This begs the question, where did AppleInsider get the pics? Was it from an Apple employee? Someone else with access to Apple? Is it illegal to publish rumors if they are in the form of a graphic?
I installed M17 and brought up Slashdot, opened an article, (then realized I wasn't logged in), I then entered my name and pass in the box in the upper right of the screen. Well, as I typed each character, it kept bumping the box to the left and the story area's (but not the comments) width kept shrinking with each keystroke. Is this a problem with Mozilla or Slashdot? This is on Win95b, btw.
I think most people here have brought up a lot of very good uses for the technology. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about the very real possibility (even inevitability) of it abused. Insurance companies are just one of the likely culprits. They have very little scruples from what I've seen. They, like any other corp, exist to make money. They don't seem to mind screwing people over if that's what it takes either.
I read something to the opposite effect. That he threatened to quit when Lucas decided to kill him off halfway through the first film. Guess that's why these things are called rumors.
But I don't agree that "we'd be stupid not to do something to help." (assuming by "we" you mean the US government.) They're not our people, they're not our responsibility.
I'm not saying we're responsible for taking care of their people. I'm saying it's not a good idea to ignore an epidemic of that size because sooner or later it will affect us too. Maybe not directly, but one way or another. If we stand by and let it happen without taking any action, we could very well regret that decision terribly later.
The way I understand it, any conversion of a text or other form of copyrighted work into another format would be considered a derivative work, which is still subject to the copyright, and therefore illegal without the copyright holder's consent.
It probably doesn't matter when CSS was broken. They can't touch Jon Johansen anyway. He didn't break any laws in his country. That seems to have been established now.
What the MPAA is doing is trying to make the distribution of the code illegal in the US which they claim is a violation of the DMCA.
and forced companies to give away drugs to people who need them
I'm not saying that drug companies should be forced to give away drugs. I'm saying that we should not use sanctions against African countries for violating patents when the produce the drugs themselves. They can't pay for them anyway, so drug companies aren't losing sales. The drugs are just helping people that would otherwise die because they can't afford to buy these drugs from American corporations. They seem to have worked out a deal of sorts now. The drug companies are now being paid, although at a much reduced rate, for the drugs that are being produced in Africa. This way they still make some money, and the drugs get used where they are needed the most.
The problem (and many people will hate me for saying this) is that people (particularly Americans) attach too high a value to each human life.
I understand what you're saying here. It's like when Spock died. The good of the many over the good of the one. But it's not always that simple or black and white.
Now calculate the cost of the most expensive cutting-edge medical treatment for one person, and multiply that number by the population of the world. Call that number C. I do not doubt that C is far greater than W.
I see what you're trying to do, but you left out so many factors that it's not even worthwhile to break out a calculator. I'm not saying that we should spare no expense to save everyone in the world. Many of these countries bring a lot of their woes on themselves, with Ethiopia and Eritria(sp?) being prime examples. But with the massive epidemic of AIDS taking place in Africa, we'd be stupid not to do something to help. These countries, and the citizens themselves especially, are extremely poor. They can't possibly afford to buy the drugs from the drug corporations, so there is little to no harm done to the corporations by allowing them to produce the drugs themselves by not forcing them to license patents (which the corporations won't license in the first place usually because they are too valuable when that company is the sole producer of a drug).
And enforceing a copyright on it to try and retain some of that money is not the same as depriveing humanity from a life saveing drug.
My, aren't we putting an innocent face on this? Retain some of that money? Try making $15 billion in profit last year. Gimme a break. What Jefferson said is important. Even England had managed to fight off the publishers who wanted perpetual control over copyrights. Just because you write and perform a song, you have no natural right to prevent anyone else from performing that same song. Then if you record the song, you still have no natural right to prevent anyone from making a copy of it. That's why we have copyright now. It's an artificial means to allow artists and creators to profit from their work so that they keep doing it. Unfortunately, we went from a reasonable length of time (14 years + 14 more on renewal) to the outrageously long term of life + 70 years, or 95 years for a work for hire (i.e. work created while under contract).
Since the public has been screwed out of its end of the deal (the works becoming public domain after a reasonable period of time for the creator to profit), it's no wonder people don't have much respect for copyright. It just feels inherently unnatural. Something created solely for the profit of big publishers. Which is exactly what it's become. The media industry has done this to itself by trying to screw the public more and more over the years. They got too greedy, now it's payback time. I'd like nothing better than to laugh at their folly and watch them sink into bankruptcy. Not sure if that's how it'll play out, but it's a nice thought.:)
The (tobacco/drug/record) companies are greedy, yes. But they aren't evil, and they aren't conspiring against you. Get some perspective.
