Neither is copyright, strictly speaking. They are both legal creations. Reverse engineering is probably a lot closer to being a natural right than copyright is though.
"Fair use" is a legal right. It has meaning only within a certain legal framework. This right is not a "natural" right. Before the Act you had no *right* to make copies for personal use, for example.
Copyright is also a legal right. Copyright owners have no natural right to prevent me from copying their "property." Given that fair use and copyright stand on equal legal footing, it is fairly similar to the civil rights movement. We'd be fighting for a legal right instead of a natural right, but given that it was the granting of a legal right to another group that deprived us of our former legal right, it seems fitting
DMCA is not about reverse-engineering (you may have been thinking UCITA -- that's a different law). DMCA is about allowing copyright owners to erect fences around their content and prohibiting anyone to meddle with these fences.
It is those fences that confound people attempting to reverse engineer something. The DMCA specifically allows reverse engineering (hence it is at least partially about reverse engineering), it also gives copyright holders a means to legally prevent reverse engineering by using a method that "effectively restricts access" to the format that someone may want to reverse engineer. By reverse engineering that format, they are circumventing the protection mechanism (however silly it might be), which is prohibited.
True, but g neric never offered any counter evidence to show that the original poster actually was exaggerating. So now we have one person's word and opinion against another's. At least some of the replying posts included reports of serious police misconduct. That supports the original poster's claims more than g neric's. However, it doesn't do anything to inform us of how frequent such abuses occur. Such information would probably be tough to come by as police departments and other law enforcement organizations won't exactly be forthcoming with such information, which is something else that should disturb us.
Depends on what you mean by "helping" I think. If that means dealing, then yeah, he was probably breaking the law. If it means something else, then the cops were probably in the wrong.
If a new organization was created and gained anything approaching wide usage, it would be deemed outlaw by the U.S. government and others. If there was so much as a hint of some corporation's name being used in a domain name handed out by such an organization, you'd have FBI kicking down the door and hauling everything and everyone away, probably with no charges filed and no right to know the evidence against them. The media would be told that a bunch of hackers were violating copyright law in a massive way and everyone would just accept that as fact. The government just saved the Internet. Hooray for the government.
Okay, that's a pretty cynical view of things, but who believes that such an organization wouldn't be destroyed either by litigation or by the government? I seriously doubt they'll let their corporate-owned Internet face any competition.
Yes they do. Just because the government stopped enforcing the monpoly doesn't mean that it just instantly disappeared. It was well-entrenched and it will take quite a bit of time for competition to return to that industry.
Everything is copyrightable, unless it is written by a government agency or employee in the course of carrying out his duties. Now, how enforceable the copyright is varies from case to case depending on several factors such as whether the copyright owner's ability to profit from the copyrighted work was damaged due to the alleged infringement or whether the infringement reduced the market for the copyrighted work, etc. I don't think those sorts of things apply in this situation. That means they will probably fall back on trade secret law, which may or may not apply, depending on how he managed to get ahold of the documents and whether a court decides that they are, in fact, proctected by trade secret laws.
But *every individual* and *every company* has the right to refuse service.
I think this has already been established as false. If your company has a monopoly on some service (whether government granted as the cable companies are, or through some other method), you play by different rules. This usually includes the obligation to provide service to anyone who wants it and is willing to pay for it.
Well I sure wouldn't want their cancer causing documents anywhere near me.:)
Seriously though, it's a good point, and the same basic idea I was talking about in another post I just made. Sometimes consumers have a right to know regardless of whether the company likes it or not and regardless of copyright, trade secret, or other laws.
If something is stamped confidential, and mailed out to thousands of people, then it isn't confidential, no matter what stamp is on it.
This sounds basically like what Microsoft tried to do with the Kerberos specs. They made them available for public download through a mechanism that did not require you to agree to anything, and then later tried to claim it all as a trade secret. Quite rightly IMO, it didn't work.
I think he said a bit more than "Hey, look what i found..." I think there are other considerations besides copyright law, such as consumer rights laws that might permit the publishing of such information in certain circumstances. He was obviously upset about their customer service practices and this was his way of letting others see what's going on. IANAL, so I'll have to ask if anyone else knows more about this. Seems to me though that a company shouldn't be able to hide information that has an impact on consumers by hiding behind copyright law.
