Absolutely correct. Kids should be taught at an early age that _everything_ they write on the web - in a forum, in a facebook, in an archived mailing list, anywhere else - can, and probably will, be copied, cached, indexed and indexed again and made available to everyone through search engines like Google. They should know that everything they publish under their real name, and most likely some that they don't, can be connected to them and viewed by their friends, parents, grandparents, and any future girlfriends, employers or enemies.
The sad truth is that a very large number of adults don't understand that.
...are bloggers and reporters trying to make a technical argument about kernel schedulers into some sort of holy war between free software server geek fanatics and corporate desktop smooth integrated experience lovers? Does the scheduler even matter that much?
No, the police have not returned any hardware or even backup copies of the contents of the disks, not to The Pirate Bay, the Pirate Bureau nor to some of the smaller businesses that were renting rack space in the same server hall. Some of the larger businesses that could afford scary lawyers have gotten their hardware back though.
I don't know if there is a hard limit on the investigation time - I think the prescriptive period for copyright infringement is 5 years (though I'm not sure), so if that is what he wants to press charges for he has to do it before June 2011...
And please try not to call it "pirating". That's a term coined by the mpaa (if I remember correctly) to try to make it sound really bad. If we, the geeks, are careful to call it what it is, copyright infringement or illegal copying, we can perhaps change public perception of the issues a little.
The ONLY thing that bugs me about thepiratebay is the name. Yes it IS cool but also makes us all look a bit like rebelling teenagers, even those of us who have thought deeply about copyright issues and realised that the system needs fixing to work in the modern world.
It has worked reasonably well in Sweden, where the think-tank The Pirate Bureau formed shortly after the copyright industry had created the Anti-Pirate Bureau, an organisation consisting mostly of lawyers and paid P2P network infiltrators that tries to track down people distributing copyrighted material. The Pirate Bureau became rather well-known and popular, and was often invited to TV debates on copyright law, and interviewed and asked for comments when newspapers published articles about the subject - and were so successful that the copyright lobbyists adopted a policy a few years ago to refuse debates where representatives from the Pirate Bureau were participating. And then there's the Pirate Party, which didn't get enough votes to take seats in the parliament this time but was treated as a serious candidate by most of the media, despite its name.
When someone is calling you names, it's usually a lot more effective to embrace it than to try and distance yourself from it.
No, its not! Drugs are illegal, music is not.
Distributing drugs is illegal, and distributing music without paying the copyright owner is illegal.
Its because of analogies like yours, that people think that ANY file sharing is illegal.
Also, the Pirate Bay team isn't doing any file sharing. Or, well, they probably are, in private. But The Pirate Bay is just an indexing service, like Google or Yahoo - they are not distributing any material that would infringe on anyone's copyright, and what they are doing is with a very high probability legal under current Swedish law.
The prosecutor who is in charge of the investigation associated with the raid against The Pirate Bay in June 2006, when all their servers were confiscated (and the site was up and running again in 3 days), has been looking over the material for almost 16 months now, and has asked the court for time extensions (and received them) twice - apparently he is having trouble finding proof of any illegal activities despite the fact that all the hundreds of thousands of torrents on the site are visible to everyone. His most recent extension expires on next monday, October 1st, at which point he has to press charges, drop the case, or request another extension - guess what he will do?
Because you can't say that a given license is either more or less permissive than any other. It's not a total order.
Take GPLv2 and GPLv3 for example. If either of them were strictly more permissive, you would be able to relicense from one to the other. But you can't since the GPLv3 prohibits you from using patents to close off the code, and GPLv2 prohibits you from adding any new probihitions.
Or take the XFree86 license and GPLv[2-3]. The XFree86 license requires attribution to a greater extent than the GPL, while GPL requires other things that the XFree86 license does not. Neither can be said to be "more permissive", because they require and allow different things.
If Google, a company whose main business model is to know everything about everyone, thinks that the European privacy laws are 'too bureaucratic and inflexible', the EU commission and the European parliament must be doing something right.
Funnily enough, the only distributions I tend to refuse to touch are the "technical" ones, so I've never run Debian, because as far as I'm concerned, the whole and only point of a distribution is to make it easy to install (so that I can then get to the part I care about, namely the kernel), so Debian or one of the "compile everything by hand" ones simply weren't interesting to me. I think that statement is a bit unfair. Debian has made enormous progress in terms of ease of use the last few years, and I doubt anyone could say that there is any significant difference between Fedora and Debian in that regard today.