Do have any idea how difficult it is to prove anything about corporations as large as the tobacco/drug/record corps are? People who try to point it out when these corps do something very bad often have their lives ruined in the process. They are sometimes smeared in the media, sued and accused of anything the corp can dig up on them, even threatened with everything, up to, and including bodily harm, harm to family, and death. Corporations ARE NOT ABOVE THESE KINDS OF TACTICS. Don't believe for a second that they will hesitate to lie, cheat, steal, or even worse to protect their profits and reputation, regardless of how bad their actions were. This is why we have whistleblower laws, because we've seen what can happen when you piss off a corporation. But even those don't always help. I'm not saying that every corporation does these kinds of things, but I am saying that you would be incredibly naive to simply assume that they don't, perhaps thinking that it would somehow leak out and become public knowledge. That attitude just makes it easier for them to get away with such things when they do choose to do them.
That said, I think I agree with a lot of what you said. Obviously drug companies need a way to recoup their expenses and turn a profit. There are cases where other interests override those of profit though. Africa is a perfect example of this. They need the drugs because they are having a massive AIDS epidemic. There's no way they can afford to pay the price the drug companies want. They have little choice but to do whatever is necessary for survival, and I don't see that we have any right to stop them. This is something that I think we here in the US need to really examine as a country. There must be a way to continue drug research without having to charge prices that are prohibitive for many people, even though their lives depend on receiving the medicine. Maybe we do need a less capitalist health system in this country. Maybe the government should buy certain critical drugs outright from their creators and pay them a lump sum for the cost of development, plus a profit percentage or something like that. This could lead to many drugs becoming available for little more than the cost of production. In other words, dirt cheap. This would probably also lead to a fair amount of regulation on the industry, but that may be necessary in order to provide the best healthcare possible for people in this country.
Is this just a non-unique acronym or is this reporter just friggin out of it?
Yes, it's a non-unique acronym. Divx and DiVX are 2 different things. You're apparently thinking of the failed encrypted DVD product, Divx. The article is talking about DiVX, the encoding method that is being used much like the mp3 encoding method to create video files that are smaller and easier to transfer over the net. As I understand it, and I'm sure everyone can tell that I have only sketchy knowledge of what I'm talking about here, it can take a DVD movie and make it fit on a CD or 2 with some loss of quality.
I'm going to ignore the rant and skip to the end now.
Anyways, anyone up for buying out an island, set up our own government with no IP or anti-hacking laws, and filling it with anonymous relay machines? Just to piss these assholes off?
Wouldn't last long. It'd be declared a "rogue nation" and bombed into oblivion or at least occupied by US or UN troops who would shut down all the servers.
They are on OUR TURF:-) Computer networks are ours. We design them, we build them, we maintain them. The geniuses trying to figure out how to keep the masses happy are still trying to figure out fucking wordperfect 5.0.
The problem with your thinking here is the "we" part. Geeks are not of a single mind. They have beliefs that range all over the place, from heavily structured and moralistic to completely anarchistic, and everything in between. Many of them are probably actively working against what you want. They do this because it fits with their beliefs and/or the money is really good.
This is why you don't see any "geek political party" of any significance. Most geeks are either politically inactive (i.e. they mostly bitch about the government but don't really do anything about it), or have taken up with the existing party that most closely shares their beliefs, or they just vote for whomever they think will do the least damage, regardless of party. It may be possible to get a large enough portion of geeks to agree on a few things and perhaps form a lobbying group, but not a political party.
As long as one country either doesn't ban or enforce one of these bullshit laws, we're safe.
Again, same problem as with the island. If you don't play by the big boys' rules, you lose. Of course you lose if you do play by them too, but at least that way they don't beat the crap out of you afterwards. Once the US and EU corporations and governments finish stitching up their control over the masses, they'll be looking to enforce their rules internationally. This will either make it impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive for people to run offshore servers. Countries would be coerced into obeying through the use of sanctions, and possibly the threat of force. The government can always contrive some excuse to bomb someone.
Re:DeCSS does not circumvent encryption on a work!
