Err... I thought that too, until I read the actual law in question. Turns out that you aren't allowed to make copies, except with a few specific exceptions. (One backup copy, copying to memory to run a computer program) And that's just what I was able to parse out of the legal spam - there could be more restrictions or exemptions sitting in the middle of two dozen pages about cable and radio frequency licenses.
And EULAs may indeed be enforcable, depending on your state. See the text of the UCITA, which I believe both Maryland and Virginia passed...
Really, what do you expect? All his post needs to be a classic antiKDE troll (note that there's not a shred of proof whatsoever for any of his assertions) is a claim that GNOME would've made a new major release immediately after discovering this or some such drivel. Neither project has a "history of security holes", because neither runs anything important as root.
Yes, its an old, worn issue... And many people still don't know about it. Or play down its importance. Or ignore it entirely.
Also, note that you used to be buying a copy of the Little Mermaid (to use your example), but some of your property rights were restricted for the good of society and the intellectual commons. Unfortunately, recent copyright law revisions have travelled far along the road to turning copyright into ownership, so this is no longer true.
Yes, its an old issue... And we should keep reminding people of it. Because ignoring it won't make it go away.
This is the United States of America we're talking about here. Thanks to the fact that it might be disruptive to the process of doing business or Fighting Terrorists, you have no expectation of privacy anywhere.
Well, your figure there puts development of the game engine alone at, what, six months? Now, look at it from the point of view of a company making a game. That's six months where they can't use screenshots to feed a hype machine. That's another six months tacked onto their release date. Another six months for their chosen technology to become obsolete, another six months for someone else to beat them to market.
Don't you think trimming those months off the start of the development cycle is worth $250,000? They apparently do. And that's not even considering the publicity from being able to say "we use the Quake 3 engine!"
And in other news, Ashcroft today announced that the blindfold would be removed from the eyes of the statue of justice. It would be replaced with a blindfold constructed from thousand-dollar bills. MS-Nuclear-Bio-Chemical News heartily commends this initiative, and feels the policies it symbolizes it will bring a sense of fairness and equitability back into our justice system after a long absence.
No, but its a bit of an excuse. After all, they are British!
(I'm a Canadian, so I'm allowed to make that kind of joke. Eh.;) )
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 2
The moon's gravity's too low for long-term lunar colonization to feasible. And remember, most of the moon is provably barren rock. Not only that, but the stuff's going to be creating its own crater when it lands, so you're not exactly leaving the existing terrain in pristine condition here.
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 1
Besides, as I said in another reply, we might WANT that radwaste in the future, sometime. =)
Point. And dropping it onto the moon lets us leave it, retrieve it, or move it around without worrying about damage to any sort of functioning ecosystem. The only potential problem I can see is asteroid impacts... And even then, that's not a problem if you bury it deeply enough.
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 1
Err... Doesn't a Hohmann-type transfer orbit (which, if I understand correctly, is the least expensive type of transfer orbit we've yet found) from Earth to Jupiter result in a very close (in relative terms) passage to the sun anyway? Wouldn't you just need a (relatively) small change in your orbit to plough into it instead of getting slung back out again?
I too vote for 1854-1860, which seems to me to be the first really big period of social change in the "west". Before that, things were pretty constant - even the Rennaisance and colonization didn't stir up the lives of most people too much. Then you hit the mid 1800s, the American Civil War, the start of the Industrial Revolution proper...
The other thing to note about this... TCP/IP networks are now at the point where, VIA telephony, they could completely replace the phone networks. (Especially with technologies like IPv6) And at a fraction of the cost - digitize the voice signal, compress it down to a reasonable bitrate, and transmit. Only problem - the Bells are currently making huge wads of cash from the existing infrastructure, which they wouldn't be making from an IP-based infrastructure.
And guess who controls most, if not all, of your bandwidth?
You think this started in the 70s? Read some of your country's own history. This started in at least the 1930s, possibly even fifty or seventy-five or a hundred years before that.
