There are very few places where "security by obscurity" works to protect anyone but the bad guys. If I were a farmer, I might find that report of great personal interest. If I know of a security problem, I might be able to do something about it. Or at least knowing what's on my farm and its surroundings, to know exactly what kind of help to buy or ask for from the Feds. Some answers might be as close as one's county agricultural agent, if one knows what questions to ask.
Let's put it this way, how would you feel as a netadmin if BugTraq suddenly became "unclassified but sensitive"?
Should the "War on Terrorism" ever become more serious than "The War on Some Drugs", i.e. more than inconveniece for the average American and an excuse to peck away at more civil liberties of the sort that the terrorist also want to see disappear, the front line of the war starts where we are sitting, we're going to have to protect ourselves, and the most important defense in this kind of war is accurate information.
Information, i.e. the stuff that Big Brother has decided is none of the public business.
Well, your solicitude towards future tyrants is touching, but is making life easier for future Hitlers, Pol Pots, etc. really a valid purpose for making law?
If you don't think there ever will be in the EU... you really ought to read some history before posting on public policy issues... start with 1939-1944.
Democracy seems like a secure, settled thing to you. The issue as to whether even the USA will remain a free country even with private access to firearms is decidedly open. As to whether any country can remain democratic forever without deadly force in the hands of its citizens, you don't know the answer and neither do I.
You EU citizens made the decision to trade security for freedom by placing a monopoly of firearms in the hands of your governments, in the hopes of getting safer streets.
Perhaps the risk/benefit tradeoff is worth it. in the EU. Perhaps the French, given free access to handguns, would exterminate each other to the last man, world, and child. Perhaps the Englishman, given access to firearms, would immediately make the Thames run red with blood. Perhaps the Italians could turn their tourists and each other into bullet-ridden corpses and only keeping them unarmed has prevented this.
On the other hand, the Swiss people are armed on a scale which would scare the hell out of even the average American if he knew about it. People keep their government-issued automatic weapons at home with ammunition, and they are encouraged to buy their own ammo so they can practice shooting on their own time and funds. (check the Swiss Embassy site for what they've got to say about it... I've seen several different versions of what the Swiss are and aren't armed with)
Switzerland is an awfully quiet, peaceful place and it isn't because they all killed each other with their assault weapons.
Studies have demonstrated that communities in the USA that have made it possible for citizens to carry handguns via freely issued permits are safer than the places with strict gun control laws.
I'm not going to tell a resident of the EU that you should immediately abandon your gun control laws. Though... it would be an interesting experiment that I would very much like to see from a safe distance to allow concealed carry (handgun permits) in one EU nation. Where do you live?
Hierachy is even more important in military commands than it is in major corporations. The people who decide what OS and what the major apps and who the major contractors in the case of the US Navy are probably getting their electronic mail printed and delivered to them... and they are deciding based on feel-good Microsoft advertising in Navy Times or business week. Political oversight? Don't expect it from appointees of people whose bosses got MS political contributions that got them elected.
Funny, but given that the Navy is going to be running supercarrier navigation and weapons systems off Windows 2000, i.e. the evolved version of the platform that turned the USS Yorktown into a sitting duck... the only people who have reasons to cheer this decision are the world terrorist community.
What would they do with the power to shut down or redirect the firepower of a US nuclear fleet? Live and find out, but if I knew anyone in the USN at this point, I'd be telling them they don't need to re-enlist. If our country values their lives so cheaply as to regard MS products as adequate protection... what does a sailor who's been in for a few years owe her country in further service?
This project is going to get US service people killed sooner or later, not just waste our money.
Assuming your security clearance form is in PDF format, use GSView (Ghostscript interface) to turn it into a vector format compatible with your favorite vector draw program. Find type size compatible with form. Type form entries somewhere around the form blanks. Grab entries and shove in with mouse.
Print or use the method that works with Ghostview to put out a PDF doc... Note that I said nothing about using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Acrobat Distiller.
But the clearance form should have been html or XML for direct output of user form entries in electronic form to begin with.
The only respect I see anyone losing over your assertion about Red Hat is whatever respect anyone has for your knowledge about computer security and Federal law.
They, Alan Cox, et.al. are right. You are wrong. Suck it up and deal.
The early adopters who ordinarily would be all over this technology are also the ones who understand the implications of the DRM technology built into SACD/DVD-Audio and also would be most likely to want to use their computers for playback and ripping. I wouldn't mind hearing my favorite music in 5.1 with s better sampling rate. However, being scammed out of "fair usage" doesn't interest me.
The RIAA labels can either dump the DRM and push CDROM-DVDROM drive vendors into carrying compatible computer drives or wait for the replacement market to slowly build up a SACD/DVD-audio userbase before they can resell us our record collections again as they did after the transition to vinyl... their choice.
I doubt they can afford to wait another 10 years before they can do this, but that's going to be the problem of whoever their replacements will be who will be buying their content for 5 cents on the dollar as they take their new Internet-optimized business models online.
For those who don't believe that a profitable digital model for content distribution is possible (i.e. any employees of RIAA labels reading this post), it took me longer to type out a description of a workable model than it did to come up with one... and I believe that mine isn't the only workable one in the solution space. Go back through my posts if you want to read what I came up with.
The RIAA labels are past the "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" point.
They now are a joke. Unfortunately, they're taking such a tediously long time about dying, and like the dinosaurs, you don't want to be under any as they fall... i.e. P2P users beware.
- and I personally give the elected representatives in Congress and the White House credit for having enough collective common sense to recognise the folly of mandating DRM functionality into, for example, the papermill refiner described by freuddot
That statement in and of itself completely confirms something I suspected when I read your post.
Your ignorance of political history makes you incapable of contributing usefully to a public policy discussion. I suggest you try lurking and reading what people less ignorant than you are (just about everybody) and taking the trouble to learn something about politics and technology before sharing any more of your ignorance with the general public.
If you know how to use google, try the key phrases:
DMCA "computer security"
Perhaps among the 4,920 hits will be something that will provide you with some useful enlightenment.
Or perhaps you should run for public office. If you win, your departure from the IT community and entering the ranks of Congress will improve the average intelligence of both groups.
If you want to avoid making an ass of yourself publically again, I suggest that you read up on what you're talking about first. The text of CBDTPA and discussions from the Broadcast Working Group are readily available, and don't admit to the exceptions you seem to think necessary.
There is no reason to believe that after the bill becomes law and the recommendations of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (try googling for "Plugging the Analog Hole". You know how to use google, don't you?) become law and regulation, that non-DRM processors (or DACs, or several other classes of electronic component) will be available in the US.
