Yes, even in this case. You DO own the music or movie you have purchased... but the courts have -- so far -- allowed restrictions to be put on the use of this OWNED product.
Which, practically as well as legally, is a contradiction. See my other reply above. One of these days the courts are going to have to decide, because as a practical matter, you really can't have it both ways: if you truly own it, then you have the right to do whatever the hell you want with it. (Except sell copies, of course, but that's copyright law, not contract or property law.)
"Btw courts have so far upheld this interpretation..."
But the court decisions have had to do with restrictions on your use... not whether you actually "own" the product. Of course, as I mentioned, this is really a contradiction, because you can't have such use restrictions on things that you truly own. Either you own it or you do not. This creates a legal contradiction which will have to be sorted out one of these days, and I see only one way it could go... and that will not make the studios happy. Well, that's just too bad.
Well, yes, of course. I am aware of efforts to change that.
"Don't forget, due to lobbying pressures by the *AAs, some countries are moving to make it a criminal act to circumvent any form of copyright encryption."
You mean like the United States? They already have. The DMCA made it illegal to even attempt to circumvent DRM, back around the year 2000 (thus the name "millenium"). It wasn't until later that courts established that there were exemptions to the law for a few specific purposes. It is still illegal in most cases.
"And, game manufacturers are trying to establish that a video game is a "service" not a "good" so they can yank it out from underneath you anytime they like."
Good luck with that. {sarcasm}
Restriction on how people can use goods after purchase has been tried in the United States for almost every kind of product under the sun, including garden shovels (yes, really). Courts have consistently ruled that if you go into a retail store and plunk down your money for a product, you have bought that product, not "licensed" it, regardless of any "license agreement" that may come with the product.
This principle has been applied across the board to EVERY kind of product that has tried it, including books and music... except, so far, software. And it hasn't been ruled that way for software yet because there hasn't been a real test case before any higher courts that I am aware of. Part of that is due to software companies rabidly pushing for out-of-court settlements so that the courts simply would not have an opportunity to rule on it. But I know of no logical (or legal) reason software should be treated differently from just about every other product in existence.
Now, having said that, of course we know of games that have an online aspect to them, such as WoW and EQII. The online aspect of the game might arguably be deemed a "service", I don't know.
"And, for the record, I hope to hell I'm wrong."
As do we all, I am sure. I am pretty weary of these money-mongers forcing legislation to guarantee themselves a profit. I'm not suggesting anybody actually do this, but from an ethical standpoint, I think they should be taken out and shot.
"Nobody expects infinite bandwidth... which was my original point..."
Bollocks. Until I made that clarification, I had never mentioned "unlimited bandwidth". In fact, I explicitly stated in the very beginning that is NOT what I was talking about, and it's right there, in your quote of my words:
"... just like anybody off-campus could get..."
... and you proceeded to argue with me about that. If you were arguing about something else, like truly unlimited bandwidth, as opposed to a reasonable comparison with other ISPs, why did you not say so, in so many words? Because that has nothing at all to do with anything I was talking about, and you could not have been arguing with ME at all. I had assumed -- actually I had stated, just as you quoted there -- that I was only interested in a discussion within reasonable bounds, which I explicitly said was a comparison with "off-campus" ISPs. Since you did not plainly state otherwise, I had no choice but to assume your arguments were in the same context. If they were not (as you now say), and you were talking about completely unlimited bandwidth, and completely unfettered access, you were doing nothing but wasting both your time and mine, because that isn't even remotely what I was talking about. So why were you arguing with me in the first place?
If you were actually arguing about something other than what I originally stated, I would have to ask why, because my statement there is perfectly clear. That is why I have repeatedly stated that you keep arguing about things I did not even say.
And also, therefore, either you could not have meant what you now say, because you were arguing with THAT SENTENCE which you quoted, or you failed to understand that sentence. Either way, my statements have been consistent from the beginning: "just as anybody off-campus could get" compares on-campus internet to what is supplied by external ISPs, exactly as I repeated later on.
With your quote, YOU have demonstrated that I have done nothing but remain consistent, and you have not. Either that, or you have been been arguing with thin air, and not me, because I made it clear in the very beginning that I was NOT talking about anything that was genuinely "unlimited"... I was only comparing to other ISPs.
And I am done with this, because it is clearly a waste of time.
"The music industry doesn't seem to be any worse off than they were when they insisted upon DRM."
Yeah... because don't use it anymore. At least, most of them have wised up and have dropped their DRM schemes. Where they did have DRM, they lost money.
Now if only some of the game makers would similarly wise up. Like you, Ubisoft.
"This is what I mean about backtracking when called on a point you make - you started out by saying it violates academic freedom to not give unfettered access and called for the ACLU to step in... I say it's not reasonable to expect unlimited, unfettered access, we go back and forth..."
How is that "backtracking"? I am adhering to my original statement. How does that constitute "backtracking"?
Yes, I did state "Nobody expects infinite bandwidth." That was merely to make sure we were keeping reasonable limits on this conversation. It is not in any way "backing down" or "backtracking" from what I originally stated. It was merely acknowledgment that we are talking about reasonable things, not outrageous hypotheticals.
So when you say "I say it's not reasonable to expect unlimited, unfettered access", I was merely clarifying that we were talking about reasonably unlimited, and reasonably unfettered... exactly as one can get from some other ISP. At no time was I suggesting infinite bandwidth or infinite access. That would not be reasonable. If you are trying to claim that's what I meant, then we aren't even having the same argument.
