Microsoft has reasonable products where they have to compete, or have some other reason to be good. (Like development products, to pull people to their platform.) They have craptacular products where they do not.
Like IE, for example. 5 years old. No CSS2 support, limited CSS1. Broken PNGs that they could trivially fix. And, most importantly, no competition for years. Now that Firefox is here, they start talking about IE 7.
OTOH, look at Word. They're competing with themselves (Sadly, simply to make more money.), so their product, while not innovative (They've never been innovated.) is very nice.
Or Outlook, the real one. Nice for business users. Fairly crappy for power users, but that's not the target.
Of course, they can't, for the life of them, secure the products they make. Witness the absurd LAND attack that's popped back up, and notice how many people are running Exchange behind a Unix mail server that's just forwarding mail inward, because any idiot can make an Exchange machine fall over by shooting rubberbands at it.
I was just pointing out that whether or not you've been given permission to make a copy is not the same thing as whether or not you have a right to make a copy.
You can even be given permission and not have the right to do so, although the only example of that I can think of is when the person you thought was the copyright owner wasn't.
Which is why DRM is so insidious. It claims to map 'copyright holder's permission' directly to 'right to make a copy', thus trying to remove centuries of American (and, hell, British) legal precedents and law that says that's not true.
And, as if that's not enough, in practice it's mapping 'permission of the person who gave the work to you' (as witnessed by public domain works distributed as ebooks with DRM that is illegal to break) to 'right to use' (as witnessed by the whole DeCSS thing).
It's really far out there, legally. 'Permission of the person who gave it to you' has never been required for a 'right to use'. (In fact, nothing has ever been required for a right to use.)
So the part when I said 'Or if you're just using coax to transmit electronic voltages instead of RF signals. As that cable is designed to keep in/out RF, it should be pretty shielded.' just completely passed you by?
Or the part where I repeatedly said it was RF-over-coax that sucked and not coax itself?
In fact, the entire fucking post you responded to was me correcting myself, that it wasn't coax I was talking about, but RF-over-coax, and that the cable itself was fine. If you'd posted this to my original post, I could see the confusion, but I quite clearly stated what I meant where you responded.
RF sucks. When people talk about hooking their HDTV up with 'the coax that came with it', they're talking about using RF, you moron, especially when they immediately go on to say s-video was better. And it is because the EMI from broadcast TV can't help but wander into your system.
Don't go around claiming that 'coax' is just fine, when 99.999% of the entertainment centers that are hooked together with coax are using RF, and that is not fine (Unless all source material is a that low quality.), that's the worse picture quality possible. People who run electronic signals over coax know damn well what I'm talking about when I said 'don't use coax' and will rightly ignore that.
Of course, you're just a fucktard who likes to skim messages and post whenever you see something that could be wrong, and not bother reading what's going on.
Fair use rights are the rights copiers have. Copyright owners do not have fair use rights, they have, tada, copyright. Fair use is an exception to copyright. You can't subvert it by allowing people to copy, the only way fair use can be subverted is by disallowing copies when the law says it's okay.
I really wish people would learn what 'fair use' means. What it is is clearly defined in the law. (When it applies is not that clearly defined, but that's not important.)
Saying Napster subverts fair use is like saying ticketing someone for speeding subverts the felony murder law...it just doesn't make any sense.
It's not a red herring when talking about blocking access to unauthorized copies.
Because sometimes even if the copies are unauthorized, they can be legal, thanks to Fair Use. Unauthorized != illegal.
And that's not even something that will ever be figured out by a computer, even if they have a fingerprint of every copyrighted work in existance. Because sometimes you have the right to copy information, copyright be damned, and when that is can only be decided by the courts.
So it's not just 'things you have legit permission to download' blocking stops, it's also 'things you have a right under the law to download even though you don't have permission'.
So even if there was a magical bittorrent filter that stopped you from downloading Star Wars but let you download a Linux ISO, it can't ever be smart enough to know you're downloading Star Wars because you want a four second clip of Greedo shooting first to go along with your dissertation on 'How the Digital Universe Allows Anyone to Edit History', and thus you're squarely in the Fair Use camp.
(No, you can't grab it off the DVD, thanks to the DMCA, which outlawed the tools in addition to using them. So you could legally rip it, but not legally possess any tools to do so.)
And before anyone says 'That's an absurd situation', I'll point that Fair Use covers a lot of things...you could even argue it covered, to get back my original example, downloading a no-longer-manufactured original vinyl rip to go along with your purchase of a CD, because it's for personal, non-commercial use, and obviously no sales have been lost, even without any aspect of research. You'd probably lose in court, because you copied the whole work, but you might not.
