By throwing their weight behind DeCSS, Red Hat are providing much needed credibility to the fight against the MPAA.
As a profitable public company, generally well respected in the industry, their name behind the donation is probably more beneficial than the money itself.
Just as an aside, what would the situation be if the AC's who posted the comments turned out to be Microsoft employees? Where does that put the legally?
Given your situation I'd take a hard look at the posts they're claiming infringe copyright. If any of the comments actually contain material that is held under copyright by Microsoft, remove that material from the comment, replace it with a suitable explanation of exactly why it was removed , but otherwise leave the comment intact as a permanent remidner that Redmond are a pack of....
Any comment your lawyers deem not to have infringed copyright, leave alone. You've already pointed out publicly how Microsoft are watching and attacking every piss-ant *perceived* threat that comes by, and retarding free speech in the process. You're also protecting yourself from liability and leaving the comments in place as a subtle protest. Remember though that the comment itself is not and cannot infringe on the copyright . Only part (or all) of text inside that comment infringes so leave the comments there for the public record and remove the text.
As for links, hasn't it already been established that linking isn't illegal in the US?? (I'm in Aus. BTW)
Now every network card and router between me and the other guy's server is a conduit for illegal material and therefore liable.
"My apologies due to an unfortunate listing in my router table you are now the subject of a lawsuit. "
And again.... since when are mp3's illegal?
Mp3's are a file format... nothing more, nothing less...
The only smart thing that Napster facilitates is the linking up of one person with a sought after file, with another who has the file. Apart from that, the file transfers have been around for decades.
What would happen if Napster (the application) was just a dynamic list and relied on the user to ftp the files from one place to another. Would it still be classed as conduit by just maintaining a list of song titles?
Yet another story about "Your Rights Online" which, translated into/. speak, is "My Right To Not Pay For Anything"
Bullshit!!
"Fair use" is "Fair use" and is written into the copyright law for a purpose. As Lessig points out, the DCMA allows copyright holders to deny fair use by wrapping the work in technology.
The medium of copyrighted works should have no bearing on the interpretation of the copyright act or limit or enhance the rights of the copyright holder or the user of the copyrighted work.
Why US universities are screaming about this I don't know. As their libraries become increasingly digital, so will the difficulty of accessing and using texts for the purpose of teaching.
"Whats that? You want to copy an excerpt on OO concepts from Ivan Hutchinson's Beginning Java 2 for an introductory programming unit? Sorry - that text is only available on CD-ROM/DVD/"
The medium should be treated as irrelevant... not doing so will only create a massive legal and beaurocratic nightmare.
Yep, I'm from Victoria... though thats not relevant here.
The point I was making wasn't that VB was good/bad/indifferent, but that for a real fair dinkum aussie drink-fest, your choices would have to be VB or Carlton Draught...
sure there are other beers (I agree Coopers ain't half bad, and Boags is even better), but if you want to go with the masses down under then a vb has to be your first stop...
Rob, on the off chance you have the time and inclination, head down to Phillip Island in Victoria to see the inspiration for Tux... its worth the trip...
As an added bonus, you'll get to see some of the real Australia in the people of Cowes and its surrounding countryside.
Further, if you let the rangers down there know you're coming and I'm sure they'll roll out the red carpet. They surely won't have forgotten the huge influx of support and donations received from slashdotters when we had a massive oil spill a few months back.
Tell the newspapers (partic. The Age) you're heading down there and you'd have a nice PR story for Linux to go with it.
...which explains why it is cheaper to buy a HP from Harvey Norman than it is to buy direct from HP. I was wondering about that;)
I wonder why HP would bother with the online distro if they can't ever be cheaper... they may get the occasional dimwit who couldn't be bothered shopping around, but that would hardly cover the cost of maintaining an e-commerce site??
This is something that I've noticed increasingly over the last couple of years, and the same thing is happening to TV.
There, quite simply, isn't anything that appears in the newspapers or on TV news broadcasts, that wasn't on the internet the day before yesterday.
I'm sick of seeing a story pop up on in a local newspaper or nightly news segment on the TV, 3-4 days or a week after I read pretty much the same story on CNN on the net.