And at no time, throughout this whole exchange, did I see ANYTHING that would cause me to believe that you actually meant "I do expect that universities can supply bandwidth to their students in a manner comparable to other local ISPs."
This entire conversation has been about a University blocking access to certain sites and materials. I do not call that "supplying bandwidth in a manner comparable to other ISPs". On the contrary; it is behavior for which "other ISPs" have either lost customers or gotten into trouble.
"But further It only applies to actions of governments."
It doesn't actually say that anywhere, but even if it did, that is irrelevant because a takedown amounts to a de facto seizure of property, without due process, as a requirement of the federal law. So even if "due process" only applies to government action, it still applies in this case, because Congress authorized the seizure of valuable property (whether text, images, or other works) without any "due process" whatever. This is antithetical to some of the most basic principles of American law.
"The only solution that is workable without totally swamping the courts would be some sort of (rapidly escalating) penalty for a false take down notice."
Nonsense. It is by no means the "only" solution. Repealing the takedown clauses of the DMCA would solve the problem as well. The problem did not exist before the DMCA. Remove the relevant clauses from the DMCA, and the problem goes away, and we are left with the much more sane system we had before, which actually worked.
"You probably still need a way to prevent people from posting an entire 60 million dollar movie on the web somewhere. A quick take down should be available in this case without going to court in every jurisdiction in the world."
I disagree 100%. The advantages are still with the rights holders, even without the DMCA. A person should have to be accused and convincingly shown to have broken the law before action is taken against him. That is the way American law has worked in almost every situation prior to the DMCA. That system did work and created a situation in which the rights of all parties were pretty fairly balanced. The same cannot be said of today, post-DMCA.
Keep in mind that infringement (in the vast majority of cases) is no crime. Nobody is "stealing" a 60-million-dollar movie. Further, the actual statistics say that downloading has not harmed actual music or movie revenue. On the contrary: after a short-lived slump that was almost certainly due to a slow economy, total music and movie sales set yet another record last year. Even in the "slow" years, their total revenue still increased from year to year; far better than many other industries fared.
Okay, I understand the difference. But deduplication -- as I already explained -- does not address the real issue, if by "deduplication" you mean they simply remove files with identical CRCs or a similar method. Because I could put my movie in a.zip file, with a text file included, and thus the CRC would no longer be useful for that purpose.
Actual deduplication would require uncompressing compressed files and checking their contents, among other things. Doing that is both intrusive and time-consuming... and is exactly the behavior that got DropBox into trouble with its users.
No, it isn't the whole problem. It is only part of the problem. Another part of the problem is that it allows takedowns BEFORE any "due process" has been undertaken. (A statement of "this is an infringing post" does not qualify as "due process".)
The whole takedown notice scheme needs to vanish from this country. Completely. Things need to go back to the way they were before, when someone actually had to demonstrate a violation in front of a court before expression could be suppressed.
And we can do perfectly good spreadsheets too. Libre Office (a fork of Open Office) does perfectly good, open-souce and open-format spreadsheets. That's not online, of course, but it is possible to do online spreadsheets also, using open-souce code, too, involving "edit-in-place" routines using tables to represent the spreadsheet.
Online, open-source spreadsheets are not an easy thing to implement, which is why they are generally limited to single-purpose tables rather than generic spreadsheets. But they are possible.
I am not positive, but I think the issue with Megaupload was that they DID take down the particular file that was being complained about, but did nothing about the (possibly several or even a hundred) other copies of the same file that other people had uploaded.
Of course, if you want to do that, you run into other issues: how do you know two uploaded files are the same? You could do a CRC check, which is non-intrusive, but also not a very good method. I could add a short text file to the.zip I upload, which changes the CRC beyond recognition. Basically, what they would have to do would be intrusively scan and catalog everything that was uploaded, which arguably throws away any "safe harbor" they might claim.
That's one of the big problems with all these schemes calling for repositories and ISPs to monitor the content passing through them: it is fundamentally intrusive, and might endanger any "safe harbor" provision they could otherwise use as a defense.
I agree, but my point was that there IS such a network that anonymizes not only where the files reside, but what nodes you get them from. That is an important improvement over some of the others.
It is easy to say that if you had a 2-person network set up, you would know where the files are coming from, but even then, that is not so. Parts of those files will already be stored encrypted on your own hard drive, other parts will be on the other node. And you don't know which parts.
So there is "plausible deniability" to every step of the process, except, as I stated earlier, actually joining a network.
I know your reply was to him... but actually, *I* am the libertarian here, and I didn't argue any of those things. In fact other than copyright I said pretty much what you did.
"Since you insist on backtracking and then evading answering my point any further discussion relevant to what you said is, well, pointless."
I agree that it is pointless, but for different reasons. It is pointless because you refuse to even acknowledge what my original argument was. Then you try to yank the discussion in a different direction, and insist that I stated (or at least implied) things that I actually did not, THEN, when I try to steer the conversation BACK to what I was originally talking about in the first place, you call that "backtracking" and denial.
Sheesh. I have been very patient with you but my patience is about gone.
"Comparing their capacity to cable is relevant - do you really think any university network can withstand unlimited, unfettered use without degradation?"