Is the market for high-end medical technology big enough that Intel will be building DRM-free microprocessors and the HD makers will be building DRM-free HDs to suit the market's needs? Will this even be possible if CBDTPA passes in anything remotely resembling its current form? (read it yourself and you'll find the answer is NO!).
In any case, the author is better qualified than you are to determine what's alarmist and what isn't, unless you're prepared to discuss the RTOSs you've developed on your own over the years.
Like anything else. Trust, but verify. Crypto-signed applications that can be verified to be the programs that were inspected, at minimum, by party and public representatives while the programs are running, and if possible, with read-only access to the general public.
Hmmm... there are programs that append a hash code to each designated file. Allow inspectors from each of the political parties read-only access to the files involved in the voting process during the vote count to make sure that the programs being run match the programs that were verified.
Of course, this requires Open Source, or at minimum, publication of the proprietary code. But if the service provider has nothing to hide, what's the problem?
Programs which count votes in a real election should be verifiable as programs which do that and nothing else. Complex? As far as I can see, a program on a voting machine that increments a count register each time a voter votes for a candidate sounds like something any moderately proficient 1st year comp sci student should be able to do, and a program that aggregates these counts into vote totals should be even less complicated.
The fact that voting machine companies are being allowed to use closed door proprietary code simply tells me that there are things about this code they really don't want the public to see. For very good reason. Whether this is due to incompetent supervision by the purchasers or deliberate collusion with public officials is an interesting question.
What Tom describes is a community with a set of beliefs that's coherent enough to build an effective political advocacy group around, the main ingredient that's lacking now is a single individual or small group willing to put up the startup capital.
Without the kind of consensus Tom complains about, the possibility to organize to achieve our goals in the political arena simply would not exist.
As for his complaints about our community losing its purity because we've been forced to take a interest in politics, I could say historically that political newsgroups were among the first things to appear on Usenet. But the fact of the matter is, that the integrity of our computer networks now depends just as much on what the politicians will let us do legally as on our technological skills.
In the case of the DMCA, if vendors use it to suppress information about exploits and don't bother to patch, the bad guys get to hammer us and we don't get to figure out why.
If we want to be free to use our own computers as we will, not as a Hollywood content provider community incapable of securing their own Website dictates, we don't have a lot of choice about getting political.
Re:Seems like a reasonable summary
on
Fritz's Hit List
·
· Score: 2
Because I've talked with one of the alleged leaders and come to the conclusion that they can't be educated, that they believe that making political waves is about "presenting the issues" in a reasonable way to our elected officials. That method is useless on any issue that has a constituency that's donating money to buy law pointing the other way.
What have they produced in the last several months after they announced?
Not a damn thing other than bad Web design, and nobody with a clue as far as I know is associated with them.
DOESN'T THAT TELL YOU ANYTHING?
I'm willing to put time and money into a group with any reasonable chance of success.
GeekPAC ain't it.
When one sees a group who announces plans to start a PAC who has already raised significant money before announcing, states that they're planning a mass action + lobbying effort like AARP or the NRA, and says that as their first public action, they're putting a fax server up in DC to get our point across to legislators, I'll probably be there, and if anybody has gotten to that point, please contact me immediately.
Also note that if anyone is in the position to pass the hat among a few high-tech corporate leaders and get the kind of startup capital this takes (think of this as a high-tech startup specializing in political action) and is wondering what to do next... my e-mail can be found easily. I've already done some research and I've run across people who know more than I do about this... but they don't work for free.
Volunteerism and idealism won't get us out of this mess... unless organized by competent experts... and that kind of expertise one has to pay for at the market rates. If we aren't willing to pay for freedom, we don't deserve it and we won't have it.
If you want to waste your time with GeekPAC, go for it. Just don't bother the rest of us about it when you discover that you have indeed wasted your time.
Meaningful political action isn't about grabbing a few pages in online tech news sites and posing in front of cameras to make A DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT, it's having an effect.
The very name GeekPAC should have told you that this group either was designed by people who never had any intent of having a real political effect or have no clue about what it takes.
My discussion says. . . no clue.
Seems like a reasonable summary
on
Fritz's Hit List
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is why I describe CBDTPA and the rest of the Hollywood regulation package for computers and the consumer electronic industry as a threat to our jobs and to the economy.
All this means is that software and hardware development move out of the US, and what we get will be the dumbed down versions that companies think people will buy in the US despite the added expense and reduced functionality incorporating DRM will mean. However, this isn't a big deal because in a post-CBDTPA economy, those of us who stick around will be too busy looking for work to buy toys... and new computers and too broke to afford them.
Why are the vendors still playing "deer in the headlights" about this? Do they figure it's cheaper to move out of the US than fight?
Why hasn't a real PAC been put together by the high-tech rank and file to save our jobs? (hint: GeekPAC is a joke, a "political organization" that can't put together a decent website together isn't going to rise up and take Congress back)
Note that the industries affected are 10x the size of Hollywood in terms of income. So why is the tail wagging the dog?
But who would be stupid enough to put them in charge of a campus network?
Well, I guess the answer is obvious.
Good news for anyone whose handle is in some form of l33t sP34k and has been looking for a good place to try all the exploits described in BugTraq.
However, if I were a CS student there and got that notice, I'd be looking hard into transferring as of the next semester.
Getting an education in the area of computing is hard enough without having to use a network where the admins have admitted in writing that they are clueless.
I suspect they're going to live to regret this. Unless they really enjoy cleaning up messes.
IIRC, Niven does have scientific training... in areas having nothing to do with the environment, climatalogy, or any speciality related to this. Outside his specialty, he's at best an informed layman, and if he's researching a story related to this, he's saying "oh, shit" just like anybody else with a clue is.
You can't always get your scientific knowledge from 10 year old science fiction.
My guess is that the intellectual property lawyers with UMG looked at it, and said "prior art" as in games and software distributed a few years ago as pointed out on this thread.
Any patents based on what's described should be readily breakable.
Just as well because I'm thinking of using this one of these days on a music project I'm involved with.
Right general idea, wrong storage and data transfer to record store site. How many new CDs do you think you could download a day via a DSL link? The answer is not enough to support a record store. (15CDs/day assuming 1 meg transfer rate and 24 hour usage)
What's really needed for this is terabyte removable media of some sort, there's one system (TVD) that's due out in a year or so that uses a super-DVD for this, there's an IBM approach using nanomachines. 1 TVD = 1538 CDs of content.
One or at most, a handful of TVDs would be adequate for a complete record label's catalog including artwork.
CD on demand is off the shelf.
Combine CD on demand with a TVD jukebox and you could distribute *everyone's* CDs. A 100 CD jukebox could distribute up to 15,380 different CDs.