Erm, saying someone is a criminal when they are not is in fact one of the very clear examples of libel and slander, and is used as such in courts and legal classes. It's a very clear fact (You either are or you aren't) and very damaging to your reputation.
However, despite what the poster claimed, the letter did not state that, at least not the part quoted.
And to be libelous, someone has to claim someone is a criminal to a third party, at least in front of a third party. You can't claim someone slandered you in a private conversation, because it requires some harm to your reputation. Hence there wouldn't be any defamation here anyway.
And let's pretend 'IP' is property, shall we? Let's ignore the existence of anything else that might get in the way, like fair use.
If I'm doing research on, say, music history, it is perfectly legal to download, oh, a vinyl rip of 'I Saw Her Standing There' from _Please Please Me_ and compare it to the CD version.
It's even legal for me to include clips when I write it up.
'Fair Use' requires a judical decision to see if it falls within the accepted bounds. There's no way machines or even random person can decide if any copying is fair use or not.
Anyone who buys such a file from you may also legaly purchase the rights to decode siad file from you. They just merely have to purchase your authentication. Or you could give it to them.
Erm, no. That's the point. Right now, that is not required under the law. It may currently be included as part of any specific DRM system, right now, but it's not a legal requirement for them to allow you to transfer your 'right' to decode it.
Because, you see, you have no such right. They have currently given you the ability to decode the file. That's not a right, although it used to be.
They can set any rules they want, however they want them, restricting things you do have the right to do, like quote small amount for academic purposes, or resell, because they explicitly took away your right to decode the file using the DMCA.
But it's still legal. But nothing about that has removed YOUR right to resell the item. You can resell it any time you want. You have that right. The fact that the buyer may have to break laws to use the product after they have bought it is not a violation of your right of first sale. It may be a violation of their right to fair use, however, that hasn't been tested in court, and using DVDJon's software isn't going to help you get there.
Things that companies allow people to do or not do are not rights. For example, you have no right to walk into Walmart. (Which is good.) They let you, because it would rather hurt their business if they didn't, but they can take that away, because it's merely a permission, not a right.
Likewise, you have no right to listen to a song you've purchased from iTunes, because they can remove that ability from you, and it is not legal for you to get around that. (And that would also hurt their business, so they wouldn't do that, but they could.) Even if the contract with them says otherwise, you're still not legally allowed around it, you'd have to sue them.
By removing your ability to legally decode the file except at their whim, they have removed all your rights, period. All the rights encoded into law about Fair Use, the first sale doctrine, they could even do legally sound software EULAs instead of the gibberish they do now. Even the fundamental right to view/listen to the work.
All those rights are rights no more, they are merely things you are able to do at their sufferance. All it takes is a cheap-ass 16-bit encryption frontend, and all the rights explicitly granted by the law you go away.
It's not really they write their help in HTML, it's that they embed IE, instead of doing the sane thing and having, you know, a bunch of HTML files and shortcuts to them, and you can use whatever browser you like.
I know what you're talking about. It goes under...um...Entire Network. I've used it before. (Right now, I use NetDrive for my webdav stuff.)
It's not part of IE. Witness: I have IE on my computer, and lack it. (I have something called Web Client Network, however, but that is not the same thing.)
It's part of Frontpage or Office. (Technically, Frontpage is part of Office, but no one buys it that way.)
You're not allowed to resell works. That isn't what fair use is. Fair use is that you may resell the instance of the work which you purchased. Again, I can't make a copy of the CD I bought a resell that.
No, that's not fair use at all, that's doctrine of first sale.
Fair use is a series of tests which, under some circumstances, can allow unauthorized copying. For example, citing a paragraph somewhere in a research paper is almost always fair use. And, more relevant to DRM, including a short clip from a DVD when discussing, for example, if Hans fired first.
You can resell your file, the fact that no one else can use that file is irellevant.
The fact that no one else can use the file legally is very relevent. People are prohibited by law from using it.
That is in direct opposition to copyright caselaw, which says we have an inherit right to resell anything we own, and an inherit right to use anything we own in any way with the sole exception of copying it.
I don't know why you're not grasping this. The courts actually ruled that it was illegal to restrict first sale, that people had a right that could not be removed by contract, and then decades later not only are companies doing so again, this time the government is helping them.
And fair use doctrine dictates those are the only types of copying you may do. But people consistantly violate those rules. Fair use is part of copyright law, which is an impicit contract.