Many universities do exactly that, so why should I expect otherwise? Of course I mean "unlimited and unfettered" only in comparison to other local ISPs... we have to be reasonable here. Nobody expects infinite bandwidth. So yes... I do expect that universities can supply bandwidth to their students in a manner comparable to other local ISPs. In fact, many of them do so via contracts with the local ISPs themselves.
If it's provided as a result of a room and board deal then it really has nothing to do with the academic mission of the university - that is governed by contract law and if you don't like their deal go elsewhere - it's as simple as that. So your whole "academic freedom" argument is moot.
That's only if you live off-campus, in which case none of this makes any difference anyway, because if you live off-campus, you aren't going to be getting your internet from the university!
That sentence should have been "relevant or not". But I wan't to add this as well: blocking sites or otherwise censoring internet content is generally MORE expensive than not doing it. So a "limited resources" argument does not necessarily apply. Possibly, if you are saying that they don't want too many people downloading files and the like. But there are perfectly legitimate reasons to do that, too.
Major ISP don't tell you just how drastically the price of supplying internet bandwidth has come DOWN, for the simple reason that they want to keep raising prices, not lower them. But the era of limited bandwidth, as a practical matter, is close to being over.
"Your point seems to be you want unfettered internet access and think it is due you simply because you pay tuition."
Not just tuition; you also pay room and board, and fees for things such as internet. If it were ONLY tuition, I think it would be more up to the school. But regardless of just exactly how it is being paid for, it *IS* being paid for. Universities do not supply services for free. They are paid by fees or by taxes, one of the two.
"Every time I reply to you, you say "I didn't say that;" despite having done so earlier."
I say that when you twist my meaning. For example:
""So you are in favor of censorship, as you would define it, as long as it's not you that is being "censored.;""
The fact is that I did NOT write that, or anything like it. You may have interpreted my words that way, but it isn't what I actually wrote and it sure is hell does not even remotely resemble anything I meant.
"As I pointed out above, you brought in the aCLU, 1st amendment issues and then backtracked"
No, that is not correct. YOU brought up the 1st Amendment. It wasn't me. YOU have kept insisting that the only justification the ACLU has to intervene is the 1st Amendment, but but that just isn't so, as I tried to tell you earlier. I neither stated or implied that the 1st Amendment was involved. You did.
"In addition to backing down whenever I called you on your argument..."
I have done no such thing. I haven't backed down from ANY of the statements I actually made; I only denied that I wrote the things that YOU were claiming I stated... but which I actually did not. Those are two very different things. I repeat: I was not making the arguments you have kept insisting I was making. I simply said that the student should contact the ACLU. I did not state or even imply that the 1st Amendment was involved. If I did, no doubt you will have no trouble quoting the words you claim I wrote which actually said that? I'd like to see them. As that link proves, the ACLU gets involved in academic freedom issues that do NOT involve the 1st Amendment. Just like I actually DID state.
"you consistently fail to address the salient point:... Does a university have the right to control the use of limited resources to the broader university community can use them as needed? You never have answered that, despite my providing a number of examples which you dismiss as straw men since you seem to have no other response."
I never answered because it was a straw-man argument that, I repeat: has nothing whatever to do with the statement I originally made. I don't owe you answers to questions that aren't even relevant to the point I made.
But since you seem to insist that I answer the question, relative or not, answer me this first: why do you keep insisting that they are "limited resources", without any evidence or citations to back that up? It is actually nothing more than an unfounded assumption. The universities with which I am familiar have internet resources that can hardly be called "limited", in comparison to regular cable service in the area. Also, they definitely charge for the privilege, as part of the cost of room and board... NOT as part of the tuition.
Repeat of what I replied to someone else above: OneSwarm is a darknet-capable file sharing client (it is also compatible with regular P2P networks), that addresses this issue. OneSwarm is designed such that once a file is put on the network, it is impossible to tell exactly where the file (or pieces of the file) are hosted, and it is equally impossible to tell what nodes they go through to get to you.
OneSwarm, from the University of Washington, addresses this issue. You can join any number of private networks or set up an arbitrary number of your own. And in that sense it is not completely anonymous, in the same way that RetroShare is not fully anonymous. But with OneSwarm, it is impossible to tell where the [pieces of] files reside on the network, or what nodes the files go through when you download. So while joining the network might not be completely anonymous, sharing files is.
"I've read the chain. Nick brings in Jesus a little weirdly, but the basic point was that "we are legion" is a quote of the "bad guys". You were the one who brought in demons and claimed there couldn't possibly be a connection between the term legion and the Bible."
That is not an accurate assessment. "Nick", as you call him, was clearly implying an association with demons. Else his statement made no sense whatever... it would have been completely pointless to write what he did. Logically, he HAD TO be referring to demons. So I was not actually the one who "brought it up". I was the first to state it in plain words, but I did not introduce the subject, he did.
And I did not go so far as to say it "could not possibly". If you did indeed read my other comments, you will see that I mostly used phrases like "probably" and "not likely".
"We are legion" is a bad-guy quote. If Anonymous wants to be considered good-guys, they might want a better motto."
See? There you go again. I disagree completely about it [i.e., the words that were actually used in this case]. I do not think that a young person today who says "we are legion" is necessarily or intentionally making an association with demons. And nothing you have stated has had any bearing whatever on that assertion. The phrase has been used too often in modern times, in too many other contexts. Repeat: today's dictionary defines it as meaning "many". And my argument was about today.
