That entire assumption is faulty, because no one cracked any encryption, and that would, in fact, be impossible to do for AES for any time in foreseeable future.
They reverse-engineered a piece of software to find where it stored the player key. With this player key, they, and anyone else, can trivially decode all HD-DVDs produced currently, just like the original software. They can hand this key to anyone, and it will allow anyone to decode all current HD-DVDs.
It didn't take any computing time to 'decode', although it might have taken some time manually pouring through memory dumps and stack traces.
There's nothing that said they didn't meet beforehand.
As the series starts after Kirk has already assumed command, it's not like there's a scene where Kirk says 'Pleased to meet you, Spock, whom I've never met before'.
And what's with all this Kirk and Spock stuff? How about McCoy?
In fact, that would be an excellent way to frame the movie. Have McCoy, who's like 160 in the ST universes 'present', die. Spock, whose mission to reunite the Romulans and the Vulcans surely was affected by the recent events, has some reason to recount their first meeting in the Academy. Kirk looks on from within the Nexus. (Remember, people don't really leave there. In fact, maybe Spock knows this and has gone to the Nexus to try to tell Kirk about his death.)
Not only would that be a nice frame, it's a send off for DeForest Kelley, having his character die on Star Trek.
You're kidding, right? Do you see how far down your list of events DRM comes into play? Before that you had an overt government action, a financial power play conspiracy, and the activation of a DRM scheme that doesn't exist.
Well, all censorship requires, at minimum, an 'overt government action', so asserting that my example requires one is a bit silly. Things don't magically censor themselves.
Likewise, we're talking about a mythological DRM scheme in the first place. That's the entire point of the damn article, the entire thing is a hypothetical about 'perfect DRM'. Any 'perfect DRM' would be required to check on the ownership of a copyright and disable access if the original material was found, legally, to violate copyright.
And almostallblack-bookgovernmentconspiracies have some sort of 'non-government funding' source, where the money passes out of the government via secret means and to the people who use it. Often these involve convoluted trails of money that take years to figure out, so the government going to someone who a) rich and b) not officially part of the government, and saying 'Hey, buy the copyright on this thing at auction and kill it, we'll make sure that you get a tax cut' is really not that hard to imagine.
Do you even have the slightest sense of history here, or do you honestly believe government conspiracies cannot exist at all?
For work contracts are a legitimate practice. You don't have to sign one. Forgeries of this document are a little harder to produce. Notarized? No. Well, um - have fun losing on that deal. Still a little paranoid to assume as the general practice.
The CIA has murdered people, but I like your assumption that the government wouldn't stoop to forgery if they wanted to censor something. Not that they would have to, as I said, they could trivially bankrupt the author, hound him out of all housing, and force him to sell his copyright to survive.
Although, currently, they'd just take the copyright away under claims of 'national security' and there wouldnt be any sort of trial at all.
There's that imaginary boogeyman DRM you mentioned last time. Will this DRM work on REAL books? Will it prevent a person from presenting the content in spoken format? If so, thats some kick ass DRM! In order to do what you speak of you would actually have to CENSOR the content. Your problem is with that - not the digital puppet that could be used to facilitate it.
And you didn't read the article summary. Yes, this mythological DRM will work on real books and keep you from copying them. The whole question here is 'If copyright were magically enforceable at exactly the amount allowed by law, with the copy protection going not one inch over and the ability to copy going not one inch under, would you be okay with that?' I gave a reason why it would not be okay, because, with the government presumably having some say over it, the government now has the most powerful form of censorship known to mankind, a form so powerful it couldn't even actually exist.
My comment wasn't to show what would actually happen with DRM, which you would understand if you'd actually read the article summary. It was to show what would happen if we had magical perfect impossible DRM. Magical perfect impossible DRM requires handing various abilities to the government that no one should be comfortable handing over to them.
Any ideal form of DRM must involve the government, if only so they can unDRM things when the copyright expires or the owner disappears. And so education and fair use rights are protected. And involving the government in the physical ability to make
No shit. If Microsoft were to say 'We'll read any video standards you guys make, and at least try to implement the access rules, but we won't do all this DRM stuff. Once it gets into the computer they're going to be able to copy it if they're smart enough. Here's our one dollar to license the patent from you, sign the contract right now or get the fuck out of my office.', what, exactly, do you think would happen?;)
Microsoft wants DRM, or DRM would not happen. They want it not because they care about the music/video industries, they want it because it a) will prevent their products from being copied easily, and b) lock out OSS from playing the content legally.
Video card makers are not in the same position with regard to HDCP. I wish they'd band together and say, as a whole, they aren't going to implement that shit, period.
It's hard to see how even perfect DRM could know things. If I'm copying a part of a song into the background of a political commercial, and putting it on a public web server as a campaign ad, that's illegal without specific permission. If I'm copying a part of a song into the background of a video college presentation about the presentation of 80s music in popular culture, and putting it on an educational web server for others in college class, that is legal.
Without psychic power's it's rather difficult to see how any software could find the differences in those things.
This article is literally asking 'If you could be assured that the police would only arrest criminals and use their powers in a perfect way, would you still be opposed to not having the right to a trial by jury and requiring search warrants?'. Or perhaps 'If there was no such things as death, would you object to murder?'.
Really? What if the government sues the author that you want to read and they don't want you to, finds him in violation of some law, and fines him all his property, requiring him to sell the copyrights to the work to the highest bidder? Which the government makes sure is some rich crony of theirs who doesn't actually sell it to anyone, and, as the legal owner of the copyright, can make all the DRM players not play it anyone. (We're talking about mythological DRM that can magically follow 'the law', remember.)
