So according to TFA, the FBI is claiming "a section of a 1978 federal wiretapping law" gives them the power to ask about phone records. TFA does not actually say what section that might be. TFA then goes on to speculate on the (il)legality of phone companies handing over records, again without any further information or even consideration for any revisions since 1978. Apparently, "experts" say that these laws are being misinterpreted by the FBI. There's no mention of a lawsuit, no mention of anything more than speculation.
That's great, guys. Please keep up the good work, fight the good fight, et cetera, but wait until you have something concrete and informative before you publish.
You're being pedantic. The example in my original post indicates that I consider "properly scrubbed" to mean "having all sensitive details altered or hidden".
That's interesting. My civics class had a few particularly memorable moments.
First was when my local representative came for a visit. He explained his decision-making process: when it came time to vote, he thought for a moment on what faction gave him the best reasons to side with them. He talked about lobbyists: When a company wants something, they could either take a trained employee off their normal post, send them on a road trip to the state capital, and spend a few days fumbling through a presentation, or the company could hire a lobbyist to present on their behalf. He talked about petitions: His assistants would tally up letters for side of an issue, and present a listing of the number of supporters with their reasons.
After that, the class had an assignment: Within the next month, pick an issue, pick a side, and write your representatives. My issue was the local river's water quality, which was about to be made worse by an incoming development. Citing a few water-quality studies and doing some of my own testing (with help from the science teacher), I wrote a nice detailed letter. I certainly wasn't the only one to voice such concerns, but I was also in direct opposition to most local (pro-development) businesses. The representative pushed legislation to require better runoff control, which was eventually rejected by the rest of the legislature. It did manage to scare the developers enough to protect the river during construction.
Democracy still works. If it doesn't agree with you, that just means you're either in the minority, or just not convincing enough. Write more letters, sign more petitions, and join more protests. In the history of the United States, corrupt politicians have done far less harm than apathetic citizens.
I believe that no person is inherently better than anyone else, free or otherwise.
A free person's lifestyle may indeed be better for that person, and similarly, a source document may indeed be more useful in the pursuit of a fully-transparent government.
However, I also believe that limits must exist. Humanity does not benefit if a psychopath is free to kill anyone they want. Likewise, humanity does not benefit if troop positions, informant identities, or even commenters' names are published.
Given that humans cannot natively process public-key encryption in a reasonable amount of time, plain old secrecy is the best mechanism we have for security. One mistake in the leak's sanitizing, and people can die. It's not hard to imagine hypothetical examples:
A North Korean diplomat confidentially speaking out against Kim Jong-Il. With a public name or even title, he and his family disappear.
An informant mentioning helping a man with a sunflower tattoo execute a mob hit. If you're a mobster with a sunflower tattoo, your partner isn't going to last long.
Personally, I'd rather have options on where to send my information. In the case of the North Korean diplomat, it'd be best released to an outlet familiar with North Korea's political and military structure, so they can be sure that no harm will come from my leak. I certainly wouldn't trust an outlet like Gizmodo, for example, who would have no idea what mundane details need censorship. I could try to redact the information myself, of course, but if I don't have the time or knowledge, I'll do a horribly bad job of it.
Because Wikileaks has, ironically, so little transparancy regarding its structure and expertise, I simply don't trust it to clean out all of the important details from a leak. OpenLeaks is intentionally removing themselves from the responsibility, passing it on to the outlets as with more traditional secret-phone-calls-to-journalists leaks.
How is a source document inherently better than a properly-scrubbed document? If a hypothetical leak indicates that the CIA meets North Korean arms dealers every Tuesday at 4:00 PM at the Starbucks on Main street, does it really matter that the released version says the meeting takes place on Friday at an old warehouse?
If an OpenLeaks submitter doesn't like what is finally released, they're welcome to try again with a different outlet. OpenLeaks just makes connections, and it's up to the submitter to determine what kind of outlet they want to deal with. WikiLeaks takes on the whole job itself, and if a submitter doesn't like the way they do business, tough.
Having multiple avenues for whistleblowing is good for humanity, but we cannot assume Wikileaks cares about what's good for humanity. A normal organization hides from slander, moving controversial figures away from the public spotlight and replacing them with new faces. Regardless of Wikileaks' benevolent message, it seems intent on parading Assange around as a sort of "martyr for the rebellion" figure. OpenLeaks stand to take attention away from that image, and in doing so, cut off the stream of revenue from donations.
Wikileaks hasn't acted like a normal charitable organization in quite a while. Now they're just capitalizing on controversy, and trying to make a profitable business out of it.
So first, Wikileaks is a great boon to democracy, then it's a threat to security, then it's the victim of a multi-government conspiracy, then it's the noble banner over coordinated multinational attacks, and now it's the victim of sabotage, and perpetrator of its own slander campaign!
It was a computer programming job. If a programmer's first instinct is "Gather lots of details, then write a specific solution from scratch" his programs will be buggy, bloated, and take far longer to produce than they should. A programmer whose first instinct is to check for pre-built solutions saves time and money.
