pretty direct parallel. The main difference I see here is in the printer being a piece of hardware and WoW being software only. However, it could be strongly argued that the consumer purchases the WoW software (just like it purchases a printer with driver software) and only pays the monthly fee for continued access.
The Warden client should never have been considered copyrightable, unless you think the Lexmark case is a bad decision. As it stands, they're not really in sync.
But again, you kept making it out as black and white and acting like I wasn't agreeing with the law. I hope at least I've shown that the law is far from black and white and a good percentage of it is opinion. Some people expressing their opinion just happen to wear long black robes.
I understand where you're coming from. But I think the court made the wrong decision. Glider simply is NOT a tool for making illegal copies of WoW. To decide any other way is incorrect. Yes, in my opinion, but then when you come down to it, unless it's written to address the specific situation, it's always someones opinion.
Glider is not a tool for making illegal copies. If you didn't buy WoW and don't pay your subscription fees, Glider won't do anything for you. Therefore it is a huge stretch to say it is a violation of a law addressing illegal copying of software. Glider is, however, a tool for making copies of WoW which violate the terms of service. Now, if you're going to stretch the interpretation so that the word "copy" applies to any program copying the bits, how is Glider any different than a file copy utility I might create? Oh, that's right, my file copy (probably) doesn't violate anyone's terms of service.
If you can point to the specific place in the DMCA that addresses this very situation without an interpretation by a judge, please do. I do not believe it is there.
It's not really so much of a "spread out" problem. It's a problem of SCALE. Any time you scale a project up orders of magnitude, you get problems. It's the same problem with large corporations and bureaucracies. You run out of smart people and aren't able to be part of the hiring process. You also turn into a faceless entity, so the employees have very little stake in the success of the operation anymore and have zero loyalty. Everything has cost overruns and delays because nobody is around and empowered to make smart decisions. It all turns into a giant charlie foxtrot, and that's even assuming you don't have some bad eggs intentionally swindling the operation.
This seems like the perfect use for print on demand, if only the infrastructure was already there. Maybe they can team up with the dying newspaper and magazine industry to make this happen.
Ditto. Unfortunately, this precedent allows developers to say that when you break the ToS, you are subject not only to terms of the contract (which are quite limited to losing all your stuff and not getting your money back for the product), but to terms that were never in the contract. This precedent says you are now a pirate, and are subject to the same criminal penalties as someone who downloaded the game off of bittorrent. This isn't a slippery slope, this is the bottom of the slope already.
Take for example some of the hidden nuggets in the Vista license: .NET benchmarks unless you follow Microsoft rules. Imagine breaking that, and now being subject to criminal penalties under the DMCA. Or if you wrote a program that does benchmarking that allows you to use settings other than the ones Microsoft approves of - you're now going to suffer the same criminal penalties as this Glider guy for creating and distributing a "circumvention device." The penalties? $150,000 every time someone uses your software.
The first thing they show is that you're now allowed to publish
Or a recent 2000/XP service pack EULA that said you allow Windows Media Player to auto-update. What happens when you put a firewall in front of the box an intentionally block the MS ip addresses? You break the contract, you're an infringer, please see the judge.
Or how about the XP license?
In other words, no VNC. Use it and guess what? Criminal.
Furthermore, there are plenty of pages and apps that let you turn on disabled features of Windows. One is the Event ID 4226 Patcher that lets you change the number of TCP connections allowed on Windows. This is something that violates the EULA. Hope you didn't download and install it, because you're now a criminal. Of course, you're better off than the guy who wrote it. With as many people that use it around the world, I think he owes about eleventy billion dollars.
As I said in another comment, the problem is that they're not using contract law (which would be what license agreements fall under), they're using copyright law. They're saying if someone breaks the ToS, they're now a pirate and are subject to all the criminal penalties of copyright law. If someone helps another person break the ToS, that helping person is now a superpirate (not as cool as it sounds), subject to even harsher criminal penalties.
Some of us just happen to think that maybe this is going a little overboard for helping someone cheat on a video game.
The problem with your argument is that contract law isn't what is the problem here. By breaking the terms of the ToS, under their contract with him Blizzard can only cut off his service and keep his money. They can't fine him $150,000 "per act of infringement", as is the case with the DMCA. If you read the article, they're moving beyond contract law and saying violating the terms of service makes you a copyright infringer, subject to copyright law: