It's not that they didn't know that it would piss people off if they understood what was going on. It was that they figured that they could pull the wool over the customers' eyes... Like the President of Sony/BMI was saying "It's not like the average consumer knows what a root kit is, anyways, so why should they care?. (paraphrase)
What they missed was the possibility that, once the geeks figured out what was going on, that they could explain it to the masses in a way that they could understand just how badly Sony is treating everybody.
After agreeing to a recall, Sony BMG said Friday it would let customers who have already purchased CDs to mail them back, postage free, for a replacement.
No sweat off of Sony's back. I'm betting that the full cost of this initiative is coming out of the artists' royalty cheques.
'Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but [many] browsing sessions during class may actually lead to higher grades.'
My reading is that: Long browsing sessions are probably associated with something completely unrelated to the class -- and a distraction from it. While many browsing sessions probably indicate that the student is looking up stuff related to what the instructor is talking about in the moment.
As a friend of mine once said: "It's not what you have, that matters -- it's knowing how to use it."
I don't know the legal term for it, but I'll call it co-conspirator liabiity -- where, If you rob a bank, for instance, and your co-conspirator kills a bank clerk, you're still open to first-degree-murder charges because the killing was part of a larger crime that you took part in. I would think/hope that Sony would be liable 'jointly and severally' with F4I for the copyright violation of this code. They can fight between themselves over who can afford to pay what of the $2billion in statutory damages.
Definitely, the suit over this should be filed in a state where spyware is explicitly illegal.
Jon wrote code that was designed and widely used for copyright infringement[0].
People who do serious copyright infringement bit-copy the DVD's and photocy the covers. They don't need DECSS. Jon didn't write his code to violate copyright. He wrote it so that he could legally view a DVD that he had legally paid good money for. It's known as "fair use" in certain corners of the world.
... people who buy DVD's do so under certain terms (including use on licensed players).
I don't remember the store clerk asking me to sign any contracts giving away my rights the last time I handed over my hard-earned cash to buy a DVD or CD.
Last time I looked, playing a legitimately purchased DVD on my Linux box in the privacy of my home fit firmly under "Fair Use".
It's like wearing a Fireman's suit in a Fuel Air Explosives explosion.... It'll help, but you're far better off getting rid of (or at least defusing) the bomb.
It doesn't change the fact that software patents (and, probably, most of the recent non software patents, as well) need to go the way of arbitrary search and siezure and star-chamber trials -- but it still helps.
If I were here, I'd not only refuse to settle, I'd file a countersuit.
If their actions have placed her kids at risk and (been part of what) led her to spend the expense and time of putting up the website to document their illegal actions, that should be just cause for a countersuit against them.
Sue them for direct costs, her time (at a consulting rate of $60/hour), and punitive damages of $2Million. If they have said anything public about the suit (like claiming that she lied), then she can also countersue for libel. (In Canada, You can't sue for statements made in court or court documents,
but you can sue for what's said on the courtroom steps before or after you file.)
Might as well negotiate first... It doesn't do much harm (although the opening of negotiations might be done with a 'friendly' letter from a lawyer, so it's on the record that they are informed of the violation).
Thing is, if they think that they can successfully litigate you into oblivion, they might just try and do that rather than settle (or they may offer way more less than what the patent is worth.
People are noticing, but too many of them are pretending/ believing that they can't do anything about it. The point to get out is that returning the defective goods and refusing to buy any more really will have an impact on the companies doing this.
(also that there are some very interesting (and often more cost-effective) alternatives to the big-media entertainment sources)
DRM is something that users will NEVER understand to the level that gets you enough people to make a boycott effective.
If it breaks functionality, people will start to notice. It's up to us geeks to get the meme out there that things are breaking because the manufacturers are delivering hostile software.
IF we can get them to understand this, they will start screaming. If there's enough screaming, the manufacturers will start to back off.
And don't go for 'the weakest form of DRM possible' -- Make it all-or-nothing. Like the one poster said.. Choosing your preferred DRM is like choosing your preferred venereal disease.
Hitch-hiker's guide to the Solar System
on
Space Lichens
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Some forms of lichen can be used as a towel in an emergency.
This happened before with games and other software in the '80s They tried some seriously intrusive copy protection and found that it just angered their good customers and cut into sales, so now copy protection on games is pretty pedestrian and generally kept minimal.
If people walk away from DRM media, and tell their friends to do the same thing, then they'll go away. Period. If people blindly let themselves get suckered into this process and put up with it, then they'll continue to get shafted.
