Well, that's considered "for commercial advantage." The presumption is that for-profit corporations act for profit. I don't think you'd get away with it in court, but, if you want to try, I'd be happy to short your stock.;)
Not wise, just spent several years fighting these issues from different sides.
I've answered this a couple of times, but I think you'll have a lot of trouble getting a nonprofit funded well enough to actually do this. Even if you can, I doubt that a nonprofit incorporated largely to facilitate piracy could get away with it for long at any scale.
Of course, at the end, you imply you'd get congress to pay for it, and if you can manage to get them to change the law, of course, anything I say here about what the law is doesn't apply.:)
Most P2P solutions have a company at the middle trying to make money off it, and they've tended to get nuked for that reason.
However, I neglected to mention that it's also quite clear as a matter of law that putting songs up for download even if you make no profit is also illegal. The RIAA is cracking down on individuals now, as well, and they have the right to do so under current law. They've been doing it for years to people who put up BBSs and FTP sites, and P2P is not so fundamentally different that the precedents in those cases won't apply.
If you feel current law should be different, I encourage you to contact your congresspeople.
I'll agree my original statement was overbroad. I'll refine it, a bit: If a for-profit company copies a work "for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage," it isn't fair use. Corporations do have limited fair use rights for stuff like reasonable backups.
It is impossible for me to conceive how a for-profit company could copy the CDs to compress them, or copy them over the wire to shareholder (especially for the nickle Cringley proposes) and have their copying be fair use, even if the copy of the data itself is fair use (which it isn't).
Also, unfortunately, this kind of "logical" idea fails as long as the company is for-profit (which it'd have to be to have a $150 million IPO, setting aside how hard that is to begin with). When the company copies the music from its computer to the shareholder's, it's doing so for commercial advantage and has comitted a copyright violation. I refer again to the mp3.com case.
Even assuming that is legal (and I believe it's untested in the courts, although IANAL), how do you fund it? Where do you get the $1.4 million to buy the music to start with? Also, I honestly don't know - can nonprofit companies have shareholders? As far as I know they can't. I think the whole thing turns on having shareholders in a public company.
I think your networked idea still results in a copy (as the bits transfer from them to you). When companies mount CDs over LAN drives, it's either software they have a site or large license to, or it's done internally and the piracy isn't noticed by anyone. A company that got big enough at this to matter would be noticed and subject to strict legal scruitiny, so I think you should stay away from that approach.
Which leaves us "renting" the CD through the mail. Ever wonder why you never see CD rental places in the US? Why there's not a "nettunz" to go with "netflix?" It's because they're illegal. According to USC Title 17, Section 109, "Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of particular copy or phonorecord":
..[U]nless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording... the owner of a particular phonorecord... may [not], for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord... by rental, lease, or lending, or by any other act or practice in the nature of rental, lease, or lending.
The edits are necessary for clarity because this section also has a lot of cumbersome language about software; go read the original if you doubt my interpretation. Why can actual libraries get away with it? Because the next sentence says, "Nothing in the preceding sentence shall apply to the rental, lease, or lending of a phonorecord for nonprofit purposes by a nonprofit library or nonprofit educational institution."
So, could you set up a nonprofit corporation to do this? I guess so, although it'd face all the normal challenges a nonprofit does in trying to find the money to build its collection. And, your strongly implied personal copy before return would itself be illegal. If it were used pretty much only for this purpose, and got big enough, I bet the RIAA would try to claim that the nonprofit should know there's monkey business going on and try to shut it down. Whether they could would be up to the courts.
But, again, it's not fair use if it's for profit. Since everything a for-profit company does is considered for profit by the law, copying CDs is considered for profit, and the company would need a license. I refer again to Exhibit A, the twisted and burning wreckage of mp3.com after the RIAA got done with it simply for copying 300,000 CDs.
An insightful article by an AC which deserves to be modded up.
You say you're not sure what law media shifting comes from - the problem is that so much of this stuff doesn't come from law, but from court decisions. The court has always tried to balance the Constitutional command to issue copyrights against the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment. Fair use is what resulted from that balancing act.
The time-shifting basis, in particular, comes from the 1984 case SONY CORP. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC. It was also used as a defense in the Diamond Rio case (my company filed an amicus brief on Diamond's side in that one).
