I guess that having a book on writing device drivers will help a lot once you have an idea about the internal workings of the peripheral you're trying to support... but then there's still a bunch of companies who are either
a) paranoid enough to think that giving out specifications for the hardware they sold you is a bad idea since it might in some way lead you to, um, not having to use Windows. I don't understand the behavior of companies that refuse to document the hardware they sell for any reason but...
b) they might be one of those companies that actually don't know what their own hardware does. Which is another reason, incidentally, why they don't want to move to embedded Linux in many cases - they actually can't write drivers for the hardware they bought without reverse engineering the drivers they were given. Daft. But very funny - their suppliers do to them just what they would do to us, ie. sell them a piece of black-box hardware and refuse to answer any questions about it.
It'd be nice to be able to persuade hardware suppliers to follow O'Reilly and FDL their specifications...
The question of THE prominent scientific journal depends what your field is. Many are so narrow that there are really only one or two journals dealing with the subject at all, although there's always the possibility of getting your pet paper published in something more general.
For example, if I wrote a document about the use of quantum dots in advanced semiconductor electronics, I'd be considering getting it published in, say, Semiconductor Physics, Quantum Electronics and Optoelectronics. If that one fell through, I might rewrite it to get a more generalist angle and then send it to the American Journal of Physics.
In case anybody's wondering why scientists spend so much time trying to get published, it's not just ego. Many universities are very strict about the minimum number of publications they'll accept from their researchers - friends of mine tell me that the Uni atmosphere has become terribly competitive, since the department directors decided to evaluate employees based almost entirely on the number of publications.
Furthermore, it's a totally cruel world out there. Whatever you've heard about caring, sharing academics, it's only half true. Most people would like to work that way, but they're constrained to hide their information jealously to avoid copying by other academics. I've even heard professors asking their PhD students to lie about their current progress, to misdirect enquirers, and so on.
This sort of thing seriously holds back progress, along with the 'No cooperation without a 60% share in the winnings' attitude of many research groups. Biological research suffers terribly from this (and with it, artificial intelligence - nobody can afford to get the data required to make anything better than intelligent guesses).
I wondered if anybody had, so I took a look at the USPTO. They don't actually seem to have patented a lab coat in the last 30 years (too much prior art?), though it appears surgical drapes weren't so lucky. However, somebody has sent in an application for anti-static gloves, pens, and other stationery products.
Of course, if you actually work in a lab about half of the apparatus you use is very likely to be patented even if your lab coat isn't. The material might be this or this, unless you work with radioactive material, in which case it's likely to be this
It might have been washed using this.
You can console yourself further that you're writing with this... the point being, if you start looking for patents you realise just how many of them there are. And there probably is one on a lab coat... somewhere. There certainly was one on your fly (zip fastener- US Patent 5, 791, 023)
I just remembered reading something vaguely relevant on The Register - EU to investigate anti-trust Internet music companies. "The future of Internet music delivery has basically been put in the hands of just two companies: MusicNet, run by AOL Time Warner, EMI and Bertlesmann; and Duet, run by Sony and Vivendi". But it's likely to end in a merge between the two, not war - the two have already admitted to being in talks with one another.
If you haven't read this article already, read it; it's worth the time.
Partner with Bertelsmann AG, EMI, and RealNetworks for MusicNet
A bunch of other usual suspect movie studios like Universal Pictures, who basically have to pay AOL-Time Warner for advertising airtime (although of course they're associated with Vivendi which probably means they have power all to their own)
Books- AOL have $100 million in Amazon...
Advertising- they're the US's second-largest advertiser, apparently.
Truly awful television (Popstars 2 out this fall)
Cisco, Swatch and Oxygen (marketing alliances)
Magazine publishing (UK publisher IPC acquired for 1.1 billion UKP)
EarthLink high-speed cable, Juno and High Speed Access on their broadband systems...
The subscription video-on-demand market in Columbia, SC (with HBO)
Grab the set-top box market with AOLTV/TiVo(TM)
Oh, and a bunch of US magazines, obviously
Your local supermarket (over 12,000 retail outlets have apparently signed distribution agreements to promote AOL... including Wal-Mart...)
