Re:"it's about taking away the ability to censor"
on
Freenet 0.3 Released
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· Score: 2
It's not talking about your freedom to control the content that passes through your computer. It's talking about the freedom of everyone to publish what they want. This means that in order to ensure your own freedom, you must help to ensure the freedom of others. If you don't think that's fair, then Freenet is not for you.
The 40% for conventional power plants is about right, but current fuel cell technology is normally around 55-60% efficient. They can get as high as about 85% when you make use of the heat as well.
I listen to quite a bit of music from mp3.com. Mostly from bands and people I've never heard of. There's more good talent and music out there than I would have imagined before hearing this stuff myself. I have started buying cds from mp3.com and from the bands themselves now. Would be nice if more people took the time to check out what's available there. We could move a lot faster towards getting rid of the huge marketing drain of the record labels. Sure, it will still cost something to present your work online, but it will be a hell of a lot cheaper than the current system and the artists could actually keep more of the profits.
We all know that the labels are just huge marketing machines. We know that that's the only reason people sign with them in the first place. I don't buy your "9 in 10 of those investments fail" line though. Got some proof? Where do you get your numbers? If they can turn a bunch of guys like N'Sync into stars, I'd hate to see what the failures are like. Then there's the fact that the labels don't seem to even have to promote you. Many artists get little or no promotion, and they still have to pay the label back for the production of the album.
Then you get the labels spouting off about how they're protecting the artists by suing Napster. They're doing no such thing. They have very little responsibility to do anything for the artists (except the bigger ones that have gotten better contracts). The industry made $15 billion last year! That's a helluva lot of money for an industry that you claim is making such a gamble on the artists. I think the reason behind that is that it isn't such a gamble. If things truly are as you say they are, then their profits shouldn't be anywhere near that big.
I don't think he was referring to Windows as the alternative. I think he was talking about Minix, a free(?) Unix clone that was available for the PC platform at that time. Linus was apparently frustrated by the slow progress that Minix was making, which drove him to start work on his own Unix clone. I believe BSD was available at this time for the PC, but I think they were charging a fair amount of money to send out a tape. Mac and Windows were toys when Linux was first being developed. They were not serious OSes. Linus apparently started writing Linux as a hobby and to fulfill his own needs for a unix clone. IIRC, he did end up using it for a thesis or some such thing, but I don't think that's why he began writing it. Of course I'm no expert on any of this, this is just some stuff that I seem to remember reading. I could be wrong.
Isn't that the point? Not everyone wants to run Windows. Nobody's saying you can't run Windows, but people should not be prohibited from viewing DVDs that they've legally purchased, simply because they don't run the most ubiquitous desktop OS in existance.
So it's not even close to representing the American people as a whole. In fact, as the previous poster suggested, it's probably only a small portion of stockholders who have the control. Most of those 50%+ people probably only own stock through a 401k plan or similar method. They probably don't even know what corporations they own stock in. They don't get to vote on anything either. Don't delude yourself into thinking that holding stock in corporations gives any significant number of people any power over those corps.
What worries me about patches like this, is their potential requirement by the workplace
First of all, your employer has the right to retain editorial control over messages you send using company equipment, bandwidth, and time. They are paying for those things afterall. Email sent by an employee naturally reflects on the company, so there right to ensure that messages sent are not damaging to the company should not be an issue here.
or, more upsetting, the government. Then it is a threat to free speech.
True, if the government were to mandate the use of such software, it would be a threat to free speech. That, however, is a sign of a very flawed government decision, and not the fault of the software simply because of its existance. Many technologies have the potential to be abused by the government. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be invented or used by people. It means we need to keep our government under better control.
So? That's not the point. The point is that just because your first, knee-jerk reaction to something is to try to destroy it before it destroys you, doesn't mean it's the right reaction. Back then, people having the ability to record what is played on their telivision was a huge leap in their ability to watch what they want, when they want. Having that ability with digital media is, at best, a modest leap from where we were. Had the movie industry succeeded in destroying the VCR market, they would have lost the enormous revenue source that videos have become. Did they realize this then? Did they even have an inkling of it back then? Nope. This could just be a rerun of that episode.