If that won't work, some extra-legal threats of their family should get them to stop distribution and lock up all existing copies.
Or, easier still, find the original work a violation of copyright. Perhaps they were under a employment contract that said everything belonged to their employer. If they weren't, well, that's easy enough to forge.
Copyright is censorship. It's the government preventing people from distributing information. It, in theory, only does so at the author's request, but don't assume there's no way around that.
Implementing a vast system that could magically connect to the Library of Congress and check the status of the copyright of every single work, and decide if you were 'allowed' to view it is just asking for government censorship.
You can't cause someone to cause harm to yourself on purpose and then sue someone for it, even if such harm is specifically laid out in the law as a tort. Even if it's illegal to have an open manhold without a fence, and that if someone falls in they get a lot of money, that doesn't mean I can delibrately walk up to it, 'fall' in, and sue. Nor can you stand behind buses and hope you get hit as they lurch into motion.
In fact, tort law requires that you take reasonable steps to prevent harm to yourself, as long as they aren't too onerous. I.e., you have to inform them they are harming you, if you suspect they don't know. Like you can't sue someone for twenty years of second-hand smoke because they smoked in the apartment below you and it went through their ceiling if you have not, at any point, told them this was happening. The courts frown on anything that makes it look like either the harm wasn't that bad, or, alternately, you were 'saving up' harm to sue over.
So, if they feel that way about various forms of inaction, you can imagine how they feel about it if you go around actively taking actions that cause 'harm' to yourself. If you try to sue over that in court, you will be thrown out. There's probably some fancy latin word for this, but it simply does not fly.
Ergo, if the MPAA is handing out torrents, either of actual movies or two-hour copyrighted blank screens, and they understand how bittorrent work, by everyone uploading, they cannot sue anyone if that, in fact, happens, even if the law explicitly says otherwise, because tort law as a whole completely excludes 'harm you deliberately caused other people to cause to yourself'.
That said, they've managed to pass criminal copyright law recently, so you could in violation of that. Of course, if you are, the MPAA has just committed a crime by entering into a general criminal conspiracy with you!
Entrapment is when a cop gives someone the idea to commit a crime, and then arrests them for doing so or attempting to do so.
Courts have held that saying 'I have things that are illegal to purchase' and then arresting someone for attempting to purchase them is not entrapment, it's only entrapment if you attempt to sell them. By the same logic, saying 'Here is an illegal download' is not entrapment. But only cops can commit entrapment, so the entire point is moot. The MPAA can do whatever they want.
However, the important point stands that the MPAA can, indeed, do whatever they want. If they want to create copyrighted material and then distributing it in a manner that expects others will also distribute it, that is certainly within their legal right, just like I could write a novel and post it to Usenet, thus causing it to be automatically redistributed, or I could create a painting and carry deliberately into the frame of a news camera, causing them to air it.
However, we all would be rightly laughed out of court if we attempted to sue anyone for said automatic behavior.
If that happens to mean the perpetrator loses something (their freedom for example) then that's the price of their crime. However suggesting that you should be allowed to seek any retribution for a crime goes contrary to what a civilised society should be aiming for.
That wasn't retribution, it was just punishment. I don't know why you're reading stuff into it that isn't there.
Before, if someone mained you, the 'courts' could order they be put to death. Then the law was changed to disallow any punishment harser than the harm someone had caused. It wasn't 'You can walk up to them on the street and stick a stick in their eye'.
The problem you have is with the maiming, not the level of punishment, because the level of punishment in our society is usually higher than the crime. In fact, our society allows more punishment than the harm caused, in almost all cases. It's just we've restricted our punishment to fines, imprisonment, and death. Try kidnapping someone for a week and see how long you get imprisoned if you want to test that.;)
But this was a legal system without prisons, so you're basically left with fines and death. They allowed maiming as a punishment for maiming and other things, and the rule 'an eye for an eye' basically restricted that punishment to maiming, and to the same level.
And, just like in our legal system, the concept was deterrence of future crime.
A bunch of religious stories for which plenty of evidence against literal interpretation exists and that I no longer choose to believe in does not bind me, and does not impress me.
I don't think anyone way trying to make it binding on you. Jesus was, after all, telling his followers what to do, not some random person on the street. In fact, despite the fact that every single 'Christian' church has apparently forgotten this, he never once gave any rules for non-believers.
If anyone, it's you who's trying to do the 'binding' here, by punishing people for hurting Christians, when the victims themselves do not wish it.:)
What do I think? Well, I'm not Jesus, and I'd rather live in a society that works, which means attempting to stop crime, which means, at some point, removing criminals from society.
Who says I won't have a flag? I'll run it up when I need repairs.
You're not quite grasping the concept here. It's not whether or not you are literally flying a flag. You are not required to actually hoist a flag at any time, as far as I know, although it's a damn good idea if there's a naval war anywhere near you and you are from a neutral country. You are required to have a flag painted on your hull for many countries, though, and the laws of war require it for warships.
It's whether or not your ship is registered with a country's ship registry. If it is registered, you are under their law, and they control, legally, what happens on your ship, and other nations cannot mess with you in international waters.(1) Now, as they have no representative there, obviously their rules might not mean much, but neither do countries station policemen in private residences, yet the law applies there too. They can require you to, for example, shut down the gambling operation you are operating, or turn over the servers to them, or execute search warrants on you. (In fact, they can board your board sans a 'warrant' in most countries.)