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NYT On DeCSS Case
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I'm not sure any court is going to want to split hairs like that. If the MPAA claims that the title key is part of their "access control system," the court is unlikely to override their claim. Therefore, compromising the title key would be considered circumvention.
Well, actually the framers were the Congress when the Copyright Act of 1790 was passed. But yes, later Congresses did start extending copyright in various ways, seemingly with little concern for the original intent.
Was that case tried in the same district? Does the precedent hold any sway over this court?
Re:this sums up the slashdot journalistic ethos
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NYT On DeCSS Case
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· Score: 2
Seemed to me that Michael was not that accurate with his statement. She seemed to have researched both sides pretty well. It's just that the arguments are quite simple and don't take a lot of critical thinking to understand. The MPAA needs the DMCA to be upheld as is or they feel they will lose money. Whereas the other side is saying that it's not ok to take away people's rights just because you're afraid you'll lose money. Not too tough, huh?
That's according to a single study. Hardly proof. Perhaps the other 72% are buying twice as many now. One measly study isn't going to prove anything either way.
How do they know people are using it as a substitute for buying the CD? Record industry profits hit record highs again last year? If there's 20 million Napster users out there downloading their music instead of buying the CDs, then why are record industry profits still going through the roof?
Actually, the FTC just slapped the record companies on the wrist for price fixing. They estimate that the industry has ripped off consumers to the tune of $400 million, give or take a few tens of millions, over the last 3 years. I'd have to check again to see what restrictions they put on them now, but it was nothing earthshaking... or anything that will make any real difference to us.
Well, if artists and fans are smart, they'll bypass the labels and create online sites for promoting their music. Probably different sites for different genres, all accessible through portals. There would need to be some real thinking done about how to regulate the site so that it doesn't become corrupted like the big labels though. That will be the key to the whole thing and the hardest part to get right I think. The upside to it will be that fans could buy music for a lot less money, and artists would get to keep a lot more of the earnings.
Slashdot Mirror
This begs the question, where did AppleInsider get the pics? Was it from an Apple employee? Someone else with access to Apple? Is it illegal to publish rumors if they are in the form of a graphic?
What law, and/or precedent are you basing your statements on?
I installed M17 and brought up Slashdot, opened an article, (then realized I wasn't logged in), I then entered my name and pass in the box in the upper right of the screen. Well, as I typed each character, it kept bumping the box to the left and the story area's (but not the comments) width kept shrinking with each keystroke. Is this a problem with Mozilla or Slashdot? This is on Win95b, btw.
I think most people here have brought up a lot of very good uses for the technology. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about the very real possibility (even inevitability) of it abused. Insurance companies are just one of the likely culprits. They have very little scruples from what I've seen. They, like any other corp, exist to make money. They don't seem to mind screwing people over if that's what it takes either.
So what? You're allowed to use copyrighted pics if it's for the purpose of criticism, commentary, news reporting, etc. It's fair use.
I read something to the opposite effect. That he threatened to quit when Lucas decided to kill him off halfway through the first film. Guess that's why these things are called rumors.
But I don't agree that "we'd be stupid not to do something to help." (assuming by "we" you mean the US government.) They're not our people, they're not our responsibility.
I'm not saying we're responsible for taking care of their people. I'm saying it's not a good idea to ignore an epidemic of that size because sooner or later it will affect us too. Maybe not directly, but one way or another. If we stand by and let it happen without taking any action, we could very well regret that decision terribly later.
The way I understand it, any conversion of a text or other form of copyrighted work into another format would be considered a derivative work, which is still subject to the copyright, and therefore illegal without the copyright holder's consent.
It probably doesn't matter when CSS was broken. They can't touch Jon Johansen anyway. He didn't break any laws in his country. That seems to have been established now.
What the MPAA is doing is trying to make the distribution of the code illegal in the US which they claim is a violation of the DMCA.
and forced companies to give away drugs to people who need them
I'm not saying that drug companies should be forced to give away drugs. I'm saying that we should not use sanctions against African countries for violating patents when the produce the drugs themselves. They can't pay for them anyway, so drug companies aren't losing sales. The drugs are just helping people that would otherwise die because they can't afford to buy these drugs from American corporations. They seem to have worked out a deal of sorts now. The drug companies are now being paid, although at a much reduced rate, for the drugs that are being produced in Africa. This way they still make some money, and the drugs get used where they are needed the most.