If the company making the derivative work did so without ever seeing or copying Hasbro's code, then it should be legal. This is not something that should be enforced by copyright. This seems more like a patent issue. It's extremely ridiculous by any standard though. This is almost as bad as "business model patents."
Maybe that's why Clinton backed off from the National Missile Defense System. They were afraid that Hasbro would sue them for infringing on Missile Command!
I think I agree with you. I just went to see Queensryche a few months ago, and Iron Maiden, Queensryche and Rob Halford just last week. None of them are ever on MTV AFAIK (unless they have some sort of special time for playing those kinds of bands, I don't know.. I haven't watched MTV in years). You're right that even when it gets down to the concerts, Ticketmaster is right there next to the record company, hoovering up our dollars. There was a $6.50 service charge on each ticket I bought last week. In addition to that, they use the movie theater trick of prohibiting you from bringing in anything to drink, and then charging 3 bucks for a cup of water. This is an area where it would be nice to see a change. More competition would be a good start.
Have you been to a good concert lately? There are thousands of people that paid $45 or more just to watch the band play for a couple hours. These people go out and buy the band's outrageously overpriced cds. Do you really think that they would balk at forking over a few bucks directly to the artist rather than the record company? Hell no. They'd jump at the chance. I know I would. There are a lot of bands out there that I really like and respect. I wouldn't hesitate to buy their cds and other merchandise. I just can't stomach the fact that the vast majority of the money i'm paying for cds now goes to the record industry which spends most of its time trying to figure out ways to screw me over and take further control over the music I buy. Give me a way to get the music I want directly from the artists and I'll be a very happy person.
It is, in a way, about social justice. The recording, movie, and television industries (among others) have long been lobbying and bribing our government into screwing over the people of this country by warping copyright and patent law. There is little or no public debate allowed. These things tend to be passed with little fanfare or media coverage. The DMCA was passed with a voice vote so we can't even know how our reps voted on it. While most people who are using Napster are doing it just to get the music, many of us would like to see Napster succeed simply as a blow to the industries that have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. (don't even start about the stupid metaphor)
They keep pushing and pushing for more and more control. It's about time they start meeting some resistance. While I don't expect Napster to succeed (and I really couldn't care less about the company itself), I can at least appreciate that they've helped draw some attention to the current state of copyright law, and probably provoked people into creating much better systems for distributing music and other media that are going to be a lot harder to get rid of. The more we keep this fight in the light where people can see what's going on, the more chance we have of getting people to really start paying attention. That's bad for them since they really don't want people to think about what's happened over the last 30 years or so. They want people to blindly accept that they should have the right to own creative works in perpetuity and control all access to those works. I'd like to see people start getting pissed off about that. I'd like to see people demand that copyright terms be shortened and demand that many of the works that should have passed into the public domain long ago be put there now.
Lamar Smith is my representative as well. I think I will follow your lead on this and write my own letter. I don't expect him to act on it, which is why I will not vote for him in the future, and I will write another letter to tell him that.
I have to work full-time and go to school just to try to make sure I will be able to survive in the future. I don't have the time or money to run for office. I'm not even old enough to run for most serious offices. Unless you have the kind of money that allows you to devote your full attention to running a campaign, you don't have much of a chance of getting elected.
This number was no more than 25,000 in 1998 due to all the backlogs.
25,000 is a tiny fraction of H1-B holders? Sounds closer to 1/3 at least. Still, are H1-Bs necesarilly supposed to lead to citizenship? The way I understand it, they are temporary work visas. If immigrants choose to take them, then they should do so with the understanding that it may not lead to citizenship and that they may not even stay the full 6 years. These things are not supposed to be permanent. They are ment to address the supposed shortage as a temporary stop-gap measure. Unfortunately, since education still sucks rather badly in this country, they may end up needing permanent workers simply because the government would rather spend it's money on corporate welfare than on helping the people of this country get a good education.