If you refuse to bring your ship in, or decide their rules don't apply to you, or just don't register in the first place, you will be where I was talking about when I said 'sailing under no flag'...you will be an outlaw ship, subject to the jurisdiction of anyone who wants to fuck with you, at least in international waters. And theywill fuck with you. There's an international organization that tracks ships sightings of ships like that, and you will be reported to some appropriately strong navy and dealt with.
Notice the second ships 'crime' was apparently just having some RPGs laying around, they were not observed or reported committing piracy. But they were in international waters and they weren't flying under a flag, and having an RPG is not only a violation of international shipping laws but a damn good indication of piracy, so the US Navy captured the boat, as it is legally allowed to do.
Um, did you read the article about Sealand? That's exactly what the British Navy did.
Sealand is not, under any legal theory, 'a ship', and thus does not need to be, and legally cannot, be registered as a ship.(2) Lifeboats don't even count as 'ships', Sealand certainly doesn't. Sealand is an island that either is part of England or is its own country, and the fact it 'repelled' an invasion by either foreign invaders or the legitimate government is not really relevant to international marine law.
Sealand does lie in an interesting legal area, and England certainly hasn't decided, legally, where it is. (And England's, really, the only one that matters.) But that doesn't have anything to do with operating an unflagged ship.
1) Not just international waters. There is a legal right of free passage through the open seas and thus if you're, for example, sailing from England to Portugal, Spain can't stop you from cutting across their territorial waters, as long as you do not attempt to land and you follow at least some basic right-of-way rules.
2) To be a ship you actually have to be able to cross ocean distances, or at least to international waters, so at minimum that's three miles. (Some countries claim that short a distance.) A vessel that cannot move that distance is not a ship. Sealand cannot, in fact, move at all. QED. (This footnote is just in case anyone wanted to quibble over the definition of 'ship'.) Legally, it's probably not a 'boat' either, but just in case it should arbitrarily define a port and bow and put lights up.;)
I'm not using it as an argument for something, I'm using it as an argument against something.
If you have a bomb, you can kill a thousand people, period. All you need is a baseball stadium.
I was just pointing out, by making lines longer and crowds bigger at airports if, for some unknown reason, terrorists wanted to target the air transportation system, you've given them a bigger target.
Of course, there's no logical reason they would want to target the air transportation system. Previously, airplanes were targeted to fly places. Criminals would hijack ones and demand they fly to various countries with dysfunctional or uncaring governments. Then 9/11 happened, and not only is that not going to work again, but just hijacking them to fly them safely elsewhere isn't going to work either.
The only point in targeting airplanes was to hijack them, and use them in some way. There as absolutely no reason beyond that to care more about airplanes, than, say, airports or stadiums.
If terrorists had an anti-aircraft missile, shooting down airplanes is about the only thing to do with it, and that's the only reason I can think to attack an airplane in the first place. But airport security won't help there. If you have a bomb, there are a lot better places to attack, like ramming the gate in a van and driving it inside a baseball stadium as far as you can get, which could kill more people than 9/11 and a lot more than blowing up a plane.
Airport security isn't only worthless security theater making us all slightly less safe, and won't work at what it's intended to do, but the entire premise is stupid because there's no reason anyone would attack a plane from the inside anymore.
These 'security precautions' that require us to stand in a long line should, um, be rethought a little, because they make no fucking sense.
Okay, before, you could walk into the airport with explosives, let's say. You could walk straight through, complete open space, no worries, get to the terminal, get in a waiting area with maybe two hundred people, get on a plane with your bomb, and kill maybe 350 people if you waited until takeoff to blow it up and picked a crowded flight. This required either you checking the bomb into your carry-on luggage, or building a pressure device to set it off. Or you could set it off in the waiting area and possibly kill more, although you'd need a more powerful bomb to make sure, because setting off a bomb in an airplane traveling a hundred miles an hour fifteen feet off the ground is going to kill everyone, whereas setting it off in a mostly open building is not going to kill everyone nearby.
We could have trivially stopped this with explosive sniffers, sniffers, I might add, don't need long lines to use, you just walk through them, possibly the boarding entrance, and if they go off you just get everyone back off the plane and figure out what the hell is going on. Or put them at the doors to the airports or terminals or whatever. The point is that people do not have to be individually processed, it's more like the exit scanners at stores.
But now, you enter into a big room the second you step into an airport, filled with maybe a thousand people, all standing in line, with security people diligently searching random people. Now, you can't get to the plane. Apparently, no one realized you can just blow up that room and possibly kill more people than could even fit on an airplane.
Of course, the point of terrorism isn't to kill people, but to terrorize people. Considering people already don't like airport security, blowing up just one bomb and killing just fifty people in line would make everyone a million times more terrorized.
It doesn't matter if no country recognizes Sealand. That's not what causes the existence of a country. You can't just choose not to recognize the existence of a country and then invade it.
The time to dispute Sealand's existence was when it was formed. Someone taking over an 'island' and operating it for 50 years makes it a 'country' for all intents and purposes.
Re:I remember Sealand from years ago...
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Sealand Put Up For Sale
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you're spending eight digits on your boat, you can afford to spend a couple million bucks to buy some SS-N-25 and P-800 surplus russian anti-ship missiles. Anything that's not an aircraft carrier battlegroup will be toast, and even some of those won't want to engage you without significant air support.
And the second that a US Navy vessel tells you to stand down and be boarded, and you refuse, and they shoot at you, and you fire back with missiles and try to sink their ship, what the fuck do you think is going to happen? They'll laugh and wander off? You'd be lucky to make off your ship alive.