Now, having said that: someone else pointed out later that on another occasion some representative of Anonymous stated "we are legion; for we are many". If you take that whole phrase, it would pretty clearly have to be a biblical reference... anything else is too much of a stretch. But even then, that does not imply that the speaker actually understands the reference. Regardless, in THIS case, that isn't what was said. So it has no bearing on my argument, which was only about the phrase "we are legion", in modern usage. That was the whole of my original point... it wasn't me who sidetracked the issue.
I agree that they could probably do with a better motto, but I do not assume that its implications are really understood by the people saying it.
"The Gospel of Mark in West Saxon uses "Legio", the actual Latin word, so it would seem that prior to "Anglicization" in 1175, we just used the Latin word directly. "
In that case, I concede the point that it could have meant "legion" in the Roman sense of the word.
"And if you'd read my post carefully, I showed you that the MODERN usage of legion to also mean "many" is because of the Bible verse."
And if you read MY posts carefully, you would see that this is completely irrelevant to what I originally said. My point was about MODERN usage. In fact that was the whole of my point... that someone today would not necessarily make the connection.
Generalized sense of "a large number" is due to translations of allusive phrase in Mark v.9.
Which is pretty much all I said. That you continue to get your dander up over it is bizarre...
You think it's bizarre because you don't have the context right. Go back and look at my ORIGINAL point. It was: that young modern English-speakers who say "we are legion" (no more, no less), are probably NOT attempting to associate themselves with demons.
In that context, it is you and others who have yanked things all over the place and made irrelevant arguments. My original point was that in MODERN, contemporary usage, it is often just a synonym for "many". The dictionary says so, quite clearly. It was other people who started BSing about the meanings of words at times that were not even relevant to the conversation. And you are one of them.
OK, even I am getting bored by this, but try to follow this.
Be bored all you like. You're the one who isn't getting it. I haven't misunderstood you, it's that your statements are irrelevant (as far as I know) to the point I was making.
When a word like legion has a dictionary entry that says "Origin 1175-1225", that's when the word entered the English language, not when it first popped out of the mouths of humans. Legio (Latin) and Legiwn (Greek) have both existed for well over 2000 years. Legio came to Greece and became Legiwn, came through Old French as Legion and entered English through Old French/Norman. Same word, with slight changes to pronunciation, century after century.
All completely irrelevant. The issue was (I asked you last time... maybe I didn't make myself clear?) WHEN was that translated into English, and what word (in whatever language) did it replace? That was the question. Was it translated to English directly from Legio or Legiwin? If so, you haven't said so. If it was, I'll concede your point.
And when it came into English, it was used in the sense of a "Roman Legion" (band of soldiers), not as a synonym for "many".
I am fully aware of this. If you bothered to read my earlier posts, I even mentioned this myself. My reference to its use as "many" was to MODERN usage. You should not have had trouble getting that part straight. I haven't even implied anything else.
"everything government does is an attack. What, you didn't know? Every single move by gov't is an attack. It's all violence. Whatever shape and form it takes, it is only possible because of the barrel of a gun pointed at your head, nothing else at all."
If you want to put it that way, I won't argue the point. But still, it behooves us to make a distinction between justifiable "attacks" on a corporation or the public, and unjustified attacks. I think we can agree that most of the time it's unjustified.
"As to 'anti-trust' -every time this was used, it was used by gov't as a response to various underhanded deals, helping out the competitors (existing or possible) of the company that is being attacked."
That's not true at all. Take the breakup of Ma Bell, for instance. While some of the consequences of that breakup were negative, a lot of the consequences were very positive. But more to the point: it was broken up for very, very good reasons. It had been soaking the American public, via monopolistic practices and in direct violation of a previous Federal court injunction, for over 20 years. And if it hadn't been broken up, you can bet you would not be walking around with a cell phone right now, because it had almost completely stifled innovation in regard to telephones.
"- that is irrelevant. Today we cannot say how things would have worked out for them, because we know how things worked out based on real events. It's impossible to know for a fact what would have happened, and that's why your argument is nonsense."
My argument isn't nonsense; that wasn't part of it. You brought Kodak up, not me. I was simply pointing out that it wasn't the government that drove Kodak out of business, it was Kodak itself. In fact, there was an article about that in the Wall Street Journal just the other day.
And if the only way Kodak could stay in business was to violate antitrust laws (read: act like a monopoly), then it deserved to get shut down anyway.
"You do not in fact know, what would have happened to Kodak if it was not for the government preventing their business ideas (acquisitions, whatever) from taking place."
No, nobody truly knows that, even the people who ran Kodak. Nevertheless, the antitrust suits were apparently for good reasons, and as I say, if the only way they could stay in business was to violate antitrust laws, then it's probably a good thing they went bye-bye.
In general, I agree with you that government interference in the marketplace is a bad thing. The bailouts, for example, were absolutely the wrong things to do. But also, again: clear back to Adam Smith, it was clearly recognized that we would have to have government-imposed antitrust laws, if we wanted to have any kind of free market at all.
Slashdot Mirror
And by the way: to be honest, I don't think you really understand what either "straw-man" arguments or "ad hominem" attacks are.
"Not in this case."
Yes, even in this case. You DO own the music or movie you have purchased... but the courts have -- so far -- allowed restrictions to be put on the use of this OWNED product.