You get what you put up with. it was true when workers struck against nasty employer tactics in the '20s and '30s and it's true now with DRM. When people stopped putting up with the nasty stuff, the laws finally got changed to something that recognized the source of the unrest.
I got a DB failure, so I'm putting up the body text from the site.
if you want to read the 75 or so responses posted to his blog, you're out of luck here...
________
The latest episode in the war between music companies and their paying customers (the one where Sony decides it's OK to surreptitiously take over your PC so you can't make a copy of the music you thought you bought from them) has finally pushed me over the edge.
I've been a big buyer of prerecorded 'media' for over 35 years. I have two or three hundred vinyl LPs, several dozen 45's, a hundred or so audio cassettes, and roughly 60 prerecorded reel-to-reel tapes. They are jammed in my closet with a couple hundred VHS tapes, 450 CDs, and 500-odd DVDs. (Mercifully, I skipped the 8-track, Betamax and laserdisc formats.)
< image >
media closet
Part of my media collection
I have to believe the record companies and movie studios would consider me a good customer. But with every day that passes it becomes more and more obvious that the greedy bastards who run these media companies prefer to treat me (and all their customers) like criminals. They continually expect us to pay more for less, and even then they are not satisfied. They want to pretend to 'sell' us their product, but they don't want us to actually have it. Well I've had enough.
From this day forward I will never spend a another dime on content that I can't use the way I please. If I can't copy it to my hard drive and play it using the devices I want, when and where I want, I won't be buying it. Period.
They can all take their DRM, and their broadcast flags, and their rootkits, and their Compact Discs that aren't really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-lines.
Might as well give the proper example inline while you're at it (for the many newbies here)...
word2opendoc < office.doc > opendoc.doc
And I wouldn't call MS's claim that they'd have to open-source MS-Word to implement ODF FUD. It's an outright lie.
Even more than that, OpenOffice is LGPL, which means that a company could compile in proprietary extensions to OpenOffice, (like SUN does to make StarOffice), and not have to open-source their extensions -- an opportunity that a small company would never have with Microsoft Office.
If you want to get some money out of MS, your best course of action is probably negotiations. Even most litigation is ultimately decided by negotiation rather than the judge.
That having been said, a legitimate plan and ability to survive long enough to win a full-out court battle (normally measured in years) would probably be a necessity in order to get MS to pay out. One company reduced itself to little more than a litigation shell that did nothing more than run the lawsuit for years in order to win against MS.
Unless you're big enough that you can manage a major lawsuit and get on with your 'real' business, I'd say that spinning off a company just for the purposes of the lawsuit(and even negotiations) is at least worth considering.
Let's say that Microsoft likes your idea and wants to.... uhm, use it. They would have at least 5 choices (in order of your probable preferences).
They could notice that you have a patent, and decide not to.... (right!).
They could license the rights from you. This is sometimes known as 'a deal with the devil'. Many a company has been burned by some wierd technicality that Microsoft places in such licensing agreements, and if they violate the agreement, you end up at option #5.
They could find a way around your patent (they have enough lawyers and programmers that this is a real possibility).
They could sue your for breaking any of their Thousands of (sometimes trivial) patents and simply litigate you into oblivion.
They could violate your patent (possibly also a non-disclosure agreement signed under the guise of #2) and let you decide if you want to sue them, risking a counter-suit (see #3) and scaring off investors.
Current patent law really only serves the really big companies. Unfortunately, it's the smaller companies that tend to be the source of most innovation. -- Most of Microsoft's big 'innovations' came from small companies [[ the biggest exception would be windows, which was lifted from Apple ]]
If you look at Microsoft's Office XML Reference Schema License, you will see that it has massive restrictions on what you can do with it. You are only allowed to read and write. Things like editing are not included (and even seem to be explicitly excluded. Microsoft may be able to deny the license for anybody for any non-governmental uses, and, in any event, they can make your whole license invalid by modifying the schema on the next iteration of Office (including, possibly even the first official release of office 12).
It may also be possible that they could force your customers to register for the right to use your software (so they know who to 'go after', in cutting off your air supply).
And, of course, if your company gets bought out, your license disappears.
I can see lenders and shareholders running screaming from any business that embarks on a major undertaking, having accepted these terms. You would have to be either foolish or desparate to do so unless you could recoup the full cost of your endeavor with your first contract (which could raise the cost of your contract, making you non-competetive).
Unlike the ODF, which (contrary to MS's FUD) does not place any restrictions on a company using it(*), Microsoft's XML license would leave any company accepting it at the abject mercy of a convicted monopolist.
