Once your state (if you're in the US) adopts UCITA, Sony can make damn near any agreement stick. As citizens and consumers, we're doing very badly in the fight to protect our rights. The saddest thing is that nearly anyone you talk to will try to justify it and defend the corps. What is it about corps that makes people idolize them?
EFF has limited resources. They need to use them where they are most urgently needed. While they may support AOL's position in this case (though I haven't heard them say anything to that effect), AOL does not have any urgent need for financial support for their defense. Their CEO could probably pay for it with the cash he leaves laying on his dresser. There are plenty of other cases, like 2600, where the defendant doesn't have the funds to mount any sort of effective defense. That is where the EFF should use its resources.
How many artists do you think actually get paid up front? They may get a loan, but the cost of the production and marketing of their album come out of that money. They get anything that's left, which, quite possibly, could be nothing.
The problem with libertarians is that i'm afraid they would make an even bigger mess trying to fix things. Simply because we've gotten used to living so far from the libertarian ideal.
To do things like eliminate welfare altogether, eliminate income taxes, drastically reduce defense spending, etc, could have dire consequences. Not to mention that something would seriously have to be done about the power of corporations. I'm not sure that can be done effectively without causing huge problems with our economy. Has any libertarian candidate discussed how they plan to make the changes without destroying everything in the process? That would be interesting reading I think.
Point 1. The Presidential election isn't the only one this november. Have you ever heard of a little thing called the SENATE?
Yep. My choices aren't much better in the congressional elections. I can choose between republican, democrat, green, libertarian, or natural law candidates. The green and natural law candidates are so obscure that I can't find any info on their positions. The libertarian kinda scares me, but I've downloaded her book in the hope of gaining some insight into exactly what her vision is and how she plans to go about it without completely destroying the country. The republican and democrat candidates are the usual. Nothing special. Nothing different. Nothing at all about their views on tech or IP issues.
Point 2. There is a world of difference between the two major party's candidates for president. Didn't you know that one of them invented the internet?
I think you're making my point here. Neither of them really have a clue about tech issues except insofar as they effect the corporations that contribute to their campaigns. Maybe if we could elect their cabinet it would help, but we can't. Both have taken tons of money from the corps that want legislation like the DMCA to be in place and that pretty much makes them both completely worthless to vote for.
but you have to vote for whomever is closest sometimes.
Exactly. And since no candidate comes within sight of my views on things, I can't think of any reason to vote for any of them based on the issues we're talking about here. There are other issues that I can base my vote on, but that's not going to improve the IP situation at all.
Given the candidates that are out there, what difference would it make to our rights which one we vote for? Thanks to tons of corporate money and a virtual monopoly on media coverage, we only have 2 viable candidates in this election. Neither one of them will do a damn thing to restore or protect our rights.
I think the real point is that we only have 2 candidates for president that have any real chance of winning, and they are both crappy choices. It hardly matters which one you vote for. Even the third party candidates suck this time around. Reform Party can't even figure out who it's candidate is. Any way you cut it, you're just deciding which way you'd rather get screwed. The real decisions are being made behind the scenes, and apparently with little to no accountability for anyone. As someone pointed out, the DMCA was passed with a voice vote. Can you believe that?! A law that important and we can't even know who voted for or against it. Just Congress doing a great CYA job.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that the only way that becomes a good plan is when you make inferior ports of the product that are just good enough to make people want them (I understand that many MS ports to the Mac are pretty sub-standard), and boom, you give them some incentive to migrate.
Nope, it's not just you. That's exactly what they'll likely do.
But it seems awfully disingenuous. Am I misinterpreting that, or is it more of a speculated, rather than overt, strategy?
It is disingenous, they just don't care as long as it works. Microsoft has continued to be in deep denial about their crimes. They aren't likely to consider the antitrust climate when making these decisions. The case is over, the facts are on the books. Yes, there's the appeals process to go through, but the facts have already been established, I don't think the DOJ can keep adding more to it now. What's the DOJ gonna do? Bring another case against them? I don't think this sort of strategy is even illegal. Disingenous, yes, but not illegal.
Or perhaps the software vendor should deliver what their salespeople are promising. If you say your software will do something, then it had better do it, and do it right.
I think it would really make more sense for them to try to keep ownership of the copyright rather than having it revert back to the artist after 35 years, as it did before this legislation passed, and as it will apparently do starting next year again. Right now they get 95 years. But if they own the copyrights, they can continue to lobby for longer and longer terms, extended retroactively of course.