The other piece of technology - the CD-on-demand setup must be turned into a neat package capable of being operated by non-technical personnel. However, this isn't rocket science.e
Updates can be done via snailmail. A major label can snailmail weekly, smaller labels might send their records out monthly or whenever they release new content. Encryption and an audit trail can make sure that the people distributing this way get paid for their work. This is a special problem, not the conventional DRM situation because a record store without this could sell or give away any number of CDs loaded with content for only the cost of the media or worse, duplicate it's 'retail only' database, allowing wholesale theft of content.
The record store connects to the central tracking database every day, and which and how many of each CDs (or tracks) were sold by a given artist go to the database. The record store pays for the tracks from money provided by customers.
Implemented properly, everybody gets distribution and for a label distributing content weekly or monthly, the price of distributing a new CD into record stores is very close to zero.
The only losers are the current record distribution companies.
You should have read my posts, the equations I supported (translating audio bandwidth to inches per second to dots per linear inch) that what he did is possible. I also provided links to relevant content to people who want to research this themselves. I'd love to see someone do this right and provide some Open Source software which will pull decent quality stereo sound out of a high-res scan image.
This combined with a scanner hardware hack would be a cool way to turn vinyl record collections into CDs or MP3s compatible with modern playback equipment.
If this guy really believes this, why aren't his member companies buying their own politicians? The consumer electronic companies have far more money than the RIAA/MPAA labels combined. His organization probably has a PAC... so why aren't they doing something about this?
"Money talks, bullshit walks"... hint: this is a fine speech, most of us agree with the content... but this speech ain't talkin' to politicians.
from Politech
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 22:35:19 -0700
To: politech@politechbot.com
From: Declan McCullagh
Subject: FC: CEA's Gary Shapiro: P2P file swapping is both legal and moral
Speech by Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association.
The Campaign to Have Copyright Interests Trump Technology and Consumer Rights
We are at a critical juncture in history when the inevitable growth of technology is conflicting with the rising power and strength of copyright owners. How we resolve this tension between copyright and technology will define our future ability to communicate, create and share information, education and entertainment.
Today I would like to share with you my views on this situation and the questions we must confront as we wind through this confusing, but historic maze.
There is no doubt that this era's rapid shift to digital and other technology is changing the rules of the game. Reproduction, transmission and storage technology all are progressing exponentially, resulting in an unprecedented power to copy, send and save all forms of media. Reproduction technology has become incredibly cheap and reliable. Transmission technology, including satellite, cable, broadcast, wired or wireless, and often connecting through the Internet, has linked everyone at ever increasing speeds and competitive pricing. Storage technologies also quickly have expanded in capacity as total storage media costs have plummeted.
With each new technology, the fears of the music and motion picture industries have grown. With television and the VCR, it was going to be the end of movies. With CDs and cassettes, it was the supposed harm from real-time transfers and one-at-a-time copies. Today's technologies make these perceived threats seem naïve and harmless. With high-speed connectivity and the Internet, it's not buying a CD and making a copy for a friend; it's downloading from a stranger or making available thousands of copies with the touch of a keystroke.
The growth of reproduction, storage and transmission technology has terrified copyright owners. The RIAA claims that 3.6 billion songs are downloaded each month. The RIAA also estimates that $4.5 billion has been lost by the music industry due to pirating. And the motion picture industry also sees the writing on the wall. Fox Group CEO and News Corp. President Peter Chernin in an August 21 keynote speech at an Aspen conference claimed that Spiderman and the latest Star Wars movie were downloaded four million times following the weekend after their release.
Based on these and similar threats the content community has gone on a scorched earth campaign attacking and burning several new recording and peer-to-peer technologies. They have used the Congress, media and courts to challenge the legality of technology and morality and legality of recording. In the same Aspen speech, Chernin attacked computers as untrustworthy and the Internet as primarily used for pornography and downloading.
I believe that hardware and software companies have a mutual interest in working together, so that they can sell more products. For years, consumer electronics companies have been working with both the recording and motion picture industries on developing technological measures that meet the needs of both industries. For instance, the DVD standard includes anti-copying protection. It also includes an anti-fast forward technology designed to ensure copyright warnings are shown, but instead is being used to require consumers to sit through movie previews. CE companies also have provided digital interfaces that allow consumers to share content among their own devices while restricting unauthorized redistribution to the Internet. By protecting content at the source, content providers can be assured their intellectual property rights are respected, while consumers can enjoy unimpeded personal use. However, source protection should not be used to mislead consumers to purchase CDs that can only be played on certain CD players.
Indeed, despite the cooperative efforts, the copyright community has declared war on technology and is using lawsuits, legislatures and clever public relations to restrict the ability to sell and use new technologies. Lawsuits have shut down file-sharing services like Napster and Aimster, and threaten peer-to-peer networks like KaZaa and Morpheus. They unsuccessfully challenged the legality of MPs recorders in the Diamond Multimedia case. They have challenged as illegal ReplayTV, a TIVO-like device, which allows television programming to be sorted and stored on a hard disc and which allows a consumer to skip commercials. In fact, one TV executive equated the skipping of commercials as "stealing" free broadcast television. The RIAA has announced that it will start suing individuals who engage in file sharing and has subpoenaed Internet access provider Verizon to identify a downloading subscriber.
At the urging of the content community, Congress has stepped into the act. Legislation has been introduced which requires all technologies to be shaped by a government-mandated copy protection system. Other legislation allows any copyright owner to seek and destroy the posting of copyrighted products on P2P networks via personal computers connected to the Internet. Still other legislation would allow a content owner to insert an embedded watermark into the work to determine if there was infringement and, at the content owner's discretion, disable the device, even if, upon subsequent determination, the use was lawful.
The most recent and scary development is that the United States Department of Justice is threatening to jail millions of Americans who use file- sharing services. In a presentation at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Aspen Summit on August 21, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Malcolm said that peer-to-peer sharing is piracy and a criminal offense.
With this pronouncement, along with similar euphemisms by the media, it is clear that the copyright community has reshaped the debate. All of a sudden, the downloading of a song to sample an artist's wares, behavior most Americans between 13 and 25 engage in regularly, has been likened to a criminal act.
Consider the clever public relations campaign of the content community. They've changed the simple language that describes the acts at issue. It used to be called "taping", "reproducing" or "downloading", and advocates on both sides would call it "unauthorized reproduction" or "unauthorized taping". Then somehow this use of technology shifted to the more pejorative and sinister "copying". The word "copying" sounds bad. It got you in big trouble in high school on a test. "Copying" is a sister to "plagiarism" which is especially bad.
But in the past few months, Hollywood and the music industry have shifted to different words. They now only talk about downloading as "piracy". They call it "stealing" and always use analogies to shoplifting products out of a store. The Justice Department has adopted this approach. "Stealing is stealing is stealing," said Malcolm in Aspen.