Good luck. You'll need it.
(*)Unlike KOffice (which also implements ODF), Open Office is LGPL, which means that a company could legaly compile in proprietary extensions to OO without having to release their own code. That is, in fact, precisely what SUN does with StarOffice. This opens up opportunities for local vendors that would never be available under MS-Office.
I'm thinking that it's got something to do with the the recent annoucement that Suse is standardizing on GNOME. I think that the reference to "lots of good people in the Ximian group" is a reference to that.... I'm guessing that the KDE hackers are feeling a little bit left out at the moment.
He may have figured that the combination of a powerful KDE group and a powerful Gnome group would have left the Novell linux group with a powerful one-two punch, but now the two punch (that his group was expecting to deliver) has been pulled behind the back.
Looking at the logs for one of my sites (for all of the entries from the mcafee site other than bare directory scans), I'm finding 31 hits from 4 sites with the first being October 6. All seem to have returned 404 errors.
So, something is hunting for vulnerable scripts (no big shock), but it seems far from rampant.
on the other hand, a friend of mine runs a multi-hosting site with a couple of hundred customers, and we've had to do multiple sweeps for people running out of date scritpts with holes in them that have been exploited (and then had to hunt down and clean up the resulting exploitation). Some of the customers respond to our warning messages. Others ignore the warnings and just blindly re-enable the broken scripts.
These are definitely user issues, not Linux issues. If you install and run a program you really are responsible for making sure that it's safe. Beyond a certain point, the OS can't protect you from your own stupidity.
On the other hand, if the exploit then finds a local root exploit, then I'd call that a Linux problem.
As far as I'm concerned, the distributor is responsible for holes in a default installation -- Those are often done by newbies who may not even know that a vulnerable service is running on his/her box (or even what a service is).
When you start installing add-on programs and remote scripts, their default forms are pretty much the responsibility of the people who make them available (modulo any explicit warnings they give an installer). The user, however is ultimately responsible for what he adds to his system.
If enough countries sign a treaty, it becomes in international force.
There is, of course the final arbiter of international affairs
Them's as has the biggest / best / most guns wins.
You have to, at some point be able to back up your claim to ownership, and the lunar embassy has absolutely nothing to back up their claim besides their bald explanations. They also have very contradictary claims -- like claiming to be exempt because they're not a government, but then claiming to be the lunar/martian/venusian embasy, handing out passports, etc.
If somebody plops down on a patch of land claimed by the Lunar Embasy, and starts digging for Oxygen, or tritrium there is absolutely nothing that the Lunar embasy can do about it besides huff and puff. That is propably the most fatal of many fatal flaws in their scheme.
Hope thinks a loophole exists in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty, which forbids governments from owning extraterrestrial property but fails to mention corporations or individuals.
That's because a corporation or person can only own land in the context of government ownership -- that's why The Dutchy of Freeland exists (whatever legal name they give it) -- If they existed as a corporation sans-government, then England would have had the recognized right (under the doctrine of terra-nullis) to override the claim to the platform and re-assert sovereignty.
This would also apply to the Lunar Embasy and it's claims.
On the other hand, if the Lunar Embasy claims to to the embasy for a government that 'owns' the moon, then it falls (and fails) under the treaty.
This is a rather old (IBM in the '70s) trick -- promise a new product that will do everything, including cleaning the kitchen sink -- and it's due in a year or so.... or 6 months... real soon now.
It's used as the eternal carrot... to keep the CTO from moving to a competetor's product that's already there and better. As long as 'real soon now' continues to inch ever closer, you can keep this up for an incredible length of time.
The mantra is: It's easier to stay with our junky product for X months than to go through the pain of migrating to their superior product. -- then, 6 months later, it's X-2 months.
If it finally comes out missing a couple of promised features (cut because 'we had to finally ship something!'), that's OK because it'll be in the next release ((due in X months).
Rinse-repeat.
Slashdot Mirror
What they missed was the possibility that, once the geeks figured out what was going on, that they could explain it to the masses in a way that they could understand just how badly Sony is treating everybody.
No sweat off of Sony's back. I'm betting that the full cost of this initiative is coming out of the artists' royalty cheques.
My reading is that: Long browsing sessions are probably associated with something completely unrelated to the class -- and a distraction from it. While many browsing sessions probably indicate that the student is looking up stuff related to what the instructor is talking about in the moment.
As a friend of mine once said: "It's not what you have, that matters -- it's knowing how to use it."
Definitely, the suit over this should be filed in a state where spyware is explicitly illegal.