Anonymous? Have you ever used a BitTorrent client?
It's trivial for anyone connecting to a torrent to get the IP adresses of other people using the same torrent. It's "anonymous" in the same way that piling up a huge stack of pirated Windows Vista CDs on the main square and throwing them at passersby is "anonymous".
1. Thomas Bodström, who was minister of justice until the election in september 2006, was accused of putting pressure on police and attorneys to act against The Pirate Bay (which is illegal under the Swedish Constitution) after high-ranking employees at his Ministry of Justice had met with representatives for MPAA and the US Department of State. Bodström is now, among other things, the chairman of ECPAT Sweden who together with the IT crime section of the Swedish police compile the list of websites to put in the DNS blacklist discussed in this article. Thomas Bodström is not a fan of The Pirate Bay. http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3969&date=20 060602
2.An anti-copyright website run by some of the same people as the ones who run The Pirate Bay was placed on this list a few weeks ago because the front page had an animation of a naked kid doing the "Copy Me" dance. There was absolutely nothing pornographic about this animation (see for yourself: http://kopimi.se/ ), which the attorney told Stefan Kronqvist, head of the IT crime section of the Swedish police, while they told him to remove the website from the blacklist after the people behind the website had made a formal complaint. They also sent a mail to Kronqvist requesting financial compensation for the time their website had been blocked but received no reply. Rumours say that Stefan Kronqvist is not a fan of The Pirate Bay. http://swartz.typepad.com/texplorer/2007/07/polise ns-hmnd-m.html
3. The US Chamber of Commerce recently arranged a seminar for pro-copyright lobbyists in Sweden with the title "Sweden - a safe haven for pirates?". In this seminar a guy from a Danish anti-piracy organisation explained how great it was to use child pornography as an argument to establish the principle that information carriers like websites and ISPs must be responsible for the information they distribute. Once that principle was established it could easily be extended to cover things like copyright infringement as well. He higly recommended lobbyists in other countries to use the same technique. http://forum.piratpartiet.se/Topic79221-15-5.aspx# bm79282
Most of the links are in Swedish, sorry about that.
Even if the immigration bill is goes nowhere, however, the Real ID Act is still in effect. It says that, starting on May 11, 2008, Americans will need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service.
What could possibly be bad about that (except administrational costs)? I don't live in USA, but I assume that you would need some sort of ID for all these things today as well (surely you can't collect social security without providing some sort of proof of who you are and that you actually are entitled to it?). What's the difference between having a federally approved ID card instead of just a state approved?
I thought it already was regulated? I know that the few times I've been in video game stores, they don't sell the most violent games to kids under 15 (just like movies). Maybe it's just on a national level though, or even done by the retailers themselves.
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)? Have you even read the license for Linux (the GNU General Public License, version 2) ? Writing a program for an OS licensed under that licence does in no way force you to use that licence for that program.
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.) What "Linux libraries"? If you mean glibc, then yes. Have you even read the licence for it (the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1) ?
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)? You can do whatever you want with your code, but since you're not going to show it to anyone that sounds both stupid and paranoid.
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party? Not for any of the reasons given above.
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems? Which problems?
If you're going to write software that uses other people's code (libraries etc) you need to make sure that you are not using that code in ways that you are not allowed to. That goes both if you are writing free software or secret closed proprietary software. Read the licences for all the libraries you are going to use, whether you are writing for BSD or Linux or Windows. Really.
Oh, and go to hell with your @#$ closed code. Why should we help you when you're not going to help anyone else?
One problem with VST is that Steinberg for some unexplained reason has released the VST header file under a very restrictive license, which makes it illegal to distribute compiled VSTs under the GPL. This is hampering native VST on Linux quite a bit (that, and the fact that VST is a rather ugly API).
I think you just had bad luck. MIDI does work out of the box on any non-braindead distribution, and the only thing you need to do to get JACK and friends running without glitches is to get a kernel with Ingo Molnar's RT patch. It's a shame that most distributions don't have pre-patched kernels packaged, but on the other hand it's trivial to do it yourself. And the RT patches are on their way into the mainline kernel, so hopefully this "problem" will go away pretty soon.
Ubuntustudio will include the Ingo Molnar low latency stuff by default. That's about time. Molnar's patch is absolutely essential to get decent latency (below 1 ms) and it's been around forever. I don't understand how so many of the major distributions simply don't have any RT-patched kernels available - even Ubuntu's "low-latency" kernel is mostly a standard kernel with the HZ setting at 1000 instead of 250.