There's even an AOL mobile service...
A strategic alliance with Sony for the PlayStation 2 (so you can use Instant Messenger, if it ever actually works)
Chinese top computer maker Legend (joint venture)
and a whole bunch of other stuff, including sponsoring Madonna's latest world tour...
But then, their financial report for the second quarter of '01 claims that they're intending to "expand agressively", and see themselves as "The world's first internet-powered media and communications company, whose industry-leading businesses include interactive services, cable systems, publishing, music, networks and filmed entertainment".
Oh, apparently AOL 7.0 will offer a new level of convenience, ease of use and other marketdroid speak that will make the service "central to members' lives". Can't wait.
What, no Linux version? Darn. Looks like I'll have to after all.
Given that Alexander Katalov, president of Elcomsoft, is allegedly ex-KGB, I have been sneakily hoping all the way through this mess that the Adobe CEO will be found at the bottom of the river with a brand new set of concrete overshoes.
Or sent to Siberia, or whatever the KGB generally did with people they disapproved of.
Note to FBI and those with no sense of humor: this is not thought-crime. It is a joke.
But there's no point in using biometrics! I mean, for a local computer, when you can be sure that this information ie. fingerprint or whatever, really is coming from the natty little USB peripheral attached to it, it's not a particularly bad idea. Easier than remembering passwords...
OTOH there is no point in the world in using this information across the net, because it becomes just like any other hard-to-guess authentication token and can be sniffed, copied, and sent round the place... plus, once somebody's cracked it, you can't change your fingerprint/retina/DNA... which means that any network using these measurements as your identification is either a) based on a quite amazing depth of trust/independent arbitration/separate cryptographic systems or b) flawed.
Not that I spend all day thinking about these things...
Take a look at this article about the Mars Climate Orbiter.
To lose one Martin orbiter may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose a second looks like carelessness. NASA's previous Mars mishap, the loss of the $1 billion Mars Observer in 1993, was instrumental in causing the switch to more frequent, cheaper missions. But some scientists wonder if the pendulum has swung too far.
"We've been saying all along they were going to lose one of these things," says one. "With 'faster, better, cheaper' you work your people to death," agrees Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, principal investigator for Mars Polar Lander.
Problem is, if you want to make a smaller, cheaper, lighter version of a probe, 'sturdier' definitely doesn't come into it. Furthermore, when you make budget cuts on projects like this, the first thing you lose out on isn't hardware but manpower. Granted that the Russians seem to be able to take off-the-shelf parts, weld 'em together, wind up the rubber band propellant system, and end up with a working probe, but NASA isn't about to evolve the ability to work this way just because you take away their funding. It'd be more useful to get the Russians in to manage it;-)
Here's a NASA archive on the subject of the Martian meteorite... and the initial press release. It doesn't read as particularly sensational, being full of language like 'suggests that', 'is believed that' and a quote from a Dr Richard Zare, a Stanford chemistry professor, "It is very difficult to prove life existed 3.6 billion years ago on Earth, let alone on Mars."
Of course, it's still a massively controversial subject and they must have been hoping that it would be good for their funding. The press release was dated August 1996, which is certainly a good time for NASA to have been feeling a bit poor. In fact, looking at the 2000 NASA budget testimony, if the 1996 release was a bid for funding, it really didn't work very well.
I definitely see a couple of immediate uses for that data. The less important (but more useful for the majority of the universe, yeah...) is just to look up useful applications, and frankly you probably don't need to download the database for that... might be a good idea for somebody to write a client so people could browse it offline, on second thoughts. It's fairly small when gzipped (130k or so) but could be a worthy addition to a Linux distro for those who disdain Freshmeat.
The more important one would be for the licencing info- I was about to face the task of building up a database of (L)GPL'd applications manually. I'd say they've definitely saved me some effort... sure they're not all there but it's a start... thanks, guys.
On the topic of the GPL, anybody notice they've licenced this XML document under the GNU Free Document License?
I can see the press release now: 'Argh! Viral pac-men documents!'