An important point many have been missing, as well, is that, if a company makes a copy, it's pretty much by definition for profit and a violation of copyright law if not performed under a license. It is certainly within your rights to copy a CD. It is just as certainly not within a corporation's, with the possible exception of reasonable backup provisions.
The flat bottom line is that the law is generally more resilient than this and just not that easy to hack. My favorite law hack is PGP, Inc.'s exportation of PGP 5.5i source code in books, but that was really an excercise in legal Judo, using the mass of the First Amendment against the ITAR arms control regime.
But generally speaking, while tech people tend to try to come up with clever routes around the legal system, the law is more resilient than that. Intent - both yours and the law-writers - matters, and so something that might look to be alright often ends up losing in court if it turns on too technical an interpretation.
I think mp3.com's idea was a good one. I was head of technology for EMusic, and I had the exact same idea before they announced theirs. Thankfully, our legal counsel was better than theirs (or more listened to by us) and he said, "What, are you insanse? As soon as you make the copies, you've broken the law!" It makes sense to the tech mind from an outcome perspective. Ironically the service itself seems to meet the fair use tests I describe above - it doesn't replace a sale, since we know you have it. Unfortunately, it's very clearly against the law. As soon as mp3.com announced their service I knew it was the end of their company as a seperate entity.
As I understand the mp3.com situation - and EMusic got bought by Vivendi and our tech got merged with theirs, so I've been down there a number of times and talked to a lot of people involved, and read the court decisions, etc. - what they got in trouble for was making the initial copy needed to compress the CDs to mp3 format. That's it.
The logic of the court is, basically, whatever mp3.com is doing is by definition for profit. If you're doing something for profit, it's by definition not fair use. The point of copyright law is to ensure that, if you make money off copying a copyrighted work, the copyright owner gets paid.
So, while it would be perfectly legal for you as an individual to copy those CDs, compress them and stream them to yourself, because mp3.com did it for you for their own profit, it's clear copyright violation.
It is exactly the same way that you can photocopy a book yourself in your home and it's fair use, but if you pay Kinko's to do it for you it's a copyright violation. On the surface it seems the same and it seems fair that you be able to pay Kinko's to save you the effort and investment of a photocopier, but the whole point of copyright law is that Kinko's can't copy works without paying the copyright owner.
People can rail against this as being cretinous, but I don't see how the current idea of copyright can continue without the law being like this. If you think copyright should exist at all (leaving aside questions like the lunacy of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions), then I don't see how the law could be any other than this and still work.
Obviously not everyone thinks there should be copyright, at all, but that's a different issue entirely.
I understand where he's coming from, I'm just saying it doesn't work. Even if the company could make copies of the CDs for distribution to shareholders (which the MP3.com case pretty clearly shows is illegal, anyway), you would at most be able to allow one shareholder (or employee) to listen to a given song at a time, even if the corporation has fair-use rights like that at all, which is doubtful.
You ask, "If I own part of a corporation, and that corporation owns a recording, do I not have rights to that recording?" The answer is, quite simply, "no, you do not." At best you might have the right to go listen to it at the corporation (if management lets you) without making a copy of it. If management doesn't let you, I guess you can go start a proxy fight to get a listening station in the corporate lobby.:)
Look at it this way: If you own one share of a public company, you own like 1/30000000th of it. I figure that gives you the right to 1/30000000th of the CD, which is.00014 seconds.;)
If it were this easy, every corporation could issue one share of stock to every employee and buy one copy of every piece of software they wanted to use. Such a result so obviously flies in the face of the intent of copyright law that, even if it weren't clearly illegal now, if it somehow made it through the court system, it would quickly be made illegal.
I'm not aware of any NASDAQ publically listed not-for-profit companies, which is what Cringley suggests. Perhaps you can enlighten me as to their stock symbols?
Obviously I was discussing the for-profit publically traded type of company he was talking about in the article. Under law, anything a (for profit) corporation does is presumed to be based upon a profit motive. This prevents corporations from claiming, "we didn't make any money off of breaking the law," since the law can say, "presumably, as a for-profit corporation, you thought you'd get something out of it."
Actually, if you, say, read the article, he suggests going public on the NASDAQ at $20/share. I was merely pointing out this was nontrivial. I'm perfectly aware how easy it is to incorporate and issue stock. That wasn't what he suggested; he is clearly seeking a world where any idiot can buy your stock from his broker. That's harder.