MIDI isn't all that complicated. Anything that is USB class compliant (i.e. almost everything) will work just as well on Linux as OSX, for other weird transports you have to look for a driver.
I don't get your point. What does USB have to do with technological savvyness? The vast majority of music hardware sold today use MIDI over USB, and if anything it's easier to handle than old serial MIDI. Just plug in a USB MIDI device and it will appear in your system as a separate device - no daisy-chaining and keeping track of which device is on which MIDI channel needed. And USB MIDI has worked very well in Linux for ages with the snd-usb-audio [sic] module.
On the other hand, software instruments are infinitely more flexible, at least if you have the source. Want to tune that vibrato just a litle bit higher than the controls allow? Just change one constant in the code. Want to add one more oscillator type to that neat subtractive synth? Just add a few lines of code.
The only hardware I would spend any larger amounts of cash on are acoustic instruments + mics and MIDI controller interfaces.
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Absolutely correct. Kids should be taught at an early age that _everything_ they write on the web - in a forum, in a facebook, in an archived mailing list, anywhere else - can, and probably will, be copied, cached, indexed and indexed again and made available to everyone through search engines like Google. They should know that everything they publish under their real name, and most likely some that they don't, can be connected to them and viewed by their friends, parents, grandparents, and any future girlfriends, employers or enemies.
The sad truth is that a very large number of adults don't understand that.
...are bloggers and reporters trying to make a technical argument about kernel schedulers into some sort of holy war between free software server geek fanatics and corporate desktop smooth integrated experience lovers? Does the scheduler even matter that much?
No, the police have not returned any hardware or even backup copies of the contents of the disks, not to The Pirate Bay, the Pirate Bureau nor to some of the smaller businesses that were renting rack space in the same server hall. Some of the larger businesses that could afford scary lawyers have gotten their hardware back though.
I don't know if there is a hard limit on the investigation time - I think the prescriptive period for copyright infringement is 5 years (though I'm not sure), so if that is what he wants to press charges for he has to do it before June 2011...
It has worked reasonably well in Sweden, where the think-tank The Pirate Bureau formed shortly after the copyright industry had created the Anti-Pirate Bureau, an organisation consisting mostly of lawyers and paid P2P network infiltrators that tries to track down people distributing copyrighted material. The Pirate Bureau became rather well-known and popular, and was often invited to TV debates on copyright law, and interviewed and asked for comments when newspapers published articles about the subject - and were so successful that the copyright lobbyists adopted a policy a few years ago to refuse debates where representatives from the Pirate Bureau were participating. And then there's the Pirate Party, which didn't get enough votes to take seats in the parliament this time but was treated as a serious candidate by most of the media, despite its name.
When someone is calling you names, it's usually a lot more effective to embrace it than to try and distance yourself from it.
No it isn't. Prostitution is legal in some areas, but the legal age of consent is 18 years.
Also, the Pirate Bay team isn't doing any file sharing. Or, well, they probably are, in private. But The Pirate Bay is just an indexing service, like Google or Yahoo - they are not distributing any material that would infringe on anyone's copyright, and what they are doing is with a very high probability legal under current Swedish law.
The prosecutor who is in charge of the investigation associated with the raid against The Pirate Bay in June 2006, when all their servers were confiscated (and the site was up and running again in 3 days), has been looking over the material for almost 16 months now, and has asked the court for time extensions (and received them) twice - apparently he is having trouble finding proof of any illegal activities despite the fact that all the hundreds of thousands of torrents on the site are visible to everyone. His most recent extension expires on next monday, October 1st, at which point he has to press charges, drop the case, or request another extension - guess what he will do?
Because you can't say that a given license is either more or less permissive than any other. It's not a total order. Take GPLv2 and GPLv3 for example. If either of them were strictly more permissive, you would be able to relicense from one to the other. But you can't since the GPLv3 prohibits you from using patents to close off the code, and GPLv2 prohibits you from adding any new probihitions. Or take the XFree86 license and GPLv[2-3]. The XFree86 license requires attribution to a greater extent than the GPL, while GPL requires other things that the XFree86 license does not. Neither can be said to be "more permissive", because they require and allow different things.
What do you mean?
Will it be free, or just "free"? I can't find any information on that.
If Google, a company whose main business model is to know everything about everyone, thinks that the European privacy laws are 'too bureaucratic and inflexible', the EU commission and the European parliament must be doing something right.
"Advocating lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a smaller, less-intrusive government. Except when it comes to copyright law."
