Society, as a whole, could indeed decide that it was your duty to watch ads when given free content.
It hasn't.
How many people will hold open doors if walk up with packages in your hands? Enough to make it a security concern. It's a social contract.
How many people will tell you if you get out of your car and left your lights on? Almost everyone. Yup, social contract.
The web is fairly new, so I point you to TV. How many people think they're supposed to watch ads, and feel bad when they fail to pay attention, leave the room, or even fast forward them?
None. No one. Zilch people think that way. Not a social contract.
You can argue it's an implied contract, but it's certainly not a social one, or we'd be shunning the adblock developers in the same way we shun, say, spammers.
A social contract is stuff like 'Don't kill people', 'Turn off your cell phone in a movie theater', 'Don't spam', 'Hold doors for people carrying packages', and 'Don't take up two parking spaces'.
It's rules that everyone is expected to obey, simply because they would not want people breaking those rules in regard to them. I.e, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The more serious offenses get coded into law. The lesser offenses just mark you as an asshole.
Of course, none of that applies to advertisers, as I'm not expecting them not to block my ads. I don't even have any damn ads to show them. The poster who mentioned 'social contract' didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
See, if it's a social contract, 99.999% of the population already wants to conform to it.
The only people who don't are misanthropics who don't like anyone, greedy bastards who want to game the system, and sociopaths who have no empathy. We come up with standards all by ourself, like 'Walk on the right in a hallway'. And robots.txt. And knocking on doors.
We've been inventing ways we all should do things, to make it easier for everyone, ever since society existed. That's almost the defination of society!
But 'look at their ads' doesn't qualify at all. It's not only disqualified by the fact it's how to act in regard to a thing done by a very small segment of society, it really obviously doesn't quality by the simple fact everyone skips ads whenever possible.
Um, duh. It can't be a social contract if more than, I dunno, 1% of the population breaks it. Everyone in the damn universe skips ads on TV, or at least talks during them. And I can't imagine the numbers of ignoring and blocking ads on the net would be lower.
On some stuff, like milk or CD-Rs, I've learned that's not good enough, so I try some middle priced stuff, until I find a good one, and go with it.
The only thing ads aimed at me would even be vaguely useful for are telling me about stores I didn't know existed, or types of products I didn't know about.
I'd eaten at one before, and they were very good, but now I'm just a little bit worried about just what the hell they were trying to imply with dancing dead rats. (Is it some really obsurce Wayside School reference I'm not getting?)
But there aren't currently any near me, anyway. And now Subways will toast their sandwiches, too.
I just posted a comment about X10 about four posts up, and scroll down to this.
Ys, there is a rather large segment of the market that is exactly who their products are aimed at that will not purchase any of their products whatsoever, because of those damn ads.
Of course, I'm the kind of guy who gives my real phone number to mortgage spammers so that I can learn what banks operate unethically by who calls me up.
A 'social contract' isn't a contract at all. You're thinking of an 'implied contract'.
A social contract is the thing everyone participates in to make society work correctly, and is not a 'contract' at all. They are simply polite behaviors.
You walk on the right, I walk on the right. Look, we no longer run into each other.
You don't be annoying with your cellphone, I don't be annoying with mine.
You tell me if you see me walk off with my headlights left on, and I do the same for you.
You refrain from killing me, and I refrain from killing you.
Etc, etc. When violation of a social contract causes serious problems, we tend to outlaw it. When it's minor, we just call those violators assholes and shot them the bird.
Now...I refrain from blocking your ad, and you...refrain from blocking mine? WTF? I have no ads.
'Social contracts' have no bearing whatsoever to ads. Ads are unidirectional, from a very small subset of people to the population at large, and hence they can't possibly be part of any social contract.
I know what 'right' means, it's still completely backwards.
It's defining 'protects a right' as 'prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of that right', which is idiotic. It doesn't matter what the right is.
The part that says 'prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title' is just wrong.
Copy protection doesn't prevent, restrict, or otherwise limit any right of the copyright owner at all, it allows the copyright owner to enforce their rights.
The fact that producing VCRs without Macrovision needed to be specifically outlawed and placed under 1201(b) rather implies they wouldn't been there otherwise.
I don't understand what the hell 1201(b) is trying to say anyway:
1201(b) 2 (B)
a technological measure "effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title.
What the fuck? It 'protects the rights of the copyright owner' if it limits the ability of the copyright owner to exercise their rights? (Their rights, of course, being the ability to prevent copying.)
As long as you're what you're breaking doesn't restrict the copyright owner, it looks like you're in the clear.
So it's now illegal to circumvent a technological measure that prevents copyright holders from enforcing the rights granted to them under law? Isn't that, um, exactly backwards?
