That permission is granted on submission by the Developer.
Only the copyright holder, or someone authorized by the copyright holder, can grant that permission. If someone else tries to do so, the grant is not effective.
Apple wasn't the "distributor" in this case, their AppStore was just being used as a Distribution Channel by the VLC Team. So VLC violated GPL by choosing an incompatible Distribution Channel, Apple had nothing to do with it. Stop spreading obvious lies.
That's not correct. When an end user installs an app via the App Store, software written by, deployed by, and under the control of Apple makes a copy and distributes that copy to the end user. Apple needs the permission of the copyright owner in order to do these things. 17 USC 106.
Apple is relying on the assurance of the developer of the app that he is either the copyright holder, or has the permission of the copyright owner to grant Apple permission to do those things. If the developer did not have permission, than the developer has violated his agreement with Apple, and if Apple were to get sued and have to pay damages to the copyright owner, they'd almost certainly be able to recover those damages from the developer. However, that's between Apple and the developer. The copyright owner is not required to delve into the relationship between Apple and its developers and ascertain the ultimate party that caused his copyright to be violated and try to get them to stop. He can go after anyone who is making and distributing unauthorized copies, and that includes Apple.
I wish they would do this for the Surface Pro. In a recent discussion over on/r/math on Reddit on taking digital notes, and there was a link to a math grad student's video review of Surface Pro with OneNote. It looked like it was an excellent tablet for doing serious mathematical note taking and writing.
Gabe at Penny Arcade reviewed it as a device for drawing, and was very pleased with it.
I would love a tablet that is good for those things, but not at $900.
The FSF has a definition of the term "free software".
Software under AGPL is not not free software according to that definition. It violates freedom 0.
Yet the FSF approved AGPL! This was an ethical disaster.
A key difference between free software licenses and commercial software EULAs was that the latter was a two way bargain. The copyright owner, who the law gives the exclusive right to make copies (including, for computer software, making temporary copies in RAM to use the software) grants you via the EULA permission to do that, in exchange for you agreeing not to do some things that otherwise would be allowed under copyright law. For example, you might have to agree to not reverse engineer the software, or to sell it when you are done with it.
The free software licenses, on the other hand, only grant you permissions. They do not require you to give up anything.
Until AGPL. AGPL goes beyond just granting you permission to do things that copyright law says require permission. It places restrictions on what you do with the software on your own machine. It is a EULA.
The real problem with an iPad for books, compared to a Kindle or to a paperback novel, is that the iPad hurts a lot more when you doze off reading in bed and drop it on face.
BTW, I'm really tired of seeing, as it was in this article, the BSD license described as being "more liberal" than the GPL. The *ONLY* "freedom" you get with the BSD license that you don't get with the GPL is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others. Claiming that that makes it "more liberal" is akin to saying that we had more freedom before the abolition of slavery because we hadn't had our freedom to own other people (and to treat our property in whatever manner we liked) restricted
I receive some software under GPL. Let G be the set of all things the license allows me to do with/to the software.
I receive some software under BSD. Let B be the set of all things the license allows me to do with/to the software.
Adecco registered the phrase "Around the world in 80 jobs" with the uspto, and a trademark was granted on April 13th.
Nope. Adecco filed an application on April 13th. The application then has to be examined, which typically takes several months. If it gets through that and the examiner decides to allow the mark, that will be published, and then there is a 30 day period where the public is invited to submit reasons the mark should not be granted.
Your comparison to HSBC fails because (1) HSBC was not specifically set up to facilitate money laundering and other criminal activity, and (2) the vast majority of HSBC's business is not in support of criminal activity.
It's more than that. Taxation is theft. Theft is taking of property against the will of the owner of that property. If it is your will to give this property to the state you may volunteer it; if it is not your will they *will* take it and if you refuse you will go to prison or face violence. This is clearly theft, at the point of a gun.
It's not theft because the money they are taking is not your property. Ben Franklin explained it well in his letter to Robert Morris on Christmas, 1783:
The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.
All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
Correct. Statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per song. (They can be lowered to $250 per song if the defendant proves that the infringement was innocent, which basically means proving that the defendant had no reason to believe that the material was copyrighted, which had no chance whatsoever of happening here). So, 24 songs times $750 per song is $18000. That's enough to make their point.