Judging by your choice of words, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when it comes to hardware and software, and probably don't know what a driver is. I'm not saying this to put you down, just to point out that you may need to do some more research before attempting to write about technical issues. In all honesty, there aren't really any relevant technical issues in this case, except perhaps how the reverse engineering was done. However, since the RE seems to have been done properly, DC really has no case. You seem to be thinking this is a copyright issue when it's not. They didn't copy anything from Digital Convergence. They figured out how the piece of hardware worked and they wrote their own driver for it. That's it. DC has no legal right to prevent them from doing that. At least they shouldn't under traditional copyright law, and currently don't even under the DMCA. If the DeCSS case continues to go badly, they could end up with such a right in the future, as it would be only a small step farther than what is happening to 2600.
You have a point. By media, I meant Big Media (i.e. the major networks, newspapers, magazines, publishers, cable companies, etc.), not the little guys. When you get to be a certain size, and are publicly traded, IP becomes this jealously guarded treasure that you will stop at nothing to accumulate, defend, and Congress-willing, extend your control over.
I too would love to hear the various parties' positions on IP issues. I just don't think they'll be willing to discuss it. That should scare us.
True, but that wasn't what this tangent was about. They can bind you to certain things if you sign a contract with them, but they have no inherent right to control the products you purchase from them (or that they give you for free).
Wrong. Removing a firing pin from a semi-automatic weapon, thereby converting it into a fully automatic weapon is illegal, even though you haven't harmed anyone. Same with sawing off the barrel of a shotgun if you make it too short.
Intellectual Property law takes on three main forms: Trade Secrecy Law, Patent Law, and Copyright Law.
Actually there are four since trademark law should be included as a form of IP (and a particularly insidious form at that).
It doesn't fall under Patent law unless they have a patent that hasn't yet been mentioned (this would have to be a patent on the software, because that's what's being recreated)
It's not even the software that's being reverse-engineered. It's just the protocol that the reader uses to send data to the computer.
It is a company's sad obligation to go after everyone who is violating one of these IP laws, lest they lose protection under the law
This simply isn't true. At least not in the sense that they are claiming. Companies are obligated to enforce their trademarks or risk having them become diluted and therefore public domain (note that the bar for a tm being considered "diluted" is still set pretty darn high). Since trademarks don't seem to be the issue here (though it could be, they were extremely vague regarding their "IP"), this doesn't apply.
Trade secrets must also be enforced, but in a different way. Companies must actively prosecute anyone violating an NDA or commiting espionage against the company. If the company can show that the secret was obtained illegally, they can prevent it from being used. However, if the secret is reverse-engineered, then it can be legally published. That's the trade-off of a trade secret versus a patent.
Something that I just learned is that there is a certain requirement placed on patent holders as well. According to this, patent holders may lose their recourse if they knew or should have known about an infringement, but take no action for 6 years or more. It should be pointed out that this does not require them to take action in all cases or risk losing control of their patent, which is what they seem to be claiming in their letter regarding their "IP." It simply means that they can't knowingly allow the infringement to occur for an unreasonable amount of time without taking action in that particular instance. Failing that, they only lose their recourse against that particular company or individual, not the rights to pursue other infringers. This seems to be designed to thwart "submarine patents." Not sure how effective it is at that, but since they don't mention any patents in their letter, it doesn't seem to apply in this situation.
Companies can selectively prosecute copyright violations to their heart's content. There is no requirement for enforcement, so this doesn't apply either.
Now, given that none of the forms of IP have been violated, what exactly are they claiming that these developers have done wrong? That's the real question, and one that they conveniently glossed over in their letter, instead preferring to try to intimidate, scare, and finally appeal to some imagined form of kinship. I found the letter to be quit offensive and demeaning. I'm going to write an email to them and tell them that myself.
And when presented in this fashion, it positively begs for a line-by-line debunking. In fact, after reading it again, I found myself taking issue with almost every line of the thing. This letter is a load of BS from a company that obviously doesn't respect our rights as consumers. I'm offended by it and I don't blame Taco for being offended by it and responding to it either.