Did they really just outlaw copyright holders from plugging in computers to send cease-and-desist letters? (The lack of being plugged is a technology that prevents them from excercising their right to prevent copies.) What kind of insanity is that?
Okay, someone takes a cheap-ass DVD player and pulls the key out of it. DVDs work by having a disc key, encoded once by each and every player key, so each player can decode one copy and play it. (This is how it always works when you encode a message to more than one person.)
So now we have one player key, with which we can decode the single instance of the DVD key for that player on every DVD already made.
So now we want to crack another key:
We have, oh, four thousand plaintexts, and four thousand encrypted versions of that plaintext encrypted with the same, unknown key, and we want to find out that key.
It's not easy, but it's not what normal cyphers are designed to protect.
OTOH, I'm not entirely sure what the point is. The easiest thing to do is to just keep cracking the software player's keys faster than they can revoke them. Does it really matter if no one knows the key for a hardware decoder if the content is all over the net getting burned to unprotected CDs, and you can go out and get your own decrypter in like five minutes if you want to copy your own?
Whatever this is about, it's not about illegal copying.
By 'violation of the DMCA', I meant the 'controls access to a copyrighted work' part, which requires digital. You know, the thing where simply talking about how to find them them can be considered 'trafficing'.
Yes, VCRSs that don't have macrovision are illegal to sell (new ones, old ones are grandfathered in). And as far as I know, have almost always been illegal, instead of being made illegal with the DMCA, although the DMCA certainly could have updated it.
However, other devices designed to strip out Macrovision are legal. As long as they are not 'analog video cassette recorders'. Line filters stripping out Macrovision are stillquite legal.
Unlike the 'digitial access/copy control circumvention' part of the DMCA, it's still quite legal to screw around with macrovision. The only people the law affects are those manufacturing and selling VCRs. Anyone else can do any damn thing they want, including selling devices that aren't VCRs or hacking their own VCR to not do it. (Although they then can no longer sell it.)
Hilariously enough, DVD players that don't do macrovision are also legal. Looks like they forgot that one. I bet that's supposed to be by covered the CSS license.
No, do it Novemember 15th or so, the year all this comes out.
Either they discover it before the holiday season and make their entire (huge) pre-holiday production useless, or they don't discover it until everyone's bought a player and it's sitting under the tree, waiting for them to open it Christmas morning and run out and buy discs that won't work.
To clarify, DVD content can't be 'macrovision encoded'. Macrovision encoding is something on the analog signal, and DVDs, rather obviously, have no analog signal on them.
DVD are supposed to have a bit flipped on them, and the DVD player is supposed to then take the output and put macrovision on it before sending it out. And then the VCR is supposed to fail to record the signal, or, more likely, record it in a very distorted fashion.
I don't know which 'supposed to' is failing, but it does seem to fail rather often on certain setups.
'The reader' doesn't need to figure out it, there have been devices out their for 'cleanig up' the video signal for years, and that's just a codeword for removing macrovision.
And, no, those arne't a violation of the DMCA, as that's not digital.
'Quick! Find some honest customers and kick them in the balls by breaking their DVD player!'
I.e., the beatings will continue until morale improves.
What's that rule again? Any organization's behavior can be predicted if it is assumed to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies out to discredit it?
That doesn't have anything to do with copyright law. People can make unauthized copies and sell them without using the Nintendo brand at all, or use the Nintendo brand without using a single bit of their code.
Using someone's name without their permission is trademark infringement, and unlike copyright infringement, isn't a criminal matter at all, so could not involve the FBI.
They're still selling the, oh, ten most popular games. You want Mario, Zelda, or Tetris, you know where to get it.
They're not selling anything else. Show me where to get Super C or Rush 'n Attack or Rampage.(1)
And I'm not quite sure why someone buying a console clone with a hacked version of SMB that doesn't work right would somehow think Nintendo sucks. That's sounds like a failure of trademark law if they're being advertised as 'Nintendo', or say that when you run them. Copyright law doesn't have anything to do with that...a crappy game could claim to be a Nintendo product without any copyright infringement at all.
1) All of I own quite legally, but do not have a functioning NES at this time.
Don't even do that. Just make them pay taxes on the amount they're selling the work for.
I.e., if they stick all their works at $1000 each in a sham catalog they had sitting in the lobby, and that's the thing they turn in as proof they're still publishing the game, they have to pay sales taxes (or whatever) on an assumed minimum 1000 copies old. Of each game.
I'm not talking about write access. I'm talking about read access. And, hell, half the time it's not even read access to the code that matters, what matters is reading the comments to see what takes what arguments, or looking to see exactly how they called some unrelated thing else so you can be consistent.
Coding correctly in small bits and pieces is not the same as operating a 'Manhattan project' where everyone knows exactly what they are supposed to do, and has no ability to even see anything else. Just because you should treat objects as blackboxes you can't see inside doesn't mean actually making them blackboxes you can't see inside is useful.