At the same conference, Chernin echoed these themes and used the words "piracy", "shoplifting" and "stealing" repeatedly to describe downloading. He even declared that those who disagree with his views on copyright are either "amoral or self-interested".
Another way copyright owners have distorted the debate is to tie in downloading with our national goal of broadband deployment. They argue that broadband demand will not grow until this issue is resolved. Indeed, Senators Holling's legislation is called "The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television and Promotion Act". Yet broadband deployment has little to do with songs and movies, and more to do with fast Internet speed, always- on convenience, exchanging home videos, interactivity on the web and a range of potential uses for education, medicine, business, shopping and gaming. Yet, some legislators have become confused and convinced by Hollywood that there is a connection between broadband and copyright.
A third way that the copyright community has reshaped and redefined the debate is almost biblical in its reach. The entire theme of the copyright community is that downloading off the Web is both illegal and immoral.
But is it either? I submit it is neither.
Despite the assertions of the Justice Department, downloading is not illegal.
First, fair use rights are guaranteed to consumers by statute, and applied judicially on a case-by-case basis. This means that, while some consumer practices ultimately could be adjudicated as either fair use or infringement, there is scant basis for challenging them as criminal.
The music and film industries claim that there is no such thing as fair use "rights" in an attempt to disparage the term. They say that fair use is only an affirmative defense to copyright infringement and therefore not a right. But various recognized "rights" only may be asserted as affirmative defenses in a lawsuit. For example, in a slander suit, one may assert the First Amendment right but only as an affirmative defense; this does not diminish the fact that the right exists.
Second, time after time, practices of individuals that were initially equated with "piracy" or "theft" have been shown to be neutral or beneficial to copyright owners, and have either been tolerated or accepted as fair use. Think of the VCR and the Supreme Court decision holding that its use to tape full movies is fully legal.
Third, the 1997 NET Act's requirement of a total retail value of $1,000 per infringement should be taken seriously as a barrier to bringing cases against ordinary consumers. This law should not be re-interpreted, after the fact, as a criminal enforcement vehicle against consumer-to-consumer recording and "swapping" practices.
Downloading is not immoral either. To make downloading immoral, you have to accept that copyrighted products are governed by the same moral and legal principles as real property, thus the recent and continuous reference by the copyright community to label downloading as stealing. But the fact is that real and intellectual property are different and are governed by different principles. Downloading a copyrighted product does not diminish the product, as would be the case of taking and using tangible property such as a dress. At worst, it is depriving the copyright owner of a potential sale. Indeed, it may be causing a sale (through familiarity) or even more likely, have no impact on the sale. My son often will become familiar with artists through downloading their music on the Internet and then go out and buy the CD.
The comparison to real property fails for several other reasons. Real property is subject to ownership taxes. Real property lasts forever and can be owned forever. A copyright can be owned only for a limited period of time. Indeed, the United States Constitution declares this. More, copyright law must bow to the First Amendment that expressly allows people to use a copyrighted product without the permission of the copyright owner. This concern contributes to the statutory and judicial concept of "fair use". The First Amendment includes, not only the right to send, but also the right to receive. Indeed, in 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court in declaring the VCR a legal product, said that it could be okay to copy an entire copyrighted product. So if the Supreme Court expressly held that VCR copying in the home for non-commercial purposes is a legal activity, how is it suddenly labeled as "piracy" because the device is a computer?
The major record labels concede that they totally have failed to transform their business models in response to the Internet. But then they whine that they "cannot compete with free", referring to the free downloading the Internet allows. While I am sympathetic to the radical shift of selling a CD with a one good song for $20 to a marketplace where consumers pick and choose which songs they want, I am not sure this is the correct approach. For one thing, you can compete with free. Purveyors of bottled water do it. America Online does it. Book retailers do it with libraries. Independent online music services say they can do it, if they can clear the rights.
The Beatles 1 album, which contained 30-year-old songs that could have been downloaded for free from Napster-like services from day one, but nevertheless sold some 26 million copies. Why? Because people were willing to pay for the quality of a CD over the often barely acceptable sound quality of a download using P2P services.
Of course, recording artists must make a living and should be paid. Most consumers likely would pay a reasonable amount for quality downloads, access to full catalogs and maybe some promotional items such as concert tickets or hidden tracks on a CD. Artists even can get new revenue from the Internet by identifying their fans and promoting their concerts, new releases and other products. But the music industry has made little effort to look at new business models or provide a viable and attractive alternative to the downloading services.
The recording industry and motion picture industry should stop complaining so much and look for technological solutions to its own problems. Doesn't it make more sense to protect content at the source, using technologies that maintain consumer expectations for personal use? Content providers would be served better by working with technology companies to deploy these solutions rather than suing everyone and lobbying Congress to legislate unreasonable and consumer-unfriendly mandates.
Despite a lack of hits and a recession, music and movie sales are holding their own. Compare this to real downfalls in other sectors from telecommunications to IT to broadcasting, and you must ask yourself if the Internet is actually a good thing for the copyright community.
So where does this lead us? I submit that policymakers should follow some basic principles:
First, do no harm. If we had previously heeded the concerns of the creative community, we would have no radio, no TV, no VCR, no computer, no e-mail and no Internet. Yet each of these technologies has enhanced the revenue stream for copyright owners.
Second, advances in technology should not be restricted. We cannot even imagine today what future advances we will choke off if we artificially restrict technology. If we can envision technology connecting the poorest in the world to medical information, to education and to a better quality of life, we should be careful about stifling its growth. Advances in technology also can supply tools to content providers to help them manage digital rights in a manner that takes into account consumers' expectations.
Third, claims of harm should be greeted with great skepticism. Not every recording is a lost sale. It actually may represent a stream of future sales. Artists from Chuck D to Janis Ian to Courtney Love support home recording rights for practical business reasons.
Fourth, copyright owners have a high burden of proof before any technology should be restricted. Broadcasters and the motion picture industry have come close to making the case that redistribution of free, over-the-air broadcast television over the Internet is harmful to the concept of free over- the-air broadcasting. This is an area where careful legislation or regular legal review, respectful of consumer rights and expectations, may be appropriate.
Fifth, copyright owners should continue developing ways to protect their content at the source, rather than insisting that the burden should be on the device that plays it. Perhaps they should consider a more flexible business model that focuses on keeping honest people honest. But, the corollary here is don't sell CDs that don't work on many CD players.
Finally, any restrictions on technology should be narrowly crafted, define limitations on abuse by copyright owners and define legitimate consumer recording rights and expectations. For example, CEA supports the distance education bill presented by Congressman Darrell Issa of California and Rick Boucher of Virginia that addresses a specific IP concern rather than attempting to legislate through a one-size-fits-all approach. The Boucher- Issa bill reaffirms fair use rights and would amend the Copyright Act to ensure educators can use PCs and new technology to foster distance learning.