Copyright isn't a type of contract at all, at least, not with the purchasers of material. Copyright is a set of restrictions that copyright holders have placed on society. In return for that, they are supposed to create work, so I guess you could claim some sort of implicit contract with them.
But not with people who buy stuff from them and are restricted. What the heck do they need a contract for? What do they gain out of a contract? Nothing. Copyright law has restricted what they can do, and they got nothing out of it.
Um, all those have been rebutted quite a while ago.
Love Canal quote, when Gore was trying to inspire some kids:
A girl wrote [Gore] that her father and grandfather suffered mysterious ailments she blamed on well water that "tasted funny."
"I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other places like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue," Mr. Gore said. "That was the one that started it all...We made a huge difference and it was all because one high school student got involved."
He never said he discovered anything was wrong there. He said he looked for places where something was wrong, and investigated it. Um, duh. That's part of what the government does.
He was just making the point that he started a series of congressional investigations because of a single young girl, not that he was Captain Planet and can detect pollution from hundreds of miles away. Because he was talking to a bunch of kids, trying to get them politically active. Some people would have told a lie there, or a story like the boy who stuck his finger in a dike, and no one would have thought the worse of them for that. He related an actual story of a teenager who, in essense, caused the creation of Superfund.
As for Love story:
Gore, indeed, along with his roommate Tommy Lee Jones (I've always rather expected someone to call him on that 'lie' also.), were the basis of the male characters in a Love Story. Tipper was not the basis for anyone, but Gore had read a newspaper article which had misstated the author as saying she was. This article actually exists, and it does indeed say that. (Actually, technically, he said that he'd read a newspaper article that said such, so nothing he'd said was even false.)
So the Love Story thing was mostly true, and partially repeating something he'd read in a newspaper that was false.
And can I point out that both those comments were not made to the public? Love Canal was to inspire a bunch of kids, kid who couldn't even vote. Love Story was when he swapping stories with reporters on Air Force one, and he spent like ten seconds on it. I think that shows how much 'falsehoods' had to be searched for. (I'm amazed you didn't bring up the union song joke, too.)
The internet thing, however, was made to the public, and has already been covered here.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who remember him going on and on and on and on about the damn 'information superhighway'. (At the same time Hillary was babbling about 'health care reform'.)
When I first heard people claiming he'd said to have invented it, I was thinking 'I don't know if he did that, but he sure wouldn't shut up about it before we had one.'.
I swear, this country has the attention span of a gnat sometimes.
Hey, remember when Gore had plans to send movies and TV shows on demand into people's homes using the information superhighway, and everyone who knew anything about computers thought he was crazy? Now, of course, the MPAA would come down on him so hard...
BTW, we're almost one month short of the 10 year anniversary of the private internet. April 30, 1995, NFSNet was sold and the government no longer owned the net.
Yes, coax is shielded on the wire. And, yeah, I meant RF over coax...coax itself is fine. I've never seen it used in an audio/video setup except as RF, but no reason it couldn't be. (Actually, I seem to remember some composite coax video ouput on a video camera from ages ago.)
Anyway, RF-over-coax is fairly poorly shielded when generated, at least in a VCR. Just an inch away from where coax comes from is the coax input, which has something on exactly the same frequency.
Unlike everything else, RF-over-coax is transmitted using RF. And thus is, by defination, more suceptible to radio interference. Especially when it's using channel 3, which usually has a television station pumping out a delibrate signal nearby, and, what's more, your box is receiving that signal on purpose.
I wasn't really thinking about anything else. If your DVD player can do coax out...well, you should still use anything else, but there shouldn't be interference. (OTOH, if you have no antenna in on the DVD player, you're going to have to rig up an A/B switch, which itself could let in interference.)
Or if you're just using coax to transmit electronic voltages instead of RF signals. As that cable is designed to keep in/out RF, it should be pretty shielded.
Furthermore, it isn't a shrinkwrap license because you had to agree to the terms of the contract BEFORE you could spend any money.
That's what shrinkwrap licenses are. They are licenses include in shrinkwrap around the ourside of the product. Unlike EULAs, you can read them before purchase. Unlike EULAs, they do not, themselves, make a mockery of contract law. It's unsure if you can sign a contract by merely ropening a box (How do they know who opened the box?), but it's not impossible.
Anyway, a long time ago, the printing industry looked around at all the used books and tried to stop them, by printing a license on the cover of the book that said you could not resell them. (Presumably not using shrinkwrap, this was too long ago, but something similiar.) In big letters around the book. No complaining you didn't see it.