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It's not talking about your freedom to control the content that passes through your computer. It's talking about the freedom of everyone to publish what they want. This means that in order to ensure your own freedom, you must help to ensure the freedom of others. If you don't think that's fair, then Freenet is not for you.
The 40% for conventional power plants is about right, but current fuel cell technology is normally around 55-60% efficient. They can get as high as about 85% when you make use of the heat as well.
I listen to quite a bit of music from mp3.com. Mostly from bands and people I've never heard of. There's more good talent and music out there than I would have imagined before hearing this stuff myself. I have started buying cds from mp3.com and from the bands themselves now. Would be nice if more people took the time to check out what's available there. We could move a lot faster towards getting rid of the huge marketing drain of the record labels. Sure, it will still cost something to present your work online, but it will be a hell of a lot cheaper than the current system and the artists could actually keep more of the profits.
We all know that the labels are just huge marketing machines. We know that that's the only reason people sign with them in the first place. I don't buy your "9 in 10 of those investments fail" line though. Got some proof? Where do you get your numbers? If they can turn a bunch of guys like N'Sync into stars, I'd hate to see what the failures are like. Then there's the fact that the labels don't seem to even have to promote you. Many artists get little or no promotion, and they still have to pay the label back for the production of the album.
Then you get the labels spouting off about how they're protecting the artists by suing Napster. They're doing no such thing. They have very little responsibility to do anything for the artists (except the bigger ones that have gotten better contracts). The industry made $15 billion last year! That's a helluva lot of money for an industry that you claim is making such a gamble on the artists. I think the reason behind that is that it isn't such a gamble. If things truly are as you say they are, then their profits shouldn't be anywhere near that big.
A cartel?
I don't think he was referring to Windows as the alternative. I think he was talking about Minix, a free(?) Unix clone that was available for the PC platform at that time. Linus was apparently frustrated by the slow progress that Minix was making, which drove him to start work on his own Unix clone. I believe BSD was available at this time for the PC, but I think they were charging a fair amount of money to send out a tape. Mac and Windows were toys when Linux was first being developed. They were not serious OSes. Linus apparently started writing Linux as a hobby and to fulfill his own needs for a unix clone. IIRC, he did end up using it for a thesis or some such thing, but I don't think that's why he began writing it. Of course I'm no expert on any of this, this is just some stuff that I seem to remember reading. I could be wrong.
Isn't that the point? Not everyone wants to run Windows. Nobody's saying you can't run Windows, but people should not be prohibited from viewing DVDs that they've legally purchased, simply because they don't run the most ubiquitous desktop OS in existance.
So it's not even close to representing the American people as a whole. In fact, as the previous poster suggested, it's probably only a small portion of stockholders who have the control. Most of those 50%+ people probably only own stock through a 401k plan or similar method. They probably don't even know what corporations they own stock in. They don't get to vote on anything either. Don't delude yourself into thinking that holding stock in corporations gives any significant number of people any power over those corps.
What worries me about patches like this, is their potential requirement by the workplace
First of all, your employer has the right to retain editorial control over messages you send using company equipment, bandwidth, and time. They are paying for those things afterall. Email sent by an employee naturally reflects on the company, so there right to ensure that messages sent are not damaging to the company should not be an issue here.
or, more upsetting, the government. Then it is a threat to free speech.
True, if the government were to mandate the use of such software, it would be a threat to free speech. That, however, is a sign of a very flawed government decision, and not the fault of the software simply because of its existance. Many technologies have the potential to be abused by the government. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be invented or used by people. It means we need to keep our government under better control.
So? That's not the point. The point is that just because your first, knee-jerk reaction to something is to try to destroy it before it destroys you, doesn't mean it's the right reaction. Back then, people having the ability to record what is played on their telivision was a huge leap in their ability to watch what they want, when they want. Having that ability with digital media is, at best, a modest leap from where we were. Had the movie industry succeeded in destroying the VCR market, they would have lost the enormous revenue source that videos have become. Did they realize this then? Did they even have an inkling of it back then? Nope. This could just be a rerun of that episode.