The collision course between copyright owners' desire to preserve existing business models and the inevitable development of newer, better, faster and cheaper technologies need not be fatal. Our future is bright if we resist the temptation to restrict technology. Digital technology will foster a Renaissance of creativity. It will connect our world and soon allow everyone to have low-cost access to information, entertainment and education. If the play button becomes the pay button, our very ability to raise the world's standard of living and education will be jeopardized.
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You won't have to. If I can't find the BOPH's e-mail address, a friend of mine does have it over in NZ. The bad news... he's in a place where guns are banned... but if the Feds wherever he is can be convinced that network and physical security should be combined, that may not be a problem.
Actually, I think that most of the $10K cost is simply that it's a low-volume product. How much would a CD player cost if it were essentially built by hand from discrete components in batches of 10 instead of 10K or 100K? Or a HD?
Depends on how he got to gray scale, it could be as bad as 8. But with respect to amplitude modulation, every dot potentially represents the full dynamic range of the scanner... 3 12 bit channels even on a cheapo... how to make that resolution useful? I think that's for the next generation of experimentation.
Your comment with respect to heat and dual beams is reasonable. I've never had occasion to take apart a laser turntable or look up the patents, if you're interested, go to the USPTO site at http://www.uspto.gov , go to the Patent search database, use laser AND turntable as search terms. I'm wondering if 2400 dpi would work best deriving horizontal position of the variation from center of a groove (L-R) or if it's best (or possible) to derive amplitude info from each side of a groove.
You really shouldn't have gotten Flamebait for this. It's a good question.
Let's say you have a collection of irreplaceable LPs and you'd like to archive them in a reasonable length of time. Would you rather play them back one at a time or scan them on an optical scanner?
Slashdot Mirror
There are very few places where "security by obscurity" works to protect anyone but the bad guys. If I were a farmer, I might find that report of great personal interest. If I know of a security problem, I might be able to do something about it. Or at least knowing what's on my farm and its surroundings, to know exactly what kind of help to buy or ask for from the Feds. Some answers might be as close as one's county agricultural agent, if one knows what questions to ask.
Let's put it this way, how would you feel as a netadmin if BugTraq suddenly became "unclassified but sensitive"?
Should the "War on Terrorism" ever become more serious than "The War on Some Drugs", i.e. more than inconveniece for the average American and an excuse to peck away at more civil liberties of the sort that the terrorist also want to see disappear, the front line of the war starts where we are sitting, we're going to have to protect ourselves, and the most important defense in this kind of war is accurate information.
Information, i.e. the stuff that Big Brother has decided is none of the public business.
If you don't think there ever will be in the EU... you really ought to read some history before posting on public policy issues... start with 1939-1944.
Democracy seems like a secure, settled thing to you. The issue as to whether even the USA will remain a free country even with private access to firearms is decidedly open. As to whether any country can remain democratic forever without deadly force in the hands of its citizens, you don't know the answer and neither do I.
You EU citizens made the decision to trade security for freedom by placing a monopoly of firearms in the hands of your governments, in the hopes of getting safer streets.
Perhaps the risk/benefit tradeoff is worth it. in the EU. Perhaps the French, given free access to handguns, would exterminate each other to the last man, world, and child. Perhaps the Englishman, given access to firearms, would immediately make the Thames run red with blood. Perhaps the Italians could turn their tourists and each other into bullet-ridden corpses and only keeping them unarmed has prevented this.
On the other hand, the Swiss people are armed on a scale which would scare the hell out of even the average American if he knew about it. People keep their government-issued automatic weapons at home with ammunition, and they are encouraged to buy their own ammo so they can practice shooting on their own time and funds. (check the Swiss Embassy site for what they've got to say about it... I've seen several different versions of what the Swiss are and aren't armed with)
Switzerland is an awfully quiet, peaceful place and it isn't because they all killed each other with their assault weapons.
Studies have demonstrated that communities in the USA that have made it possible for citizens to carry handguns via freely issued permits are safer than the places with strict gun control laws.
I'm not going to tell a resident of the EU that you should immediately abandon your gun control laws. Though ... it would be an interesting experiment that I would very much like to see from a safe distance to allow concealed carry (handgun permits) in one EU nation. Where do you live?
Funny, but given that the Navy is going to be running supercarrier navigation and weapons systems off Windows 2000, i.e. the evolved version of the platform that turned the USS Yorktown into a sitting duck... the only people who have reasons to cheer this decision are the world terrorist community.
What would they do with the power to shut down or redirect the firepower of a US nuclear fleet? Live and find out, but if I knew anyone in the USN at this point, I'd be telling them they don't need to re-enlist. If our country values their lives so cheaply as to regard MS products as adequate protection... what does a sailor who's been in for a few years owe her country in further service?
This project is going to get US service people killed sooner or later, not just waste our money.
Print or use the method that works with Ghostview to put out a PDF doc... Note that I said nothing about using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Acrobat Distiller. But the clearance form should have been html or XML for direct output of user form entries in electronic form to begin with.
They, Alan Cox, et.al. are right. You are wrong. Suck it up and deal.
The RIAA labels can either dump the DRM and push CDROM-DVDROM drive vendors into carrying compatible computer drives or wait for the replacement market to slowly build up a SACD/DVD-audio userbase before they can resell us our record collections again as they did after the transition to vinyl... their choice.
I doubt they can afford to wait another 10 years before they can do this, but that's going to be the problem of whoever their replacements will be who will be buying their content for 5 cents on the dollar as they take their new Internet-optimized business models online.
For those who don't believe that a profitable digital model for content distribution is possible (i.e. any employees of RIAA labels reading this post), it took me longer to type out a description of a workable model than it did to come up with one... and I believe that mine isn't the only workable one in the solution space. Go back through my posts if you want to read what I came up with.
The RIAA labels are past the "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" point.
They now are a joke. Unfortunately, they're taking such a tediously long time about dying, and like the dinosaurs, you don't want to be under any as they fall... i.e. P2P users beware.
That statement in and of itself completely confirms something I suspected when I read your post.
Your ignorance of political history makes you incapable of contributing usefully to a public policy discussion. I suggest you try lurking and reading what people less ignorant than you are (just about everybody) and taking the trouble to learn something about politics and technology before sharing any more of your ignorance with the general public.
If you know how to use google, try the key phrases:
DMCA "computer security"
Perhaps among the 4,920 hits will be something that will provide you with some useful enlightenment.
Or perhaps you should run for public office. If you win, your departure from the IT community and entering the ranks of Congress will improve the average intelligence of both groups.