People bitch constantly about Slashdot's bias as it is. If they were to start trying to induce action in/. readers, we'd have a ton of people screaming bloody murder. I, personally, would like to see such things done. I don't consider/. to be an unbiased news source. (Actually, I can't think of any unbiased news sources.) It says what it is, right up front. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. It was created by a couple of college guys as a place where they could have discussions of stuff that was interesting and important to them. It doesn't claim to be an unbiased news agency, although it does seem to try to be fair usually, and has increasingly done so over time.
I don't think/. should be held to the same standard that we should hold CNN or ABC to. They don't claim to exist for the same reason, and they shouldn't be treated the same. I think it would be fine for/. stories to include "what you can do" links and information. They aren't making anyone doing anything. They're just giving you useful links in case you decide to use them.
But if they do create such devices, the public could reject them, as they did Divx players, as being to constrictive and not worth buying. That said, I agree that technological means should not be allowed to violate consumer's rights any more than legislative means should be allowed to.
You automatically own the copyright to works that you create. You don't have to explicitly state that they are copyrighted. Therefore the copyright on the Tommy/Pam tape was owned by them. That didn't make a difference. I'm not responsible for maintaining their privacy. Nor am I responsible for maintaining Apple's privacy. The government offers them ways of controlling their information, but they chose to take it upon themselves with this information. I don't think they should be allowed to use the law to bludgeon those who publish the information that they receive unless they have some sort of contract with Apple that says they will not. Why is it that corporations should have so much more privacy protection than actual citizens of this country? That's just twisted.
Sure, but if what the quote from the earlier post is true, then these laws go way beyond just covering corporate espionage. I don't believe that that's an accident.
Think of it this way. A bunch of fat, greedy bastards are suing a bunch of other fat, greedy bastards. We've already been screwed out of our cash. We aren't getting it back. But it's nice to see the people who screwed us over getting screwed out of the money they stole from us. Isn't this a sad, sad state of affairs?
I have serious doubts about the artistic effort being among the most significant chunks of the cost of a CD. Typically artists get only a very tiny fraction of what each CD sells for. I'd love to see some real numbers on this. The industry made $15 billion in profit last year. Doesn't sound like they're having a tough time of it to me. There's no way in hell I'm going to take their word for it. I want the full investigation done. They aren't telling us everything, you'd be a fool to believe they are.
Intellectual property is a fiction created by those who want you to believe the crap you just posted. It is not the same as physical property. Physical property laws don't, and shouldn't, apply. IP laws are used to create artificial scarcity to profit corporations that control most methods of distribution. Now that they've managed to corrupt the copyright and patent systems, they're starting to flex their new muscle.
"Intellectual property" is not the same as physical property. Even though corporate interests are trying to get that changed, it's just a fiction created by them so that they can justify the censorship and absolute control of information that they are striving for.
He didn't say that. He's saying that comparing physical property to "intellectual property" is like comparing apples and oranges. They aren't the same, even though big business is lobbying hard to get them treated the same (with pretty good success so far), so the CompUSA analogy is not valid.
If a corporate employee violates his NDA and gives info to a friend, and I get it from his friend and post it on my website, am I liable? What if I give it to someone else, and they give it to someone else, etc, until someone finally publishes it? How far does the chain go?
I'm asking this because these laws basically seem to give a coporation carte blanche to prosecute anyone publishing any information that they don't want made public. They simply have to declare that it's a trade secret. All of their employees have likely signed contracts to the effect that they are not allowed to disclose any company information to anyone not directly employed by the company for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, obtaining information through any possible means could be traced directly to a security lapse by an employee of the company, and therefore would be covered under the trade secret law. That is why this will serve as a tool for corporate censorship of the press and of individuals. The movie "The Insider" is a good example of how the press can be censored by a corporation. Even though the information is extremely important for the public to know, and even though they have signed no contracts with the corporation, they can be coerced into silence with the threat of a bankrupting lawsuit.
Granted, the Mac pics weren't earthshakingly important to the public, but the same principle applies. We can't really judge what's important, or to whom, or why. There should be equal protection for all speech such as this.
Maybe someday we'll realize that you can't just slap a legal muzzle on people for revealing the truth, even though it's not to your benefit. Unfortunately, until something is done about laws like this, that's exactly what will happen.
The corps must have spent some big cash to get that kind of legislation passed. Why should anyone but the leakee be responsible for a corporation's inability to keep its secrets? Nobody else signed a contract with them. Nobody else should be bound by law to keep their secrets. The answer, as the quote above points out, is money. The last thing we need is more laws to constrain us so that corporations have an easier time making money. If a corporation doesn't want to make its secret public via a patent, copyright, etc, then it shouldn't receive government protection.
Slashdot Mirror
Once your state (if you're in the US) adopts UCITA, Sony can make damn near any agreement stick. As citizens and consumers, we're doing very badly in the fight to protect our rights. The saddest thing is that nearly anyone you talk to will try to justify it and defend the corps. What is it about corps that makes people idolize them?