Err... They'd probably be in violation of the PATRIOT act. And you're also in violation of the DMCA for circumventing a "copyright protection technology". Guess the only solution is for the government to ban generic computing devices.
Oh wait...
Sorry, I forgot that they're already planning to do that. My bad.
Not only that, but songs are usually webcast at a much lower quality than the songs you'd find on Kazaa. Which usually means pretty bad quality indeed. Good enough to compete with radio, but not nearly good enough to compete with CDs.
Of course, this ignores the fact that the RIAA has been training its customers to believe that quality doesn't really matter for years now...
This man contributed many great ideas to our field. The sad thing is how many programmers are still in ignorance of them, even now. You did great things, Mr. Dijkstra, and will be sorely missed. I just hope we're still allowed to have generic computing devices in ten years' time, so we can continue to refine and develop the revolutionary ideas you left us with.
Actually, as someone pointed out to me, you may not be allowed to rip pages out of a book. American copyright law prohibits creation of derivative works, not just their distribution. Its arguable that a book with pages ripped out is a derivative work of the original book, and thus illegal. Which is why American copyright law needs some serious common-sense revision.
Have you ever looked at a DVD? They don't. At least, not in readable text on the outside of the packaging. And because of this, despite what the MPAA might state, there is no contract when I lay down my money to purchase it. Implied or otherwise. Just like there's no contract requiring me to watch advertising when I sit down to watch TV.
Software EULAs also are not legally binding. They are contracts, and thus cannot be legally binding without a signature. (As opposed to, say, the GPL, where if you don't accept its terms, you default to the rights provided by copyright law, which do not allow for modification or redistribution) There are numerous books analyzing this, the best I've seen is The Software Conspiracy, by Mark Minasi. (If you can find a copy, that is.)
You can disclaim these warrantees (see above), but that requires an explicit agreement between the consumer and the vendor, in the form of an EULA or click wrap installer.
See, this was the problem with the UCITA as originally proposed. And it has not been fixed. It creates a default warranty for software, complete with (IIRC) default damages for bugs, security flaws, etc. Now, this would be a good thing if the damages were based on the cost of the software, which they aren't. Or if the law also didn't explicitly allow software companies to completely escape from the warranty with a tiny little clause in the presented-on-install click-through EULA... Which, incidentally, means that there's no way for most free software to disclaim warranty without compromising morals or functionality.
I'm all in favour of disposing of the practice of warranty-less software... As long as everyone has to play by the same rules. This law doesn't do that. It lets proprietary, potentially-illegal-EULA employing software companies get off the hook, while dumping a huge burden on hobbiests and those who look to freely share software. If anyone's exempted from warranty requirements, it should be those building software in their spare time, not those selling it with utterly mindboggling profit margins.
Want to bet that if the movie industry wins, the first thing they're going to push for is barring Johansen from employment in the technology field? After all, he is an Evil Terrorist Hacker!(TM)
Yes, but they don't care about that. They want control. So they ignore those people, and instead point to the much smaller group who've been downloading movies that they'll claim were ripped with DeCSS. (Never mind all the other tools out there that do it without going near DeCSS...)
How one can prove lost profits is still beyond me. "We made less money than our projections showed"? "Less than 100% of the population bought our product"? "More people bought this product from some indie studio?"
Sorry, that logic doesn't work in America, and it shouldn't work under Norwegian law either. If I don't sign a negotiable contract whose terms I can examine before I lay down my money in exchange for the disc, then they've got no legal hold on me. I'd hope the same applies under Norwegian law.
Or didn't, before the DMCA. Now they very well might.
They got him arrested in the first place with no more than a letter. I'm sure that they or their European division could arrange for some legal distraction or technicality. Though I'm also being unnecessarily pessimistic - the Norwegians could have simply been wanting to avoid having another Kaplan blindly sign off on whatever the industry shoves under their noses.