Even penny stocks have some listing requirements. They're just less than for the major exchanges. Unfortunately for the purposes of Mr. Cringley's idea, generally the less reputable the exchange and listing requirements, the harder it is to actually buy. Still, if the rest of it were legal, you might be able to set up a company you'd list on the OTC:BB and sell shares in for some small amount. But since there are no market makers on the OTC, your stock would be illiquid and ripe for manipulation.
As for issuing shares in your still-private company to the massess: Selling unlicensed securities to unaccredited (read: not rich) investors will generally get you sent to jail for running a stock scam.
1. Doesn't matter. MP3 wasn't sued for the downloads, MP3 was sued for making the copy to populate the database. Cringley proposes doing exactly the same thing to start his system. Doesn't matter what the intent was or is, a corporation simply copying a CD without a license is a violation of existing copyright law. As Judge Rakoff said in his opinion, "The complex marvels of cyberspatial communication may create difficult legal issues; but not in this case. Defendant's infringement of plaintiffs' copyrights is clear." Explain to me how you can implement Cringley's proposal without doing exactly what MP3.com did and got busted for - making copies.
2. Not relevant, you're already out of business from 1.
3. "Would it replace a sale" is a shorthand way of saying, "would you normally need to buy it to do what you're doing?" The relevant law is 17 U.S.C. 107, "Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use":
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1)
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2)
the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3)
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4)
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
I'd say his idea is a slam dunk not-fair-use under section four, as (he freely admits) it would "destroy the potential market for...the copyrighted work." Not fair use, not legal, not a good business idea.
None of this, of course, is trying to make any argument about what the law should be. But these questions aren't hard under the law now, and they're very obviously not legal under the law now. Anyone who tries this is going to get eaten for breakfast by the major labels (and the minor ones, too - they sued mp3.com pretty hard as well).
The ignorance of both business and law displayed in his article is nothing short of breathtaking.
First, he handwaves about going public at $20/share. Maybe in 1999, pal, but not now. You can't just decide to do it, there are significant capitalization requirements, to say nothing of the money the bankers will want for doing the work for you.
But the real guffaw-worthiness of this article is the tremendous misunderstanding of fair use he displays. Number one, it's quite questionable what corporations' fair use rights are - but it's clear that they are less than an individual. Remember mp3.com? They bought 300,000 CDs and made one digital copy of each. That's perfectly legal, under fair use, for you and me. But when a corporation does it for profit (and by definition everything a corporation does is for profit), it's copyright infringement. MP3.com got pwn3ed by the major record labels for this.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the traditional test of fair use is, "would it replace a sale?" This clearly would. It's legal for you to make a copy of a CD so you can listen to one and home and one at work, since you won't be listening to both simultaneously. If they wanted to build this system so that only one shareholder could listen to a given piece at one time, they MIGHT be able to squeak through. But try this, and they Major Labels will just laugh all the way to the bank.
Fair use is a loser, man. You don't have the right to allow others to download, which is what they're complaining about. You could own the CD to every single song you share on Kazaa and you're still violating US copyright law, according to the decisions handed down in the Napster cases. Offering music for download is currently illegal in the US and has a lot of case law behind it. There are lot of people who've been busted for doing it over FTP, and it's no different over P2P.
Your best defense is to claim it wasn't you. Failing that, sue for peace and settle. That advice goes to anyone on this list.
Yup, this is what I do, too. Treat the wireless network as though it's the Internet. I even use CIPE to connect untrusted protocols (SMB) on my wired network, because I don't trust my wireless network.
The great thing about this is you can leave your wireless network open enough that friends can easily come over and use your network without needing a WEP key. Ideally, if you route the wireless network over a different NATted network, you can easily block off individual sources if anyone tries to abuse it.
My favorite part about XV was, if you did "xv *.jpg" (for instance) and then deleted some of the files out from under it, it would pop up a box as you got to each file that was deleted to let you know that it couldn't load the picture.
The dialog box said something along the lines of, "Couldn't display picture." But the fun part was, the button didn't say "OK," because, well, it probably wasn't OK. It said "Bummer."
I always thought that was a nice counterpoint to programs that say things like "All of your data has been lost" and then ask you to click "OK" No, it's NOT OK! But xv gaved you a way to acknowledge receipt of the information without having you approve of it, and I always appreciated that.