There is no reason to believe that after the bill becomes law and the recommendations of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (try googling for "Plugging the Analog Hole". You know how to use google, don't you?) become law and regulation, that non-DRM processors (or DACs, or several other classes of electronic component) will be available in the US.
Is the market for high-end medical technology big enough that Intel will be building DRM-free microprocessors and the HD makers will be building DRM-free HDs to suit the market's needs? Will this even be possible if CBDTPA passes in anything remotely resembling its current form? (read it yourself and you'll find the answer is NO!).
In any case, the author is better qualified than you are to determine what's alarmist and what isn't, unless you're prepared to discuss the RTOSs you've developed on your own over the years.
Like anything else. Trust, but verify. Crypto-signed applications that can be verified to be the programs that were inspected, at minimum, by party and public representatives while the programs are running, and if possible, with read-only access to the general public.
Of course, this requires Open Source, or at minimum, publication of the proprietary code. But if the service provider has nothing to hide, what's the problem?
Programs which count votes in a real election should be verifiable as programs which do that and nothing else. Complex? As far as I can see, a program on a voting machine that increments a count register each time a voter votes for a candidate sounds like something any moderately proficient 1st year comp sci student should be able to do, and a program that aggregates these counts into vote totals should be even less complicated.
The fact that voting machine companies are being allowed to use closed door proprietary code simply tells me that there are things about this code they really don't want the public to see. For very good reason. Whether this is due to incompetent supervision by the purchasers or deliberate collusion with public officials is an interesting question.
Without the kind of consensus Tom complains about, the possibility to organize to achieve our goals in the political arena simply would not exist.
As for his complaints about our community losing its purity because we've been forced to take a interest in politics, I could say historically that political newsgroups were among the first things to appear on Usenet. But the fact of the matter is, that the integrity of our computer networks now depends just as much on what the politicians will let us do legally as on our technological skills.
In the case of the DMCA, if vendors use it to suppress information about exploits and don't bother to patch, the bad guys get to hammer us and we don't get to figure out why.
If we want to be free to use our own computers as we will, not as a Hollywood content provider community incapable of securing their own Website dictates, we don't have a lot of choice about getting political.
What have they produced in the last several months after they announced?
Not a damn thing other than bad Web design, and nobody with a clue as far as I know is associated with them.
DOESN'T THAT TELL YOU ANYTHING?
I'm willing to put time and money into a group with any reasonable chance of success.
GeekPAC ain't it.
When one sees a group who announces plans to start a PAC who has already raised significant money before announcing, states that they're planning a mass action + lobbying effort like AARP or the NRA, and says that as their first public action, they're putting a fax server up in DC to get our point across to legislators, I'll probably be there, and if anybody has gotten to that point, please contact me immediately.
Also note that if anyone is in the position to pass the hat among a few high-tech corporate leaders and get the kind of startup capital this takes (think of this as a high-tech startup specializing in political action) and is wondering what to do next... my e-mail can be found easily. I've already done some research and I've run across people who know more than I do about this... but they don't work for free.
Volunteerism and idealism won't get us out of this mess... unless organized by competent experts... and that kind of expertise one has to pay for at the market rates. If we aren't willing to pay for freedom, we don't deserve it and we won't have it.
If you want to waste your time with GeekPAC, go for it. Just don't bother the rest of us about it when you discover that you have indeed wasted your time.
Meaningful political action isn't about grabbing a few pages in online tech news sites and posing in front of cameras to make A DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT, it's having an effect.
The very name GeekPAC should have told you that this group either was designed by people who never had any intent of having a real political effect or have no clue about what it takes.
My discussion says. . . no clue.
All this means is that software and hardware development move out of the US, and what we get will be the dumbed down versions that companies think people will buy in the US despite the added expense and reduced functionality incorporating DRM will mean. However, this isn't a big deal because in a post-CBDTPA economy, those of us who stick around will be too busy looking for work to buy toys... and new computers and too broke to afford them.
Why are the vendors still playing "deer in the headlights" about this? Do they figure it's cheaper to move out of the US than fight?
Why hasn't a real PAC been put together by the high-tech rank and file to save our jobs? (hint: GeekPAC is a joke, a "political organization" that can't put together a decent website together isn't going to rise up and take Congress back)
Note that the industries affected are 10x the size of Hollywood in terms of income. So why is the tail wagging the dog?
Well, I guess the answer is obvious.
Good news for anyone whose handle is in some form of l33t sP34k and has been looking for a good place to try all the exploits described in BugTraq.
However, if I were a CS student there and got that notice, I'd be looking hard into transferring as of the next semester.
Getting an education in the area of computing is hard enough without having to use a network where the admins have admitted in writing that they are clueless.
I suspect they're going to live to regret this. Unless they really enjoy cleaning up messes.
You can't always get your scientific knowledge from 10 year old science fiction.
Hint: Matter transporters aren't real, either.
Any patents based on what's described should be readily breakable.
Just as well because I'm thinking of using this one of these days on a music project I'm involved with.
What's really needed for this is terabyte removable media of some sort, there's one system (TVD) that's due out in a year or so that uses a super-DVD for this, there's an IBM approach using nanomachines. 1 TVD = 1538 CDs of content.
One or at most, a handful of TVDs would be adequate for a complete record label's catalog including artwork.
CD on demand is off the shelf.
Combine CD on demand with a TVD jukebox and you could distribute *everyone's* CDs. A 100 CD jukebox could distribute up to 15,380 different CDs.
The other piece of technology - the CD-on-demand setup must be turned into a neat package capable of being operated by non-technical personnel. However, this isn't rocket science.e
Updates can be done via snailmail. A major label can snailmail weekly, smaller labels might send their records out monthly or whenever they release new content. Encryption and an audit trail can make sure that the people distributing this way get paid for their work. This is a special problem, not the conventional DRM situation because a record store without this could sell or give away any number of CDs loaded with content for only the cost of the media or worse, duplicate it's 'retail only' database, allowing wholesale theft of content.
The record store connects to the central tracking database every day, and which and how many of each CDs (or tracks) were sold by a given artist go to the database. The record store pays for the tracks from money provided by customers.
Implemented properly, everybody gets distribution and for a label distributing content weekly or monthly, the price of distributing a new CD into record stores is very close to zero.
The only losers are the current record distribution companies.
This combined with a scanner hardware hack would be a cool way to turn vinyl record collections into CDs or MP3s compatible with modern playback equipment.
"Money talks, bullshit walks"... hint: this is a fine speech, most of us agree with the content... but this speech ain't talkin' to politicians.
from Politech
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 22:35:19 -0700
To: politech@politechbot.com
From: Declan McCullagh
Subject: FC: CEA's Gary Shapiro: P2P file swapping is both legal and moral
Speech by Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association.