And I don't know why 'pirate' would make you laugh. They kill people, you know. Navies are allowed to board anyone they suspect of piracy, and operating without a flag is a pretty strong indicator. And in international waters ships without a flag are subject to the jurisdiction of all nations, and thus any vessel operated by any country can demand they allow themselves to be boarded under suspicion of being a pirate vessel, and fire on them if they refuse.
That actually isn't just some hypothetical situation. Navies actually do board unflagged ships whenever they find them in international waters or their own waters. (And they alert the host country when they find them suspicious in other people's waters.)
If you're an innocent person in a boat that wasn't intended for international trips, but drifted, you'll usually be fine, and they'll even tow you back to shore. If you refuse to stand down and be boarded, they will attempt to board by force, period. If you attempt to stop them, they will shoot back. You might be able to hold them off, but they will send their military. And, hell, even if you can defeat their entire military, they'll just alert other navies where you are. Navies board and search suspected pirate ships on general principles, you can't just fire at them and they go 'Well, that seems a bit hard, let's just give up'.
Plus, have fun finding a port that will take a ship without a flag when you need to get repairs.
Because, legally, invading another country is illegal under international law, whereas a coup is only illegal under the laws of the country it happens in, which don't matter if the coup succeeds.
The only reason England hasn't threatened military force is the sole fact that an invasion of what is, under international law, a sovereign nation, is illegal.
Technically, doing what I suggested is also frowned on, but a rebellion with the support of 100% of the resident population, who don't get to vote, against a non-local king who owns their land and requires them to pay taxes and rent without providing any services...well, we know it's silly, but it sounds a lot better, it sounds almost like a medieval feudal rebellion.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, 90% of the criticism here against 'Christianity', or, at least, the thing that currently represents itself as Christianity, is perfectly valid. Real Christians not only wouldn't support a war of aggression, they wouldn't even defend themselves if attacked, like that guy they pretend to follow explicitly and repeatedly said.
Retribution is a bad idea. If you punish someone it shouldn't be because you're trying to justify your rage at what they've done to you. You should be trying to minimise harm and prevent recurrence of harm, not adding to it. How does adding to the pain and loss improve anything for anyone???
It doesn't. The rule is a reduction in the amount of harm you can demand under the law.
And threats of punishment was how that society got people to follow the rules. This a society without tort law or anything like that, so removing the penalty under the law would have, as you said later on, allowed anyone to do whatever they want without impunity.
A very stupid idea to live with. Never mind that it's hard. Some ideas are hard and worthwhile. This one just means you end up with a bunch of loons running around poking out both people's eyes because they know there's no consequence.
Let me be incredibly presumptuous and argue as if I were Jesus:
So? Don't be afraid of those who can kill your body, be afraid of those who can kill your soul. It is better for you to live mained than to be thrown into the eternal fire. (Parapharased from Luke 12 and Matthew 18)
Now, I'm not Jesus(At least, not officially), and I'm not entirely sure that society would be very good if anyone could do anything they wanted with no punishment. But Jesus was not arguing how the government should work, in fact, he expressed absolutely no opinions on how a government should operate. He was talking about how his followers should operate.
I'm all for that in the long run, although I think swapping out batteries at service stations might work better than induction charging. Although we should certainly should have some sort of plug-in standard for parking charging. And note everyone but your own house are going to want to bill for it, although I'm wondering if it might be offered as a employee benefit, and if companies will start 'validating for charging' for their visitors.
On the plus side, maybe some places will get parking that sorely need it, because parking lot owners will be making extra money off charging.
Anyway, my point about an insertable generator was for now. The idea being that, in ten years, no one would use those generators, and they would be operated fully-electric.
No, I'm not talking about the fairness doctrine, although we should reimplement that. That said that if you give time to one candidate, you had to give time the opposing one.
I'm talking about the fact that, even today, television and radio broadcast stations have a legal duty to report the news. Part of this duty, and it's specifically in the law somewhere, is to report multiple sides to stories. They don't have to give 'equal time', but they do have to, for example, report on what the people they've investigated and discovered wrongdoing say in response to said discovery. (Although this is usually 'No comment', or they can't even be reached.)
The fairness doctrine only cover politicians, and only the amount of time they got handed. (Whether they got handed it as a result of purchasing ads or whatever.)
Multiple viewpoints applies to the news, and is still in effect. At least, technically still in effect. Like I said, the FCC stopped regulating for that and useful content and stuff like that ages ago. Show something that claims to be news at six and show something that claims to be educational at two(1) and present whatever crap you want at other times and you're good.
Meanwhile, the FCC has made up an 'indecency' fighting mission that has no legal constitutional validity behind it, and very few actual laws and actual hard regulations, making all television stations extremely paranoid and conservative in what they are willing to show on the air.
I'm not a big fan of the FCC's original mission, but I absolutely loathe their current one and would prefer to have the original back if at all possible.
1) If you're wondering why all stations seem to have shitty educational programming aimed at toddlers, that's why. They are required by law to show a certain amount of education programs, and so they show them at two in the afternoon, because that's when people who buy things don't watch TV. And the FCC might care if they showed shows for people who were at school at the time, so all 'educational' programming is aimed at toddler who can't tie their shoes, and who, in all likelyhood, can't actually be educated at that point. (There's a reason they aren't in school.) In an ideal world, the FCC would say things like 'No, you need to run an educational program aimed at elementary school children, at 4, or one aimed at adults at 7.'. Like they used to have.
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That entire assumption is faulty, because no one cracked any encryption, and that would, in fact, be impossible to do for AES for any time in foreseeable future.
They reverse-engineered a piece of software to find where it stored the player key. With this player key, they, and anyone else, can trivially decode all HD-DVDs produced currently, just like the original software. They can hand this key to anyone, and it will allow anyone to decode all current HD-DVDs.