And their restrictions on first sale were declared null and void in court. Not because of the current objections about EULA, restricting things after a sale, which these did not do, but because copyright holders cannot further restrict copyrighted works like that. At all. Even if they get a contract signed in blood. You own a copy, you own a copy, and can do whatever you want with it that is not a violation of copyright law. (Hence current gibberish about 'leasing' software. But Apple's not claiming to do that with iTunes.)
You can resell your DRM file, but you can't make a copy of it and sell it. First sale is not violated as you are free to sell the original item at any time.
No you can't. You cannot resell the work. You can resell an encrypted version of it, but you cannot transfer the ability to decode it...there is a legal decoder out there (iTunes), but it will not decode resold files. And all other decoders are illegal.
Now, except for the 'other decoders are illegal', there's nothing legally wrong with that. If they want to print books that, somehow, only one person can read, they are free to so.
It's when they get the courts to outlaw glasses for others to read the books anyway that they step over the line.
And the end user can only use their rights in certain ways. But end users continualy violate the terms of Fair Use, an impicit contract. That is why DRM exists.
I don't know what you're talking about with fair use there. We can't violate fair use, that's an ability granted to us that says certain kinds of copying of a work isn't a copyright violation.
The coax cable wasn't crappy becuase it was poor quality, it was crappy because it was coax. Coax is very succeptable to EMI. And doesn't leave the signals seperated.
And, really, that's all that goes on. The back of an entertainment center is full of EMI. Shielded cables will stop EMI, and make the signal look better.
And which cable you use is important, at least which kind of cable. Buy the 'highest' you can to connect any two devices, starting at component (YCrCb), then s-video, then RCA, then coax if that's all you've got. For audio, forget all that...go digital. (You can go digital with video, too, but not reasonably.)
And buy shielded. And make sure you go gold to gold and silver to silver. (I find it easiest to stay in silver.)
But you don't need to buy into Monster's technobabble. You can get shielded cables for a lot cheaper.
Public domain refers to works, not instances of the work. Nothing about the DRM prevents the actual work from entering the public domain.
'The actual work'? What are you talking about? Nothing requires the copyright holder to have a copy of the work and hand it on on demand.
When copyright expires, people are supposed to take copies they have and freely copy it. The idea that copyright holders are going to keep copies of their work to hand out freely decades later is a bit absurd.
Now, granted, this isn't a big point WRT music. However, think about DVDs. There's content encrypted behind CSS on those things that isn't available anywhere, aka, 'bonus features'. And it's illegal to get to. At all, under any circumstances.
That's really where the protest is coming from. It's the fear that, in the future, all works will be behind DRM.
Furthermore, as the DMCA applies to DRM, and it's designs to protect ccopyrights. When a work's copyright expires and the work enters the public domain, then it would not be illegal to circumvent prexisting protections on the copyright because said copyright no longer exists and the protections are not protecting anything.
So, your theory is, in 75 years, we will pull out the data files we kept uselessly around for 60 years (Ever since Apple music store closed and wouldn't let us reauthorized our music on a new computer.), then we'll go and download a program that was illegal to ownwhen released but somehow, decades later, we can find a copy of it floating around in the net, and decode the work?
And, of course, this presumes that it is legal to own a method of circumventing copy protection on public domain works and copyrighted works, which is the law does not imply. There's no 'once any of the works are out of copyright, the tool is legal' exception in the law. Obviously, once all of them are out of copyright, the tool is legal, but according to the law, tools that can be used (and, in fact, were designed) to circumvent copy protection are illegal. Period. Doesn't matter what you're using them for. (We already went through this with fair use rights. It's illegal to use tools to excersize fair use.)
However, in the US, you can sign away specific rights in a contract. By using the iTMS you have entered into such a contract, which is legaly binding and enforceable. You were not forced or coerced into such a contract, you willingly entered into it.
Shrink-wrap licenses on books disallowing first sale are not legal in the US. That was explicitly decided in court half a century or more.
See, the thing is, copyright holders can't do whatever they want, because copyright is a government granted monopoly, and they can only use it in certain ways. Even with contracts.
But, instead, we now have laws saying 'You can't violate any digital protection'. A sane court system would find those unconstitutional on exactly the same grounds. Sadly, our court system stopped being sane a long time ago.
I think you're the retard. Attempting do decryption in a general purpose computer but keep it secret from said computer is, indeed, a cryptographically unsound principle. Which is what all currently available DRM does...and all currently available DRM has been cracked because of exactly that.