Thomas was a compete idiot for not taking the settlement. She knew she was guilty. She knew they had overwhelming proof. Since the minimum possible damages after losing the suit would be $18000 (hell, even if she could somehow get the lower innocent infringer rate of $250 song it would still be $6000 for 24 songs), she could only worsen her position by going to trial.
According to Ars, the average settlement offered by the RIAA is $3000 plus a written statement by the accused saying that they will not do it again (and probably a confession). That sounds reasonable next to the fines that Thomas-Rasset has been saddled with, but $3000 for $24 worth of music is still outrageous.
It was way more than $24 worth of music. This settlement offer was for all the songs she was sharing, which was around 1700 songs. When she refused and insisted that they take her to court, they only picked 24 songs to actually sue over, since there is no point whatsoever in suing over all 1700.
And even if she was able to swallow that, the written statement that they demand would put you at the RIAA's mercy if they decided to come after you again. It's no wonder that she fought this.
They would not have had grounds to come after again, assuming that she refrained from future file sharing.
The day before sentencing, he did an AMA on Reddit, and in that he said that he was sorry that he did not do more harm, and said the next time he will do much more harm.
The prosecutors saw this and brought it up at the sentencing hearing, and it is likely a factor in why he got a relatively long sentence.
Tell that to the people who were working anonymously in places like Iran to try to work for human rights, who depended on that anonymity to avoid arrest, torture, or worse at the hands of their government's security forces. They probably don't see very much heroic in releasing their names.
Tell that to Afghan civilians who did things that the Taliban opposes (like treating women as humans). US forces would make sure to keep an eye on those people during patrols, in case the Taliban found out what the civilians were doing and targeted them. Reports from those patrols included names, address, and GPS coordinates--and Manning leaked those reports.
No one will ever likely be able to prove that the leaks got any of those people killed, because any particular civilian the Taliban targets, or any particular human rights activist in Iran who gets taken away by the government, could have been found out by means other than the leaks. However, the odds are high that some have died from the leaks.
The sentences reported in press releases when someone is indicted are derived by adding up for each charge the maximum sentence that it is possible for anyone to get for that charge, and then that total is reported. That is nowhere near what the person actually faces in almost every case. There are three things under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines that greatly reduce the sentence they actually face.
First, the maximum sentence for a given count is only possible for the most severe instances of that kind of violation.
Second, priory convictions are taken into account. To get the maximum sentence, you have to pretty much be a career criminal.
Finally, felonies are divided into groups. If you are charged with multiple felonies from the same group for the same underlying acts, you will only be sentenced for one of the felonies in the group.
The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are non-binding, so it is possible for a judge to sentence someone to more than the guidelines call for, but such sentences are almost always reduced on appeal to something in accord with the Guidelines. I've not seen anything in the Sabu case that would make it an exception to this.
It's pretty clear from many of the top voted comments that most people here have no clue what Swartz was actually doing. On the off chance that some people might want to base discussion on facts, here's a nice post by a law professor who has worked, for both defense and prosecution, on these kind of cases, covering what Swartz was actually alleged to have done and analyzing the charges.
Don't assume some random Slashdot submitter's summary is accurate. According to the actual court documents, the badge they offered to let her use had the chip and electronic components removed. leaving just the empty shell.
You can't directly tie the leaks to any particular case of harm for the same reason that you can't tie cigarette smoking to any particular lung cancer death of a smoker. You can, however, determine that the chances are very high that smoking has killed people--you just can't name any particular individual.
It's the same situation with the leaks. The Taliban has a long history of seeking out and killing people that they suspect are informants. When some random informant is killed, we have no idea how the Taliban got information on that informant. It's possible the Taliban decided to go completely against all of their past behavior, and decide to not target any of the leaked informants unless they found independent corroborating evidence--and that is about as likely as every lung cancer death of a smoker being due to causes unrelated to their smoking.
They offered to settle for what worked out to around $2 or so per song shared (note: she was sharing around a couple thousand songs--the trial only concerned 24 for technical and practical reasons). That's a lot less than someone would normally pay for a license to redistribute songs to an arbitrary number of untracked people for a flat rate. Note also that even though they only sued over a small fraction of the songs she was sharing, the minimum possible statutory damages would be quite a bit larger than the settlement offer. She knew she was guilty, and should have known they could prove it, so should have jumped at such a reasonable offer.