It didn't take any computing time to 'decode', although it might have taken some time manually pouring through memory dumps and stack traces.
There's nothing that said they didn't meet beforehand.
As the series starts after Kirk has already assumed command, it's not like there's a scene where Kirk says 'Pleased to meet you, Spock, whom I've never met before'.
And what's with all this Kirk and Spock stuff? How about McCoy?
In fact, that would be an excellent way to frame the movie. Have McCoy, who's like 160 in the ST universes 'present', die. Spock, whose mission to reunite the Romulans and the Vulcans surely was affected by the recent events, has some reason to recount their first meeting in the Academy. Kirk looks on from within the Nexus. (Remember, people don't really leave there. In fact, maybe Spock knows this and has gone to the Nexus to try to tell Kirk about his death.)
Not only would that be a nice frame, it's a send off for DeForest Kelley, having his character die on Star Trek.
You're kidding, right? Do you see how far down your list of events DRM comes into play? Before that you had an overt government action, a financial power play conspiracy, and the activation of a DRM scheme that doesn't exist.
Well, all censorship requires, at minimum, an 'overt government action', so asserting that my example requires one is a bit silly. Things don't magically censor themselves.
Likewise, we're talking about a mythological DRM scheme in the first place. That's the entire point of the damn article, the entire thing is a hypothetical about 'perfect DRM'. Any 'perfect DRM' would be required to check on the ownership of a copyright and disable access if the original material was found, legally, to violate copyright.
And almost all black-book government conspiracies have some sort of 'non-government funding' source, where the money passes out of the government via secret means and to the people who use it. Often these involve convoluted trails of money that take years to figure out, so the government going to someone who a) rich and b) not officially part of the government, and saying 'Hey, buy the copyright on this thing at auction and kill it, we'll make sure that you get a tax cut' is really not that hard to imagine.
Do you even have the slightest sense of history here, or do you honestly believe government conspiracies cannot exist at all?
For work contracts are a legitimate practice. You don't have to sign one. Forgeries of this document are a little harder to produce. Notarized? No. Well, um - have fun losing on that deal. Still a little paranoid to assume as the general practice.
The CIA has murdered people, but I like your assumption that the government wouldn't stoop to forgery if they wanted to censor something. Not that they would have to, as I said, they could trivially bankrupt the author, hound him out of all housing, and force him to sell his copyright to survive.
Although, currently, they'd just take the copyright away under claims of 'national security' and there wouldnt be any sort of trial at all.
There's that imaginary boogeyman DRM you mentioned last time. Will this DRM work on REAL books? Will it prevent a person from presenting the content in spoken format? If so, thats some kick ass DRM! In order to do what you speak of you would actually have to CENSOR the content. Your problem is with that - not the digital puppet that could be used to facilitate it.
And you didn't read the article summary. Yes, this mythological DRM will work on real books and keep you from copying them. The whole question here is 'If copyright were magically enforceable at exactly the amount allowed by law, with the copy protection going not one inch over and the ability to copy going not one inch under, would you be okay with that?' I gave a reason why it would not be okay, because, with the government presumably having some say over it, the government now has the most powerful form of censorship known to mankind, a form so powerful it couldn't even actually exist.
My comment wasn't to show what would actually happen with DRM, which you would understand if you'd actually read the article summary. It was to show what would happen if we had magical perfect impossible DRM. Magical perfect impossible DRM requires handing various abilities to the government that no one should be comfortable handing over to them.
Any ideal form of DRM must involve the government, if only so they can unDRM things when the copyright expires or the owner disappears. And so education and fair use rights are protected. And involving the government in the physical ability to make
'Invisible' does not mean 'transparent', and, thus, 'colorless'. All it means is that you can't see it.
No shit. If Microsoft were to say 'We'll read any video standards you guys make, and at least try to implement the access rules, but we won't do all this DRM stuff. Once it gets into the computer they're going to be able to copy it if they're smart enough. Here's our one dollar to license the patent from you, sign the contract right now or get the fuck out of my office.', what, exactly, do you think would happen? ;)
Microsoft wants DRM, or DRM would not happen. They want it not because they care about the music/video industries, they want it because it a) will prevent their products from being copied easily, and b) lock out OSS from playing the content legally.
Video card makers are not in the same position with regard to HDCP. I wish they'd band together and say, as a whole, they aren't going to implement that shit, period.
Video DVDs do not actually have licenses.
It's a violation of copyright law to put on public performances.
However, it's not as large a restriction as you would think, and it's not impossible that nursing house common rooms could fit under the people limit.
I always thought copyright law should let you 'use' two copies at once and double the size.
It's hard to see how even perfect DRM could know things. If I'm copying a part of a song into the background of a political commercial, and putting it on a public web server as a campaign ad, that's illegal without specific permission. If I'm copying a part of a song into the background of a video college presentation about the presentation of 80s music in popular culture, and putting it on an educational web server for others in college class, that is legal.
Without psychic power's it's rather difficult to see how any software could find the differences in those things.
This article is literally asking 'If you could be assured that the police would only arrest criminals and use their powers in a perfect way, would you still be opposed to not having the right to a trial by jury and requiring search warrants?'. Or perhaps 'If there was no such things as death, would you object to murder?'.
Really? What if the government sues the author that you want to read and they don't want you to, finds him in violation of some law, and fines him all his property, requiring him to sell the copyrights to the work to the highest bidder? Which the government makes sure is some rich crony of theirs who doesn't actually sell it to anyone, and, as the legal owner of the copyright, can make all the DRM players not play it anyone. (We're talking about mythological DRM that can magically follow 'the law', remember.)