EFF has limited resources. They need to use them where they are most urgently needed. While they may support AOL's position in this case (though I haven't heard them say anything to that effect), AOL does not have any urgent need for financial support for their defense. Their CEO could probably pay for it with the cash he leaves laying on his dresser. There are plenty of other cases, like 2600, where the defendant doesn't have the funds to mount any sort of effective defense. That is where the EFF should use its resources.
How long do you think it will be before one of these huge conglomerates ends up suing some portion of itself over something like this?
How many artists do you think actually get paid up front? They may get a loan, but the cost of the production and marketing of their album come out of that money. They get anything that's left, which, quite possibly, could be nothing.
The problem with libertarians is that i'm afraid they would make an even bigger mess trying to fix things. Simply because we've gotten used to living so far from the libertarian ideal.
To do things like eliminate welfare altogether, eliminate income taxes, drastically reduce defense spending, etc, could have dire consequences. Not to mention that something would seriously have to be done about the power of corporations. I'm not sure that can be done effectively without causing huge problems with our economy. Has any libertarian candidate discussed how they plan to make the changes without destroying everything in the process? That would be interesting reading I think.
Point 1. The Presidential election isn't the only one this november. Have you ever heard of a little thing called the SENATE?
Yep. My choices aren't much better in the congressional elections. I can choose between republican, democrat, green, libertarian, or natural law candidates. The green and natural law candidates are so obscure that I can't find any info on their positions. The libertarian kinda scares me, but I've downloaded her book in the hope of gaining some insight into exactly what her vision is and how she plans to go about it without completely destroying the country. The republican and democrat candidates are the usual. Nothing special. Nothing different. Nothing at all about their views on tech or IP issues.
Point 2. There is a world of difference between the two major party's candidates for president. Didn't you know that one of them invented the internet?
I think you're making my point here. Neither of them really have a clue about tech issues except insofar as they effect the corporations that contribute to their campaigns. Maybe if we could elect their cabinet it would help, but we can't. Both have taken tons of money from the corps that want legislation like the DMCA to be in place and that pretty much makes them both completely worthless to vote for.
but you have to vote for whomever is closest sometimes.
Exactly. And since no candidate comes within sight of my views on things, I can't think of any reason to vote for any of them based on the issues we're talking about here. There are other issues that I can base my vote on, but that's not going to improve the IP situation at all.
Given the candidates that are out there, what difference would it make to our rights which one we vote for? Thanks to tons of corporate money and a virtual monopoly on media coverage, we only have 2 viable candidates in this election. Neither one of them will do a damn thing to restore or protect our rights.
I think the real point is that we only have 2 candidates for president that have any real chance of winning, and they are both crappy choices. It hardly matters which one you vote for. Even the third party candidates suck this time around. Reform Party can't even figure out who it's candidate is. Any way you cut it, you're just deciding which way you'd rather get screwed. The real decisions are being made behind the scenes, and apparently with little to no accountability for anyone. As someone pointed out, the DMCA was passed with a voice vote. Can you believe that?! A law that important and we can't even know who voted for or against it. Just Congress doing a great CYA job.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that the only way that becomes a good plan is when you make inferior ports of the product that are just good enough to make people want them (I understand that many MS ports to the Mac are pretty sub-standard), and boom, you give them some incentive to migrate.
Nope, it's not just you. That's exactly what they'll likely do.
But it seems awfully disingenuous. Am I misinterpreting that, or is it more of a speculated, rather than overt, strategy?
It is disingenous, they just don't care as long as it works. Microsoft has continued to be in deep denial about their crimes. They aren't likely to consider the antitrust climate when making these decisions. The case is over, the facts are on the books. Yes, there's the appeals process to go through, but the facts have already been established, I don't think the DOJ can keep adding more to it now. What's the DOJ gonna do? Bring another case against them? I don't think this sort of strategy is even illegal. Disingenous, yes, but not illegal.
Or perhaps the software vendor should deliver what their salespeople are promising. If you say your software will do something, then it had better do it, and do it right.
I think it would really make more sense for them to try to keep ownership of the copyright rather than having it revert back to the artist after 35 years, as it did before this legislation passed, and as it will apparently do starting next year again. Right now they get 95 years. But if they own the copyrights, they can continue to lobby for longer and longer terms, extended retroactively of course.
Life+70 isn't always shorter than the 95 years that a corp gets on a copyright. In fact, it's often quite a bit longer...
Lessig is probably the best candidate on the list. He's got my vote.