If the company making the derivative work did so without ever seeing or copying Hasbro's code, then it should be legal. This is not something that should be enforced by copyright. This seems more like a patent issue. It's extremely ridiculous by any standard though. This is almost as bad as "business model patents."
Maybe that's why Clinton backed off from the National Missile Defense System. They were afraid that Hasbro would sue them for infringing on Missile Command!
I think I agree with you. I just went to see Queensryche a few months ago, and Iron Maiden, Queensryche and Rob Halford just last week. None of them are ever on MTV AFAIK (unless they have some sort of special time for playing those kinds of bands, I don't know.. I haven't watched MTV in years). You're right that even when it gets down to the concerts, Ticketmaster is right there next to the record company, hoovering up our dollars. There was a $6.50 service charge on each ticket I bought last week. In addition to that, they use the movie theater trick of prohibiting you from bringing in anything to drink, and then charging 3 bucks for a cup of water. This is an area where it would be nice to see a change. More competition would be a good start.
Have you been to a good concert lately? There are thousands of people that paid $45 or more just to watch the band play for a couple hours. These people go out and buy the band's outrageously overpriced cds. Do you really think that they would balk at forking over a few bucks directly to the artist rather than the record company? Hell no. They'd jump at the chance. I know I would. There are a lot of bands out there that I really like and respect. I wouldn't hesitate to buy their cds and other merchandise. I just can't stomach the fact that the vast majority of the money i'm paying for cds now goes to the record industry which spends most of its time trying to figure out ways to screw me over and take further control over the music I buy. Give me a way to get the music I want directly from the artists and I'll be a very happy person.
It is, in a way, about social justice. The recording, movie, and television industries (among others) have long been lobbying and bribing our government into screwing over the people of this country by warping copyright and patent law. There is little or no public debate allowed. These things tend to be passed with little fanfare or media coverage. The DMCA was passed with a voice vote so we can't even know how our reps voted on it. While most people who are using Napster are doing it just to get the music, many of us would like to see Napster succeed simply as a blow to the industries that have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. (don't even start about the stupid metaphor)
They keep pushing and pushing for more and more control. It's about time they start meeting some resistance. While I don't expect Napster to succeed (and I really couldn't care less about the company itself), I can at least appreciate that they've helped draw some attention to the current state of copyright law, and probably provoked people into creating much better systems for distributing music and other media that are going to be a lot harder to get rid of. The more we keep this fight in the light where people can see what's going on, the more chance we have of getting people to really start paying attention. That's bad for them since they really don't want people to think about what's happened over the last 30 years or so. They want people to blindly accept that they should have the right to own creative works in perpetuity and control all access to those works. I'd like to see people start getting pissed off about that. I'd like to see people demand that copyright terms be shortened and demand that many of the works that should have passed into the public domain long ago be put there now.
Lamar Smith is my representative as well. I think I will follow your lead on this and write my own letter. I don't expect him to act on it, which is why I will not vote for him in the future, and I will write another letter to tell him that.
I have to work full-time and go to school just to try to make sure I will be able to survive in the future. I don't have the time or money to run for office. I'm not even old enough to run for most serious offices. Unless you have the kind of money that allows you to devote your full attention to running a campaign, you don't have much of a chance of getting elected.
This number was no more than 25,000 in 1998 due to all the backlogs.
25,000 is a tiny fraction of H1-B holders? Sounds closer to 1/3 at least. Still, are H1-Bs necesarilly supposed to lead to citizenship? The way I understand it, they are temporary work visas. If immigrants choose to take them, then they should do so with the understanding that it may not lead to citizenship and that they may not even stay the full 6 years. These things are not supposed to be permanent. They are ment to address the supposed shortage as a temporary stop-gap measure. Unfortunately, since education still sucks rather badly in this country, they may end up needing permanent workers simply because the government would rather spend it's money on corporate welfare than on helping the people of this country get a good education.