[The DMCA] gives the *copyright holder* privileges with respect to devices that can decode the encoded work. The DMCA says a decoder is legal if it has a 'commercially significant non-infringing' use. If it's your stuff on the partition, *you* determine what non-infringing means.
Microsoft: Hmm, let's use, say, a Caesar cipher to encode the partition table. It's ours, after all.
Kernel hacker: Wow, they've garbled this file allocation table up with some stupid substitution thing, never mind, I get it.
Microsoft: Hey! We have copyright on that filesystem design! Put down our decoding algorithm before we get real cross! And stop trying to write to it! You're stealing our work by attempting to replicate the filesystem we spent months perfecting!
My point being that whilst you certainly are permitted to decode your own data, if that data doesn't belong to you but is instead, say, an integral part of the operating system (think encoded registry, FAT-equivalent, and so on) then I'm not so sure, looking at your comment, where Microsoft stand. And whilst there's no good reason to encrypt these things, you never know.
Yeah, but Windows CE 3.0 is definitely reaching its sell-by-date, don't you think?
Back when I was working in embedded systems I used to laugh at the whole concept of using Windows CE, due to the fact that it was slow, annoying to use, crashed a lot, was sluggish to control, and generally annoyed the hell out of us for an OS that only had to control a few pieces of known hardware and give about three functions (web [no java of course, no JavaScript beyond like 1.0 or something], addressbook, and something to do with the phone system).
I'd almost got them to go with the Linux solution when Microsoft went on marketing offensive and brought out their new and comparatively wonderful Windows CE version, and I had to admit it- it might have had flaws of its own but it was nothing like the last one.
The point being that Windows CE certainly is not dead overall, but reading the source code of last years' versions is like reading the source of Windows 3.11 to gain insight into the workings of '98. Not all that revealing...
I was recently reading about the new Microsoft technologies (SOAP,.NET, etc) and I have to say that it doesn't look good on the safety front. True, the whole Microsoft Passport/crypto authentication is a step in the 'right' direction, in the sense that it cuts down the amounts of software that can be run. However, I can see SOAP giving serious headaches to sysadmins in the future.
Knowing Microsoft, bugs will remain to exist in their software, ie Outlook, that nice newly discovered bug in Office XP, and so on. Presumably the same will be true of approved third party software. SOAP would appear to involve passing XML through port 80 ie as an HTTP request (not so bizarre in a sense)... which when you come to think about it means that a sysadmin (or any firewall software user) can no longer rely on blocking ports to secure a computer.
Meaning that firewall software is going to have to make more of a point of scanning for content, just, but it's strange how Microsoft manage to add 'security' by constraint whilst simultaneously messing up in the other direction. It's not going to be enough to lay down the law to software vendors about 'the highest security levels' without going into 'why we use standards and don't go off doing whatever the hell we feel like just to confuse sysadmins and break firewalls'. (This might be why Schneier seems so dubious about the measure...) Having said that, congratulations to all 170 members of the Center for Internet Security for trying - at least it gives them legitimate grounds to gripe when Microsoft open new and innovative ways to destroy PCs and deliver viruses via HTTP and email...
I had the impression from a mail on the Free-Sklyarov archive that rather than Adobe themselves providing the Rot-13'd encryption plugin, there were third parties involved.
Apparently Adobe gave out an SDK which included a 'test case' with a Rot-13 example. Some third-party company (the one that charges $3,000) added a bit of code that checks for a hardware dongle or some such, and then just used the Rot-13 code practically verbatim.
The other encryption plugins also appear to have been third party additions.
Yes and no. Most of the "dumb" distributions function as you say, but from my experience of playing with, say, Red Hat, there's a little too much scripting going on. It's sometimes very hard (without reading the entirety of/etc/rc.d/) to figure out how to change stuff by hand... or rather, you can change them, but unknown to you, Red Hat have cunningly chosen to save the original values elsewhere and restore them on reboot. Very, very annoying. Furthermore, they didn't seem to find it necessary to update the man files to explain any of that, making it (unintentionally) more complex than it was in the first place.