There may be a fraction more information avaliable, but generally they are a straight rehash of CNN's coverage.
Which leads me to my second problem. There is no independence in news gathering these days. Whether its the fault of all of the media mergers over the last few years or not I don't know, but the problem is that everyone is using the same news wires to generate their stories... so what you end up with 100's of newspapers and TV stations sprout ing the same stuff over and over.
Prior to the net, that was ok, because physical location dictated the target audience. That's no longer the case. From Ballarat, Australia, I can read the New York Times , or CNN just as easy as I can buy the Melbourne Age or the Ballarat Courier. In fact, the only thing these papers can give me that I can't get elsewhere online is local content.
As I see it, there a two choices that can be made to keep a newspaper relevant over the next few years. Either start concentrating on local content and local issues, or play with the big boys and start generating your own news... ie. maybe start looking into the issues raised by cnn, ap and reuters, and provide something extra rather than just regurgitating the story, which is what every newspaper around the world seems to be doing these days....
Oh... and one other thing... so toning everything (stories AND editorial content) down in an attempt to keep your advertisers happy. If a newspaper anywhere was to give an accurate depiction of what is happening with DeCSS, then I'd buy a years subscription from them...
I'd have to say I'm shocked that there have only been 71 comments posted on the site! With all the outrage over the DeCSS lawsuits and arrests, and all of the commentary raised on/. and elsewhere, I would have thought this site would have been slashdotted to hell... As I am not a US citizen, I can't put forward my views, but I urge those of you who are to do so iimediately. There's no point bitching on slashdot about the state of DeCSS and how wrong it all is, when an opportunity exists to vent your frustrations with those directly responsible for the DCMA's implementation. M@T
also, amazon doesn't exactly imply books. interestingly, there was already an american bookseller called amazon in america before the amazon.com lot came online... would things have been different if it had all happened in australia, i wonder?
Probably not. As long as Amazon was already a registered business name, they would have a legitimate claim to register the domain.
In situations where a particular domain name might be sought after, its still a case of first in first served, but you need to have a legitimate claim to it, such as a registered business name or trade mark - you can't register a.com.au domain for the hell of it.
Note: this is only for.com.au, not.org.au or.net.au etc.
While it wasn't always the case... you can't register a.com.au domain unless the domain is directly related to your business name or a trade-mark registered to your business.
This doesn't change the fact that all of my preferred domains are already gone but it does make cyber-squatting that much harder.
It also doesn't do anything to help situations where multiple tradmarks exist across different industries, but I don't think DNS can ever fix that.
FWIW, even if you banned the registration of trademarks as top-level domains, there would still be conflicts on name similarities, and the larger corporations would start dummy companies just to get the domains anyway...
With all of the lawsuits floating around these days, we're yet again faced with THE major dilemma for open source projects - inadequate legal representation.
It doesn't matter what is right and what is wrong.
If the open source community does not have the ability to defend itself against the myriad of legal attacks that it is bound to face in the near future - then open source is already dead as a mainstream development environment.
The court systems of most countries, not just the US, will never be technically adept enough to make informed decisions by themselves. The plaintiff makes a legal argument as to why a particular decision should be made, the defendant provides the counter argument, and the judge makes a decision based upon the facts before him/her and prior rulings of court.
Can this happen where open source developers are the defendants? I just can't see a situation at the moment where open source developers can adequately state their case against large well-funded companies and organisations...
From all of the comments here, I can only assume that this case SHOULD be thrown out immediately, and yet there is still a large amount of doubt about the outcome... what will happen with those cases where the plaintiffs case, while wrong, actually contains an ounce of merit?
And further, what of the situations where the plaintiff NEEDS to be the open-source developer/project etc.
Yes, I know the 1st Amendment argument, but let's reverse this for a moment. Let's say I don't want ads from Microsoft on my computer. I am entitled to set up filters, screening them out, and Microsoft's 1st Amemdment rights don't apply. I'm not stopping them speaking, but I have the absolute right not to hear, and my right overrides any rights to speak they may have.