Judging by your choice of words, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when it comes to hardware and software, and probably don't know what a driver is. I'm not saying this to put you down, just to point out that you may need to do some more research before attempting to write about technical issues. In all honesty, there aren't really any relevant technical issues in this case, except perhaps how the reverse engineering was done. However, since the RE seems to have been done properly, DC really has no case. You seem to be thinking this is a copyright issue when it's not. They didn't copy anything from Digital Convergence. They figured out how the piece of hardware worked and they wrote their own driver for it. That's it. DC has no legal right to prevent them from doing that. At least they shouldn't under traditional copyright law, and currently don't even under the DMCA. If the DeCSS case continues to go badly, they could end up with such a right in the future, as it would be only a small step farther than what is happening to 2600.
It would definitely be considered a derivative work, and therefore the property of the copyright owner.
You have a point. By media, I meant Big Media (i.e. the major networks, newspapers, magazines, publishers, cable companies, etc.), not the little guys. When you get to be a certain size, and are publicly traded, IP becomes this jealously guarded treasure that you will stop at nothing to accumulate, defend, and Congress-willing, extend your control over.
I too would love to hear the various parties' positions on IP issues. I just don't think they'll be willing to discuss it. That should scare us.
True, but that wasn't what this tangent was about. They can bind you to certain things if you sign a contract with them, but they have no inherent right to control the products you purchase from them (or that they give you for free).
Wrong. Removing a firing pin from a semi-automatic weapon, thereby converting it into a fully automatic weapon is illegal, even though you haven't harmed anyone. Same with sawing off the barrel of a shotgun if you make it too short.
Intellectual Property law takes on three main forms: Trade Secrecy Law, Patent Law, and Copyright Law.
Actually there are four since trademark law should be included as a form of IP (and a particularly insidious form at that).
It doesn't fall under Patent law unless they have a patent that hasn't yet been mentioned (this would have to be a patent on the software, because that's what's being recreated)
It's not even the software that's being reverse-engineered. It's just the protocol that the reader uses to send data to the computer.
It is a company's sad obligation to go after everyone who is violating one of these IP laws, lest they lose protection under the law
This simply isn't true. At least not in the sense that they are claiming. Companies are obligated to enforce their trademarks or risk having them become diluted and therefore public domain (note that the bar for a tm being considered "diluted" is still set pretty darn high). Since trademarks don't seem to be the issue here (though it could be, they were extremely vague regarding their "IP"), this doesn't apply.
Trade secrets must also be enforced, but in a different way. Companies must actively prosecute anyone violating an NDA or commiting espionage against the company. If the company can show that the secret was obtained illegally, they can prevent it from being used. However, if the secret is reverse-engineered, then it can be legally published. That's the trade-off of a trade secret versus a patent.
Something that I just learned is that there is a certain requirement placed on patent holders as well. According to this, patent holders may lose their recourse if they knew or should have known about an infringement, but take no action for 6 years or more. It should be pointed out that this does not require them to take action in all cases or risk losing control of their patent, which is what they seem to be claiming in their letter regarding their "IP." It simply means that they can't knowingly allow the infringement to occur for an unreasonable amount of time without taking action in that particular instance. Failing that, they only lose their recourse against that particular company or individual, not the rights to pursue other infringers. This seems to be designed to thwart "submarine patents." Not sure how effective it is at that, but since they don't mention any patents in their letter, it doesn't seem to apply in this situation.
Companies can selectively prosecute copyright violations to their heart's content. There is no requirement for enforcement, so this doesn't apply either.
Now, given that none of the forms of IP have been violated, what exactly are they claiming that these developers have done wrong? That's the real question, and one that they conveniently glossed over in their letter, instead preferring to try to intimidate, scare, and finally appeal to some imagined form of kinship. I found the letter to be quit offensive and demeaning. I'm going to write an email to them and tell them that myself.
And when presented in this fashion, it positively begs for a line-by-line debunking. In fact, after reading it again, I found myself taking issue with almost every line of the thing. This letter is a load of BS from a company that obviously doesn't respect our rights as consumers. I'm offended by it and I don't blame Taco for being offended by it and responding to it either.