Sadly, the answer may be "yes," because you get into the issue of rexport. It doesn't matter where technology is created, the law just says you can't export it. Hypothetically, it could be created in the UK and packaged by Linus in Finland (before he moved here). IBM could then legitimately download it, but putting it back up for anyone else to download without export restrictions would be a violation.
That's all assuming, of course, that the SMP technology in Linux is sufficient to be controlled under these laws. I believe this is a novel position from SCO. Certainly if the government felt that way they would've been moving to shut down Linux's distribution at the time. It's not like Linux was some big secret. And I can sure tell you they knew enough what was going on at PGP to keep us dotting our is and crossing our ts with regard to export control. You'd better believe IBM had a flock of lawyers looking at issues just like this when they first got involved with Linux, and they decided there was no issue, here.
Not only that - why does Boies have such a sterling rep, anyway? The three big cases I'm aware of he's been involved in are DOJ vs. Microsoft, his management of Gore's legal strategy in 2000, and his defense of Napster.
Microsoft - nominally won, but the original terms of the settlement were pretty much a slap on the wrist, which Microsoft is now (allegedly) ignoring anyway.
Gore - anyone who's noticed who our President is right now knows how this one went.
Napster - Lost in convincing fashion, so badly the company cratered.
Now maybe he has a knack for finding indefensible defendants (I don't think Perry Mason could've won Napster), but as far as I can tell, when you put Boies on the case, it's as good as lost!
Re:THAT'S considered an acceptible release bug???
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
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· Score: 1
Err, I am NOT using 1.4 RC1 any time soon, I have OCD and I compulsivly click on white space on a website while reading it. (no, seriously. . ..)
Whoa. As far as I know, I'm not Obsessive-Compulsive (I assume that's what OCD is), but I have this weird habit of selecting the text of whatevever I'm reading. I don't even notice I'm doing it.
It caused me fits when I upgraded KDE to some version which added a "feature" to konsoles where, if you select text, then drag the selected text, it pastes it whereever you drop it. Even if where you drop it is the window you dragged it from (which, by the way, is a clear violation of drag-n-drop norms). Took me a LONG time to figure out what was going on, since, as I said, I don't even notice that I'm constantly selecting text while I read stuff. I'd be looking at a man page and all of the sudden less would start jumping all over the place...
Anyway, once I figured out what was going on, I turned on "Require Ctrl key for drag and drop" in konsole and life has been much less confusing, sense. But your post really struct a nerve with me, I could really see how one quirk of how a program works could significantly impact your ability to use it.
This brings up an interesting point, as yet unanswered in the movies: When Neo learns Jujitsu, or Trinity learns to fly a chopper, are they really learning those things, or are they simply giving their avatars new abilities? Is this basically like a hack to get instant grandmaster in a skill in an MMORPG, or does Neo become a jujitsu master in Real Life, too. Of course, with our recent supposition that Zion isn't real, either, Neo performing Jujitsu in Zion wouldn't prove this definitively. But it's not clear to me that skills are being put in their brains when they do that.
All of that said, you're right, it's not hard to believe that Smith just copied himself or parts of himself into someone's brain.
The scene I'm getting at is early in the movie. We suddenly see two human avatars in the matrix world, with a package. A asks B if he's OK, and A says he'll be alright. And that's what important is "this," a package. He gives it to B, and says, "after you." B picks up a nearby landline and is translated out of the matrix; he de-digitizes and the phone falls to the floor. As A picks the phone back up, Agent Smith comes around the corner, and does the virus copy job on him. When the phone next rings, the new Agent smith answers it, and also de-digitizes. The strong implication is that Agent Smith has just left the matrix for the "real" world. This person, I believe, is the "double agent" that set off the EMP to knock out Zion's defenses, and whom we see in sickback unconscious next to Neo in the Zion world at the end of the movie.
It is, I suppose, arguable that Agent Smith somehow ported himself to the brain of the unfortunate individual. But my gut reaction was that he had essentially just jumped digital worlds, and was now inhabiting a new avatar in the Zion-matrix rather than controlling a human in real space.
I think this is the crux of the argument against "the Oracle knew it all because she's done it before."
In this case things are definitely different. I say this not because of the Oracle or the Architect but because of the French guy who's name I can't remember. He comments that the previous Neos showed more respect. Clearly this Neo is fundamentally different than the past ones. It's also interesting to note that apparently the French fellow always tries to stop Neo and apparently always fails. You'd think he'd try something different...