I should have noted it was my first answer. The second answer (delivered immediately without further prompting) was a process of estimation pretty similar to what you described.
I actually agree with this, to an extent. Religion aside, my understanding (as an atheist) is that confession is supposed to be an admission of guilt, and reflects an internal acceptance of the church's morality. I'm not saying that morality is particularly right, but I digress. I think the actual visit with another person is a vital part of that admission and acceptance. With a quick look through any online forum, it's quite clear that people are inclined to be aggressive and dishonest if they think they are anonymous.
Remove the personal contact, and sincerity vanishes as well.
Stories are often a delivery method for propaganda (even the good-safe-happy Aesop kind), and almost any bit of propaganda can be framed into a narrative story. The effects and influence of propaganda campaigns have been studied well previously. Start there.
I call bullshit, and I mean that literally. As I read the headline, I said "bullshit". It may have confused those around me, but they're used to that by now...
That's assuming you own the work in question. You do not own the movie. You own the DVD that contains the movie, so you can copy and display that. Then there's also the issue of how closed a home has to be to be considered private, but even I'm not going to go there...
They sold you silicon and a license to use the software, just like they said they would. If you choose to reject half of what you bought, it's not their fault.
Let's (hypothetically) get rid of licensing, then.
I'm a software developer. I write a program, and sell it (in a legal sense) to one customer. He turns around, copies it at no cost to himself, and distributes it for free. Since I sold him the original, I'm screwed. I can't sell my work anymore. So much for eating next week. Maybe I should just keep producing. I'll make another program, and have the same experience. Now, this one took me three months to make, but at least I made $10 off of it. That ought to help well with the three months of food and shelter. I could go get a different job making something physical, but then why would I bother programming anything significant?
Or, I could keep copyright control of my work, and license it to each customer. Since I maintain exclusive control of each product, i don't have to worry about rampant copying.
The key difference between a creative work and a physical work is the cost of copying. An exact replica of a physical object still costs a significant amount to copy, just for raw materials and manufacturing. A creative work costs effectively nothing to reproduce today, and hasn't since the invention of the printing press. Following basic economics, that leads to rampant devaluation of the works, to the point where nobody can make a living producing them.
Fortunately for me, society has decided for the past few hundred years that creative works are valuable, and deserve protection from assholes.
I might have misunderstood you... Regardless, I think there's a misunderstanding here.
If your doodle could, as a whole, be separated from the literary work contained with it in the book, then there would not be any infringement. You do own the book. Since you do not own the literary work that the book contains, any use of that work would be derivative.
When I read your post initially, I took it to mean that the picture and page 57 would be a work of art together. Since page 57 would likely contain words, those words (and the part of the literary work they represent) would be an inseparable part of the cat picture, and could be reasonable justification for a lawsuit.
If you draw the picture such that it is separable from the words and story (such as in the margins then torn out), there is no copyright infringement.
Agreed. The computer landscape is a bit different, for now, mostly because of the effort of open-source advocates with the same position as you and I. For what it's worth, I also have no consoles, but I do keep a Windows XP machine around for occasional use. I know exactly how little I can do with it, and I stay within those bounds.
Agreed. I have ADHD. It's rather hard to meet deadlines when the assignment is to "write a simulated filesystem" and the only thing I can think about is how the consistency of cream cheese changes with temperature.
I've also never cheated on any assignment, opting instead to take reduced grades, visit professors during office hours, going to secluded interior rooms to work, and even skipping easier classes to do work for harder ones. I missed grade points, honors, and an internship opportunity because of my incomplete work and refusal to cheat, and I'm proud of it.
I once went to a job interview, and got one of those problem-solving questions: How would you determine the number of gas stations in the USA?
My answer was simple: I'd search on Google, because there's probably a news article or government report with a better estimate than I could produce on my own. That got me a nice scowl from the interviewer, who expected me to perform extrapolation based on a sample. My guess is that the guy had never left the New England state he worked in, and had never seen a stretch of 150 miles between gas stations on a Great Plains highway.
The rest of the interview was pretty standard, but that one question still annoys me.
"This DVD is licensed for private home viewing only. It is not licensed for any other use. Any public performance, copying or other use is strictly prohibited. All other rights reserved."
A movie, being clearly an audiovisual work, can only be displayed in any form anywhere by the copyright holder or the entities that the copyright holder has licensed to make such a display. That exclusivity is one of the basic provisions of copyright law.
You can buy any DVD you want, and it has a copy of the movie on it. You can't display the movie, even within your own home, without the proper license.
If software were sold, you'd just be granted the additional right to make an archive copy, resell it to someone else, and a few other trivial things. It's not that big a deal, because you certainly aren't being sold the copyrights to the software.