Which, practically as well as legally, is a contradiction. See my other reply above. One of these days the courts are going to have to decide, because as a practical matter, you really can't have it both ways: if you truly own it, then you have the right to do whatever the hell you want with it. (Except sell copies, of course, but that's copyright law, not contract or property law.)
"Btw courts have so far upheld this interpretation..."
But the court decisions have had to do with restrictions on your use... not whether you actually "own" the product. Of course, as I mentioned, this is really a contradiction, because you can't have such use restrictions on things that you truly own. Either you own it or you do not. This creates a legal contradiction which will have to be sorted out one of these days, and I see only one way it could go... and that will not make the studios happy. Well, that's just too bad.
"For now."
Well, yes, of course. I am aware of efforts to change that.
"Don't forget, due to lobbying pressures by the *AAs, some countries are moving to make it a criminal act to circumvent any form of copyright encryption."
You mean like the United States? They already have. The DMCA made it illegal to even attempt to circumvent DRM, back around the year 2000 (thus the name "millenium"). It wasn't until later that courts established that there were exemptions to the law for a few specific purposes. It is still illegal in most cases.
"And, game manufacturers are trying to establish that a video game is a "service" not a "good" so they can yank it out from underneath you anytime they like."
Good luck with that. {sarcasm}
Restriction on how people can use goods after purchase has been tried in the United States for almost every kind of product under the sun, including garden shovels (yes, really). Courts have consistently ruled that if you go into a retail store and plunk down your money for a product, you have bought that product, not "licensed" it, regardless of any "license agreement" that may come with the product.
This principle has been applied across the board to EVERY kind of product that has tried it, including books and music... except, so far, software. And it hasn't been ruled that way for software yet because there hasn't been a real test case before any higher courts that I am aware of. Part of that is due to software companies rabidly pushing for out-of-court settlements so that the courts simply would not have an opportunity to rule on it. But I know of no logical (or legal) reason software should be treated differently from just about every other product in existence.
Now, having said that, of course we know of games that have an online aspect to them, such as WoW and EQII. The online aspect of the game might arguably be deemed a "service", I don't know.
"And, for the record, I hope to hell I'm wrong."
As do we all, I am sure. I am pretty weary of these money-mongers forcing legislation to guarantee themselves a profit. I'm not suggesting anybody actually do this, but from an ethical standpoint, I think they should be taken out and shot.
"Nobody expects infinite bandwidth... which was my original point..."
Bollocks. Until I made that clarification, I had never mentioned "unlimited bandwidth". In fact, I explicitly stated in the very beginning that is NOT what I was talking about, and it's right there, in your quote of my words:
"... just like anybody off-campus could get..."
... and you proceeded to argue with me about that. If you were arguing about something else, like truly unlimited bandwidth, as opposed to a reasonable comparison with other ISPs, why did you not say so, in so many words? Because that has nothing at all to do with anything I was talking about, and you could not have been arguing with ME at all. I had assumed -- actually I had stated, just as you quoted there -- that I was only interested in a discussion within reasonable bounds, which I explicitly said was a comparison with "off-campus" ISPs. Since you did not plainly state otherwise, I had no choice but to assume your arguments were in the same context. If they were not (as you now say), and you were talking about completely unlimited bandwidth, and completely unfettered access, you were doing nothing but wasting both your time and mine, because that isn't even remotely what I was talking about. So why were you arguing with me in the first place?
If you were actually arguing about something other than what I originally stated, I would have to ask why, because my statement there is perfectly clear. That is why I have repeatedly stated that you keep arguing about things I did not even say.
And also, therefore, either you could not have meant what you now say, because you were arguing with THAT SENTENCE which you quoted, or you failed to understand that sentence. Either way, my statements have been consistent from the beginning: "just as anybody off-campus could get" compares on-campus internet to what is supplied by external ISPs, exactly as I repeated later on.
With your quote, YOU have demonstrated that I have done nothing but remain consistent, and you have not. Either that, or you have been been arguing with thin air, and not me, because I made it clear in the very beginning that I was NOT talking about anything that was genuinely "unlimited"... I was only comparing to other ISPs.
And I am done with this, because it is clearly a waste of time.
If somebody came up with a good drop-in spreadsheet for, say, Ruby/Rails, they could make a fortune.
"It is the position of the movie industry that you are renting viewing rights with any movie purchase and nothing more."
Their "position" is irrelevant. The law says otherwise.
"The music industry doesn't seem to be any worse off than they were when they insisted upon DRM."
Yeah... because don't use it anymore. At least, most of them have wised up and have dropped their DRM schemes. Where they did have DRM, they lost money.
Now if only some of the game makers would similarly wise up. Like you, Ubisoft.
"This is what I mean about backtracking when called on a point you make - you started out by saying it violates academic freedom to not give unfettered access and called for the ACLU to step in ... I say it's not reasonable to expect unlimited, unfettered access, we go back and forth ..."
How is that "backtracking"? I am adhering to my original statement. How does that constitute "backtracking"?
Yes, I did state "Nobody expects infinite bandwidth." That was merely to make sure we were keeping reasonable limits on this conversation. It is not in any way "backing down" or "backtracking" from what I originally stated. It was merely acknowledgment that we are talking about reasonable things, not outrageous hypotheticals.