Whilst I'd hate to take M$ side on anything, what you're stating here is pure crap!
If you disagree with the advertising content that a particular site is providing, then you should avoid that site altogether.
The site is able to provide the level of content that it does through the money paid it by its advertisers, rather than charging you a subscription.
By circumventing those advertisements and reading the content regardless, you are, IMHO, effectively stealing that content.
They're my eyes, and they don't belong to any damn advertiser or web master.
As stated above, you pay for the content that a site provides in by allowing your eyes to peruse their ads, rather than forking out hard cash for a subscription. That's tough. Either you agree to do that or you don't.
If you don't, then you should be taking your eyes elsewhere and letting them get on with running their business - or volunteer your time and money, so that they can buy the servers and equipment required for maintaining and expanding the site without having to find the bucks to do so!
In the US, when speaking of the Labour Party in Oz, we use the "u", because it's their party, after all. I should think that the Canadians would likewise omit the "u" when discussing our department.
Not in my country matey... if you were to check, the Australian Labor Party drops the "u" from their name, due to the influence of the American labour/labor movement in the early 1900s - Australians still spell it "labour" in common English, as do the Canadians, I assume, from this absurd thread.
"Colour" or "color"... does it matter as long as the point is made clearly?
..in relation to all of the "bad" news coming out of Australia in the last few months:
1. We currently have an overly conservative governement in place.
The current government came to power due to the economic hardships of the previous decade (thanks to a global recession), and the fact that the previous government had been in power for 13 years (ie. it was time for a change).
The current Government has been in power since 1996 and almost lost the last election, and are guaranteed to lose the next election. (They know it too).
2. Australia has the rough equivalent of the population of New York, spread across a land mass the size of the United States. This usually results in Australian's depending on its media services to highlight issues of concern. IT issues generally get drowned out by the latest political gaffe, or our sensationalistic story of the day.
IT in general doesn't sell newspapers and as such, Internet censorship and other technology-related issues are not news-worthy. It should be noted though, that the PBL-Acxiom database story made the front page of all major newspapers and TV news networks. There was significant outrage... for once I was happy.
3. Don't forget to do the maths with the exchange rates. I don't know exactly what it is at the moment, but the Aussie dollar usually sits at around $0.70 USD. That means that ISP rates and Cable-modem rates are not necessarily as expensive as you think they are, if its an Australian news article.
For all those who have been saying how shitty a place Australia must be to live, given the events of the last few months, you may want to get a little introspective.
I could turn around and say "Americans profile their own school children to weed our the mass murderers? Danm the United States must suck!"
On the whole, Australia is a great place to live. It's open, relatively in touch with what is happening around the world and, for the most part, consists of an extremely diverse set of people and cultures, who generally get along very well.
At the moment, however, we have an overly conservative government in place, thanks to the economic hardships of the previous decade, (global recession etc). They're currently doing all of the things that overly conservative governments do everywhere around the world (and stepping on toes in the process while claiming a greater good)
In the not too distant future, however, there will be an election, and this overly conservative government will be tossed out having pissed too many people off, as it almost was in the last election, and Australia will be the better for it.
I am not entirely familiar with the US system of government - but if the US had a republican president and a predominantly republican congress and senate, wouldn't the US be in a similar situation right now?
Slashdot Mirror
...though I am should it will help.
By throwing their weight behind DeCSS, Red Hat are providing much needed credibility to the fight against the MPAA.
As a profitable public company, generally well respected in the industry, their name behind the donation is probably more beneficial than the money itself.
M@T
Just as an aside, what would the situation be if the AC's who posted the comments turned out to be Microsoft employees? Where does that put the legally?
Good job so far, BTW
Given your situation I'd take a hard look at the posts they're claiming infringe copyright. If any of the comments actually contain material that is held under copyright by Microsoft, remove that material from the comment, replace it with a suitable explanation of exactly why it was removed , but otherwise leave the comment intact as a permanent remidner that Redmond are a pack of....