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Err... I thought that too, until I read the actual law in question. Turns out that you aren't allowed to make copies, except with a few specific exceptions. (One backup copy, copying to memory to run a computer program) And that's just what I was able to parse out of the legal spam - there could be more restrictions or exemptions sitting in the middle of two dozen pages about cable and radio frequency licenses.
And EULAs may indeed be enforcable, depending on your state. See the text of the UCITA, which I believe both Maryland and Virginia passed...
Quite frankly, you are an idiot spreading FUD.
Really, what do you expect? All his post needs to be a classic antiKDE troll (note that there's not a shred of proof whatsoever for any of his assertions) is a claim that GNOME would've made a new major release immediately after discovering this or some such drivel. Neither project has a "history of security holes", because neither runs anything important as root.
Yes, its an old, worn issue... And many people still don't know about it. Or play down its importance. Or ignore it entirely.
Also, note that you used to be buying a copy of the Little Mermaid (to use your example), but some of your property rights were restricted for the good of society and the intellectual commons. Unfortunately, recent copyright law revisions have travelled far along the road to turning copyright into ownership, so this is no longer true.
Yes, its an old issue... And we should keep reminding people of it. Because ignoring it won't make it go away.
This is the United States of America we're talking about here. Thanks to the fact that it might be disruptive to the process of doing business or Fighting Terrorists, you have no expectation of privacy anywhere.
Well, your figure there puts development of the game engine alone at, what, six months? Now, look at it from the point of view of a company making a game. That's six months where they can't use screenshots to feed a hype machine. That's another six months tacked onto their release date. Another six months for their chosen technology to become obsolete, another six months for someone else to beat them to market.
Don't you think trimming those months off the start of the development cycle is worth $250,000? They apparently do. And that's not even considering the publicity from being able to say "we use the Quake 3 engine!"
And in other news, Ashcroft today announced that the blindfold would be removed from the eyes of the statue of justice. It would be replaced with a blindfold constructed from thousand-dollar bills. MS-Nuclear-Bio-Chemical News heartily commends this initiative, and feels the policies it symbolizes it will bring a sense of fairness and equitability back into our justice system after a long absence.
No, but its a bit of an excuse. After all, they are British!
(I'm a Canadian, so I'm allowed to make that kind of joke. Eh. ;) )
The moon's gravity's too low for long-term lunar colonization to feasible. And remember, most of the moon is provably barren rock. Not only that, but the stuff's going to be creating its own crater when it lands, so you're not exactly leaving the existing terrain in pristine condition here.
Besides, as I said in another reply, we might WANT that radwaste in the future, sometime. =)
Point. And dropping it onto the moon lets us leave it, retrieve it, or move it around without worrying about damage to any sort of functioning ecosystem. The only potential problem I can see is asteroid impacts... And even then, that's not a problem if you bury it deeply enough.
Err... Doesn't a Hohmann-type transfer orbit (which, if I understand correctly, is the least expensive type of transfer orbit we've yet found) from Earth to Jupiter result in a very close (in relative terms) passage to the sun anyway? Wouldn't you just need a (relatively) small change in your orbit to plough into it instead of getting slung back out again?
I too vote for 1854-1860, which seems to me to be the first really big period of social change in the "west". Before that, things were pretty constant - even the Rennaisance and colonization didn't stir up the lives of most people too much. Then you hit the mid 1800s, the American Civil War, the start of the Industrial Revolution proper...
The other thing to note about this... TCP/IP networks are now at the point where, VIA telephony, they could completely replace the phone networks. (Especially with technologies like IPv6) And at a fraction of the cost - digitize the voice signal, compress it down to a reasonable bitrate, and transmit. Only problem - the Bells are currently making huge wads of cash from the existing infrastructure, which they wouldn't be making from an IP-based infrastructure.
And guess who controls most, if not all, of your bandwidth?
More like "discuss making controversial laws, pull millions in bribes into their own pockets."
You think this started in the 70s? Read some of your country's own history. This started in at least the 1930s, possibly even fifty or seventy-five or a hundred years before that.