People who do serious copyright infringement bit-copy the DVD's and photocy the covers. They don't need DECSS. Jon didn't write his code to violate copyright. He wrote it so that he could legally view a DVD that he had legally paid good money for. It's known as "fair use" in certain corners of the world.
I don't remember the store clerk asking me to sign any contracts giving away my rights the last time I handed over my hard-earned cash to buy a DVD or CD. Last time I looked, playing a legitimately purchased DVD on my Linux box in the privacy of my home fit firmly under "Fair Use".
It doesn't change the fact that software patents (and, probably, most of the recent non software patents, as well) need to go the way of arbitrary search and siezure and star-chamber trials -- but it still helps.
If their actions have placed her kids at risk and (been part of what) led her to spend the expense and time of putting up the website to document their illegal actions, that should be just cause for a countersuit against them.
Sue them for direct costs, her time (at a consulting rate of $60/hour), and punitive damages of $2Million. If they have said anything public about the suit (like claiming that she lied), then she can also countersue for libel. (In Canada, You can't sue for statements made in court or court documents, but you can sue for what's said on the courtroom steps before or after you file.)
Thing is, if they think that they can successfully litigate you into oblivion, they might just try and do that rather than settle (or they may offer way more less than what the patent is worth.
(also that there are some very interesting (and often more cost-effective) alternatives to the big-media entertainment sources)
If it breaks functionality, people will start to notice. It's up to us geeks to get the meme out there that things are breaking because the manufacturers are delivering hostile software. IF we can get them to understand this, they will start screaming. If there's enough screaming, the manufacturers will start to back off.
And don't go for 'the weakest form of DRM possible' -- Make it all-or-nothing. Like the one poster said.. Choosing your preferred DRM is like choosing your preferred venereal disease.
Some forms of lichen can be used as a towel in an emergency.
If people walk away from DRM media, and tell their friends to do the same thing, then they'll go away. Period. If people blindly let themselves get suckered into this process and put up with it, then they'll continue to get shafted.
You get what you put up with. it was true when workers struck against nasty employer tactics in the '20s and '30s and it's true now with DRM. When people stopped putting up with the nasty stuff, the laws finally got changed to something that recognized the source of the unrest.
if you want to read the 75 or so responses posted to his blog, you're out of luck here...
________
The latest episode in the war between music companies and their paying customers (the one where Sony decides it's OK to surreptitiously take over your PC so you can't make a copy of the music you thought you bought from them) has finally pushed me over the edge.
I've been a big buyer of prerecorded 'media' for over 35 years. I have two or three hundred vinyl LPs, several dozen 45's, a hundred or so audio cassettes, and roughly 60 prerecorded reel-to-reel tapes. They are jammed in my closet with a couple hundred VHS tapes, 450 CDs, and 500-odd DVDs. (Mercifully, I skipped the 8-track, Betamax and laserdisc formats.)
< image > media closet
Part of my media collection
I have to believe the record companies and movie studios would consider me a good customer. But with every day that passes it becomes more and more obvious that the greedy bastards who run these media companies prefer to treat me (and all their customers) like criminals. They continually expect us to pay more for less, and even then they are not satisfied. They want to pretend to 'sell' us their product, but they don't want us to actually have it. Well I've had enough.
From this day forward I will never spend a another dime on content that I can't use the way I please. If I can't copy it to my hard drive and play it using the devices I want, when and where I want, I won't be buying it. Period.
They can all take their DRM, and their broadcast flags, and their rootkits, and their Compact Discs that aren't really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-lines.
This is such an obvious lie, that I wonder if someone could sue them for malicious misrepresentation, and unfair business practices.
Besides forcing them to stop spouting that garbage, I think it would also generate some interesting (and very useful) press.
And I wouldn't call MS's claim that they'd have to open-source MS-Word to implement ODF FUD. It's an outright lie .
Even more than that, OpenOffice is LGPL, which means that a company could compile in proprietary extensions to OpenOffice, (like SUN does to make StarOffice), and not have to open-source their extensions -- an opportunity that a small company would never have with Microsoft Office.
OINk -- because software patents are a pig.
That having been said, a legitimate plan and ability to survive long enough to win a full-out court battle (normally measured in years) would probably be a necessity in order to get MS to pay out. One company reduced itself to little more than a litigation shell that did nothing more than run the lawsuit for years in order to win against MS.
Unless you're big enough that you can manage a major lawsuit and get on with your 'real' business, I'd say that spinning off a company just for the purposes of the lawsuit(and even negotiations) is at least worth considering.
risking a counter-suit (see #3)
Urk. That should be "see #4".