If it's true that all this literally has happened before, I think the change is that, in the past, while Trinity has fallen in love with Neo, Neo hasn't fallen in love with Trinity. That's the big change. This allows the "Orcale has lived it before" theory an out: She predicted Trinity would fall in love with Neo, not vice versa. Maybe Trinity falls in love every time, but it's never mattered, before.
I still believe what I originally said, that the Oracle simulates people, and that's the source of her knowledge. But we have not yet been able to definitively rule out the "been there, done that" theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's considered "for commercial advantage." The presumption is that for-profit corporations act for profit. I don't think you'd get away with it in court, but, if you want to try, I'd be happy to short your stock. ;)
Again though, I'll direct you to USC Title 17, Section 109 which says that lending or renting CDs for profit is illegal, anyway.
Not wise, just spent several years fighting these issues from different sides.
:)
I've answered this a couple of times, but I think you'll have a lot of trouble getting a nonprofit funded well enough to actually do this. Even if you can, I doubt that a nonprofit incorporated largely to facilitate piracy could get away with it for long at any scale.
Of course, at the end, you imply you'd get congress to pay for it, and if you can manage to get them to change the law, of course, anything I say here about what the law is doesn't apply.
Most P2P solutions have a company at the middle trying to make money off it, and they've tended to get nuked for that reason.
However, I neglected to mention that it's also quite clear as a matter of law that putting songs up for download even if you make no profit is also illegal. The RIAA is cracking down on individuals now, as well, and they have the right to do so under current law. They've been doing it for years to people who put up BBSs and FTP sites, and P2P is not so fundamentally different that the precedents in those cases won't apply.
If you feel current law should be different, I encourage you to contact your congresspeople.
I'll agree my original statement was overbroad. I'll refine it, a bit: If a for-profit company copies a work "for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage," it isn't fair use. Corporations do have limited fair use rights for stuff like reasonable backups.
It is impossible for me to conceive how a for-profit company could copy the CDs to compress them, or copy them over the wire to shareholder (especially for the nickle Cringley proposes) and have their copying be fair use, even if the copy of the data itself is fair use (which it isn't).
See US Code Title 17, Section 109 (b)(1)(A). "Rental, lease or lending" of CDs "for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage" is prohibited.
Also, unfortunately, this kind of "logical" idea fails as long as the company is for-profit (which it'd have to be to have a $150 million IPO, setting aside how hard that is to begin with). When the company copies the music from its computer to the shareholder's, it's doing so for commercial advantage and has comitted a copyright violation. I refer again to the mp3.com case.
Even assuming that is legal (and I believe it's untested in the courts, although IANAL), how do you fund it? Where do you get the $1.4 million to buy the music to start with? Also, I honestly don't know - can nonprofit companies have shareholders? As far as I know they can't. I think the whole thing turns on having shareholders in a public company.
Which leaves us "renting" the CD through the mail. Ever wonder why you never see CD rental places in the US? Why there's not a "nettunz" to go with "netflix?" It's because they're illegal. According to USC Title 17, Section 109, "Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of particular copy or phonorecord":
The edits are necessary for clarity because this section also has a lot of cumbersome language about software; go read the original if you doubt my interpretation. Why can actual libraries get away with it? Because the next sentence says, "Nothing in the preceding sentence shall apply to the rental, lease, or lending of a phonorecord for nonprofit purposes by a nonprofit library or nonprofit educational institution."
So, could you set up a nonprofit corporation to do this? I guess so, although it'd face all the normal challenges a nonprofit does in trying to find the money to build its collection. And, your strongly implied personal copy before return would itself be illegal. If it were used pretty much only for this purpose, and got big enough, I bet the RIAA would try to claim that the nonprofit should know there's monkey business going on and try to shut it down. Whether they could would be up to the courts.
But, again, it's not fair use if it's for profit. Since everything a for-profit company does is considered for profit by the law, copying CDs is considered for profit, and the company would need a license. I refer again to Exhibit A, the twisted and burning wreckage of mp3.com after the RIAA got done with it simply for copying 300,000 CDs.
An insightful article by an AC which deserves to be modded up.
You say you're not sure what law media shifting comes from - the problem is that so much of this stuff doesn't come from law, but from court decisions. The court has always tried to balance the Constitutional command to issue copyrights against the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment. Fair use is what resulted from that balancing act.