Any comment your lawyers deem not to have infringed copyright, leave alone. You've already pointed out publicly how Microsoft are watching and attacking every piss-ant *perceived* threat that comes by, and retarding free speech in the process. You're also protecting yourself from liability and leaving the comments in place as a subtle protest. Remember though that the comment itself is not and cannot infringe on the copyright . Only part (or all) of text inside that comment infringes so leave the comments there for the public record and remove the text.
As for links, hasn't it already been established that linking isn't illegal in the US?? (I'm in Aus. BTW)
M@T
Now every network card and router between me and the other guy's server is a conduit for illegal material and therefore liable.
"My apologies due to an unfortunate listing in my router table you are now the subject of a lawsuit. "
And again.... since when are mp3's illegal?
Mp3's are a file format... nothing more, nothing less...
The only smart thing that Napster facilitates is the linking up of one person with a sought after file, with another who has the file. Apart from that, the file transfers have been around for decades.
What would happen if Napster (the application) was just a dynamic list and relied on the user to ftp the files from one place to another. Would it still be classed as conduit by just maintaining a list of song titles?
M@T
Yet another story about "Your Rights Online" which, translated into /. speak, is "My Right To Not Pay For Anything"
Bullshit!!
"Fair use" is "Fair use" and is written into the copyright law for a purpose. As Lessig points out, the DCMA allows copyright holders to deny fair use by wrapping the work in technology.
The medium of copyrighted works should have no bearing on the interpretation of the copyright act or limit or enhance the rights of the copyright holder or the user of the copyrighted work.
Why US universities are screaming about this I don't know. As their libraries become increasingly digital, so will the difficulty of accessing and using texts for the purpose of teaching.
"Whats that? You want to copy an excerpt on OO concepts from Ivan Hutchinson's Beginning Java 2 for an introductory programming unit? Sorry - that text is only available on CD-ROM/DVD/"
The medium should be treated as irrelevant... not doing so will only create a massive legal and beaurocratic nightmare.
M@T
Settlement talks have stalled.
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail, (G)rab Hammer?
Abort
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail ?
Abort
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail ?
Fail
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail ?
Retry
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail ?
Fail
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail ?
Abort
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail ?
CTRL+ALT+DEL
CTRL+ALT+DEL
You're not from Victoria are you?
Yep, I'm from Victoria... though thats not relevant here.
The point I was making wasn't that VB was good/bad/indifferent, but that for a real fair dinkum aussie drink-fest, your choices would have to be VB or Carlton Draught...
sure there are other beers (I agree Coopers ain't half bad, and Boags is even better), but if you want to go with the masses down under then a vb has to be your first stop...
Rob, on the off chance you have the time and inclination, head down to Phillip Island in Victoria to see the inspiration for Tux... its worth the trip...
;)
As an added bonus, you'll get to see some of the real Australia in the people of Cowes and its surrounding countryside.
Further, if you let the rangers down there know you're coming and I'm sure they'll roll out the red carpet. They surely won't have forgotten the huge influx of support and donations received from slashdotters when we had a massive oil spill a few months back.
Tell the newspapers (partic. The Age) you're heading down there and you'd have a nice PR story for Linux to go with it.
just a thought
M@T
why this issue ended up in a US court? I don't care about whether the rebroadcast is moral/ethical or legal in the US.
How did it end up in a US court, if iCrave is a Canadian company, and rebroadcasting is legal in Canada?
...which explains why it is cheaper to buy a HP from Harvey Norman than it is to buy direct from HP. I was wondering about that
I wonder why HP would bother with the online distro if they can't ever be cheaper... they may get the occasional dimwit who couldn't be bothered shopping around, but that would hardly cover the cost of maintaining an e-commerce site??
...Linux Bloatware??
This is something that I've noticed increasingly over the last couple of years, and the same thing is happening to TV.
There, quite simply, isn't anything that appears in the newspapers or on TV news broadcasts, that wasn't on the internet the day before yesterday.
I'm sick of seeing a story pop up on in a local newspaper or nightly news segment on the TV, 3-4 days or a week after I read pretty much the same story on CNN on the net.