DVDs, for example, probably never would have been cracked if not for the fact there were DVD video players on computers...if computers had just been able to read the physical media, but not decode the movies, we'd still be searching for the key. Well, in theory. In practice the keylength is broken for some reason and is only actually 40 bits, IIRC.
Attempting to do it in a dedicated chip may work if done exactly right, but as no one has ever produced such a chip it seems rather doubtful, and all it takes is one leak of an authorized key or one authorized program with a buffer overflow and they're screwed.
Remember, 95% of TPM is in software, software that's signed. One little problem in that software and you can dump out all protected content. One software problem, and all currently protected content is decoded, and either all your new content is broken, too, or people have to upgrade their hardware.
It doesn't seem like a fairly good scheme to bank on, for me. And until it's acutally out there it's not 'retarded' to talk about what actual exists and is used.
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Like IE, for example. 5 years old. No CSS2 support, limited CSS1. Broken PNGs that they could trivially fix. And, most importantly, no competition for years. Now that Firefox is here, they start talking about IE 7.
OTOH, look at Word. They're competing with themselves (Sadly, simply to make more money.), so their product, while not innovative (They've never been innovated.) is very nice.
Or Outlook, the real one. Nice for business users. Fairly crappy for power users, but that's not the target.
Of course, they can't, for the life of them, secure the products they make. Witness the absurd LAND attack that's popped back up, and notice how many people are running Exchange behind a Unix mail server that's just forwarding mail inward, because any idiot can make an Exchange machine fall over by shooting rubberbands at it.
You can even be given permission and not have the right to do so, although the only example of that I can think of is when the person you thought was the copyright owner wasn't.
Which is why DRM is so insidious. It claims to map 'copyright holder's permission' directly to 'right to make a copy', thus trying to remove centuries of American (and, hell, British) legal precedents and law that says that's not true.
And, as if that's not enough, in practice it's mapping 'permission of the person who gave the work to you' (as witnessed by public domain works distributed as ebooks with DRM that is illegal to break) to 'right to use' (as witnessed by the whole DeCSS thing).
It's really far out there, legally. 'Permission of the person who gave it to you' has never been required for a 'right to use'. (In fact, nothing has ever been required for a right to use.)
Or the part where I repeatedly said it was RF-over-coax that sucked and not coax itself?
In fact, the entire fucking post you responded to was me correcting myself, that it wasn't coax I was talking about, but RF-over-coax, and that the cable itself was fine. If you'd posted this to my original post, I could see the confusion, but I quite clearly stated what I meant where you responded.
RF sucks. When people talk about hooking their HDTV up with 'the coax that came with it', they're talking about using RF, you moron, especially when they immediately go on to say s-video was better. And it is because the EMI from broadcast TV can't help but wander into your system.
Don't go around claiming that 'coax' is just fine, when 99.999% of the entertainment centers that are hooked together with coax are using RF, and that is not fine (Unless all source material is a that low quality.), that's the worse picture quality possible. People who run electronic signals over coax know damn well what I'm talking about when I said 'don't use coax' and will rightly ignore that.
Of course, you're just a fucktard who likes to skim messages and post whenever you see something that could be wrong, and not bother reading what's going on.
Fair use rights are the rights copiers have. Copyright owners do not have fair use rights, they have, tada, copyright. Fair use is an exception to copyright. You can't subvert it by allowing people to copy, the only way fair use can be subverted is by disallowing copies when the law says it's okay.
I really wish people would learn what 'fair use' means. What it is is clearly defined in the law. (When it applies is not that clearly defined, but that's not important.)
Saying Napster subverts fair use is like saying ticketing someone for speeding subverts the felony murder law...it just doesn't make any sense.
Because sometimes even if the copies are unauthorized, they can be legal, thanks to Fair Use. Unauthorized != illegal.
And that's not even something that will ever be figured out by a computer, even if they have a fingerprint of every copyrighted work in existance. Because sometimes you have the right to copy information, copyright be damned, and when that is can only be decided by the courts.
So it's not just 'things you have legit permission to download' blocking stops, it's also 'things you have a right under the law to download even though you don't have permission'.
So even if there was a magical bittorrent filter that stopped you from downloading Star Wars but let you download a Linux ISO, it can't ever be smart enough to know you're downloading Star Wars because you want a four second clip of Greedo shooting first to go along with your dissertation on 'How the Digital Universe Allows Anyone to Edit History', and thus you're squarely in the Fair Use camp.