If that won't work, some extra-legal threats of their family should get them to stop distribution and lock up all existing copies.
Or, easier still, find the original work a violation of copyright. Perhaps they were under a employment contract that said everything belonged to their employer. If they weren't, well, that's easy enough to forge.
Copyright is censorship. It's the government preventing people from distributing information. It, in theory, only does so at the author's request, but don't assume there's no way around that.
Implementing a vast system that could magically connect to the Library of Congress and check the status of the copyright of every single work, and decide if you were 'allowed' to view it is just asking for government censorship.
I wouldn't be happy, but they should be required to do this anyway.
No, the law doesn't work that way.
You can't cause someone to cause harm to yourself on purpose and then sue someone for it, even if such harm is specifically laid out in the law as a tort. Even if it's illegal to have an open manhold without a fence, and that if someone falls in they get a lot of money, that doesn't mean I can delibrately walk up to it, 'fall' in, and sue. Nor can you stand behind buses and hope you get hit as they lurch into motion.
In fact, tort law requires that you take reasonable steps to prevent harm to yourself, as long as they aren't too onerous. I.e., you have to inform them they are harming you, if you suspect they don't know. Like you can't sue someone for twenty years of second-hand smoke because they smoked in the apartment below you and it went through their ceiling if you have not, at any point, told them this was happening. The courts frown on anything that makes it look like either the harm wasn't that bad, or, alternately, you were 'saving up' harm to sue over.
So, if they feel that way about various forms of inaction, you can imagine how they feel about it if you go around actively taking actions that cause 'harm' to yourself. If you try to sue over that in court, you will be thrown out. There's probably some fancy latin word for this, but it simply does not fly.
Ergo, if the MPAA is handing out torrents, either of actual movies or two-hour copyrighted blank screens, and they understand how bittorrent work, by everyone uploading, they cannot sue anyone if that, in fact, happens, even if the law explicitly says otherwise, because tort law as a whole completely excludes 'harm you deliberately caused other people to cause to yourself'.
That said, they've managed to pass criminal copyright law recently, so you could in violation of that. Of course, if you are, the MPAA has just committed a crime by entering into a general criminal conspiracy with you!
'Come back to BT'? What the fuck are you talking about?
Entrapment is when a cop gives someone the idea to commit a crime, and then arrests them for doing so or attempting to do so.
Courts have held that saying 'I have things that are illegal to purchase' and then arresting someone for attempting to purchase them is not entrapment, it's only entrapment if you attempt to sell them. By the same logic, saying 'Here is an illegal download' is not entrapment. But only cops can commit entrapment, so the entire point is moot. The MPAA can do whatever they want.
However, the important point stands that the MPAA can, indeed, do whatever they want. If they want to create copyrighted material and then distributing it in a manner that expects others will also distribute it, that is certainly within their legal right, just like I could write a novel and post it to Usenet, thus causing it to be automatically redistributed, or I could create a painting and carry deliberately into the frame of a news camera, causing them to air it.
However, we all would be rightly laughed out of court if we attempted to sue anyone for said automatic behavior.
If that happens to mean the perpetrator loses something (their freedom for example) then that's the price of their crime. However suggesting that you should be allowed to seek any retribution for a crime goes contrary to what a civilised society should be aiming for.
That wasn't retribution, it was just punishment. I don't know why you're reading stuff into it that isn't there.
Before, if someone mained you, the 'courts' could order they be put to death. Then the law was changed to disallow any punishment harser than the harm someone had caused. It wasn't 'You can walk up to them on the street and stick a stick in their eye'.
The problem you have is with the maiming, not the level of punishment, because the level of punishment in our society is usually higher than the crime. In fact, our society allows more punishment than the harm caused, in almost all cases. It's just we've restricted our punishment to fines, imprisonment, and death. Try kidnapping someone for a week and see how long you get imprisoned if you want to test that. ;)
But this was a legal system without prisons, so you're basically left with fines and death. They allowed maiming as a punishment for maiming and other things, and the rule 'an eye for an eye' basically restricted that punishment to maiming, and to the same level.
And, just like in our legal system, the concept was deterrence of future crime.
A bunch of religious stories for which plenty of evidence against literal interpretation exists and that I no longer choose to believe in does not bind me, and does not impress me.
I don't think anyone way trying to make it binding on you. Jesus was, after all, telling his followers what to do, not some random person on the street. In fact, despite the fact that every single 'Christian' church has apparently forgotten this, he never once gave any rules for non-believers.
If anyone, it's you who's trying to do the 'binding' here, by punishing people for hurting Christians, when the victims themselves do not wish it. :)
What do I think? Well, I'm not Jesus, and I'd rather live in a society that works, which means attempting to stop crime, which means, at some point, removing criminals from society.
Who says I won't have a flag? I'll run it up when I need repairs.
You're not quite grasping the concept here. It's not whether or not you are literally flying a flag. You are not required to actually hoist a flag at any time, as far as I know, although it's a damn good idea if there's a naval war anywhere near you and you are from a neutral country. You are required to have a flag painted on your hull for many countries, though, and the laws of war require it for warships.
It's whether or not your ship is registered with a country's ship registry. If it is registered, you are under their law, and they control, legally, what happens on your ship, and other nations cannot mess with you in international waters.(1) Now, as they have no representative there, obviously their rules might not mean much, but neither do countries station policemen in private residences, yet the law applies there too. They can require you to, for example, shut down the gambling operation you are operating, or turn over the servers to them, or execute search warrants on you. (In fact, they can board your board sans a 'warrant' in most countries.)