Then, after she stupidly decided to fight, and lost, and got caught tampering with evidence and perjuring herself (things that do not endear one to a jury--the same jury that will be deciding the damages), and got hit with damages much larger than the settlement offer, the RIAA again offered to settle, again for a reasonable amount. Again she refused, got another trial, lost again, and that jury went for an even bigger amount of damages.
I believe there was a third settlement offer after that.
I question the ethics of her lawyer. I think he's putting satisfying his legal fantasy of winning a stunning case at the Supreme Court ahead of his client's best interests.
That's ridiculous. If the punishment for an illegal act is simply what it would have cost to do the act in the first place, then there is no reason to ever do the act legally. Doing it illegally always has a better expected outcome than doing it legally.
Furthermore, you didn't even calculate the costs correctly under your flawed model. $24 would be the cost to legally download 24 songs for personal listening. The cost for a license to legally download 24 songs and redistribute them to an arbitrary number of strangers for no addition fees and with no tracking or reporting requirements would be a lot more than $1/song.
It was designed to find potential infringement on consumer-oriented sharing services where people can sign up and post or stream video without any screening beforehand. On such services, the fast majority of videos that get caught will in fact be blatant infringement, not fair use.
There are two ways to stream on UStream and avoid the risk of a false positive. First, you can use the paid service, instead of the ad-supported service. They assume that people who are actually paying are probably not pirates, and disable the automated copyright checking. Second, if you are using the ad-supported service you can notify them in advance of broadcasts of this kind and they will disable the checking. The organizers of the Hugo ceremony did not do this.
The fact that the songs normally retail for $0.99 is completely irrelevant. It would perhaps be relevant if he were merely downloading songs for his own personal enjoyment. That's not, however, what he was doing. He was downloading and then redistributing.
The relevant price comparison should be to the cost of a fixed price license that allows the licensee to make unlimited copies and redistribute them without restriction to anyone in the world, with no requirement to track or report on any of this to the licensor.
That license is going to cost a lot more than $0.99 per song.
What is the point of the BSD licence? Why not just go straight to public domain (for new works)?
There is some disagreement in legal circles as to whether or not it is possible to put a work into the public domain in some countries (including the United States). In US copyright law, a work that otherwise would be copyrighted can be in the public domain because the law explicitly says it is not copyrighted (e.g., works authored by the US government) or it can be in the public domain because its copyright expired. There's nothing in there that says you can actually put a work into the public domain.
Better to go with a permissive license like BSD and be on firm ground rather than trying for public domain and having to live with uncertainty.
IMHO, the fallacy in the claim of unbreakable one-time pad encryption is the reliance that all computed plain-texts for the key space are equally possible to be the correct plain-text for the cipher text.
Imagine you are being that exists beyond time and space and can experience all possibilities at the same time. I would think that all possible computed plain-texts would mostly look a huge pile of crap, but an exceedingly few amount are going to look like something you recognize, and then one of them will look like an Apple.
Once again, that does not mean one-time pads are not very secure. They are very secure, just not truly unbreakable.
No, a one time pad with a true random key is truly unbreakable.
What you've overlooked is that when your hypothetical Godlike being sees all possible computed plain texts, that consists of every possible message of the length of the cipher text.
Note that what the Godlike being sees when he tries all possible decryptions does not depend on what the message is (other than the length). Thus, he gets absolutely no information from the cipher text (other than the length).
Try thinking about it with a small example and that should help you see it. For instance, do a 3 bit message. We've got 8 possible messages: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. Let's say you know that only 001, 010, and 100 make any sense. Alice sends to Bob the encrypted message 110.
When your Godlike being considers all possible decryptions, he gets 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111, depending on whether the key was 110, 111, 100, 101, 010, 011, 000, or 001.
So he looks at these, and picks out 001, 010, and 100 as the only meaningful messages. Now what? He has no idea which is the right message.
Now perhaps he knows that some of the meaningful messages are more likely than others. Maybe he knows that 99% of the time, Alice sends 010. So he will probably be right if he guesses that this message was 010.
However, he'd have had exactly the same chance of being right if he had guessed 010 without even looking at Alice's message!
Slashdot Mirror
That permission is granted on submission by the Developer.
Only the copyright holder, or someone authorized by the copyright holder, can grant that permission. If someone else tries to do so, the grant is not effective.