The time-shifting basis, in particular, comes from the 1984 case SONY CORP. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC. It was also used as a defense in the Diamond Rio case (my company filed an amicus brief on Diamond's side in that one).
An important point many have been missing, as well, is that, if a company makes a copy, it's pretty much by definition for profit and a violation of copyright law if not performed under a license. It is certainly within your rights to copy a CD. It is just as certainly not within a corporation's, with the possible exception of reasonable backup provisions.
The flat bottom line is that the law is generally more resilient than this and just not that easy to hack. My favorite law hack is PGP, Inc.'s exportation of PGP 5.5i source code in books, but that was really an excercise in legal Judo, using the mass of the First Amendment against the ITAR arms control regime.
But generally speaking, while tech people tend to try to come up with clever routes around the legal system, the law is more resilient than that. Intent - both yours and the law-writers - matters, and so something that might look to be alright often ends up losing in court if it turns on too technical an interpretation.
I think mp3.com's idea was a good one. I was head of technology for EMusic, and I had the exact same idea before they announced theirs. Thankfully, our legal counsel was better than theirs (or more listened to by us) and he said, "What, are you insanse? As soon as you make the copies, you've broken the law!" It makes sense to the tech mind from an outcome perspective. Ironically the service itself seems to meet the fair use tests I describe above - it doesn't replace a sale, since we know you have it. Unfortunately, it's very clearly against the law. As soon as mp3.com announced their service I knew it was the end of their company as a seperate entity.
As I understand the mp3.com situation - and EMusic got bought by Vivendi and our tech got merged with theirs, so I've been down there a number of times and talked to a lot of people involved, and read the court decisions, etc. - what they got in trouble for was making the initial copy needed to compress the CDs to mp3 format. That's it.
The logic of the court is, basically, whatever mp3.com is doing is by definition for profit. If you're doing something for profit, it's by definition not fair use. The point of copyright law is to ensure that, if you make money off copying a copyrighted work, the copyright owner gets paid.
So, while it would be perfectly legal for you as an individual to copy those CDs, compress them and stream them to yourself, because mp3.com did it for you for their own profit, it's clear copyright violation.
It is exactly the same way that you can photocopy a book yourself in your home and it's fair use, but if you pay Kinko's to do it for you it's a copyright violation. On the surface it seems the same and it seems fair that you be able to pay Kinko's to save you the effort and investment of a photocopier, but the whole point of copyright law is that Kinko's can't copy works without paying the copyright owner.
People can rail against this as being cretinous, but I don't see how the current idea of copyright can continue without the law being like this. If you think copyright should exist at all (leaving aside questions like the lunacy of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions), then I don't see how the law could be any other than this and still work.
Obviously not everyone thinks there should be copyright, at all, but that's a different issue entirely.
I understand where he's coming from, I'm just saying it doesn't work. Even if the company could make copies of the CDs for distribution to shareholders (which the MP3.com case pretty clearly shows is illegal, anyway), you would at most be able to allow one shareholder (or employee) to listen to a given song at a time, even if the corporation has fair-use rights like that at all, which is doubtful.
:)
.00014 seconds. ;)
You ask, "If I own part of a corporation, and that corporation owns a recording, do I not have rights to that recording?" The answer is, quite simply, "no, you do not." At best you might have the right to go listen to it at the corporation (if management lets you) without making a copy of it. If management doesn't let you, I guess you can go start a proxy fight to get a listening station in the corporate lobby.
Look at it this way: If you own one share of a public company, you own like 1/30000000th of it. I figure that gives you the right to 1/30000000th of the CD, which is
If it were this easy, every corporation could issue one share of stock to every employee and buy one copy of every piece of software they wanted to use. Such a result so obviously flies in the face of the intent of copyright law that, even if it weren't clearly illegal now, if it somehow made it through the court system, it would quickly be made illegal.
I'm not aware of any NASDAQ publically listed not-for-profit companies, which is what Cringley suggests. Perhaps you can enlighten me as to their stock symbols?
Obviously I was discussing the for-profit publically traded type of company he was talking about in the article. Under law, anything a (for profit) corporation does is presumed to be based upon a profit motive. This prevents corporations from claiming, "we didn't make any money off of breaking the law," since the law can say, "presumably, as a for-profit corporation, you thought you'd get something out of it."