(No, you can't grab it off the DVD, thanks to the DMCA, which outlawed the tools in addition to using them. So you could legally rip it, but not legally possess any tools to do so.)
And before anyone says 'That's an absurd situation', I'll point that Fair Use covers a lot of things...you could even argue it covered, to get back my original example, downloading a no-longer-manufactured original vinyl rip to go along with your purchase of a CD, because it's for personal, non-commercial use, and obviously no sales have been lost, even without any aspect of research. You'd probably lose in court, because you copied the whole work, but you might not.
However, despite what the poster claimed, the letter did not state that, at least not the part quoted.
And to be libelous, someone has to claim someone is a criminal to a third party, at least in front of a third party. You can't claim someone slandered you in a private conversation, because it requires some harm to your reputation. Hence there wouldn't be any defamation here anyway.
If I'm doing research on, say, music history, it is perfectly legal to download, oh, a vinyl rip of 'I Saw Her Standing There' from _Please Please Me_ and compare it to the CD version.
It's even legal for me to include clips when I write it up.
'Fair Use' requires a judical decision to see if it falls within the accepted bounds. There's no way machines or even random person can decide if any copying is fair use or not.
Erm, no. That's the point. Right now, that is not required under the law. It may currently be included as part of any specific DRM system, right now, but it's not a legal requirement for them to allow you to transfer your 'right' to decode it.
Because, you see, you have no such right. They have currently given you the ability to decode the file. That's not a right, although it used to be.
They can set any rules they want, however they want them, restricting things you do have the right to do, like quote small amount for academic purposes, or resell, because they explicitly took away your right to decode the file using the DMCA.
But it's still legal. But nothing about that has removed YOUR right to resell the item. You can resell it any time you want. You have that right. The fact that the buyer may have to break laws to use the product after they have bought it is not a violation of your right of first sale. It may be a violation of their right to fair use, however, that hasn't been tested in court, and using DVDJon's software isn't going to help you get there.
Things that companies allow people to do or not do are not rights. For example, you have no right to walk into Walmart. (Which is good.) They let you, because it would rather hurt their business if they didn't, but they can take that away, because it's merely a permission, not a right.
Likewise, you have no right to listen to a song you've purchased from iTunes, because they can remove that ability from you, and it is not legal for you to get around that. (And that would also hurt their business, so they wouldn't do that, but they could.) Even if the contract with them says otherwise, you're still not legally allowed around it, you'd have to sue them.
By removing your ability to legally decode the file except at their whim, they have removed all your rights, period. All the rights encoded into law about Fair Use, the first sale doctrine, they could even do legally sound software EULAs instead of the gibberish they do now. Even the fundamental right to view/listen to the work.
All those rights are rights no more, they are merely things you are able to do at their sufferance. All it takes is a cheap-ass 16-bit encryption frontend, and all the rights explicitly granted by the law you go away.
Because Firefox will do drag and drop just fine, as far as I know, although I will admit I normally use a real FTP client for that.
Right now, in the CIA, there is someone who can tell you everything you want to know about France, including how its GDP compares to everyone else.
It just doesn't put that stuff on the website.
Take some basic business law courses. This is illegal for monopolys.
It's not really they write their help in HTML, it's that they embed IE, instead of doing the sane thing and having, you know, a bunch of HTML files and shortcuts to them, and you can use whatever browser you like.
To be fair, that does seem true.
OpenOffice can print to PDFs.
It's not part of IE. Witness: I have IE on my computer, and lack it. (I have something called Web Client Network, however, but that is not the same thing.)
It's part of Frontpage or Office. (Technically, Frontpage is part of Office, but no one buys it that way.)
Without those, you do not have it.
That's not part of IE. You got it either as part of Office or Frontpage.
Or, in the case of automatially installing malware, any burden on the user!
No, that's not fair use at all, that's doctrine of first sale.
Fair use is a series of tests which, under some circumstances, can allow unauthorized copying. For example, citing a paragraph somewhere in a research paper is almost always fair use. And, more relevant to DRM, including a short clip from a DVD when discussing, for example, if Hans fired first.
You can resell your file, the fact that no one else can use that file is irellevant.
The fact that no one else can use the file legally is very relevent. People are prohibited by law from using it.
That is in direct opposition to copyright caselaw, which says we have an inherit right to resell anything we own, and an inherit right to use anything we own in any way with the sole exception of copying it.
I don't know why you're not grasping this. The courts actually ruled that it was illegal to restrict first sale, that people had a right that could not be removed by contract, and then decades later not only are companies doing so again, this time the government is helping them.