In the real world, people realize 'Hey, we do this a lot. Someone write a function to do it and we'll add it to the spec'. That can't happen if you have no idea what anyone else is doing. Everyone would constantly reinvent the wheel. Unless you have some sort of God handing down exactly perfect specifications to start with, that get followed to the letter.
And we all know, 90% of development is finding the bugs, and the bugs that cause you problems aren't always magically located in your own code.
Like I said, if you're operating in that enviroment, people can't even compile their own code, because they don't have read access to all the code they need to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
It hasn't.
How many people will hold open doors if walk up with packages in your hands?
Enough to make it a security concern. It's a social contract.
How many people will tell you if you get out of your car and left your lights on?
Almost everyone. Yup, social contract.
The web is fairly new, so I point you to TV. How many people think they're supposed to watch ads, and feel bad when they fail to pay attention, leave the room, or even fast forward them?
None. No one. Zilch people think that way. Not a social contract.
You can argue it's an implied contract, but it's certainly not a social one, or we'd be shunning the adblock developers in the same way we shun, say, spammers.
It's rules that everyone is expected to obey, simply because they would not want people breaking those rules in regard to them. I.e, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The more serious offenses get coded into law. The lesser offenses just mark you as an asshole.
Of course, none of that applies to advertisers, as I'm not expecting them not to block my ads. I don't even have any damn ads to show them. The poster who mentioned 'social contract' didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
See, if it's a social contract, 99.999% of the population already wants to conform to it.
The only people who don't are misanthropics who don't like anyone, greedy bastards who want to game the system, and sociopaths who have no empathy. We come up with standards all by ourself, like 'Walk on the right in a hallway'. And robots.txt. And knocking on doors.
We've been inventing ways we all should do things, to make it easier for everyone, ever since society existed. That's almost the defination of society!
But 'look at their ads' doesn't qualify at all. It's not only disqualified by the fact it's how to act in regard to a thing done by a very small segment of society, it really obviously doesn't quality by the simple fact everyone skips ads whenever possible.
Um, duh. It can't be a social contract if more than, I dunno, 1% of the population breaks it. Everyone in the damn universe skips ads on TV, or at least talks during them. And I can't imagine the numbers of ignoring and blocking ads on the net would be lower.
On some stuff, like milk or CD-Rs, I've learned that's not good enough, so I try some middle priced stuff, until I find a good one, and go with it.
The only thing ads aimed at me would even be vaguely useful for are telling me about stores I didn't know existed, or types of products I didn't know about.
Anyone got a workaround? Or another extension that allows me to undo 'always block cookies from this site'?
I'd eaten at one before, and they were very good, but now I'm just a little bit worried about just what the hell they were trying to imply with dancing dead rats. (Is it some really obsurce Wayside School reference I'm not getting?)
But there aren't currently any near me, anyway. And now Subways will toast their sandwiches, too.
Ys, there is a rather large segment of the market that is exactly who their products are aimed at that will not purchase any of their products whatsoever, because of those damn ads.
Of course, I'm the kind of guy who gives my real phone number to mortgage spammers so that I can learn what banks operate unethically by who calls me up.
A 'social contract' isn't a contract at all. You're thinking of an 'implied contract'.
A social contract is the thing everyone participates in to make society work correctly, and is not a 'contract' at all. They are simply polite behaviors.
You walk on the right, I walk on the right. Look, we no longer run into each other.
You don't be annoying with your cellphone, I don't be annoying with mine.
You tell me if you see me walk off with my headlights left on, and I do the same for you.
You refrain from killing me, and I refrain from killing you.
Etc, etc. When violation of a social contract causes serious problems, we tend to outlaw it. When it's minor, we just call those violators assholes and shot them the bird.
Now...I refrain from blocking your ad, and you...refrain from blocking mine? WTF? I have no ads.
'Social contracts' have no bearing whatsoever to ads. Ads are unidirectional, from a very small subset of people to the population at large, and hence they can't possibly be part of any social contract.
It's defining 'protects a right' as 'prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of that right', which is idiotic. It doesn't matter what the right is.
The part that says 'prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title' is just wrong.
Copy protection doesn't prevent, restrict, or otherwise limit any right of the copyright owner at all, it allows the copyright owner to enforce their rights.
The fact that producing VCRs without Macrovision needed to be specifically outlawed and placed under 1201(b) rather implies they wouldn't been there otherwise.
I don't understand what the hell 1201(b) is trying to say anyway:
1201(b) 2 (B) a technological measure "effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title.
What the fuck? It 'protects the rights of the copyright owner' if it limits the ability of the copyright owner to exercise their rights? (Their rights, of course, being the ability to prevent copying.)