Actually, if you, say, read the article, he suggests going public on the NASDAQ at $20/share. I was merely pointing out this was nontrivial. I'm perfectly aware how easy it is to incorporate and issue stock. That wasn't what he suggested; he is clearly seeking a world where any idiot can buy your stock from his broker. That's harder.
Even penny stocks have some listing requirements. They're just less than for the major exchanges. Unfortunately for the purposes of Mr. Cringley's idea, generally the less reputable the exchange and listing requirements, the harder it is to actually buy. Still, if the rest of it were legal, you might be able to set up a company you'd list on the OTC:BB and sell shares in for some small amount. But since there are no market makers on the OTC, your stock would be illiquid and ripe for manipulation.
As for issuing shares in your still-private company to the massess: Selling unlicensed securities to unaccredited (read: not rich) investors will generally get you sent to jail for running a stock scam.
2. Not relevant, you're already out of business from 1.
3. "Would it replace a sale" is a shorthand way of saying, "would you normally need to buy it to do what you're doing?" The relevant law is 17 U.S.C. 107, "Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use":
I'd say his idea is a slam dunk not-fair-use under section four, as (he freely admits) it would "destroy the potential market for...the copyrighted work." Not fair use, not legal, not a good business idea.
None of this, of course, is trying to make any argument about what the law should be. But these questions aren't hard under the law now, and they're very obviously not legal under the law now. Anyone who tries this is going to get eaten for breakfast by the major labels (and the minor ones, too - they sued mp3.com pretty hard as well).
The ignorance of both business and law displayed in his article is nothing short of breathtaking.
First, he handwaves about going public at $20/share. Maybe in 1999, pal, but not now. You can't just decide to do it, there are significant capitalization requirements, to say nothing of the money the bankers will want for doing the work for you.
But the real guffaw-worthiness of this article is the tremendous misunderstanding of fair use he displays. Number one, it's quite questionable what corporations' fair use rights are - but it's clear that they are less than an individual. Remember mp3.com? They bought 300,000 CDs and made one digital copy of each. That's perfectly legal, under fair use, for you and me. But when a corporation does it for profit (and by definition everything a corporation does is for profit), it's copyright infringement. MP3.com got pwn3ed by the major record labels for this.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the traditional test of fair use is, "would it replace a sale?" This clearly would. It's legal for you to make a copy of a CD so you can listen to one and home and one at work, since you won't be listening to both simultaneously. If they wanted to build this system so that only one shareholder could listen to a given piece at one time, they MIGHT be able to squeak through. But try this, and they Major Labels will just laugh all the way to the bank.
Fair use is a loser, man. You don't have the right to allow others to download, which is what they're complaining about. You could own the CD to every single song you share on Kazaa and you're still violating US copyright law, according to the decisions handed down in the Napster cases. Offering music for download is currently illegal in the US and has a lot of case law behind it. There are lot of people who've been busted for doing it over FTP, and it's no different over P2P.
Your best defense is to claim it wasn't you. Failing that, sue for peace and settle. That advice goes to anyone on this list.
Yup, this is what I do, too. Treat the wireless network as though it's the Internet. I even use CIPE to connect untrusted protocols (SMB) on my wired network, because I don't trust my wireless network.
The great thing about this is you can leave your wireless network open enough that friends can easily come over and use your network without needing a WEP key. Ideally, if you route the wireless network over a different NATted network, you can easily block off individual sources if anyone tries to abuse it.
My favorite part about XV was, if you did "xv *.jpg" (for instance) and then deleted some of the files out from under it, it would pop up a box as you got to each file that was deleted to let you know that it couldn't load the picture.
The dialog box said something along the lines of, "Couldn't display picture." But the fun part was, the button didn't say "OK," because, well, it probably wasn't OK. It said "Bummer."
I always thought that was a nice counterpoint to programs that say things like "All of your data has been lost" and then ask you to click "OK" No, it's NOT OK! But xv gaved you a way to acknowledge receipt of the information without having you approve of it, and I always appreciated that.
I know a bit about this from my PGP days.
Sadly, the answer may be "yes," because you get into the issue of rexport. It doesn't matter where technology is created, the law just says you can't export it. Hypothetically, it could be created in the UK and packaged by Linus in Finland (before he moved here). IBM could then legitimately download it, but putting it back up for anyone else to download without export restrictions would be a violation.