Apple wasn't the "distributor" in this case, their AppStore was just being used as a Distribution Channel by the VLC Team. So VLC violated GPL by choosing an incompatible Distribution Channel, Apple had nothing to do with it. Stop spreading obvious lies.
That's not correct. When an end user installs an app via the App Store, software written by, deployed by, and under the control of Apple makes a copy and distributes that copy to the end user. Apple needs the permission of the copyright owner in order to do these things. 17 USC 106.
Apple is relying on the assurance of the developer of the app that he is either the copyright holder, or has the permission of the copyright owner to grant Apple permission to do those things. If the developer did not have permission, than the developer has violated his agreement with Apple, and if Apple were to get sued and have to pay damages to the copyright owner, they'd almost certainly be able to recover those damages from the developer. However, that's between Apple and the developer. The copyright owner is not required to delve into the relationship between Apple and its developers and ascertain the ultimate party that caused his copyright to be violated and try to get them to stop. He can go after anyone who is making and distributing unauthorized copies, and that includes Apple.
I wish they would do this for the Surface Pro. In a recent discussion over on /r/math on Reddit on taking digital notes, and there was a link to a math grad student's video review of Surface Pro with OneNote. It looked like it was an excellent tablet for doing serious mathematical note taking and writing.
Gabe at Penny Arcade reviewed it as a device for drawing, and was very pleased with it.
I would love a tablet that is good for those things, but not at $900.
The FSF has a definition of the term "free software".
Software under AGPL is not not free software according to that definition. It violates freedom 0.
Yet the FSF approved AGPL! This was an ethical disaster.
A key difference between free software licenses and commercial software EULAs was that the latter was a two way bargain. The copyright owner, who the law gives the exclusive right to make copies (including, for computer software, making temporary copies in RAM to use the software) grants you via the EULA permission to do that, in exchange for you agreeing not to do some things that otherwise would be allowed under copyright law. For example, you might have to agree to not reverse engineer the software, or to sell it when you are done with it.
The free software licenses, on the other hand, only grant you permissions. They do not require you to give up anything.
Until AGPL. AGPL goes beyond just granting you permission to do things that copyright law says require permission. It places restrictions on what you do with the software on your own machine. It is a EULA.
They eyestrain worry is overstated.
The real problem with an iPad for books, compared to a Kindle or to a paperback novel, is that the iPad hurts a lot more when you doze off reading in bed and drop it on face.
BTW, I'm really tired of seeing, as it was in this article, the BSD license described as being "more liberal" than the GPL. The *ONLY* "freedom" you get with the BSD license that you don't get with the GPL is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others. Claiming that that makes it "more liberal" is akin to saying that we had more freedom before the abolition of slavery because we hadn't had our freedom to own other people (and to treat our property in whatever manner we liked) restricted
I receive some software under GPL. Let G be the set of all things the license allows me to do with/to the software.
I receive some software under BSD. Let B be the set of all things the license allows me to do with/to the software.
G is a strict subset of B.
Hence, B has a more liberal license than G.
Adecco registered the phrase "Around the world in 80 jobs" with the uspto, and a trademark was granted on April 13th.
Nope. Adecco filed an application on April 13th. The application then has to be examined, which typically takes several months. If it gets through that and the examiner decides to allow the mark, that will be published, and then there is a 30 day period where the public is invited to submit reasons the mark should not be granted.
Your comparison to HSBC fails because (1) HSBC was not specifically set up to facilitate money laundering and other criminal activity, and (2) the vast majority of HSBC's business is not in support of criminal activity.
It's more than that. Taxation is theft. Theft is taking of property against the will of the owner of that property. If it is your will to give this property to the state you may volunteer it; if it is not your will they *will* take it and if you refuse you will go to prison or face violence. This is clearly theft, at the point of a gun.
It's not theft because the money they are taking is not your property. Ben Franklin explained it well in his letter to Robert Morris on Christmas, 1783:
The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.
All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
Correct. Statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per song. (They can be lowered to $250 per song if the defendant proves that the infringement was innocent, which basically means proving that the defendant had no reason to believe that the material was copyrighted, which had no chance whatsoever of happening here). So, 24 songs times $750 per song is $18000. That's enough to make their point.