What does she "run"? Eh? Know what I mean, know what I mean?
Not the internet, but he did invent the web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
Anonymous? Have you ever used a BitTorrent client? It's trivial for anyone connecting to a torrent to get the IP adresses of other people using the same torrent. It's "anonymous" in the same way that piling up a huge stack of pirated Windows Vista CDs on the main square and throwing them at passersby is "anonymous".
1. Thomas Bodström, who was minister of justice until the election in september 2006, was accused of putting pressure on police and attorneys to act against The Pirate Bay (which is illegal under the Swedish Constitution) after high-ranking employees at his Ministry of Justice had met with representatives for MPAA and the US Department of State. Bodström is now, among other things, the chairman of ECPAT Sweden who together with the IT crime section of the Swedish police compile the list of websites to put in the DNS blacklist discussed in this article. Thomas Bodström is not a fan of The Pirate Bay.0 060602
e ns-hmnd-m.html
# bm79282
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3969&date=2
2.An anti-copyright website run by some of the same people as the ones who run The Pirate Bay was placed on this list a few weeks ago because the front page had an animation of a naked kid doing the "Copy Me" dance. There was absolutely nothing pornographic about this animation (see for yourself: http://kopimi.se/ ), which the attorney told Stefan Kronqvist, head of the IT crime section of the Swedish police, while they told him to remove the website from the blacklist after the people behind the website had made a formal complaint. They also sent a mail to Kronqvist requesting financial compensation for the time their website had been blocked but received no reply. Rumours say that Stefan Kronqvist is not a fan of The Pirate Bay.
http://swartz.typepad.com/texplorer/2007/07/polis
3. The US Chamber of Commerce recently arranged a seminar for pro-copyright lobbyists in Sweden with the title "Sweden - a safe haven for pirates?". In this seminar a guy from a Danish anti-piracy organisation explained how great it was to use child pornography as an argument to establish the principle that information carriers like websites and ISPs must be responsible for the information they distribute. Once that principle was established it could easily be extended to cover things like copyright infringement as well. He higly recommended lobbyists in other countries to use the same technique.
http://forum.piratpartiet.se/Topic79221-15-5.aspx
Most of the links are in Swedish, sorry about that.
I may be stupid, but I just don't get it.
Even if the immigration bill is goes nowhere, however, the Real ID Act is still in effect. It says that, starting on May 11, 2008, Americans will need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service.What could possibly be bad about that (except administrational costs)? I don't live in USA, but I assume that you would need some sort of ID for all these things today as well (surely you can't collect social security without providing some sort of proof of who you are and that you actually are entitled to it?). What's the difference between having a federally approved ID card instead of just a state approved?
I thought it already was regulated? I know that the few times I've been in video game stores, they don't sell the most violent games to kids under 15 (just like movies). Maybe it's just on a national level though, or even done by the retailers themselves.
Oh, and go to hell with your @#$ closed code. Why should we help you when you're not going to help anyone else?
One problem with VST is that Steinberg for some unexplained reason has released the VST header file under a very restrictive license, which makes it illegal to distribute compiled VSTs under the GPL. This is hampering native VST on Linux quite a bit (that, and the fact that VST is a rather ugly API).
I think you just had bad luck. MIDI does work out of the box on any non-braindead distribution, and the only thing you need to do to get JACK and friends running without glitches is to get a kernel with Ingo Molnar's RT patch. It's a shame that most distributions don't have pre-patched kernels packaged, but on the other hand it's trivial to do it yourself. And the RT patches are on their way into the mainline kernel, so hopefully this "problem" will go away pretty soon.
MIDI isn't all that complicated. Anything that is USB class compliant (i.e. almost everything) will work just as well on Linux as OSX, for other weird transports you have to look for a driver.
I don't get your point. What does USB have to do with technological savvyness? The vast majority of music hardware sold today use MIDI over USB, and if anything it's easier to handle than old serial MIDI. Just plug in a USB MIDI device and it will appear in your system as a separate device - no daisy-chaining and keeping track of which device is on which MIDI channel needed. And USB MIDI has worked very well in Linux for ages with the snd-usb-audio [sic] module.
On the other hand, software instruments are infinitely more flexible, at least if you have the source. Want to tune that vibrato just a litle bit higher than the controls allow? Just change one constant in the code. Want to add one more oscillator type to that neat subtractive synth? Just add a few lines of code. The only hardware I would spend any larger amounts of cash on are acoustic instruments + mics and MIDI controller interfaces.