mainly they're trying to clean up ambiguities in
the orginal specifications which have become apparent over the past 20 years or so, and which occasionally caused interoperability problems. they're also trying to discourage some things which have been found to work poorly in practice.
if this is what I think it is, I developed and demonstrated a similar system back in 1995.
there's probably some published prior art.
maybe what we need is a lawsuit
against the USPTO for irresponsibly ignoring
the criteria set by statute and precendent
and continuiously awarding trivial patents.
it is not inherently unethical to break copyright law. laws are made up by elected officials, who can hardly claim to be examples of virtue or ethical conduct that the rest of us should follow. rather, the law merely says that there are penalties associated with certain activities regardless of whether those activities are ethical or not.
intellectual property isn't property in a real sense. the notion of tangible property is a natural one, because it is the nature of most tangible property that it cannot be used for multiple purposes at once. it's useful to have the concept of ownership attached to tangible property, because otherwise a great many disputes would arise from conflicts over who can use that property.
intellectual content is different in several ways.
the concept of exclusion doesn't apply - multiple people can be using the same content at one time.
neither do the laws of supply and demand apply -
unlike tangible property, intellectual property is often made more valuable when a greater number of people are using it. furthermore, copying of intellectual property serves a socially valuable function that is not served by theft of tangible property. which is not to say that copying is inherently defensible in all cases,just that it's not the same thing as theft. it has different economic and social effects.
the idea of copyright comes from an age where it was expensive to publish things, and few people had that capability. in order to provide some protection to the authors of works from rampant copying, governments made publishers (owners of printing presses) responsible for securing permission from authors. this worked entirely because with the technology of the time there were inherently few publishers and because they had large investments in equipment and material that they needed to protect. copyright was never an inherent right in the same sense as ownership of tangible property - it was just a mechanism to provide some incentive to authors to produce new works. it was based on the economic and technological realities of the time which no longer apply.
recent changes in technology have made copyright obsolete. yet governments, lawyers, and media houses insist that this obsolete mechanism is still in the interests of society, despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. meanwhile they are doing their best to erode various measures (such as "fair use" and the doctrine of first sale) which were intended to help strike a balance between the interests of creators and the interests of society.
you might be fined for breaking copyright laws.
you might even go to jail if you break the DMCA.
but that doesn't mean it's unethical.
it just means that we're being threatened with
loss of money or freedom for doing what are sometimes perfectly reasonable activities.
it's perfectly reasonable and natural to share music and films with your friends, even if you do so over the net. this is part of the exchange of ideas in which we are all privileged to participate, every bit as much as the creation of the work itself. creators need some ability to be compensated for their works (if they are in demand) but that's hardly tantamount to giving them the ability to control how their work sare used or to demand tribute everytime someone wants to share the experience of that work with a friend.
we need to find another point of balance. existing notions of copyright don't serve us anymore, and need to be discarded. it's not unethical to challenge these notions; rather, it's essential that we do so.
one problem with schemes like this is that compared to IP routing, DNS is much slower,
less reliable, and more prone to misconfiguration.
for another approach to solving the address exhaustion problem in the context of NATs, see RFC 3056 and draft-moore-6overnat-00.txt.
NSI is doing this because they see a potential
market for non-ASCII names in the domains that
they control. which is hardly surprising.
the problem is that there are still a lot of
technical details that need to be worked out
regarding how internationalized domain names
should work. some of these details might
end up limiting the kinds of names that should
be registered, or specify that registrations
for two different spellings/encodings of
what looks like the same name should not
both be accepted. (the technical definition
of "looks like the same" is still being debated)
if NSI starts accepting registration of
internationalized domain names before these
details are worked out, they are inviting
trouble.
this is just another example of why.COM,.NET
and.ORG need to be taken away from NSI and
put in the hands of a group that will act
responsibly.
the fact that some congressmen think you should go to jail for doing something doesn't mean it's immoral. the idea that politicans are somehow moral beacons for the rest of us strikes me as hilarious. and just because the music industry jumps up and down whenever they think they might lose some control over artistic expression doesn't mean that they deserve to have that control. and just because napster and its cousins can be used to violate copyright doesn't mean that this is their only purpose.
this is nothing new. the music industry has a long history of grossly exaggerating and misrepresenting the legality and effects of any copying. they are spreading FUD in a desperate attempt to keep their monopolies. ~20 years ago they took out advertisements about "the home taping bite" claiming that people recording casette tapes were bilking them out of billions per year. Go look at Billboard magazines from the early 1980s if you want to see examples. those claims were lies, and the music industry's current claims about mp3 are also lies. let's stamp out the riaa in our lifetime. (along with dvd cca, mpaa, ascap, bmi, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
mainly they're trying to clean up ambiguities in the orginal specifications which have become apparent over the past 20 years or so, and which occasionally caused interoperability problems. they're also trying to discourage some things which have been found to work poorly in practice.