If you refuse to bring your ship in, or decide their rules don't apply to you, or just don't register in the first place, you will be where I was talking about when I said 'sailing under no flag'...you will be an outlaw ship, subject to the jurisdiction of anyone who wants to fuck with you, at least in international waters. And they will fuck with you. There's an international organization that tracks ships sightings of ships like that, and you will be reported to some appropriately strong navy and dealt with.
Notice the second ships 'crime' was apparently just having some RPGs laying around, they were not observed or reported committing piracy. But they were in international waters and they weren't flying under a flag, and having an RPG is not only a violation of international shipping laws but a damn good indication of piracy, so the US Navy captured the boat, as it is legally allowed to do.
Um, did you read the article about Sealand? That's exactly what the British Navy did.
Sealand is not, under any legal theory, 'a ship', and thus does not need to be, and legally cannot, be registered as a ship.(2) Lifeboats don't even count as 'ships', Sealand certainly doesn't. Sealand is an island that either is part of England or is its own country, and the fact it 'repelled' an invasion by either foreign invaders or the legitimate government is not really relevant to international marine law.
Sealand does lie in an interesting legal area, and England certainly hasn't decided, legally, where it is. (And England's, really, the only one that matters.) But that doesn't have anything to do with operating an unflagged ship.
1) Not just international waters. There is a legal right of free passage through the open seas and thus if you're, for example, sailing from England to Portugal, Spain can't stop you from cutting across their territorial waters, as long as you do not attempt to land and you follow at least some basic right-of-way rules.
2) To be a ship you actually have to be able to cross ocean distances, or at least to international waters, so at minimum that's three miles. (Some countries claim that short a distance.) A vessel that cannot move that distance is not a ship. Sealand cannot, in fact, move at all. QED. (This footnote is just in case anyone wanted to quibble over the definition of 'ship'.) Legally, it's probably not a 'boat' either, but just in case it should arbitrarily define a port and bow and put lights up. ;)
I'm not using it as an argument for something, I'm using it as an argument against something.
If you have a bomb, you can kill a thousand people, period. All you need is a baseball stadium.
I was just pointing out, by making lines longer and crowds bigger at airports if, for some unknown reason, terrorists wanted to target the air transportation system, you've given them a bigger target.
Of course, there's no logical reason they would want to target the air transportation system. Previously, airplanes were targeted to fly places. Criminals would hijack ones and demand they fly to various countries with dysfunctional or uncaring governments. Then 9/11 happened, and not only is that not going to work again, but just hijacking them to fly them safely elsewhere isn't going to work either.
The only point in targeting airplanes was to hijack them, and use them in some way. There as absolutely no reason beyond that to care more about airplanes, than, say, airports or stadiums.
If terrorists had an anti-aircraft missile, shooting down airplanes is about the only thing to do with it, and that's the only reason I can think to attack an airplane in the first place. But airport security won't help there. If you have a bomb, there are a lot better places to attack, like ramming the gate in a van and driving it inside a baseball stadium as far as you can get, which could kill more people than 9/11 and a lot more than blowing up a plane.
Airport security isn't only worthless security theater making us all slightly less safe, and won't work at what it's intended to do, but the entire premise is stupid because there's no reason anyone would attack a plane from the inside anymore.
No. Shit.
These 'security precautions' that require us to stand in a long line should, um, be rethought a little, because they make no fucking sense.
Okay, before, you could walk into the airport with explosives, let's say. You could walk straight through, complete open space, no worries, get to the terminal, get in a waiting area with maybe two hundred people, get on a plane with your bomb, and kill maybe 350 people if you waited until takeoff to blow it up and picked a crowded flight. This required either you checking the bomb into your carry-on luggage, or building a pressure device to set it off. Or you could set it off in the waiting area and possibly kill more, although you'd need a more powerful bomb to make sure, because setting off a bomb in an airplane traveling a hundred miles an hour fifteen feet off the ground is going to kill everyone, whereas setting it off in a mostly open building is not going to kill everyone nearby.
We could have trivially stopped this with explosive sniffers, sniffers, I might add, don't need long lines to use, you just walk through them, possibly the boarding entrance, and if they go off you just get everyone back off the plane and figure out what the hell is going on. Or put them at the doors to the airports or terminals or whatever. The point is that people do not have to be individually processed, it's more like the exit scanners at stores.
But now, you enter into a big room the second you step into an airport, filled with maybe a thousand people, all standing in line, with security people diligently searching random people. Now, you can't get to the plane. Apparently, no one realized you can just blow up that room and possibly kill more people than could even fit on an airplane.
Of course, the point of terrorism isn't to kill people, but to terrorize people. Considering people already don't like airport security, blowing up just one bomb and killing just fifty people in line would make everyone a million times more terrorized.
It doesn't matter if no country recognizes Sealand. That's not what causes the existence of a country. You can't just choose not to recognize the existence of a country and then invade it.
The time to dispute Sealand's existence was when it was formed. Someone taking over an 'island' and operating it for 50 years makes it a 'country' for all intents and purposes.
If you're spending eight digits on your boat, you can afford to spend a couple million bucks to buy some SS-N-25 and P-800 surplus russian anti-ship missiles. Anything that's not an aircraft carrier battlegroup will be toast, and even some of those won't want to engage you without significant air support.
And the second that a US Navy vessel tells you to stand down and be boarded, and you refuse, and they shoot at you, and you fire back with missiles and try to sink their ship, what the fuck do you think is going to happen? They'll laugh and wander off? You'd be lucky to make off your ship alive.