The Campaign to Have Copyright Interests Trump Technology and Consumer Rights
We are at a critical juncture in history when the inevitable growth of technology is conflicting with the rising power and strength of copyright owners. How we resolve this tension between copyright and technology will define our future ability to communicate, create and share information, education and entertainment.
Today I would like to share with you my views on this situation and the questions we must confront as we wind through this confusing, but historic maze.
There is no doubt that this era's rapid shift to digital and other technology is changing the rules of the game. Reproduction, transmission and storage technology all are progressing exponentially, resulting in an unprecedented power to copy, send and save all forms of media. Reproduction technology has become incredibly cheap and reliable. Transmission technology, including satellite, cable, broadcast, wired or wireless, and often connecting through the Internet, has linked everyone at ever increasing speeds and competitive pricing. Storage technologies also quickly have expanded in capacity as total storage media costs have plummeted.
With each new technology, the fears of the music and motion picture industries have grown. With television and the VCR, it was going to be the end of movies. With CDs and cassettes, it was the supposed harm from real-time transfers and one-at-a-time copies. Today's technologies make these perceived threats seem naïve and harmless. With high-speed connectivity and the Internet, it's not buying a CD and making a copy for a friend; it's downloading from a stranger or making available thousands of copies with the touch of a keystroke.
The growth of reproduction, storage and transmission technology has terrified copyright owners. The RIAA claims that 3.6 billion songs are downloaded each month. The RIAA also estimates that $4.5 billion has been lost by the music industry due to pirating. And the motion picture industry also sees the writing on the wall. Fox Group CEO and News Corp. President Peter Chernin in an August 21 keynote speech at an Aspen conference claimed that Spiderman and the latest Star Wars movie were downloaded four million times following the weekend after their release.
Based on these and similar threats the content community has gone on a scorched earth campaign attacking and burning several new recording and peer-to-peer technologies. They have used the Congress, media and courts to challenge the legality of technology and morality and legality of recording. In the same Aspen speech, Chernin attacked computers as untrustworthy and the Internet as primarily used for pornography and downloading.
I believe that hardware and software companies have a mutual interest in working together, so that they can sell more products. For years, consumer electronics companies have been working with both the recording and motion picture industries on developing technological measures that meet the needs of both industries. For instance, the DVD standard includes anti-copying protection. It also includes an anti-fast forward technology designed to ensure copyright warnings are shown, but instead is being used to require consumers to sit through movie previews. CE companies also have provided digital interfaces that allow consumers to share content among their own devices while restricting unauthorized redistribution to the Internet. By protecting content at the source, content providers can be assured their intellectual property rights are respected, while consumers can enjoy unimpeded personal use. However, source protection should not be used to mislead consumers to purchase CDs that can only be played on certain CD players.
Indeed, despite the cooperative efforts, the copyright community has declared war on technology and is using lawsuits, legislatures and clever public relations to restrict the ability to sell and use new technologies. Lawsuits have shut down file-sharing services like Napster and Aimster, and threaten peer-to-peer networks like KaZaa and Morpheus. They unsuccessfully challenged the legality of MPs recorders in the Diamond Multimedia case. They have challenged as illegal ReplayTV, a TIVO-like device, which allows television programming to be sorted and stored on a hard disc and which allows a consumer to skip commercials. In fact, one TV executive equated the skipping of commercials as "stealing" free broadcast television. The RIAA has announced that it will start suing individuals who engage in file sharing and has subpoenaed Internet access provider Verizon to identify a downloading subscriber.
At the urging of the content community, Congress has stepped into the act. Legislation has been introduced which requires all technologies to be shaped by a government-mandated copy protection system. Other legislation allows any copyright owner to seek and destroy the posting of copyrighted products on P2P networks via personal computers connected to the Internet. Still other legislation would allow a content owner to insert an embedded watermark into the work to determine if there was infringement and, at the content owner's discretion, disable the device, even if, upon subsequent determination, the use was lawful.
The most recent and scary development is that the United States Department of Justice is threatening to jail millions of Americans who use file- sharing services. In a presentation at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Aspen Summit on August 21, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Malcolm said that peer-to-peer sharing is piracy and a criminal offense.
With this pronouncement, along with similar euphemisms by the media, it is clear that the copyright community has reshaped the debate. All of a sudden, the downloading of a song to sample an artist's wares, behavior most Americans between 13 and 25 engage in regularly, has been likened to a criminal act.
Consider the clever public relations campaign of the content community. They've changed the simple language that describes the acts at issue. It used to be called "taping", "reproducing" or "downloading", and advocates on both sides would call it "unauthorized reproduction" or "unauthorized taping". Then somehow this use of technology shifted to the more pejorative and sinister "copying". The word "copying" sounds bad. It got you in big trouble in high school on a test. "Copying" is a sister to "plagiarism" which is especially bad.
But in the past few months, Hollywood and the music industry have shifted to different words. They now only talk about downloading as "piracy". They call it "stealing" and always use analogies to shoplifting products out of a store. The Justice Department has adopted this approach. "Stealing is stealing is stealing," said Malcolm in Aspen.
At the same conference, Chernin echoed these themes and used the words "piracy", "shoplifting" and "stealing" repeatedly to describe downloading. He even declared that those who disagree with his views on copyright are either "amoral or self-interested".
Another way copyright owners have distorted the debate is to tie in downloading with our national goal of broadband deployment. They argue that broadband demand will not grow until this issue is resolved. Indeed, Senators Holling's legislation is called "The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television and Promotion Act". Yet broadband deployment has little to do with songs and movies, and more to do with fast Internet speed, always- on convenience, exchanging home videos, interactivity on the web and a range of potential uses for education, medicine, business, shopping and gaming. Yet, some legislators have become confused and convinced by Hollywood that there is a connection between broadband and copyright.
A third way that the copyright community has reshaped and redefined the debate is almost biblical in its reach. The entire theme of the copyright community is that downloading off the Web is both illegal and immoral.
But is it either? I submit it is neither.
Despite the assertions of the Justice Department, downloading is not illegal.
First, fair use rights are guaranteed to consumers by statute, and applied judicially on a case-by-case basis. This means that, while some consumer practices ultimately could be adjudicated as either fair use or infringement, there is scant basis for challenging them as criminal.
The music and film industries claim that there is no such thing as fair use "rights" in an attempt to disparage the term. They say that fair use is only an affirmative defense to copyright infringement and therefore not a right. But various recognized "rights" only may be asserted as affirmative defenses in a lawsuit. For example, in a slander suit, one may assert the First Amendment right but only as an affirmative defense; this does not diminish the fact that the right exists.
Second, time after time, practices of individuals that were initially equated with "piracy" or "theft" have been shown to be neutral or beneficial to copyright owners, and have either been tolerated or accepted as fair use. Think of the VCR and the Supreme Court decision holding that its use to tape full movies is fully legal.