And fair use doctrine dictates those are the only types of copying you may do. But people consistantly violate those rules. Fair use is part of copyright law, which is an impicit contract.
Copyright isn't a type of contract at all, at least, not with the purchasers of material. Copyright is a set of restrictions that copyright holders have placed on society. In return for that, they are supposed to create work, so I guess you could claim some sort of implicit contract with them.
But not with people who buy stuff from them and are restricted. What the heck do they need a contract for? What do they gain out of a contract? Nothing. Copyright law has restricted what they can do, and they got nothing out of it.
Love Canal quote, when Gore was trying to inspire some kids:
A girl wrote [Gore] that her father and grandfather suffered mysterious ailments she blamed on well water that "tasted funny."
"I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other places like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue," Mr. Gore said. "That was the one that started it all...We made a huge difference and it was all because one high school student got involved."
He never said he discovered anything was wrong there. He said he looked for places where something was wrong, and investigated it. Um, duh. That's part of what the government does.
He was just making the point that he started a series of congressional investigations because of a single young girl, not that he was Captain Planet and can detect pollution from hundreds of miles away. Because he was talking to a bunch of kids, trying to get them politically active. Some people would have told a lie there, or a story like the boy who stuck his finger in a dike, and no one would have thought the worse of them for that. He related an actual story of a teenager who, in essense, caused the creation of Superfund.
As for Love story:
Gore, indeed, along with his roommate Tommy Lee Jones (I've always rather expected someone to call him on that 'lie' also.), were the basis of the male characters in a Love Story. Tipper was not the basis for anyone, but Gore had read a newspaper article which had misstated the author as saying she was. This article actually exists, and it does indeed say that. (Actually, technically, he said that he'd read a newspaper article that said such, so nothing he'd said was even false.)
So the Love Story thing was mostly true, and partially repeating something he'd read in a newspaper that was false.
And can I point out that both those comments were not made to the public? Love Canal was to inspire a bunch of kids, kid who couldn't even vote. Love Story was when he swapping stories with reporters on Air Force one, and he spent like ten seconds on it. I think that shows how much 'falsehoods' had to be searched for. (I'm amazed you didn't bring up the union song joke, too.)
The internet thing, however, was made to the public, and has already been covered here.
When I first heard people claiming he'd said to have invented it, I was thinking 'I don't know if he did that, but he sure wouldn't shut up about it before we had one.'.
I swear, this country has the attention span of a gnat sometimes.
Hey, remember when Gore had plans to send movies and TV shows on demand into people's homes using the information superhighway, and everyone who knew anything about computers thought he was crazy? Now, of course, the MPAA would come down on him so hard...
BTW, we're almost one month short of the 10 year anniversary of the private internet. April 30, 1995, NFSNet was sold and the government no longer owned the net.
Anyway, RF-over-coax is fairly poorly shielded when generated, at least in a VCR. Just an inch away from where coax comes from is the coax input, which has something on exactly the same frequency.
Unlike everything else, RF-over-coax is transmitted using RF. And thus is, by defination, more suceptible to radio interference. Especially when it's using channel 3, which usually has a television station pumping out a delibrate signal nearby, and, what's more, your box is receiving that signal on purpose.
I wasn't really thinking about anything else. If your DVD player can do coax out...well, you should still use anything else, but there shouldn't be interference. (OTOH, if you have no antenna in on the DVD player, you're going to have to rig up an A/B switch, which itself could let in interference.)
Or if you're just using coax to transmit electronic voltages instead of RF signals. As that cable is designed to keep in/out RF, it should be pretty shielded.
That's what shrinkwrap licenses are. They are licenses include in shrinkwrap around the ourside of the product. Unlike EULAs, you can read them before purchase. Unlike EULAs, they do not, themselves, make a mockery of contract law. It's unsure if you can sign a contract by merely ropening a box (How do they know who opened the box?), but it's not impossible.
Anyway, a long time ago, the printing industry looked around at all the used books and tried to stop them, by printing a license on the cover of the book that said you could not resell them. (Presumably not using shrinkwrap, this was too long ago, but something similiar.) In big letters around the book. No complaining you didn't see it.
And their restrictions on first sale were declared null and void in court. Not because of the current objections about EULA, restricting things after a sale, which these did not do, but because copyright holders cannot further restrict copyrighted works like that. At all. Even if they get a contract signed in blood. You own a copy, you own a copy, and can do whatever you want with it that is not a violation of copyright law. (Hence current gibberish about 'leasing' software. But Apple's not claiming to do that with iTunes.)