So when you say "I say it's not reasonable to expect unlimited, unfettered access", I was merely clarifying that we were talking about reasonably unlimited, and reasonably unfettered... exactly as one can get from some other ISP. At no time was I suggesting infinite bandwidth or infinite access. That would not be reasonable. If you are trying to claim that's what I meant, then we aren't even having the same argument.
And at no time, throughout this whole exchange, did I see ANYTHING that would cause me to believe that you actually meant "I do expect that universities can supply bandwidth to their students in a manner comparable to other local ISPs."
This entire conversation has been about a University blocking access to certain sites and materials. I do not call that "supplying bandwidth in a manner comparable to other ISPs". On the contrary; it is behavior for which "other ISPs" have either lost customers or gotten into trouble.
"But further It only applies to actions of governments."
It doesn't actually say that anywhere, but even if it did, that is irrelevant because a takedown amounts to a de facto seizure of property, without due process, as a requirement of the federal law. So even if "due process" only applies to government action, it still applies in this case, because Congress authorized the seizure of valuable property (whether text, images, or other works) without any "due process" whatever. This is antithetical to some of the most basic principles of American law.
"The only solution that is workable without totally swamping the courts would be some sort of (rapidly escalating) penalty for a false take down notice."
Nonsense. It is by no means the "only" solution. Repealing the takedown clauses of the DMCA would solve the problem as well. The problem did not exist before the DMCA. Remove the relevant clauses from the DMCA, and the problem goes away, and we are left with the much more sane system we had before, which actually worked.
"You probably still need a way to prevent people from posting an entire 60 million dollar movie on the web somewhere. A quick take down should be available in this case without going to court in every jurisdiction in the world."
I disagree 100%. The advantages are still with the rights holders, even without the DMCA. A person should have to be accused and convincingly shown to have broken the law before action is taken against him. That is the way American law has worked in almost every situation prior to the DMCA. That system did work and created a situation in which the rights of all parties were pretty fairly balanced. The same cannot be said of today, post-DMCA.
Keep in mind that infringement (in the vast majority of cases) is no crime. Nobody is "stealing" a 60-million-dollar movie. Further, the actual statistics say that downloading has not harmed actual music or movie revenue. On the contrary: after a short-lived slump that was almost certainly due to a slow economy, total music and movie sales set yet another record last year. Even in the "slow" years, their total revenue still increased from year to year; far better than many other industries fared.
Okay, I understand the difference. But deduplication -- as I already explained -- does not address the real issue, if by "deduplication" you mean they simply remove files with identical CRCs or a similar method. Because I could put my movie in a .zip file, with a text file included, and thus the CRC would no longer be useful for that purpose.
Actual deduplication would require uncompressing compressed files and checking their contents, among other things. Doing that is both intrusive and time-consuming... and is exactly the behavior that got DropBox into trouble with its users.
No, it isn't the whole problem. It is only part of the problem. Another part of the problem is that it allows takedowns BEFORE any "due process" has been undertaken. (A statement of "this is an infringing post" does not qualify as "due process".)
The whole takedown notice scheme needs to vanish from this country. Completely. Things need to go back to the way they were before, when someone actually had to demonstrate a violation in front of a court before expression could be suppressed.
And we can do perfectly good spreadsheets too. Libre Office (a fork of Open Office) does perfectly good, open-souce and open-format spreadsheets. That's not online, of course, but it is possible to do online spreadsheets also, using open-souce code, too, involving "edit-in-place" routines using tables to represent the spreadsheet.
Online, open-source spreadsheets are not an easy thing to implement, which is why they are generally limited to single-purpose tables rather than generic spreadsheets. But they are possible.
I am not positive, but I think the issue with Megaupload was that they DID take down the particular file that was being complained about, but did nothing about the (possibly several or even a hundred) other copies of the same file that other people had uploaded.
.zip I upload, which changes the CRC beyond recognition. Basically, what they would have to do would be intrusively scan and catalog everything that was uploaded, which arguably throws away any "safe harbor" they might claim.
Of course, if you want to do that, you run into other issues: how do you know two uploaded files are the same? You could do a CRC check, which is non-intrusive, but also not a very good method. I could add a short text file to the
That's one of the big problems with all these schemes calling for repositories and ISPs to monitor the content passing through them: it is fundamentally intrusive, and might endanger any "safe harbor" provision they could otherwise use as a defense.
I agree, but my point was that there IS such a network that anonymizes not only where the files reside, but what nodes you get them from. That is an important improvement over some of the others.
It is easy to say that if you had a 2-person network set up, you would know where the files are coming from, but even then, that is not so. Parts of those files will already be stored encrypted on your own hard drive, other parts will be on the other node. And you don't know which parts.
So there is "plausible deniability" to every step of the process, except, as I stated earlier, actually joining a network.
I know your reply was to him... but actually, * I * am the libertarian here, and I didn't argue any of those things. In fact other than copyright I said pretty much what you did.
"Since you insist on backtracking and then evading answering my point any further discussion relevant to what you said is, well, pointless."
I agree that it is pointless, but for different reasons. It is pointless because you refuse to even acknowledge what my original argument was. Then you try to yank the discussion in a different direction, and insist that I stated (or at least implied) things that I actually did not, THEN, when I try to steer the conversation BACK to what I was originally talking about in the first place, you call that "backtracking" and denial.