The problem (and many people will hate me for saying this) is that people (particularly Americans) attach too high a value to each human life.
I understand what you're saying here. It's like when Spock died. The good of the many over the good of the one. But it's not always that simple or black and white.
Now calculate the cost of the most expensive cutting-edge medical treatment for one person, and multiply that number by the population of the world. Call that number C. I do not doubt that C is far greater than W.
I see what you're trying to do, but you left out so many factors that it's not even worthwhile to break out a calculator. I'm not saying that we should spare no expense to save everyone in the world. Many of these countries bring a lot of their woes on themselves, with Ethiopia and Eritria(sp?) being prime examples. But with the massive epidemic of AIDS taking place in Africa, we'd be stupid not to do something to help. These countries, and the citizens themselves especially, are extremely poor. They can't possibly afford to buy the drugs from the drug corporations, so there is little to no harm done to the corporations by allowing them to produce the drugs themselves by not forcing them to license patents (which the corporations won't license in the first place usually because they are too valuable when that company is the sole producer of a drug).
It serverly hampers radio astronomy so that Joe and Mary Consumer can feel good about having a cell phone that works anywhere on the globe.
Joe and Mary consumer? Not likely. More like Richard Consumer III, esq. Those phones and service are godawful expensive.
And enforceing a copyright on it to try and retain some of that money is not the same as depriveing humanity from a life saveing drug.
My, aren't we putting an innocent face on this? Retain some of that money? Try making $15 billion in profit last year. Gimme a break. What Jefferson said is important. Even England had managed to fight off the publishers who wanted perpetual control over copyrights. Just because you write and perform a song, you have no natural right to prevent anyone else from performing that same song. Then if you record the song, you still have no natural right to prevent anyone from making a copy of it. That's why we have copyright now. It's an artificial means to allow artists and creators to profit from their work so that they keep doing it. Unfortunately, we went from a reasonable length of time (14 years + 14 more on renewal) to the outrageously long term of life + 70 years, or 95 years for a work for hire (i.e. work created while under contract).
Since the public has been screwed out of its end of the deal (the works becoming public domain after a reasonable period of time for the creator to profit), it's no wonder people don't have much respect for copyright. It just feels inherently unnatural. Something created solely for the profit of big publishers. Which is exactly what it's become. The media industry has done this to itself by trying to screw the public more and more over the years. They got too greedy, now it's payback time. I'd like nothing better than to laugh at their folly and watch them sink into bankruptcy. Not sure if that's how it'll play out, but it's a nice thought. :)
The (tobacco/drug/record) companies are greedy, yes. But they aren't evil, and they aren't conspiring against you. Get some perspective.
Do have any idea how difficult it is to prove anything about corporations as large as the tobacco/drug/record corps are? People who try to point it out when these corps do something very bad often have their lives ruined in the process. They are sometimes smeared in the media, sued and accused of anything the corp can dig up on them, even threatened with everything, up to, and including bodily harm, harm to family, and death. Corporations ARE NOT ABOVE THESE KINDS OF TACTICS. Don't believe for a second that they will hesitate to lie, cheat, steal, or even worse to protect their profits and reputation, regardless of how bad their actions were. This is why we have whistleblower laws, because we've seen what can happen when you piss off a corporation. But even those don't always help. I'm not saying that every corporation does these kinds of things, but I am saying that you would be incredibly naive to simply assume that they don't, perhaps thinking that it would somehow leak out and become public knowledge. That attitude just makes it easier for them to get away with such things when they do choose to do them.
That said, I think I agree with a lot of what you said. Obviously drug companies need a way to recoup their expenses and turn a profit. There are cases where other interests override those of profit though. Africa is a perfect example of this. They need the drugs because they are having a massive AIDS epidemic. There's no way they can afford to pay the price the drug companies want. They have little choice but to do whatever is necessary for survival, and I don't see that we have any right to stop them. This is something that I think we here in the US need to really examine as a country. There must be a way to continue drug research without having to charge prices that are prohibitive for many people, even though their lives depend on receiving the medicine. Maybe we do need a less capitalist health system in this country. Maybe the government should buy certain critical drugs outright from their creators and pay them a lump sum for the cost of development, plus a profit percentage or something like that. This could lead to many drugs becoming available for little more than the cost of production. In other words, dirt cheap. This would probably also lead to a fair amount of regulation on the industry, but that may be necessary in order to provide the best healthcare possible for people in this country.