You can resell your DRM file, but you can't make a copy of it and sell it. First sale is not violated as you are free to sell the original item at any time.
No you can't. You cannot resell the work. You can resell an encrypted version of it, but you cannot transfer the ability to decode it...there is a legal decoder out there (iTunes), but it will not decode resold files. And all other decoders are illegal.
Now, except for the 'other decoders are illegal', there's nothing legally wrong with that. If they want to print books that, somehow, only one person can read, they are free to so.
It's when they get the courts to outlaw glasses for others to read the books anyway that they step over the line.
And the end user can only use their rights in certain ways. But end users continualy violate the terms of Fair Use, an impicit contract. That is why DRM exists.
I don't know what you're talking about with fair use there. We can't violate fair use, that's an ability granted to us that says certain kinds of copying of a work isn't a copyright violation.
And, really, that's all that goes on. The back of an entertainment center is full of EMI. Shielded cables will stop EMI, and make the signal look better.
And which cable you use is important, at least which kind of cable. Buy the 'highest' you can to connect any two devices, starting at component (YCrCb), then s-video, then RCA, then coax if that's all you've got. For audio, forget all that...go digital. (You can go digital with video, too, but not reasonably.)
And buy shielded. And make sure you go gold to gold and silver to silver. (I find it easiest to stay in silver.)
But you don't need to buy into Monster's technobabble. You can get shielded cables for a lot cheaper.
'The actual work'? What are you talking about? Nothing requires the copyright holder to have a copy of the work and hand it on on demand.
When copyright expires, people are supposed to take copies they have and freely copy it. The idea that copyright holders are going to keep copies of their work to hand out freely decades later is a bit absurd.
Now, granted, this isn't a big point WRT music. However, think about DVDs. There's content encrypted behind CSS on those things that isn't available anywhere, aka, 'bonus features'. And it's illegal to get to. At all, under any circumstances.
That's really where the protest is coming from. It's the fear that, in the future, all works will be behind DRM.
Furthermore, as the DMCA applies to DRM, and it's designs to protect ccopyrights. When a work's copyright expires and the work enters the public domain, then it would not be illegal to circumvent prexisting protections on the copyright because said copyright no longer exists and the protections are not protecting anything.
So, your theory is, in 75 years, we will pull out the data files we kept uselessly around for 60 years (Ever since Apple music store closed and wouldn't let us reauthorized our music on a new computer.), then we'll go and download a program that was illegal to ownwhen released but somehow, decades later, we can find a copy of it floating around in the net, and decode the work?
And, of course, this presumes that it is legal to own a method of circumventing copy protection on public domain works and copyrighted works, which is the law does not imply. There's no 'once any of the works are out of copyright, the tool is legal' exception in the law. Obviously, once all of them are out of copyright, the tool is legal, but according to the law, tools that can be used (and, in fact, were designed) to circumvent copy protection are illegal. Period. Doesn't matter what you're using them for. (We already went through this with fair use rights. It's illegal to use tools to excersize fair use.)
However, in the US, you can sign away specific rights in a contract. By using the iTMS you have entered into such a contract, which is legaly binding and enforceable. You were not forced or coerced into such a contract, you willingly entered into it.
Shrink-wrap licenses on books disallowing first sale are not legal in the US. That was explicitly decided in court half a century or more.
See, the thing is, copyright holders can't do whatever they want, because copyright is a government granted monopoly, and they can only use it in certain ways. Even with contracts.
But, instead, we now have laws saying 'You can't violate any digital protection'. A sane court system would find those unconstitutional on exactly the same grounds. Sadly, our court system stopped being sane a long time ago.
DVDs, for example, probably never would have been cracked if not for the fact there were DVD video players on computers...if computers had just been able to read the physical media, but not decode the movies, we'd still be searching for the key. Well, in theory. In practice the keylength is broken for some reason and is only actually 40 bits, IIRC.
Attempting to do it in a dedicated chip may work if done exactly right, but as no one has ever produced such a chip it seems rather doubtful, and all it takes is one leak of an authorized key or one authorized program with a buffer overflow and they're screwed.
Remember, 95% of TPM is in software, software that's signed. One little problem in that software and you can dump out all protected content. One software problem, and all currently protected content is decoded, and either all your new content is broken, too, or people have to upgrade their hardware.
It doesn't seem like a fairly good scheme to bank on, for me. And until it's acutally out there it's not 'retarded' to talk about what actual exists and is used.