There may be a fraction more information avaliable, but generally they are a straight rehash of CNN's coverage.
Which leads me to my second problem. There is no independence in news gathering these days. Whether its the fault of all of the media mergers over the last few years or not I don't know, but the problem is that everyone is using the same news wires to generate their stories... so what you end up with 100's of newspapers and TV stations sprout ing the same stuff over and over.
Prior to the net, that was ok, because physical location dictated the target audience. That's no longer the case. From Ballarat, Australia, I can read the New York Times , or CNN just as easy as I can buy the Melbourne Age or the Ballarat Courier. In fact, the only thing these papers can give me that I can't get elsewhere online is local content.
As I see it, there a two choices that can be made to keep a newspaper relevant over the next few years. Either start concentrating on local content and local issues, or play with the big boys and start generating your own news... ie. maybe start looking into the issues raised by cnn, ap and reuters, and provide something extra rather than just regurgitating the story, which is what every newspaper around the world seems to be doing these days....
Oh... and one other thing... so toning everything (stories AND editorial content) down in an attempt to keep your advertisers happy. If a newspaper anywhere was to give an accurate depiction of what is happening with DeCSS, then I'd buy a years subscription from them...
I'd have to say I'm shocked that there have only been 71 comments posted on the site! With all the outrage over the DeCSS lawsuits and arrests, and all of the commentary raised on /. and elsewhere, I would have thought this site would have been slashdotted to hell... As I am not a US citizen, I can't put forward my views, but I urge those of you who are to do so iimediately. There's no point bitching on slashdot about the state of DeCSS and how wrong it all is, when an opportunity exists to vent your frustrations with those directly responsible for the DCMA's implementation. M@T
...that they're patenting, what is to most people in the industry, obvious technology.
Most of it is so obvious that most of us wouldn't think of publishing the details of the process, let alone try to get a patent.
It's usually too banal to capture our minds, which is why we're so surprised every time a new bullshit patent gets awarded.
M@T
being a new @home user..[snip]..anyway a hapless victim could get around this?
Yep... contact @Home and tell them you're pissed off. Keep doing it until they see the light.
M@T
...is how this might affect the anti-trust case against Microsoft.
AOL seems to have done a rather poor job of looking like a victim in recent times - this can only weaken the government's position further.
M@T
also, amazon doesn't exactly imply books. interestingly, there was already an american bookseller called amazon in america before the amazon.com lot came online ... would things have been different if it had all happened in australia, i wonder?
.com.au domain for the hell of it.
.com.au, not .org.au or .net.au etc.
Probably not. As long as Amazon was already a registered business name, they would have a legitimate claim to register the domain.
In situations where a particular domain name might be sought after, its still a case of first in first served, but you need to have a legitimate claim to it, such as a registered business name or trade mark - you can't register a
Note: this is only for
Also, Amazon own amazon.com.au.
M@T
While it wasn't always the case... you can't register a .com.au domain unless the domain is directly related to your business name or a trade-mark registered to your business.
This doesn't change the fact that all of my preferred domains are already gone but it does make cyber-squatting that much harder.
It also doesn't do anything to help situations where multiple tradmarks exist across different industries, but I don't think DNS can ever fix that.
FWIW, even if you banned the registration of trademarks as top-level domains, there would still be conflicts on name similarities, and the larger corporations would start dummy companies just to get the domains anyway...
M@T
You can send your thoughts to etoys here .
The bigger issue is who is defending these guys?
With all of the lawsuits floating around these days, we're yet again faced with THE major dilemma for open source projects - inadequate legal representation.
It doesn't matter what is right and what is wrong.
If the open source community does not have the ability to defend itself against the myriad of legal attacks that it is bound to face in the near future - then open source is already dead as a mainstream development environment.
The court systems of most countries, not just the US, will never be technically adept enough to make informed decisions by themselves. The plaintiff makes a legal argument as to why a particular decision should be made, the defendant provides the counter argument, and the judge makes a decision based upon the facts before him/her and prior rulings of court.
Can this happen where open source developers are the defendants? I just can't see a situation at the moment where open source developers can adequately state their case against large well-funded companies and organisations...