Thomas was a compete idiot for not taking the settlement. She knew she was guilty. She knew they had overwhelming proof. Since the minimum possible damages after losing the suit would be $18000 (hell, even if she could somehow get the lower innocent infringer rate of $250 song it would still be $6000 for 24 songs), she could only worsen her position by going to trial.
According to Ars, the average settlement offered by the RIAA is $3000 plus a written statement by the accused saying that they will not do it again (and probably a confession). That sounds reasonable next to the fines that Thomas-Rasset has been saddled with, but $3000 for $24 worth of music is still outrageous.
It was way more than $24 worth of music. This settlement offer was for all the songs she was sharing, which was around 1700 songs. When she refused and insisted that they take her to court, they only picked 24 songs to actually sue over, since there is no point whatsoever in suing over all 1700.
And even if she was able to swallow that, the written statement that they demand would put you at the RIAA's mercy if they decided to come after you again. It's no wonder that she fought this.
They would not have had grounds to come after again, assuming that she refrained from future file sharing.
The RIAA offered to settle for around $2 to $3 per song shared, and she refused.
The day before sentencing, he did an AMA on Reddit, and in that he said that he was sorry that he did not do more harm, and said the next time he will do much more harm.
The prosecutors saw this and brought it up at the sentencing hearing, and it is likely a factor in why he got a relatively long sentence.
Tell that to the people who were working anonymously in places like Iran to try to work for human rights, who depended on that anonymity to avoid arrest, torture, or worse at the hands of their government's security forces. They probably don't see very much heroic in releasing their names.
Tell that to Afghan civilians who did things that the Taliban opposes (like treating women as humans). US forces would make sure to keep an eye on those people during patrols, in case the Taliban found out what the civilians were doing and targeted them. Reports from those patrols included names, address, and GPS coordinates--and Manning leaked those reports.
No one will ever likely be able to prove that the leaks got any of those people killed, because any particular civilian the Taliban targets, or any particular human rights activist in Iran who gets taken away by the government, could have been found out by means other than the leaks. However, the odds are high that some have died from the leaks.
The sentences reported in press releases when someone is indicted are derived by adding up for each charge the maximum sentence that it is possible for anyone to get for that charge, and then that total is reported. That is nowhere near what the person actually faces in almost every case. There are three things under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines that greatly reduce the sentence they actually face.
First, the maximum sentence for a given count is only possible for the most severe instances of that kind of violation.
Second, priory convictions are taken into account. To get the maximum sentence, you have to pretty much be a career criminal.
Finally, felonies are divided into groups. If you are charged with multiple felonies from the same group for the same underlying acts, you will only be sentenced for one of the felonies in the group.
The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are non-binding, so it is possible for a judge to sentence someone to more than the guidelines call for, but such sentences are almost always reduced on appeal to something in accord with the Guidelines. I've not seen anything in the Sabu case that would make it an exception to this.
It's pretty clear from many of the top voted comments that most people here have no clue what Swartz was actually doing. On the off chance that some people might want to base discussion on facts, here's a nice post by a law professor who has worked, for both defense and prosecution, on these kind of cases, covering what Swartz was actually alleged to have done and analyzing the charges.
Don't assume some random Slashdot submitter's summary is accurate. According to the actual court documents, the badge they offered to let her use had the chip and electronic components removed. leaving just the empty shell.
You can't directly tie the leaks to any particular case of harm for the same reason that you can't tie cigarette smoking to any particular lung cancer death of a smoker. You can, however, determine that the chances are very high that smoking has killed people--you just can't name any particular individual.
It's the same situation with the leaks. The Taliban has a long history of seeking out and killing people that they suspect are informants. When some random informant is killed, we have no idea how the Taliban got information on that informant. It's possible the Taliban decided to go completely against all of their past behavior, and decide to not target any of the leaked informants unless they found independent corroborating evidence--and that is about as likely as every lung cancer death of a smoker being due to causes unrelated to their smoking.
They offered to settle for what worked out to around $2 or so per song shared (note: she was sharing around a couple thousand songs--the trial only concerned 24 for technical and practical reasons). That's a lot less than someone would normally pay for a license to redistribute songs to an arbitrary number of untracked people for a flat rate. Note also that even though they only sued over a small fraction of the songs she was sharing, the minimum possible statutory damages would be quite a bit larger than the settlement offer. She knew she was guilty, and should have known they could prove it, so should have jumped at such a reasonable offer.