People bitch constantly about Slashdot's bias as it is. If they were to start trying to induce action in /. readers, we'd have a ton of people screaming bloody murder. I, personally, would like to see such things done. I don't consider /. to be an unbiased news source. (Actually, I can't think of any unbiased news sources.) It says what it is, right up front. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. It was created by a couple of college guys as a place where they could have discussions of stuff that was interesting and important to them. It doesn't claim to be an unbiased news agency, although it does seem to try to be fair usually, and has increasingly done so over time.
I don't think /. should be held to the same standard that we should hold CNN or ABC to. They don't claim to exist for the same reason, and they shouldn't be treated the same. I think it would be fine for /. stories to include "what you can do" links and information. They aren't making anyone doing anything. They're just giving you useful links in case you decide to use them.
But if they do create such devices, the public could reject them, as they did Divx players, as being to constrictive and not worth buying. That said, I agree that technological means should not be allowed to violate consumer's rights any more than legislative means should be allowed to.
You automatically own the copyright to works that you create. You don't have to explicitly state that they are copyrighted. Therefore the copyright on the Tommy/Pam tape was owned by them. That didn't make a difference. I'm not responsible for maintaining their privacy. Nor am I responsible for maintaining Apple's privacy. The government offers them ways of controlling their information, but they chose to take it upon themselves with this information. I don't think they should be allowed to use the law to bludgeon those who publish the information that they receive unless they have some sort of contract with Apple that says they will not. Why is it that corporations should have so much more privacy protection than actual citizens of this country? That's just twisted.
Sure, but if what the quote from the earlier post is true, then these laws go way beyond just covering corporate espionage. I don't believe that that's an accident.
Which means you'd have to prove you haven't had any kind of contact with any of Apple's proprietary information. You can't prove that.
Think of it this way. A bunch of fat, greedy bastards are suing a bunch of other fat, greedy bastards. We've already been screwed out of our cash. We aren't getting it back. But it's nice to see the people who screwed us over getting screwed out of the money they stole from us. Isn't this a sad, sad state of affairs?
I have serious doubts about the artistic effort being among the most significant chunks of the cost of a CD. Typically artists get only a very tiny fraction of what each CD sells for. I'd love to see some real numbers on this. The industry made $15 billion in profit last year. Doesn't sound like they're having a tough time of it to me. There's no way in hell I'm going to take their word for it. I want the full investigation done. They aren't telling us everything, you'd be a fool to believe they are.
Intellectual property is a fiction created by those who want you to believe the crap you just posted. It is not the same as physical property. Physical property laws don't, and shouldn't, apply. IP laws are used to create artificial scarcity to profit corporations that control most methods of distribution. Now that they've managed to corrupt the copyright and patent systems, they're starting to flex their new muscle.
"Intellectual property" is not the same as physical property. Even though corporate interests are trying to get that changed, it's just a fiction created by them so that they can justify the censorship and absolute control of information that they are striving for.
He didn't say that. He's saying that comparing physical property to "intellectual property" is like comparing apples and oranges. They aren't the same, even though big business is lobbying hard to get them treated the same (with pretty good success so far), so the CompUSA analogy is not valid.
If a corporate employee violates his NDA and gives info to a friend, and I get it from his friend and post it on my website, am I liable? What if I give it to someone else, and they give it to someone else, etc, until someone finally publishes it? How far does the chain go?
I'm asking this because these laws basically seem to give a coporation carte blanche to prosecute anyone publishing any information that they don't want made public. They simply have to declare that it's a trade secret. All of their employees have likely signed contracts to the effect that they are not allowed to disclose any company information to anyone not directly employed by the company for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, obtaining information through any possible means could be traced directly to a security lapse by an employee of the company, and therefore would be covered under the trade secret law. That is why this will serve as a tool for corporate censorship of the press and of individuals. The movie "The Insider" is a good example of how the press can be censored by a corporation. Even though the information is extremely important for the public to know, and even though they have signed no contracts with the corporation, they can be coerced into silence with the threat of a bankrupting lawsuit.
Granted, the Mac pics weren't earthshakingly important to the public, but the same principle applies. We can't really judge what's important, or to whom, or why. There should be equal protection for all speech such as this.
Maybe someday we'll realize that you can't just slap a legal muzzle on people for revealing the truth, even though it's not to your benefit. Unfortunately, until something is done about laws like this, that's exactly what will happen.
The corps must have spent some big cash to get that kind of legislation passed. Why should anyone but the leakee be responsible for a corporation's inability to keep its secrets? Nobody else signed a contract with them. Nobody else should be bound by law to keep their secrets. The answer, as the quote above points out, is money. The last thing we need is more laws to constrain us so that corporations have an easier time making money. If a corporation doesn't want to make its secret public via a patent, copyright, etc, then it shouldn't receive government protection.