From all of the comments here, I can only assume that this case SHOULD be thrown out immediately, and yet there is still a large amount of doubt about the outcome... what will happen with those cases where the plaintiffs case, while wrong, actually contains an ounce of merit?
And further, what of the situations where the plaintiff NEEDS to be the open-source developer/project etc.
Any thoughts?
M@T
Yes, I know the 1st Amendment argument, but let's reverse this for a moment. Let's say I don't want ads from Microsoft on my computer. I am entitled to set up filters, screening them out, and Microsoft's 1st Amemdment rights don't apply. I'm not stopping them speaking, but I have the absolute right not to hear, and my right overrides any rights to speak they may have.
Whilst I'd hate to take M$ side on anything, what you're stating here is pure crap!
If you disagree with the advertising content that a particular site is providing, then you should avoid that site altogether.
The site is able to provide the level of content that it does through the money paid it by its advertisers, rather than charging you a subscription.
By circumventing those advertisements and reading the content regardless, you are, IMHO, effectively stealing that content.
They're my eyes, and they don't belong to any damn advertiser or web master.
As stated above, you pay for the content that a site provides in by allowing your eyes to peruse their ads, rather than forking out hard cash for a subscription. That's tough. Either you agree to do that or you don't.
If you don't, then you should be taking your eyes elsewhere and letting them get on with running their business - or volunteer your time and money, so that they can buy the servers and equipment required for maintaining and expanding the site without having to find the bucks to do so!
M@T
In the US, when speaking of the Labour Party in Oz, we use the "u", because it's their party, after all. I should think that the Canadians would likewise omit the "u" when discussing our department.
Not in my country matey... if you were to check, the Australian Labor Party drops the "u" from their name, due to the influence of the American labour/labor movement in the early 1900s - Australians still spell it "labour" in common English, as do the Canadians, I assume, from this absurd thread.
"Colour" or "color"... does it matter as long as the point is made clearly?
M@T
...that not all IT news in the land down under is necessarily bad!
M@T
..in relation to all of the "bad" news coming out of Australia in the last few months:
1. We currently have an overly conservative governement in place.
The current government came to power due to the economic hardships of the previous decade (thanks to a global recession), and the fact that the previous government had been in power for 13 years (ie. it was time for a change).
The current Government has been in power since 1996 and almost lost the last election, and are guaranteed to lose the next election. (They know it too).
2. Australia has the rough equivalent of the population of New York, spread across a land mass the size of the United States. This usually results in Australian's depending on its media services to highlight issues of concern. IT issues generally get drowned out by the latest political gaffe, or our sensationalistic story of the day.
IT in general doesn't sell newspapers and as such, Internet censorship and other technology-related issues are not news-worthy. It should be noted though, that the PBL-Acxiom database story made the front page of all major newspapers and TV news networks. There was significant outrage... for once I was happy.
3. Don't forget to do the maths with the exchange rates. I don't know exactly what it is at the moment, but the Aussie dollar usually sits at around $0.70 USD. That means that ISP rates and Cable-modem rates are not necessarily as expensive as you think they are, if its an Australian news article.
M@T
For all those who have been saying how shitty a place Australia must be to live, given the events of the last few months, you may want to get a little introspective.
I could turn around and say "Americans profile their own school children to weed our the mass murderers? Danm the United States must suck!"
On the whole, Australia is a great place to live.
It's open, relatively in touch with what is happening around the world and, for the most part, consists of an extremely diverse set of people and cultures, who generally get along very well.
At the moment, however, we have an overly conservative government in place, thanks to the economic hardships of the previous decade, (global recession etc). They're currently doing all of the things that overly conservative governments do everywhere around the world (and stepping on toes in the process while claiming a greater good)
In the not too distant future, however, there will be an election, and this overly conservative government will be tossed out having pissed too many people off, as it almost was in the last election, and Australia will be the better for it.
I am not entirely familiar with the US system of government - but if the US had a republican president and a predominantly republican congress and senate, wouldn't the US be in a similar situation right now?
M@T