And I don't know why 'pirate' would make you laugh. They kill people, you know. Navies are allowed to board anyone they suspect of piracy, and operating without a flag is a pretty strong indicator. And in international waters ships without a flag are subject to the jurisdiction of all nations, and thus any vessel operated by any country can demand they allow themselves to be boarded under suspicion of being a pirate vessel, and fire on them if they refuse.
That actually isn't just some hypothetical situation. Navies actually do board unflagged ships whenever they find them in international waters or their own waters. (And they alert the host country when they find them suspicious in other people's waters.)
If you're an innocent person in a boat that wasn't intended for international trips, but drifted, you'll usually be fine, and they'll even tow you back to shore. If you refuse to stand down and be boarded, they will attempt to board by force, period. If you attempt to stop them, they will shoot back. You might be able to hold them off, but they will send their military. And, hell, even if you can defeat their entire military, they'll just alert other navies where you are. Navies board and search suspected pirate ships on general principles, you can't just fire at them and they go 'Well, that seems a bit hard, let's just give up'.
Plus, have fun finding a port that will take a ship without a flag when you need to get repairs.
Because, legally, invading another country is illegal under international law, whereas a coup is only illegal under the laws of the country it happens in, which don't matter if the coup succeeds.
The only reason England hasn't threatened military force is the sole fact that an invasion of what is, under international law, a sovereign nation, is illegal.
Technically, doing what I suggested is also frowned on, but a rebellion with the support of 100% of the resident population, who don't get to vote, against a non-local king who owns their land and requires them to pay taxes and rent without providing any services...well, we know it's silly, but it sounds a lot better, it sounds almost like a medieval feudal rebellion.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, 90% of the criticism here against 'Christianity', or, at least, the thing that currently represents itself as Christianity, is perfectly valid. Real Christians not only wouldn't support a war of aggression, they wouldn't even defend themselves if attacked, like that guy they pretend to follow explicitly and repeatedly said.
He overturned tables, and rebuked people quite strongly a few times.
He didn't ever resort to violence against people, though.
Retribution is a bad idea. If you punish someone it shouldn't be because you're trying to justify your rage at what they've done to you. You should be trying to minimise harm and prevent recurrence of harm, not adding to it. How does adding to the pain and loss improve anything for anyone???
It doesn't. The rule is a reduction in the amount of harm you can demand under the law.
And threats of punishment was how that society got people to follow the rules. This a society without tort law or anything like that, so removing the penalty under the law would have, as you said later on, allowed anyone to do whatever they want without impunity.
A very stupid idea to live with. Never mind that it's hard. Some ideas are hard and worthwhile. This one just means you end up with a bunch of loons running around poking out both people's eyes because they know there's no consequence.
Let me be incredibly presumptuous and argue as if I were Jesus:
So? Don't be afraid of those who can kill your body, be afraid of those who can kill your soul. It is better for you to live mained than to be thrown into the eternal fire. (Parapharased from Luke 12 and Matthew 18)
Now, I'm not Jesus(At least, not officially), and I'm not entirely sure that society would be very good if anyone could do anything they wanted with no punishment. But Jesus was not arguing how the government should work, in fact, he expressed absolutely no opinions on how a government should operate. He was talking about how his followers should operate.
I'm all for that in the long run, although I think swapping out batteries at service stations might work better than induction charging. Although we should certainly should have some sort of plug-in standard for parking charging. And note everyone but your own house are going to want to bill for it, although I'm wondering if it might be offered as a employee benefit, and if companies will start 'validating for charging' for their visitors.
On the plus side, maybe some places will get parking that sorely need it, because parking lot owners will be making extra money off charging.
Anyway, my point about an insertable generator was for now. The idea being that, in ten years, no one would use those generators, and they would be operated fully-electric.
No, I'm not talking about the fairness doctrine, although we should reimplement that. That said that if you give time to one candidate, you had to give time the opposing one.
I'm talking about the fact that, even today, television and radio broadcast stations have a legal duty to report the news. Part of this duty, and it's specifically in the law somewhere, is to report multiple sides to stories. They don't have to give 'equal time', but they do have to, for example, report on what the people they've investigated and discovered wrongdoing say in response to said discovery. (Although this is usually 'No comment', or they can't even be reached.)
The fairness doctrine only cover politicians, and only the amount of time they got handed. (Whether they got handed it as a result of purchasing ads or whatever.)
Multiple viewpoints applies to the news, and is still in effect. At least, technically still in effect. Like I said, the FCC stopped regulating for that and useful content and stuff like that ages ago. Show something that claims to be news at six and show something that claims to be educational at two(1) and present whatever crap you want at other times and you're good.
Meanwhile, the FCC has made up an 'indecency' fighting mission that has no legal constitutional validity behind it, and very few actual laws and actual hard regulations, making all television stations extremely paranoid and conservative in what they are willing to show on the air.
I'm not a big fan of the FCC's original mission, but I absolutely loathe their current one and would prefer to have the original back if at all possible.
1) If you're wondering why all stations seem to have shitty educational programming aimed at toddlers, that's why. They are required by law to show a certain amount of education programs, and so they show them at two in the afternoon, because that's when people who buy things don't watch TV. And the FCC might care if they showed shows for people who were at school at the time, so all 'educational' programming is aimed at toddler who can't tie their shoes, and who, in all likelyhood, can't actually be educated at that point. (There's a reason they aren't in school.) In an ideal world, the FCC would say things like 'No, you need to run an educational program aimed at elementary school children, at 4, or one aimed at adults at 7.'. Like they used to have.
I was assuming there'd be some sort of faceplate with a lock on it to keep that from happening.