I know exactly how he feels. Switch to whom? There is no other choice. I am not in a DSL service area, and Time-Warner is the only cable provider in town. What other choice do I have for broadband that is in the same price range?
What we need to do is leave people the hell alone when they aren't hurting others and get rid of a lot of the stupid laws that have been passed. If someone wants to smoke pot, let them smoke pot. If they want to smoke pot and then drive while high, then they are an imminent threat to others and should be punished. Do it again and the punishment is greater, etc. The War on Drugs has created a hell of a lot more problems than it has fixed (in fact I can't think of a single thing it's fixed in 20 years). It's become nothing but an excuse for the government to spy on us and violate our rights.
The vote must be cast, and cast for the candidate that you think will do best, not the candidate that you think 'is most likely' to keep the candidate you dislike the most out of office.
You're looking at it as if I can have only one candidate that I think would be satisfactory. Just because I think Nader is the best choice doesn't mean that I don't have an opinion on the others. It's not a black-and-white question. That's the real problem here. Take this example:
Perhaps 30% like Gore, but consider Nader preferable to Bush. Perhaps another 30% like Nader, but consider Gore preferable to Bush. Now that leaves 40 percent (or slightly less if you take out votes for other obscure party candidates) that want only Bush. Now, the majority (60%) want either Nader or Gore, and definitely don't want Bush. The way the election system works today though, they'll end up with Bush. That's just plain wrong. That's why we need to change the way the voting system works. People could then vote for their first choice without worrying about bad side-effects of that choice. Either approval voting or the Boorda count would work well for this.
We (the USA) learned that lesson the hard way in the 1920s, with prohibition.
I think it's rather obvious that we learned nothing from prohibition, else we would not be spending obscene amounts of money trying to prevent people from smoking pot in this country. It's done nothing but increase the number of people that are deemed criminals, fill up our prisons to the point where we are constantly building new ones, increase actual violent crime and theft, increase corruption of our own and foreign governments, and violate the basic human rights of millions of people.
Sure, but it can take a decade or more to get new advances into most of the vehicles on the road. Much quicker to get things installed in power plants.
IIRC, they can't copyright a mathematical formula, they can only copyright the words they use to explain it. Should be possible to copy all the formulas you want, but provide your own explanations.
The point is that nobody with any influence will stand up and stop this from happening. The politicians will get on tv and lie through their teeth to the people of this country about how this isn't really a bad thing. Nobody will know what's going on, and therefore they won't get sufficiently pissed off to put a stop to it.
I'll be writing more letters to my congresscritters about this. They're idiots apparently, given their responses to my last round of letters. (My representative took my support for the new Music Owners' Listening Rights Act as support for Napster, which I only mentioned briefly in passing. Aaargh!) They're idiots, but I don't know what else I can do right now to fight this sort of thing.
The problem is that voting our conscience can have disastrous results. If I were to vote for Nader, I might as well be directly supporting Bush in this election. Yes, perhaps my vote will help the Green party get some cash next time around, but it will also help put the candidate who is most antithetical to Nader into office by reducing Gore's total count (since Gore would be my next choice). Until the voting system is reformed, there can be no fair election since we can't vote our conscience and still have a clear conscience. How do you get an election system reformed when it's controlled by parties that are determined to keep other parties from having anything approaching an equal voice in the election? The only answer I can think of is "very very slowly." Until such time as we can vote in a fair election, we have to choose between not voting, or voting for someone who really isn't the person we want in office, just to keep the person who we really don't want in office out. Some choice.
How do the fatcats think Napster is making money? Where is their revenue source? Why would someone invest in it? Do they think they will be able to stick ads or some other revenue generator in later?
I wrote to my representative and informed him that I wanted him to support this bill. It doesn't really have anything to do with Napster, and a lot to do with my.mp3.com. But, being rather ignorant apparently, and even though I barely mentioned Napster in my letter, I got a letter back telling me that my support of Napster was noted and that he'd look into the bill. Damn! That's annoying. I don't really support Napster per se, I am just against the rampant abuses of copyright that have taken place over the years and this bill is at least a small step in the right direction.
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reverse engineering is not a right!
Neither is copyright, strictly speaking. They are both legal creations. Reverse engineering is probably a lot closer to being a natural right than copyright is though.