Sheesh. I have been very patient with you but my patience is about gone.
"Comparing their capacity to cable is relevant - do you really think any university network can withstand unlimited, unfettered use without degradation?"
Many universities do exactly that, so why should I expect otherwise? Of course I mean "unlimited and unfettered" only in comparison to other local ISPs... we have to be reasonable here. Nobody expects infinite bandwidth. So yes... I do expect that universities can supply bandwidth to their students in a manner comparable to other local ISPs. In fact, many of them do so via contracts with the local ISPs themselves.
If it's provided as a result of a room and board deal then it really has nothing to do with the academic mission of the university - that is governed by contract law and if you don't like their deal go elsewhere - it's as simple as that. So your whole "academic freedom" argument is moot.
That's only if you live off-campus, in which case none of this makes any difference anyway, because if you live off-campus, you aren't going to be getting your internet from the university!
That sentence should have been "relevant or not". But I wan't to add this as well: blocking sites or otherwise censoring internet content is generally MORE expensive than not doing it. So a "limited resources" argument does not necessarily apply. Possibly, if you are saying that they don't want too many people downloading files and the like. But there are perfectly legitimate reasons to do that, too.
Major ISP don't tell you just how drastically the price of supplying internet bandwidth has come DOWN, for the simple reason that they want to keep raising prices, not lower them. But the era of limited bandwidth, as a practical matter, is close to being over.
"Your point seems to be you want unfettered internet access and think it is due you simply because you pay tuition."
Not just tuition; you also pay room and board, and fees for things such as internet. If it were ONLY tuition, I think it would be more up to the school. But regardless of just exactly how it is being paid for, it *IS* being paid for. Universities do not supply services for free. They are paid by fees or by taxes, one of the two.
"Every time I reply to you, you say "I didn't say that;" despite having done so earlier."
I say that when you twist my meaning. For example:
""So you are in favor of censorship, as you would define it, as long as it's not you that is being "censored.;""
The fact is that I did NOT write that, or anything like it. You may have interpreted my words that way, but it isn't what I actually wrote and it sure is hell does not even remotely resemble anything I meant.
"As I pointed out above, you brought in the aCLU, 1st amendment issues and then backtracked"
No, that is not correct. YOU brought up the 1st Amendment. It wasn't me. YOU have kept insisting that the only justification the ACLU has to intervene is the 1st Amendment, but but that just isn't so, as I tried to tell you earlier. I neither stated or implied that the 1st Amendment was involved. You did.
"In addition to backing down whenever I called you on your argument..."
I have done no such thing. I haven't backed down from ANY of the statements I actually made; I only denied that I wrote the things that YOU were claiming I stated... but which I actually did not. Those are two very different things. I repeat: I was not making the arguments you have kept insisting I was making. I simply said that the student should contact the ACLU. I did not state or even imply that the 1st Amendment was involved. If I did, no doubt you will have no trouble quoting the words you claim I wrote which actually said that? I'd like to see them. As that link proves, the ACLU gets involved in academic freedom issues that do NOT involve the 1st Amendment. Just like I actually DID state.
"you consistently fail to address the salient point: ... Does a university have the right to control the use of limited resources to the broader university community can use them as needed? You never have answered that, despite my providing a number of examples which you dismiss as straw men since you seem to have no other response."
I never answered because it was a straw-man argument that, I repeat: has nothing whatever to do with the statement I originally made. I don't owe you answers to questions that aren't even relevant to the point I made.
But since you seem to insist that I answer the question, relative or not, answer me this first: why do you keep insisting that they are "limited resources", without any evidence or citations to back that up? It is actually nothing more than an unfounded assumption. The universities with which I am familiar have internet resources that can hardly be called "limited", in comparison to regular cable service in the area. Also, they definitely charge for the privilege, as part of the cost of room and board... NOT as part of the tuition.
Repeat of what I replied to someone else above: OneSwarm is a darknet-capable file sharing client (it is also compatible with regular P2P networks), that addresses this issue. OneSwarm is designed such that once a file is put on the network, it is impossible to tell exactly where the file (or pieces of the file) are hosted, and it is equally impossible to tell what nodes they go through to get to you.
So actual transfer of files is indeed anonymous.
OneSwarm, from the University of Washington, addresses this issue. You can join any number of private networks or set up an arbitrary number of your own. And in that sense it is not completely anonymous, in the same way that RetroShare is not fully anonymous. But with OneSwarm, it is impossible to tell where the [pieces of] files reside on the network, or what nodes the files go through when you download. So while joining the network might not be completely anonymous, sharing files is.
"I've read the chain. Nick brings in Jesus a little weirdly, but the basic point was that "we are legion" is a quote of the "bad guys". You were the one who brought in demons and claimed there couldn't possibly be a connection between the term legion and the Bible."
That is not an accurate assessment. "Nick", as you call him, was clearly implying an association with demons. Else his statement made no sense whatever... it would have been completely pointless to write what he did. Logically, he HAD TO be referring to demons. So I was not actually the one who "brought it up". I was the first to state it in plain words, but I did not introduce the subject, he did.
And I did not go so far as to say it "could not possibly". If you did indeed read my other comments, you will see that I mostly used phrases like "probably" and "not likely".
"We are legion" is a bad-guy quote. If Anonymous wants to be considered good-guys, they might want a better motto."