Then, after she stupidly decided to fight, and lost, and got caught tampering with evidence and perjuring herself (things that do not endear one to a jury--the same jury that will be deciding the damages), and got hit with damages much larger than the settlement offer, the RIAA again offered to settle, again for a reasonable amount. Again she refused, got another trial, lost again, and that jury went for an even bigger amount of damages.
I believe there was a third settlement offer after that.
I question the ethics of her lawyer. I think he's putting satisfying his legal fantasy of winning a stunning case at the Supreme Court ahead of his client's best interests.
She owes about $24.
That's ridiculous. If the punishment for an illegal act is simply what it would have cost to do the act in the first place, then there is no reason to ever do the act legally. Doing it illegally always has a better expected outcome than doing it legally.
Furthermore, you didn't even calculate the costs correctly under your flawed model. $24 would be the cost to legally download 24 songs for personal listening. The cost for a license to legally download 24 songs and redistribute them to an arbitrary number of strangers for no addition fees and with no tracking or reporting requirements would be a lot more than $1/song.
No serious neckbeard used a 300 baud modem. The modem of choice was the Telebit Trailblazer.
It was designed to find potential infringement on consumer-oriented sharing services where people can sign up and post or stream video without any screening beforehand. On such services, the fast majority of videos that get caught will in fact be blatant infringement, not fair use.
There are two ways to stream on UStream and avoid the risk of a false positive. First, you can use the paid service, instead of the ad-supported service. They assume that people who are actually paying are probably not pirates, and disable the automated copyright checking. Second, if you are using the ad-supported service you can notify them in advance of broadcasts of this kind and they will disable the checking. The organizers of the Hugo ceremony did not do this.
The fact that the songs normally retail for $0.99 is completely irrelevant. It would perhaps be relevant if he were merely downloading songs for his own personal enjoyment. That's not, however, what he was doing. He was downloading and then redistributing.
The relevant price comparison should be to the cost of a fixed price license that allows the licensee to make unlimited copies and redistribute them without restriction to anyone in the world, with no requirement to track or report on any of this to the licensor.
That license is going to cost a lot more than $0.99 per song.
What is the point of the BSD licence? Why not just go straight to public domain (for new works)?
There is some disagreement in legal circles as to whether or not it is possible to put a work into the public domain in some countries (including the United States). In US copyright law, a work that otherwise would be copyrighted can be in the public domain because the law explicitly says it is not copyrighted (e.g., works authored by the US government) or it can be in the public domain because its copyright expired. There's nothing in there that says you can actually put a work into the public domain.
Better to go with a permissive license like BSD and be on firm ground rather than trying for public domain and having to live with uncertainty.
IMHO, the fallacy in the claim of unbreakable one-time pad encryption is the reliance that all computed plain-texts for the key space are equally possible to be the correct plain-text for the cipher text.
Imagine you are being that exists beyond time and space and can experience all possibilities at the same time. I would think that all possible computed plain-texts would mostly look a huge pile of crap, but an exceedingly few amount are going to look like something you recognize, and then one of them will look like an Apple.
Once again, that does not mean one-time pads are not very secure. They are very secure, just not truly unbreakable.
No, a one time pad with a true random key is truly unbreakable.
What you've overlooked is that when your hypothetical Godlike being sees all possible computed plain texts, that consists of every possible message of the length of the cipher text.
Note that what the Godlike being sees when he tries all possible decryptions does not depend on what the message is (other than the length). Thus, he gets absolutely no information from the cipher text (other than the length).
Try thinking about it with a small example and that should help you see it. For instance, do a 3 bit message. We've got 8 possible messages: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. Let's say you know that only 001, 010, and 100 make any sense. Alice sends to Bob the encrypted message 110.
When your Godlike being considers all possible decryptions, he gets 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111, depending on whether the key was 110, 111, 100, 101, 010, 011, 000, or 001.
So he looks at these, and picks out 001, 010, and 100 as the only meaningful messages. Now what? He has no idea which is the right message.
Now perhaps he knows that some of the meaningful messages are more likely than others. Maybe he knows that 99% of the time, Alice sends 010. So he will probably be right if he guesses that this message was 010.
However, he'd have had exactly the same chance of being right if he had guessed 010 without even looking at Alice's message!