Is this just a non-unique acronym or is this reporter just friggin out of it?
Yes, it's a non-unique acronym. Divx and DiVX are 2 different things. You're apparently thinking of the failed encrypted DVD product, Divx. The article is talking about DiVX, the encoding method that is being used much like the mp3 encoding method to create video files that are smaller and easier to transfer over the net. As I understand it, and I'm sure everyone can tell that I have only sketchy knowledge of what I'm talking about here, it can take a DVD movie and make it fit on a CD or 2 with some loss of quality.
I'm going to ignore the rant and skip to the end now.
Anyways, anyone up for buying out an island, set up our own government with no IP or anti-hacking laws, and filling it with anonymous relay machines? Just to piss these assholes off?
Wouldn't last long. It'd be declared a "rogue nation" and bombed into oblivion or at least occupied by US or UN troops who would shut down all the servers.
They are on OUR TURF :-) Computer networks are ours. We design them, we build them, we maintain them. The geniuses trying to figure out how to keep the masses happy are still trying to figure out fucking wordperfect 5.0.
The problem with your thinking here is the "we" part. Geeks are not of a single mind. They have beliefs that range all over the place, from heavily structured and moralistic to completely anarchistic, and everything in between. Many of them are probably actively working against what you want. They do this because it fits with their beliefs and/or the money is really good.
This is why you don't see any "geek political party" of any significance. Most geeks are either politically inactive (i.e. they mostly bitch about the government but don't really do anything about it), or have taken up with the existing party that most closely shares their beliefs, or they just vote for whomever they think will do the least damage, regardless of party. It may be possible to get a large enough portion of geeks to agree on a few things and perhaps form a lobbying group, but not a political party.
As long as one country either doesn't ban or enforce one of these bullshit laws, we're safe.
Again, same problem as with the island. If you don't play by the big boys' rules, you lose. Of course you lose if you do play by them too, but at least that way they don't beat the crap out of you afterwards. Once the US and EU corporations and governments finish stitching up their control over the masses, they'll be looking to enforce their rules internationally. This will either make it impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive for people to run offshore servers. Countries would be coerced into obeying through the use of sanctions, and possibly the threat of force. The government can always contrive some excuse to bomb someone.
I'm not sure any court is going to want to split hairs like that. If the MPAA claims that the title key is part of their "access control system," the court is unlikely to override their claim. Therefore, compromising the title key would be considered circumvention.
I would make a distinction here. I believe they are legally in the right, but not morally in the right. The real problem is bad copyright laws.
Well, actually the framers were the Congress when the Copyright Act of 1790 was passed. But yes, later Congresses did start extending copyright in various ways, seemingly with little concern for the original intent.
Was that case tried in the same district? Does the precedent hold any sway over this court?
Seemed to me that Michael was not that accurate with his statement. She seemed to have researched both sides pretty well. It's just that the arguments are quite simple and don't take a lot of critical thinking to understand. The MPAA needs the DMCA to be upheld as is or they feel they will lose money. Whereas the other side is saying that it's not ok to take away people's rights just because you're afraid you'll lose money. Not too tough, huh?
He's referring to lawsuits that Apple has filed in the past.
We'd all be driving 3-wheeled, 3-doored tricycle-mobiles.
That's according to a single study. Hardly proof. Perhaps the other 72% are buying twice as many now. One measly study isn't going to prove anything either way.
How do they know people are using it as a substitute for buying the CD? Record industry profits hit record highs again last year? If there's 20 million Napster users out there downloading their music instead of buying the CDs, then why are record industry profits still going through the roof?
Actually, the FTC just slapped the record companies on the wrist for price fixing. They estimate that the industry has ripped off consumers to the tune of $400 million, give or take a few tens of millions, over the last 3 years. I'd have to check again to see what restrictions they put on them now, but it was nothing earthshaking... or anything that will make any real difference to us.
Well, if artists and fans are smart, they'll bypass the labels and create online sites for promoting their music. Probably different sites for different genres, all accessible through portals. There would need to be some real thinking done about how to regulate the site so that it doesn't become corrupted like the big labels though. That will be the key to the whole thing and the hardest part to get right I think. The upside to it will be that fans could buy music for a lot less money, and artists would get to keep a lot more of the earnings.