Very annoying: as a remedy, I chose Slackware, which sticks more or less to the absolute minimum when it comes to scripting and configuration tools. Actually, this makes it easier in some ways... particularly in that period of half-competency when you've understood what the files in/etc/ do, but you don't get bash scripting yet. At that point, Red Hat stops being userfriendly and starts being insanely frustrating.
Of course they do. The point is that in law, it is not the child themselves who deals with the issue of copyright and contracts - it is their legal guardians who do this or delegate the responsibility to somebody else ie. a lawyer or agent. You can't sign a contract with a ten year old and expect it to be legally binding.
What, then, is the point in asking them to administer copyright to their works when, until they are no longer minors, they will have no actual responsibilities in the area whatsoever? It's simply false to imply that the copyright of their work is their responsibility- at this stage, it isn't.
On the other hand, some children do learn about copyright fairly early. I recall a situation in the UK some time ago in which some famous teen or other ended up sueing their legal guardian for taking inadequate care of the money they'd made. I suppose the next step will be for the legal age of responsibility to be lowered correspondingly to make way for all this avarice, greed and possessiveness.
A couple of practical/legal points that just occurred:
Firstly, the example given in the Salon story doesn't work out anyway. If little Johnny puts (C) Johnny Bloggs, 2001 on his work, he's actually only half right - as far as I know, Johnny is legally a minor (juvenile). As such, he doesn't actually have full control over his works, in the sense that he is too young to be considered 'responsible' or able to meaningfully enter into contracts. Therefore, if this example were to be in any way meaningful, it would have to be made clear at the time that the legal guardians actually owned the copyright to the piece of work in any case.
Secondly, based on the first comment I just made, bringing IP into the classroom is likely to lead to a few complications. Teachers tend to assume that they largely have control over the childrens' work, and can publish it in newsletters, etc, maybe telling the child about it. Which is fine. But if you're going to bring IP into the forefront, the teacher should legally be forced to ask, not only the child, but the guardians who actually control the child's copyrighted works, and ask permission. Otherwise, barring agreements previously made between the child's parents and the teachers, there's no reason (other than bad taste) for the parents to refrain from sueing the school for stealing copyrighted works.
If we're going to bring IP into the classroom at all, actually getting the legal aspect wrong makes something of a mockery of the whole thing (hmm: a mockery of a joke. Brilliant).
In any case, it's true that this copyright exists whether or not little Johnny chooses to explicitly sign it onto the bottom of the page. However, to me, bringing legal matters explicitly into the lives of ten-year-old children is in extremely bad taste. They don't need it, and it's a bad precedent given that we should be teaching children the value of community, outdated and unprofitable as it is. Maybe the schools ought to all sit down together and thrash out an IP agreement between themselves and the guardians, then proceed on that basis, but for one, I'd rather it wasn't necessary.
Well, how about starting with the basic human rights (try the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and going from there? They're about as general a definition of 'right and wrong' as you're likely to find. They're also theoretically internationally agreed. Now the exact translation of all this into a coherent day-to-day policy is not something one ought to define too closely to a child.
If you can get a child to agree that those rights are basically acceptable... then you might not stop them MP3 trading. But they'll certainly have a sense of right and wrong. As for whether MP3 trading should be banned, Article 17 states:
1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
and that's about all that it has to say on the topic. The reason why MP3 trading is such a difficult one is that it really isn't clear whether one is doing harm or not. If, when you find a song you like, you then go out and buy the CD, then it seems that you didn't do harm to the record company... so they don't lose their livelihoods because you copied an MP3. If you're trading MP3s that (horrors) aren't copyrighted to any record label, then it probably comes under free speech.
For myself, I think I'd rather give a child the ability to feel their way through the rights and wrongs of that sort of problem than simply parrot the corporate line ("IP is all! Copying is Stealing! Napster is Communism!")... but hey. As a UK citizen I have to say that this is only the latest in a long string of idiotic policies from our alleged leaders and as such not surprising.
I'm amazed Microsoft haven't taken the easy way out on this one and just gone out and bought America.:)
About time that this case got resolved one way or another... by the time this one comes out, nobody's even going to be using dos-derived systems any more and Red Hat will be the new Ultimate Evil. At which point it'll all have to start over.