You're joking, right? You've obviously never been to prison.
"Fair use" is a legal right. It has meaning only within a certain legal framework. This right is not a "natural" right. Before the Act you had no *right* to make copies for personal use, for example.
Copyright is also a legal right. Copyright owners have no natural right to prevent me from copying their "property." Given that fair use and copyright stand on equal legal footing, it is fairly similar to the civil rights movement. We'd be fighting for a legal right instead of a natural right, but given that it was the granting of a legal right to another group that deprived us of our former legal right, it seems fitting
DMCA is not about reverse-engineering (you may have been thinking UCITA -- that's a different law). DMCA is about allowing copyright owners to erect fences around their content and prohibiting anyone to meddle with these fences.
It is those fences that confound people attempting to reverse engineer something. The DMCA specifically allows reverse engineering (hence it is at least partially about reverse engineering), it also gives copyright holders a means to legally prevent reverse engineering by using a method that "effectively restricts access" to the format that someone may want to reverse engineer. By reverse engineering that format, they are circumventing the protection mechanism (however silly it might be), which is prohibited.
True, but g neric never offered any counter evidence to show that the original poster actually was exaggerating. So now we have one person's word and opinion against another's. At least some of the replying posts included reports of serious police misconduct. That supports the original poster's claims more than g neric's. However, it doesn't do anything to inform us of how frequent such abuses occur. Such information would probably be tough to come by as police departments and other law enforcement organizations won't exactly be forthcoming with such information, which is something else that should disturb us.
Depends on what you mean by "helping" I think. If that means dealing, then yeah, he was probably breaking the law. If it means something else, then the cops were probably in the wrong.
If a new organization was created and gained anything approaching wide usage, it would be deemed outlaw by the U.S. government and others. If there was so much as a hint of some corporation's name being used in a domain name handed out by such an organization, you'd have FBI kicking down the door and hauling everything and everyone away, probably with no charges filed and no right to know the evidence against them. The media would be told that a bunch of hackers were violating copyright law in a massive way and everyone would just accept that as fact. The government just saved the Internet. Hooray for the government.
Okay, that's a pretty cynical view of things, but who believes that such an organization wouldn't be destroyed either by litigation or by the government? I seriously doubt they'll let their corporate-owned Internet face any competition.
Yes they do. Just because the government stopped enforcing the monpoly doesn't mean that it just instantly disappeared. It was well-entrenched and it will take quite a bit of time for competition to return to that industry.
Everything is copyrightable, unless it is written by a government agency or employee in the course of carrying out his duties. Now, how enforceable the copyright is varies from case to case depending on several factors such as whether the copyright owner's ability to profit from the copyrighted work was damaged due to the alleged infringement or whether the infringement reduced the market for the copyrighted work, etc. I don't think those sorts of things apply in this situation. That means they will probably fall back on trade secret law, which may or may not apply, depending on how he managed to get ahold of the documents and whether a court decides that they are, in fact, proctected by trade secret laws.
But *every individual* and *every company* has the right to refuse service.
I think this has already been established as false. If your company has a monopoly on some service (whether government granted as the cable companies are, or through some other method), you play by different rules. This usually includes the obligation to provide service to anyone who wants it and is willing to pay for it.
They do have a monopoly on *cable internet access*, which is exactly the point.
Did they wait til the end of the period? Doesn't sound like they did.
Well I sure wouldn't want their cancer causing documents anywhere near me. :)
Seriously though, it's a good point, and the same basic idea I was talking about in another post I just made. Sometimes consumers have a right to know regardless of whether the company likes it or not and regardless of copyright, trade secret, or other laws.
If something is stamped confidential, and mailed out to thousands of people, then it isn't confidential, no matter what stamp is on it.
This sounds basically like what Microsoft tried to do with the Kerberos specs. They made them available for public download through a mechanism that did not require you to agree to anything, and then later tried to claim it all as a trade secret. Quite rightly IMO, it didn't work.
And like The Blob, they seem to be reforming into larger and larger entities anyway.
I think he said a bit more than "Hey, look what i found..." I think there are other considerations besides copyright law, such as consumer rights laws that might permit the publishing of such information in certain circumstances. He was obviously upset about their customer service practices and this was his way of letting others see what's going on. IANAL, so I'll have to ask if anyone else knows more about this. Seems to me though that a company shouldn't be able to hide information that has an impact on consumers by hiding behind copyright law.