Third, the 1997 NET Act's requirement of a total retail value of $1,000 per infringement should be taken seriously as a barrier to bringing cases against ordinary consumers. This law should not be re-interpreted, after the fact, as a criminal enforcement vehicle against consumer-to-consumer recording and "swapping" practices.
Downloading is not immoral either. To make downloading immoral, you have to accept that copyrighted products are governed by the same moral and legal principles as real property, thus the recent and continuous reference by the copyright community to label downloading as stealing. But the fact is that real and intellectual property are different and are governed by different principles. Downloading a copyrighted product does not diminish the product, as would be the case of taking and using tangible property such as a dress. At worst, it is depriving the copyright owner of a potential sale. Indeed, it may be causing a sale (through familiarity) or even more likely, have no impact on the sale. My son often will become familiar with artists through downloading their music on the Internet and then go out and buy the CD.
The comparison to real property fails for several other reasons. Real property is subject to ownership taxes. Real property lasts forever and can be owned forever. A copyright can be owned only for a limited period of time. Indeed, the United States Constitution declares this. More, copyright law must bow to the First Amendment that expressly allows people to use a copyrighted product without the permission of the copyright owner. This concern contributes to the statutory and judicial concept of "fair use". The First Amendment includes, not only the right to send, but also the right to receive. Indeed, in 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court in declaring the VCR a legal product, said that it could be okay to copy an entire copyrighted product. So if the Supreme Court expressly held that VCR copying in the home for non-commercial purposes is a legal activity, how is it suddenly labeled as "piracy" because the device is a computer?
The major record labels concede that they totally have failed to transform their business models in response to the Internet. But then they whine that they "cannot compete with free", referring to the free downloading the Internet allows. While I am sympathetic to the radical shift of selling a CD with a one good song for $20 to a marketplace where consumers pick and choose which songs they want, I am not sure this is the correct approach. For one thing, you can compete with free. Purveyors of bottled water do it. America Online does it. Book retailers do it with libraries. Independent online music services say they can do it, if they can clear the rights.
The Beatles 1 album, which contained 30-year-old songs that could have been downloaded for free from Napster-like services from day one, but nevertheless sold some 26 million copies. Why? Because people were willing to pay for the quality of a CD over the often barely acceptable sound quality of a download using P2P services.
Of course, recording artists must make a living and should be paid. Most consumers likely would pay a reasonable amount for quality downloads, access to full catalogs and maybe some promotional items such as concert tickets or hidden tracks on a CD. Artists even can get new revenue from the Internet by identifying their fans and promoting their concerts, new releases and other products. But the music industry has made little effort to look at new business models or provide a viable and attractive alternative to the downloading services.
The recording industry and motion picture industry should stop complaining so much and look for technological solutions to its own problems. Doesn't it make more sense to protect content at the source, using technologies that maintain consumer expectations for personal use? Content providers would be served better by working with technology companies to deploy these solutions rather than suing everyone and lobbying Congress to legislate unreasonable and consumer-unfriendly mandates.
Despite a lack of hits and a recession, music and movie sales are holding their own. Compare this to real downfalls in other sectors from telecommunications to IT to broadcasting, and you must ask yourself if the Internet is actually a good thing for the copyright community.
So where does this lead us? I submit that policymakers should follow some basic principles:
First, do no harm. If we had previously heeded the concerns of the creative community, we would have no radio, no TV, no VCR, no computer, no e-mail and no Internet. Yet each of these technologies has enhanced the revenue stream for copyright owners.
Second, advances in technology should not be restricted. We cannot even imagine today what future advances we will choke off if we artificially restrict technology. If we can envision technology connecting the poorest in the world to medical information, to education and to a better quality of life, we should be careful about stifling its growth. Advances in technology also can supply tools to content providers to help them manage digital rights in a manner that takes into account consumers' expectations.
Third, claims of harm should be greeted with great skepticism. Not every recording is a lost sale. It actually may represent a stream of future sales. Artists from Chuck D to Janis Ian to Courtney Love support home recording rights for practical business reasons.
Fourth, copyright owners have a high burden of proof before any technology should be restricted. Broadcasters and the motion picture industry have come close to making the case that redistribution of free, over-the-air broadcast television over the Internet is harmful to the concept of free over- the-air broadcasting. This is an area where careful legislation or regular legal review, respectful of consumer rights and expectations, may be appropriate.
Fifth, copyright owners should continue developing ways to protect their content at the source, rather than insisting that the burden should be on the device that plays it. Perhaps they should consider a more flexible business model that focuses on keeping honest people honest. But, the corollary here is don't sell CDs that don't work on many CD players.
Finally, any restrictions on technology should be narrowly crafted, define limitations on abuse by copyright owners and define legitimate consumer recording rights and expectations. For example, CEA supports the distance education bill presented by Congressman Darrell Issa of California and Rick Boucher of Virginia that addresses a specific IP concern rather than attempting to legislate through a one-size-fits-all approach. The Boucher- Issa bill reaffirms fair use rights and would amend the Copyright Act to ensure educators can use PCs and new technology to foster distance learning.
The collision course between copyright owners' desire to preserve existing business models and the inevitable development of newer, better, faster and cheaper technologies need not be fatal. Our future is bright if we resist the temptation to restrict technology. Digital technology will foster a Renaissance of creativity. It will connect our world and soon allow everyone to have low-cost access to information, entertainment and education. If the play button becomes the pay button, our very ability to raise the world's standard of living and education will be jeopardized. \
***
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You won't have to. If I can't find the BOPH's e-mail address, a friend of mine does have it over in NZ. The bad news... he's in a place where guns are banned... but if the Feds wherever he is can be convinced that network and physical security should be combined, that may not be a problem.
Actually, I think that most of the $10K cost is simply that it's a low-volume product. How much would a CD player cost if it were essentially built by hand from discrete components in batches of 10 instead of 10K or 100K? Or a HD?
Depends on how he got to gray scale, it could be as bad as 8. But with respect to amplitude modulation, every dot potentially represents the full dynamic range of the scanner... 3 12 bit channels even on a cheapo... how to make that resolution useful? I think that's for the next generation of experimentation.
Your comment with respect to heat and dual beams is reasonable. I've never had occasion to take apart a laser turntable or look up the patents, if you're interested, go to the USPTO site at http://www.uspto.gov , go to the Patent search database, use laser AND turntable as search terms. I'm wondering if 2400 dpi would work best deriving horizontal position of the variation from center of a groove (L-R) or if it's best (or possible) to derive amplitude info from each side of a groove.
Let's say you have a collection of irreplaceable LPs and you'd like to archive them in a reasonable length of time. Would you rather play them back one at a time or scan them on an optical scanner?