See? There you go again. I disagree completely about it [i.e., the words that were actually used in this case]. I do not think that a young person today who says "we are legion" is necessarily or intentionally making an association with demons. And nothing you have stated has had any bearing whatever on that assertion. The phrase has been used too often in modern times, in too many other contexts. Repeat: today's dictionary defines it as meaning "many". And my argument was about today.
Now, having said that: someone else pointed out later that on another occasion some representative of Anonymous stated "we are legion; for we are many". If you take that whole phrase, it would pretty clearly have to be a biblical reference... anything else is too much of a stretch. But even then, that does not imply that the speaker actually understands the reference. Regardless, in THIS case, that isn't what was said. So it has no bearing on my argument, which was only about the phrase "we are legion", in modern usage. That was the whole of my original point... it wasn't me who sidetracked the issue.
I agree that they could probably do with a better motto, but I do not assume that its implications are really understood by the people saying it.
"The Gospel of Mark in West Saxon uses "Legio", the actual Latin word, so it would seem that prior to "Anglicization" in 1175, we just used the Latin word directly. "
In that case, I concede the point that it could have meant "legion" in the Roman sense of the word.
"And if you'd read my post carefully, I showed you that the MODERN usage of legion to also mean "many" is because of the Bible verse."
And if you read MY posts carefully, you would see that this is completely irrelevant to what I originally said. My point was about MODERN usage. In fact that was the whole of my point... that someone today would not necessarily make the connection.
Generalized sense of "a large number" is due to translations of allusive phrase in Mark v.9.
Which is pretty much all I said. That you continue to get your dander up over it is bizarre...
You think it's bizarre because you don't have the context right. Go back and look at my ORIGINAL point. It was: that young modern English-speakers who say "we are legion" (no more, no less), are probably NOT attempting to associate themselves with demons.
In that context, it is you and others who have yanked things all over the place and made irrelevant arguments. My original point was that in MODERN, contemporary usage, it is often just a synonym for "many". The dictionary says so, quite clearly. It was other people who started BSing about the meanings of words at times that were not even relevant to the conversation. And you are one of them.
OK, even I am getting bored by this, but try to follow this.
Be bored all you like. You're the one who isn't getting it. I haven't misunderstood you, it's that your statements are irrelevant (as far as I know) to the point I was making.
When a word like legion has a dictionary entry that says "Origin 1175-1225", that's when the word entered the English language, not when it first popped out of the mouths of humans. Legio (Latin) and Legiwn (Greek) have both existed for well over 2000 years. Legio came to Greece and became Legiwn, came through Old French as Legion and entered English through Old French/Norman. Same word, with slight changes to pronunciation, century after century.
All completely irrelevant. The issue was (I asked you last time... maybe I didn't make myself clear?) WHEN was that translated into English, and what word (in whatever language) did it replace? That was the question. Was it translated to English directly from Legio or Legiwin? If so, you haven't said so. If it was, I'll concede your point.
And when it came into English, it was used in the sense of a "Roman Legion" (band of soldiers), not as a synonym for "many".
I am fully aware of this. If you bothered to read my earlier posts, I even mentioned this myself. My reference to its use as "many" was to MODERN usage. You should not have had trouble getting that part straight. I haven't even implied anything else.
"everything government does is an attack. What, you didn't know? Every single move by gov't is an attack. It's all violence. Whatever shape and form it takes, it is only possible because of the barrel of a gun pointed at your head, nothing else at all."
If you want to put it that way, I won't argue the point. But still, it behooves us to make a distinction between justifiable "attacks" on a corporation or the public, and unjustified attacks. I think we can agree that most of the time it's unjustified.
"As to 'anti-trust' -every time this was used, it was used by gov't as a response to various underhanded deals, helping out the competitors (existing or possible) of the company that is being attacked."
That's not true at all. Take the breakup of Ma Bell, for instance. While some of the consequences of that breakup were negative, a lot of the consequences were very positive. But more to the point: it was broken up for very, very good reasons. It had been soaking the American public, via monopolistic practices and in direct violation of a previous Federal court injunction, for over 20 years. And if it hadn't been broken up, you can bet you would not be walking around with a cell phone right now, because it had almost completely stifled innovation in regard to telephones.
"- that is irrelevant. Today we cannot say how things would have worked out for them, because we know how things worked out based on real events. It's impossible to know for a fact what would have happened, and that's why your argument is nonsense."
My argument isn't nonsense; that wasn't part of it. You brought Kodak up, not me. I was simply pointing out that it wasn't the government that drove Kodak out of business, it was Kodak itself. In fact, there was an article about that in the Wall Street Journal just the other day.
And if the only way Kodak could stay in business was to violate antitrust laws (read: act like a monopoly), then it deserved to get shut down anyway.
"You do not in fact know, what would have happened to Kodak if it was not for the government preventing their business ideas (acquisitions, whatever) from taking place."
No, nobody truly knows that, even the people who ran Kodak. Nevertheless, the antitrust suits were apparently for good reasons, and as I say, if the only way they could stay in business was to violate antitrust laws, then it's probably a good thing they went bye-bye.
In general, I agree with you that government interference in the marketplace is a bad thing. The bailouts, for example, were absolutely the wrong things to do. But also, again: clear back to Adam Smith, it was clearly recognized that we would have to have government-imposed antitrust laws, if we wanted to have any kind of free market at all.