Err... They'd probably be in violation of the PATRIOT act. And you're also in violation of the DMCA for circumventing a "copyright protection technology". Guess the only solution is for the government to ban generic computing devices.
Oh wait...
Sorry, I forgot that they're already planning to do that. My bad.
Not only that, but songs are usually webcast at a much lower quality than the songs you'd find on Kazaa. Which usually means pretty bad quality indeed. Good enough to compete with radio, but not nearly good enough to compete with CDs.
Of course, this ignores the fact that the RIAA has been training its customers to believe that quality doesn't really matter for years now...
This man contributed many great ideas to our field. The sad thing is how many programmers are still in ignorance of them, even now. You did great things, Mr. Dijkstra, and will be sorely missed. I just hope we're still allowed to have generic computing devices in ten years' time, so we can continue to refine and develop the revolutionary ideas you left us with.
Actually, as someone pointed out to me, you may not be allowed to rip pages out of a book. American copyright law prohibits creation of derivative works, not just their distribution. Its arguable that a book with pages ripped out is a derivative work of the original book, and thus illegal. Which is why American copyright law needs some serious common-sense revision.
Have you ever looked at a DVD? They don't. At least, not in readable text on the outside of the packaging. And because of this, despite what the MPAA might state, there is no contract when I lay down my money to purchase it. Implied or otherwise. Just like there's no contract requiring me to watch advertising when I sit down to watch TV.
Software EULAs also are not legally binding. They are contracts, and thus cannot be legally binding without a signature. (As opposed to, say, the GPL, where if you don't accept its terms, you default to the rights provided by copyright law, which do not allow for modification or redistribution) There are numerous books analyzing this, the best I've seen is The Software Conspiracy, by Mark Minasi. (If you can find a copy, that is.)
You can disclaim these warrantees (see above), but that requires an explicit agreement between the consumer and the vendor, in the form of an EULA or click wrap installer.
See, this was the problem with the UCITA as originally proposed. And it has not been fixed. It creates a default warranty for software, complete with (IIRC) default damages for bugs, security flaws, etc. Now, this would be a good thing if the damages were based on the cost of the software, which they aren't. Or if the law also didn't explicitly allow software companies to completely escape from the warranty with a tiny little clause in the presented-on-install click-through EULA... Which, incidentally, means that there's no way for most free software to disclaim warranty without compromising morals or functionality.
I'm all in favour of disposing of the practice of warranty-less software... As long as everyone has to play by the same rules. This law doesn't do that. It lets proprietary, potentially-illegal-EULA employing software companies get off the hook, while dumping a huge burden on hobbiests and those who look to freely share software. If anyone's exempted from warranty requirements, it should be those building software in their spare time, not those selling it with utterly mindboggling profit margins.
Want to bet that if the movie industry wins, the first thing they're going to push for is barring Johansen from employment in the technology field? After all, he is an Evil Terrorist Hacker!(TM)
Yes, but they don't care about that. They want control. So they ignore those people, and instead point to the much smaller group who've been downloading movies that they'll claim were ripped with DeCSS. (Never mind all the other tools out there that do it without going near DeCSS...)
How one can prove lost profits is still beyond me. "We made less money than our projections showed"? "Less than 100% of the population bought our product"? "More people bought this product from some indie studio?"
Sorry, that logic doesn't work in America, and it shouldn't work under Norwegian law either. If I don't sign a negotiable contract whose terms I can examine before I lay down my money in exchange for the disc, then they've got no legal hold on me. I'd hope the same applies under Norwegian law.
Or didn't, before the DMCA. Now they very well might.
They got him arrested in the first place with no more than a letter. I'm sure that they or their European division could arrange for some legal distraction or technicality. Though I'm also being unnecessarily pessimistic - the Norwegians could have simply been wanting to avoid having another Kaplan blindly sign off on whatever the industry shoves under their noses.
Ahhhh. And there are now two years worth of "lost" profits for the MPAA to point their fingers at?