As long as you're what you're breaking doesn't restrict the copyright owner, it looks like you're in the clear.
So it's now illegal to circumvent a technological measure that prevents copyright holders from enforcing the rights granted to them under law? Isn't that, um, exactly backwards?
Did they really just outlaw copyright holders from plugging in computers to send cease-and-desist letters? (The lack of being plugged is a technology that prevents them from excercising their right to prevent copies.) What kind of insanity is that?
So now we have one player key, with which we can decode the single instance of the DVD key for that player on every DVD already made.
So now we want to crack another key:
We have, oh, four thousand plaintexts, and four thousand encrypted versions of that plaintext encrypted with the same, unknown key, and we want to find out that key.
It's not easy, but it's not what normal cyphers are designed to protect.
OTOH, I'm not entirely sure what the point is. The easiest thing to do is to just keep cracking the software player's keys faster than they can revoke them. Does it really matter if no one knows the key for a hardware decoder if the content is all over the net getting burned to unprotected CDs, and you can go out and get your own decrypter in like five minutes if you want to copy your own?
Whatever this is about, it's not about illegal copying.
OTOH, Alaska's got a lot of islands it's not using. Florida, too.
Ask the US government to bomb them.
Yes, VCRSs that don't have macrovision are illegal to sell (new ones, old ones are grandfathered in). And as far as I know, have almost always been illegal, instead of being made illegal with the DMCA, although the DMCA certainly could have updated it.
However, other devices designed to strip out Macrovision are legal. As long as they are not 'analog video cassette recorders'. Line filters stripping out Macrovision are still quite legal.
Unlike the 'digitial access/copy control circumvention' part of the DMCA, it's still quite legal to screw around with macrovision. The only people the law affects are those manufacturing and selling VCRs. Anyone else can do any damn thing they want, including selling devices that aren't VCRs or hacking their own VCR to not do it. (Although they then can no longer sell it.)
Hilariously enough, DVD players that don't do macrovision are also legal. Looks like they forgot that one. I bet that's supposed to be by covered the CSS license.
And, hilariously, the outcry over this could easily spill over to all copy protection that's made by being incompatible. (I.e, fake CDs.)
Either they discover it before the holiday season and make their entire (huge) pre-holiday production useless, or they don't discover it until everyone's bought a player and it's sitting under the tree, waiting for them to open it Christmas morning and run out and buy discs that won't work.
DVD are supposed to have a bit flipped on them, and the DVD player is supposed to then take the output and put macrovision on it before sending it out. And then the VCR is supposed to fail to record the signal, or, more likely, record it in a very distorted fashion.
I don't know which 'supposed to' is failing, but it does seem to fail rather often on certain setups.
And, no, those arne't a violation of the DMCA, as that's not digital.
'Quick! Find some honest customers and kick them in the balls by breaking their DVD player!'
I.e., the beatings will continue until morale improves.
What's that rule again? Any organization's behavior can be predicted if it is assumed to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies out to discredit it?
And I actually have a suspicion this is as much about 'region-less players' and whatnot as it is about copy protection.
Using someone's name without their permission is trademark infringement, and unlike copyright infringement, isn't a criminal matter at all, so could not involve the FBI.
They're not selling anything else. Show me where to get Super C or Rush 'n Attack or Rampage.(1)
And I'm not quite sure why someone buying a console clone with a hacked version of SMB that doesn't work right would somehow think Nintendo sucks. That's sounds like a failure of trademark law if they're being advertised as 'Nintendo', or say that when you run them. Copyright law doesn't have anything to do with that...a crappy game could claim to be a Nintendo product without any copyright infringement at all.
1) All of I own quite legally, but do not have a functioning NES at this time.
I.e., if they stick all their works at $1000 each in a sham catalog they had sitting in the lobby, and that's the thing they turn in as proof they're still publishing the game, they have to pay sales taxes (or whatever) on an assumed minimum 1000 copies old. Of each game.
Photoship and IE both work under Wine.
Coding correctly in small bits and pieces is not the same as operating a 'Manhattan project' where everyone knows exactly what they are supposed to do, and has no ability to even see anything else. Just because you should treat objects as blackboxes you can't see inside doesn't mean actually making them blackboxes you can't see inside is useful.
In the real world, people realize 'Hey, we do this a lot. Someone write a function to do it and we'll add it to the spec'. That can't happen if you have no idea what anyone else is doing. Everyone would constantly reinvent the wheel. Unless you have some sort of God handing down exactly perfect specifications to start with, that get followed to the letter.
And we all know, 90% of development is finding the bugs, and the bugs that cause you problems aren't always magically located in your own code.
Like I said, if you're operating in that enviroment, people can't even compile their own code, because they don't have read access to all the code they need to do so.