I know exactly how he feels. Switch to whom? There is no other choice. I am not in a DSL service area, and Time-Warner is the only cable provider in town. What other choice do I have for broadband that is in the same price range?
What we need to do is leave people the hell alone when they aren't hurting others and get rid of a lot of the stupid laws that have been passed. If someone wants to smoke pot, let them smoke pot. If they want to smoke pot and then drive while high, then they are an imminent threat to others and should be punished. Do it again and the punishment is greater, etc. The War on Drugs has created a hell of a lot more problems than it has fixed (in fact I can't think of a single thing it's fixed in 20 years). It's become nothing but an excuse for the government to spy on us and violate our rights.
The vote must be cast, and cast for the candidate that you think will do best, not the candidate that you think 'is most likely' to keep the candidate you dislike the most out of office.
You're looking at it as if I can have only one candidate that I think would be satisfactory. Just because I think Nader is the best choice doesn't mean that I don't have an opinion on the others. It's not a black-and-white question. That's the real problem here. Take this example:
Perhaps 30% like Gore, but consider Nader preferable to Bush. Perhaps another 30% like Nader, but consider Gore preferable to Bush. Now that leaves 40 percent (or slightly less if you take out votes for other obscure party candidates) that want only Bush. Now, the majority (60%) want either Nader or Gore, and definitely don't want Bush. The way the election system works today though, they'll end up with Bush. That's just plain wrong. That's why we need to change the way the voting system works. People could then vote for their first choice without worrying about bad side-effects of that choice. Either approval voting or the Boorda count would work well for this.
We (the USA) learned that lesson the hard way in the 1920s, with prohibition.
I think it's rather obvious that we learned nothing from prohibition, else we would not be spending obscene amounts of money trying to prevent people from smoking pot in this country. It's done nothing but increase the number of people that are deemed criminals, fill up our prisons to the point where we are constantly building new ones, increase actual violent crime and theft, increase corruption of our own and foreign governments, and violate the basic human rights of millions of people.
Sure, but it can take a decade or more to get new advances into most of the vehicles on the road. Much quicker to get things installed in power plants.
IIRC, they can't copyright a mathematical formula, they can only copyright the words they use to explain it. Should be possible to copy all the formulas you want, but provide your own explanations.
The point is that nobody with any influence will stand up and stop this from happening. The politicians will get on tv and lie through their teeth to the people of this country about how this isn't really a bad thing. Nobody will know what's going on, and therefore they won't get sufficiently pissed off to put a stop to it.
I'll be writing more letters to my congresscritters about this. They're idiots apparently, given their responses to my last round of letters. (My representative took my support for the new Music Owners' Listening Rights Act as support for Napster, which I only mentioned briefly in passing. Aaargh!) They're idiots, but I don't know what else I can do right now to fight this sort of thing.
The problem is that voting our conscience can have disastrous results. If I were to vote for Nader, I might as well be directly supporting Bush in this election. Yes, perhaps my vote will help the Green party get some cash next time around, but it will also help put the candidate who is most antithetical to Nader into office by reducing Gore's total count (since Gore would be my next choice). Until the voting system is reformed, there can be no fair election since we can't vote our conscience and still have a clear conscience. How do you get an election system reformed when it's controlled by parties that are determined to keep other parties from having anything approaching an equal voice in the election? The only answer I can think of is "very very slowly." Until such time as we can vote in a fair election, we have to choose between not voting, or voting for someone who really isn't the person we want in office, just to keep the person who we really don't want in office out. Some choice.
How do the fatcats think Napster is making money? Where is their revenue source? Why would someone invest in it? Do they think they will be able to stick ads or some other revenue generator in later?
I wrote to my representative and informed him that I wanted him to support this bill. It doesn't really have anything to do with Napster, and a lot to do with my.mp3.com. But, being rather ignorant apparently, and even though I barely mentioned Napster in my letter, I got a letter back telling me that my support of Napster was noted and that he'd look into the bill. Damn! That's annoying. I don't really support Napster per se, I am just against the rampant abuses of copyright that have taken place over the years and this bill is at least a small step in the right direction.