Slashdot Mirror
375 dates in one evening, at a conservative three minutes a date, would need 18.75 hours...
Maybe on Pluto... but it's a bit cold there to get romantic... ;-)
a) paranoid enough to think that giving out specifications for the hardware they sold you is a bad idea since it might in some way lead you to, um, not having to use Windows. I don't understand the behavior of companies that refuse to document the hardware they sell for any reason but...
b) they might be one of those companies that actually don't know what their own hardware does. Which is another reason, incidentally, why they don't want to move to embedded Linux in many cases - they actually can't write drivers for the hardware they bought without reverse engineering the drivers they were given. Daft. But very funny - their suppliers do to them just what they would do to us, ie. sell them a piece of black-box hardware and refuse to answer any questions about it.
It'd be nice to be able to persuade hardware suppliers to follow O'Reilly and FDL their specifications...
For example, if I wrote a document about the use of quantum dots in advanced semiconductor electronics, I'd be considering getting it published in, say, Semiconductor Physics, Quantum Electronics and Optoelectronics. If that one fell through, I might rewrite it to get a more generalist angle and then send it to the American Journal of Physics.
In case anybody's wondering why scientists spend so much time trying to get published, it's not just ego. Many universities are very strict about the minimum number of publications they'll accept from their researchers - friends of mine tell me that the Uni atmosphere has become terribly competitive, since the department directors decided to evaluate employees based almost entirely on the number of publications.
Furthermore, it's a totally cruel world out there. Whatever you've heard about caring, sharing academics, it's only half true. Most people would like to work that way, but they're constrained to hide their information jealously to avoid copying by other academics. I've even heard professors asking their PhD students to lie about their current progress, to misdirect enquirers, and so on.
This sort of thing seriously holds back progress, along with the 'No cooperation without a 60% share in the winnings' attitude of many research groups. Biological research suffers terribly from this (and with it, artificial intelligence - nobody can afford to get the data required to make anything better than intelligent guesses).
Of course, if you actually work in a lab about half of the apparatus you use is very likely to be patented even if your lab coat isn't. The material might be this or this, unless you work with radioactive material, in which case it's likely to be this It might have been washed using this.
You can console yourself further that you're writing with this... the point being, if you start looking for patents you realise just how many of them there are. And there probably is one on a lab coat... somewhere. There certainly was one on your fly (zip fastener- US Patent 5, 791, 023)
Patenting lab coats was yesterday's job ;-)
'Scuse the off-topicness.
I just remembered reading something vaguely relevant on The Register - EU to investigate anti-trust Internet music companies . "The future of Internet music delivery has basically been put in the hands of just two companies: MusicNet, run by AOL Time Warner, EMI and Bertlesmann; and Duet, run by Sony and Vivendi". But it's likely to end in a merge between the two, not war - the two have already admitted to being in talks with one another.
If you haven't read this article already, read it; it's worth the time.
- Online music
and Internet radio
- Partner with Bertelsmann AG, EMI, and RealNetworks for MusicNet
- A bunch of other usual suspect movie studios like Universal Pictures, who basically have to pay AOL-Time Warner for advertising airtime (although of course they're associated with Vivendi which probably means they have power all to their own)
- Books- AOL have $100 million in Amazon...
- Advertising- they're the US's second-largest advertiser, apparently.
- Truly awful television (Popstars 2 out this fall)
- Cisco, Swatch and Oxygen (marketing alliances)
- Magazine publishing (UK publisher IPC acquired for 1.1 billion UKP)
- EarthLink high-speed cable, Juno and High Speed Access on their broadband systems...
- The subscription video-on-demand market in Columbia, SC (with HBO)
- Grab the set-top box market with AOLTV/TiVo(TM)
- Oh, and a bunch of US magazines, obviously
- Your local supermarket (over 12,000 retail outlets have apparently signed distribution agreements to promote AOL... including Wal-Mart...)
- There's even an AOL mobile service...
- A strategic alliance with Sony for the PlayStation 2 (so you can use Instant Messenger, if it ever actually works)
- Chinese top computer maker Legend (joint venture)
- and a whole bunch of other stuff, including sponsoring Madonna's latest world tour...