- They could notice that you have a patent, and decide not to.... (right!).
- They could license the rights from you. This is sometimes known as 'a deal with the devil'. Many a company has been burned by some wierd technicality that Microsoft places in such licensing agreements, and if they violate the agreement, you end up at option #5.
- They could find a way around your patent (they have enough lawyers and programmers that this is a real possibility).
- They could sue your for breaking any of their Thousands of (sometimes trivial) patents and simply litigate you into oblivion.
- They could violate your patent (possibly also a non-disclosure agreement signed under the guise of #2) and let you decide if you want to sue them, risking a counter-suit (see #3) and scaring off investors.
Current patent law really only serves the really big companies. Unfortunately, it's the smaller companies that tend to be the source of most innovation. -- Most of Microsoft's big 'innovations' came from small companies [[ the biggest exception would be windows, which was lifted from Apple ]]It may also be possible that they could force your customers to register for the right to use your software (so they know who to 'go after', in cutting off your air supply).
And, of course, if your company gets bought out, your license disappears.
I can see lenders and shareholders running screaming from any business that embarks on a major undertaking, having accepted these terms. You would have to be either foolish or desparate to do so unless you could recoup the full cost of your endeavor with your first contract (which could raise the cost of your contract, making you non-competetive).
Unlike the ODF, which (contrary to MS's FUD) does not place any restrictions on a company using it(*), Microsoft's XML license would leave any company accepting it at the abject mercy of a convicted monopolist.
Good luck. You'll need it.
(*)Unlike KOffice (which also implements ODF), Open Office is LGPL, which means that a company could legaly compile in proprietary extensions to OO without having to release their own code. That is, in fact, precisely what SUN does with StarOffice. This opens up opportunities for local vendors that would never be available under MS-Office.
He may have figured that the combination of a powerful KDE group and a powerful Gnome group would have left the Novell linux group with a powerful one-two punch, but now the two punch (that his group was expecting to deliver) has been pulled behind the back.
So, something is hunting for vulnerable scripts (no big shock), but it seems far from rampant.
on the other hand, a friend of mine runs a multi-hosting site with a couple of hundred customers, and we've had to do multiple sweeps for people running out of date scritpts with holes in them that have been exploited (and then had to hunt down and clean up the resulting exploitation). Some of the customers respond to our warning messages. Others ignore the warnings and just blindly re-enable the broken scripts.
These are definitely user issues, not Linux issues. If you install and run a program you really are responsible for making sure that it's safe. Beyond a certain point, the OS can't protect you from your own stupidity.
On the other hand, if the exploit then finds a local root exploit, then I'd call that a Linux problem.
As far as I'm concerned, the distributor is responsible for holes in a default installation -- Those are often done by newbies who may not even know that a vulnerable service is running on his/her box (or even what a service is).
When you start installing add-on programs and remote scripts, their default forms are pretty much the responsibility of the people who make them available (modulo any explicit warnings they give an installer). The user, however is ultimately responsible for what he adds to his system.
There is, of course the final arbiter of international affairs
You have to, at some point be able to back up your claim to ownership, and the lunar embassy has absolutely nothing to back up their claim besides their bald explanations. They also have very contradictary claims -- like claiming to be exempt because they're not a government, but then claiming to be the lunar/martian/venusian embasy, handing out passports, etc.If somebody plops down on a patch of land claimed by the Lunar Embasy, and starts digging for Oxygen, or tritrium there is absolutely nothing that the Lunar embasy can do about it besides huff and puff. That is propably the most fatal of many fatal flaws in their scheme.
That's because a corporation or person can only own land in the context of government ownership -- that's why The Dutchy of Freeland exists (whatever legal name they give it) -- If they existed as a corporation sans-government, then England would have had the recognized right (under the doctrine of terra-nullis) to override the claim to the platform and re-assert sovereignty.
This would also apply to the Lunar Embasy and it's claims. On the other hand, if the Lunar Embasy claims to to the embasy for a government that 'owns' the moon, then it falls (and fails) under the treaty.
It's used as the eternal carrot... to keep the CTO from moving to a competetor's product that's already there and better. As long as 'real soon now' continues to inch ever closer, you can keep this up for an incredible length of time.
The mantra is: It's easier to stay with our junky product for X months than to go through the pain of migrating to their superior product. -- then, 6 months later, it's X-2 months.
If it finally comes out missing a couple of promised features (cut because 'we had to finally ship something!'), that's OK because it'll be in the next release ((due in X months).
Rinse-repeat.