RFC 821 still applies for things that RFC 2821 doesn't specify - like SMTP over X.25. For most
purposes, RFC 2821 supersedes RFC 821.
if this is what I think it is, I developed and demonstrated a similar system back in 1995. there's probably some published prior art. maybe what we need is a lawsuit against the USPTO for irresponsibly ignoring the criteria set by statute and precendent and continuiously awarding trivial patents.
you seem to have confused ethics and legality.
it is not inherently unethical to break copyright law. laws are made up by elected officials, who can hardly claim to be examples of virtue or ethical conduct that the rest of us should follow. rather, the law merely says that there are penalties associated with certain activities regardless of whether those activities are ethical or not.
intellectual property isn't property in a real sense. the notion of tangible property is a natural one, because it is the nature of most tangible property that it cannot be used for multiple purposes at once. it's useful to have the concept of ownership attached to tangible property, because otherwise a great many disputes would arise from conflicts over who can use that property.
intellectual content is different in several ways.
the concept of exclusion doesn't apply - multiple people can be using the same content at one time.
neither do the laws of supply and demand apply -
unlike tangible property, intellectual property is often made more valuable when a greater number of people are using it. furthermore, copying of intellectual property serves a socially valuable function that is not served by theft of tangible property. which is not to say that copying is inherently defensible in all cases,just that it's not the same thing as theft. it has different economic and social effects.
the idea of copyright comes from an age where it was expensive to publish things, and few people had that capability. in order to provide some protection to the authors of works from rampant copying, governments made publishers (owners of printing presses) responsible for securing permission from authors. this worked entirely because with the technology of the time there were inherently few publishers and because they had large investments in equipment and material that they needed to protect. copyright was never an inherent right in the same sense as ownership of tangible property - it was just a mechanism to provide some incentive to authors to produce new works. it was based on the economic and technological realities of the time which no longer apply.
recent changes in technology have made copyright obsolete. yet governments, lawyers, and media houses insist that this obsolete mechanism is still in the interests of society, despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. meanwhile they are doing their best to erode various measures (such as "fair use" and the doctrine of first sale) which were intended to help strike a balance between the interests of creators and the interests of society.
you might be fined for breaking copyright laws.
you might even go to jail if you break the DMCA.
but that doesn't mean it's unethical.
it just means that we're being threatened with
loss of money or freedom for doing what are sometimes perfectly reasonable activities.
it's perfectly reasonable and natural to share music and films with your friends, even if you do so over the net. this is part of the exchange of ideas in which we are all privileged to participate, every bit as much as the creation of the work itself. creators need some ability to be compensated for their works (if they are in demand) but that's hardly tantamount to giving them the ability to control how their work sare used or to demand tribute everytime someone wants to share the experience of that work with a friend.
we need to find another point of balance. existing notions of copyright don't serve us anymore, and need to be discarded. it's not unethical to challenge these notions; rather, it's essential that we do so.
one problem with schemes like this is that compared to IP routing, DNS is much slower, less reliable, and more prone to misconfiguration. for another approach to solving the address exhaustion problem in the context of NATs, see RFC 3056 and draft-moore-6overnat-00.txt.
if NSI starts accepting registration of internationalized domain names before these details are worked out, they are inviting trouble.
this is just another example of why .COM, .NET
and .ORG need to be taken away from NSI and
put in the hands of a group that will act
responsibly.
the fact that some congressmen think you should go to jail for doing something doesn't mean it's immoral. the idea that politicans are somehow moral beacons for the rest of us strikes me as hilarious. and just because the music industry jumps up and down whenever they think they might lose some control over artistic expression doesn't mean that they deserve to have that control. and just because napster and its cousins can be used to violate copyright doesn't mean that this is their only purpose.
this is nothing new. the music industry has a long history of grossly exaggerating and misrepresenting the legality and effects of any copying. they are spreading FUD in a desperate attempt to keep their monopolies. ~20 years ago they took out advertisements about "the home taping bite" claiming that people recording casette tapes were bilking them out of billions per year. Go look at Billboard magazines from the early 1980s if you want to see examples. those claims were lies, and the music industry's current claims about mp3 are also lies. let's stamp out the riaa in our lifetime. (along with dvd cca, mpaa, ascap, bmi, etc.)