But then, their financial report for the second quarter of '01 claims that they're intending to "expand agressively", and see themselves as "The world's first internet-powered media and communications company, whose industry-leading businesses include interactive services, cable systems, publishing, music, networks and filmed entertainment".Oh, apparently AOL 7.0 will offer a new level of convenience, ease of use and other marketdroid speak that will make the service "central to members' lives". Can't wait.
What, no Linux version? Darn. Looks like I'll have to after all.
Or sent to Siberia, or whatever the KGB generally did with people they disapproved of.
Note to FBI and those with no sense of humor: this is not thought-crime. It is a joke.
OTOH there is no point in the world in using this information across the net, because it becomes just like any other hard-to-guess authentication token and can be sniffed, copied, and sent round the place... plus, once somebody's cracked it, you can't change your fingerprint/retina/DNA... which means that any network using these measurements as your identification is either a) based on a quite amazing depth of trust/independent arbitration/separate cryptographic systems or b) flawed.
Not that I spend all day thinking about these things...
Of course, it's still a massively controversial subject and they must have been hoping that it would be good for their funding. The press release was dated August 1996, which is certainly a good time for NASA to have been feeling a bit poor. In fact, looking at the 2000 NASA budget testimony, if the 1996 release was a bid for funding, it really didn't work very well.
The more important one would be for the licencing info- I was about to face the task of building up a database of (L)GPL'd applications manually. I'd say they've definitely saved me some effort... sure they're not all there but it's a start... thanks, guys.
On the topic of the GPL, anybody notice they've licenced this XML document under the GNU Free Document License? I can see the press release now: 'Argh! Viral pac-men documents!'
Microsoft: Hmm, let's use, say, a Caesar cipher to encode the partition table. It's ours, after all.
Kernel hacker: Wow, they've garbled this file allocation table up with some stupid substitution thing, never mind, I get it.
Microsoft: Hey! We have copyright on that filesystem design! Put down our decoding algorithm before we get real cross! And stop trying to write to it! You're stealing our work by attempting to replicate the filesystem we spent months perfecting!
My point being that whilst you certainly are permitted to decode your own data, if that data doesn't belong to you but is instead, say, an integral part of the operating system (think encoded registry, FAT-equivalent, and so on) then I'm not so sure, looking at your comment, where Microsoft stand. And whilst there's no good reason to encrypt these things, you never know.
Back when I was working in embedded systems I used to laugh at the whole concept of using Windows CE, due to the fact that it was slow, annoying to use, crashed a lot, was sluggish to control, and generally annoyed the hell out of us for an OS that only had to control a few pieces of known hardware and give about three functions (web [no java of course, no JavaScript beyond like 1.0 or something], addressbook, and something to do with the phone system).
I'd almost got them to go with the Linux solution when Microsoft went on marketing offensive and brought out their new and comparatively wonderful Windows CE version, and I had to admit it- it might have had flaws of its own but it was nothing like the last one.
The point being that Windows CE certainly is not dead overall, but reading the source code of last years' versions is like reading the source of Windows 3.11 to gain insight into the workings of '98. Not all that revealing...
Knowing Microsoft, bugs will remain to exist in their software, ie Outlook, that nice newly discovered bug in Office XP, and so on. Presumably the same will be true of approved third party software. SOAP would appear to involve passing XML through port 80 ie as an HTTP request (not so bizarre in a sense)... which when you come to think about it means that a sysadmin (or any firewall software user) can no longer rely on blocking ports to secure a computer.
Meaning that firewall software is going to have to make more of a point of scanning for content, just, but it's strange how Microsoft manage to add 'security' by constraint whilst simultaneously messing up in the other direction. It's not going to be enough to lay down the law to software vendors about 'the highest security levels' without going into 'why we use standards and don't go off doing whatever the hell we feel like just to confuse sysadmins and break firewalls'. (This might be why Schneier seems so dubious about the measure...) Having said that, congratulations to all 170 members of the Center for Internet Security for trying - at least it gives them legitimate grounds to gripe when Microsoft open new and innovative ways to destroy PCs and deliver viruses via HTTP and email...