That's all assuming, of course, that the SMP technology in Linux is sufficient to be controlled under these laws. I believe this is a novel position from SCO. Certainly if the government felt that way they would've been moving to shut down Linux's distribution at the time. It's not like Linux was some big secret. And I can sure tell you they knew enough what was going on at PGP to keep us dotting our is and crossing our ts with regard to export control. You'd better believe IBM had a flock of lawyers looking at issues just like this when they first got involved with Linux, and they decided there was no issue, here.
Not only that - why does Boies have such a sterling rep, anyway? The three big cases I'm aware of he's been involved in are DOJ vs. Microsoft, his management of Gore's legal strategy in 2000, and his defense of Napster.
Microsoft - nominally won, but the original terms of the settlement were pretty much a slap on the wrist, which Microsoft is now (allegedly) ignoring anyway.
Gore - anyone who's noticed who our President is right now knows how this one went.
Napster - Lost in convincing fashion, so badly the company cratered.
Now maybe he has a knack for finding indefensible defendants (I don't think Perry Mason could've won Napster), but as far as I can tell, when you put Boies on the case, it's as good as lost!
Whoa. As far as I know, I'm not Obsessive-Compulsive (I assume that's what OCD is), but I have this weird habit of selecting the text of whatevever I'm reading. I don't even notice I'm doing it.
It caused me fits when I upgraded KDE to some version which added a "feature" to konsoles where, if you select text, then drag the selected text, it pastes it whereever you drop it. Even if where you drop it is the window you dragged it from (which, by the way, is a clear violation of drag-n-drop norms). Took me a LONG time to figure out what was going on, since, as I said, I don't even notice that I'm constantly selecting text while I read stuff. I'd be looking at a man page and all of the sudden less would start jumping all over the place...
Anyway, once I figured out what was going on, I turned on "Require Ctrl key for drag and drop" in konsole and life has been much less confusing, sense. But your post really struct a nerve with me, I could really see how one quirk of how a program works could significantly impact your ability to use it.
This brings up an interesting point, as yet unanswered in the movies: When Neo learns Jujitsu, or Trinity learns to fly a chopper, are they really learning those things, or are they simply giving their avatars new abilities? Is this basically like a hack to get instant grandmaster in a skill in an MMORPG, or does Neo become a jujitsu master in Real Life, too. Of course, with our recent supposition that Zion isn't real, either, Neo performing Jujitsu in Zion wouldn't prove this definitively. But it's not clear to me that skills are being put in their brains when they do that.
All of that said, you're right, it's not hard to believe that Smith just copied himself or parts of himself into someone's brain.
The scene I'm getting at is early in the movie. We suddenly see two human avatars in the matrix world, with a package. A asks B if he's OK, and A says he'll be alright. And that's what important is "this," a package. He gives it to B, and says, "after you." B picks up a nearby landline and is translated out of the matrix; he de-digitizes and the phone falls to the floor. As A picks the phone back up, Agent Smith comes around the corner, and does the virus copy job on him. When the phone next rings, the new Agent smith answers it, and also de-digitizes. The strong implication is that Agent Smith has just left the matrix for the "real" world. This person, I believe, is the "double agent" that set off the EMP to knock out Zion's defenses, and whom we see in sickback unconscious next to Neo in the Zion world at the end of the movie.
It is, I suppose, arguable that Agent Smith somehow ported himself to the brain of the unfortunate individual. But my gut reaction was that he had essentially just jumped digital worlds, and was now inhabiting a new avatar in the Zion-matrix rather than controlling a human in real space.
I think this is the crux of the argument against "the Oracle knew it all because she's done it before."
In this case things are definitely different. I say this not because of the Oracle or the Architect but because of the French guy who's name I can't remember. He comments that the previous Neos showed more respect. Clearly this Neo is fundamentally different than the past ones. It's also interesting to note that apparently the French fellow always tries to stop Neo and apparently always fails. You'd think he'd try something different...
If it's true that all this literally has happened before, I think the change is that, in the past, while Trinity has fallen in love with Neo, Neo hasn't fallen in love with Trinity. That's the big change. This allows the "Orcale has lived it before" theory an out: She predicted Trinity would fall in love with Neo, not vice versa. Maybe Trinity falls in love every time, but it's never mattered, before.
I still believe what I originally said, that the Oracle simulates people, and that's the source of her knowledge. But we have not yet been able to definitively rule out the "been there, done that" theory.