I had the impression from a mail on the Free-Sklyarov archive that rather than Adobe themselves providing the Rot-13'd encryption plugin, there were third parties involved.
Apparently Adobe gave out an SDK which included a 'test case' with a Rot-13 example. Some third-party company (the one that charges $3,000) added a bit of code that checks for a hardware dongle or some such, and then just used the Rot-13 code practically verbatim.
The other encryption plugins also appear to have been third party additions.
Very annoying: as a remedy, I chose Slackware, which sticks more or less to the absolute minimum when it comes to scripting and configuration tools. Actually, this makes it easier in some ways... particularly in that period of half-competency when you've understood what the files in /etc/ do, but you don't get bash scripting yet. At that point, Red Hat stops being userfriendly and starts being insanely frustrating.
What, then, is the point in asking them to administer copyright to their works when, until they are no longer minors, they will have no actual responsibilities in the area whatsoever? It's simply false to imply that the copyright of their work is their responsibility- at this stage, it isn't.
On the other hand, some children do learn about copyright fairly early. I recall a situation in the UK some time ago in which some famous teen or other ended up sueing their legal guardian for taking inadequate care of the money they'd made. I suppose the next step will be for the legal age of responsibility to be lowered correspondingly to make way for all this avarice, greed and possessiveness.
Firstly, the example given in the Salon story doesn't work out anyway. If little Johnny puts (C) Johnny Bloggs, 2001 on his work, he's actually only half right - as far as I know, Johnny is legally a minor (juvenile). As such, he doesn't actually have full control over his works, in the sense that he is too young to be considered 'responsible' or able to meaningfully enter into contracts. Therefore, if this example were to be in any way meaningful, it would have to be made clear at the time that the legal guardians actually owned the copyright to the piece of work in any case.
Secondly, based on the first comment I just made, bringing IP into the classroom is likely to lead to a few complications. Teachers tend to assume that they largely have control over the childrens' work, and can publish it in newsletters, etc, maybe telling the child about it. Which is fine. But if you're going to bring IP into the forefront, the teacher should legally be forced to ask, not only the child, but the guardians who actually control the child's copyrighted works, and ask permission. Otherwise, barring agreements previously made between the child's parents and the teachers, there's no reason (other than bad taste) for the parents to refrain from sueing the school for stealing copyrighted works.
If we're going to bring IP into the classroom at all, actually getting the legal aspect wrong makes something of a mockery of the whole thing (hmm: a mockery of a joke. Brilliant).
In any case, it's true that this copyright exists whether or not little Johnny chooses to explicitly sign it onto the bottom of the page. However, to me, bringing legal matters explicitly into the lives of ten-year-old children is in extremely bad taste. They don't need it, and it's a bad precedent given that we should be teaching children the value of community, outdated and unprofitable as it is. Maybe the schools ought to all sit down together and thrash out an IP agreement between themselves and the guardians, then proceed on that basis, but for one, I'd rather it wasn't necessary.
If you can get a child to agree that those rights are basically acceptable... then you might not stop them MP3 trading. But they'll certainly have a sense of right and wrong. As for whether MP3 trading should be banned, Article 17 states:
1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
and that's about all that it has to say on the topic. The reason why MP3 trading is such a difficult one is that it really isn't clear whether one is doing harm or not. If, when you find a song you like, you then go out and buy the CD, then it seems that you didn't do harm to the record company... so they don't lose their livelihoods because you copied an MP3. If you're trading MP3s that (horrors) aren't copyrighted to any record label, then it probably comes under free speech.
For myself, I think I'd rather give a child the ability to feel their way through the rights and wrongs of that sort of problem than simply parrot the corporate line ("IP is all! Copying is Stealing! Napster is Communism!")... but hey. As a UK citizen I have to say that this is only the latest in a long string of idiotic policies from our alleged leaders and as such not surprising.
About time that this case got resolved one way or another... by the time this one comes out, nobody's even going to be using dos-derived systems any more and Red Hat will be the new Ultimate Evil. At which point it'll all have to start over.