There is no such requirement in any jurisdiction I've looked at. A contract is just a formal agreement between parties. It can be a note on a cocktail napkin signed in a bar, and it's still legal (though drunkenness/competence affects the validity, but that varies by jurisdiction). There are some limits, but they're usually defined vaguely and differ for each jurisdiction. A contract requiring you to pay a friend $10,000 each day for no reason and no return is probably legitimate. A contract requiring you to change your name to Bob and move to Madagascar is probably not legitimate everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
So according to TFA, the FBI is claiming "a section of a 1978 federal wiretapping law" gives them the power to ask about phone records. TFA does not actually say what section that might be. TFA then goes on to speculate on the (il)legality of phone companies handing over records, again without any further information or even consideration for any revisions since 1978. Apparently, "experts" say that these laws are being misinterpreted by the FBI. There's no mention of a lawsuit, no mention of anything more than speculation.
That's great, guys. Please keep up the good work, fight the good fight, et cetera, but wait until you have something concrete and informative before you publish.
You're being pedantic. The example in my original post indicates that I consider "properly scrubbed" to mean "having all sensitive details altered or hidden".
There are easy ways to sanitize documents. Wikileaks has not done so. The State Department has criticized them for it.
That's interesting. My civics class had a few particularly memorable moments.
First was when my local representative came for a visit. He explained his decision-making process: when it came time to vote, he thought for a moment on what faction gave him the best reasons to side with them. He talked about lobbyists: When a company wants something, they could either take a trained employee off their normal post, send them on a road trip to the state capital, and spend a few days fumbling through a presentation, or the company could hire a lobbyist to present on their behalf. He talked about petitions: His assistants would tally up letters for side of an issue, and present a listing of the number of supporters with their reasons.
After that, the class had an assignment: Within the next month, pick an issue, pick a side, and write your representatives. My issue was the local river's water quality, which was about to be made worse by an incoming development. Citing a few water-quality studies and doing some of my own testing (with help from the science teacher), I wrote a nice detailed letter. I certainly wasn't the only one to voice such concerns, but I was also in direct opposition to most local (pro-development) businesses. The representative pushed legislation to require better runoff control, which was eventually rejected by the rest of the legislature. It did manage to scare the developers enough to protect the river during construction.
Democracy still works. If it doesn't agree with you, that just means you're either in the minority, or just not convincing enough. Write more letters, sign more petitions, and join more protests. In the history of the United States, corrupt politicians have done far less harm than apathetic citizens.
I believe that no person is inherently better than anyone else, free or otherwise.
A free person's lifestyle may indeed be better for that person, and similarly, a source document may indeed be more useful in the pursuit of a fully-transparent government.
However, I also believe that limits must exist. Humanity does not benefit if a psychopath is free to kill anyone they want. Likewise, humanity does not benefit if troop positions, informant identities, or even commenters' names are published.
Given that humans cannot natively process public-key encryption in a reasonable amount of time, plain old secrecy is the best mechanism we have for security. One mistake in the leak's sanitizing, and people can die. It's not hard to imagine hypothetical examples:
Personally, I'd rather have options on where to send my information. In the case of the North Korean diplomat, it'd be best released to an outlet familiar with North Korea's political and military structure, so they can be sure that no harm will come from my leak. I certainly wouldn't trust an outlet like Gizmodo, for example, who would have no idea what mundane details need censorship. I could try to redact the information myself, of course, but if I don't have the time or knowledge, I'll do a horribly bad job of it.
Because Wikileaks has, ironically, so little transparancy regarding its structure and expertise, I simply don't trust it to clean out all of the important details from a leak. OpenLeaks is intentionally removing themselves from the responsibility, passing it on to the outlets as with more traditional secret-phone-calls-to-journalists leaks.
How is a source document inherently better than a properly-scrubbed document? If a hypothetical leak indicates that the CIA meets North Korean arms dealers every Tuesday at 4:00 PM at the Starbucks on Main street, does it really matter that the released version says the meeting takes place on Friday at an old warehouse?
If an OpenLeaks submitter doesn't like what is finally released, they're welcome to try again with a different outlet. OpenLeaks just makes connections, and it's up to the submitter to determine what kind of outlet they want to deal with. WikiLeaks takes on the whole job itself, and if a submitter doesn't like the way they do business, tough.
That was the funniest thing I've read on here in a while. I sincerely wish I could mod you up, even if you are an AC.
Having multiple avenues for whistleblowing is good for humanity, but we cannot assume Wikileaks cares about what's good for humanity. A normal organization hides from slander, moving controversial figures away from the public spotlight and replacing them with new faces. Regardless of Wikileaks' benevolent message, it seems intent on parading Assange around as a sort of "martyr for the rebellion" figure. OpenLeaks stand to take attention away from that image, and in doing so, cut off the stream of revenue from donations.
Wikileaks hasn't acted like a normal charitable organization in quite a while. Now they're just capitalizing on controversy, and trying to make a profitable business out of it.
So first, Wikileaks is a great boon to democracy, then it's a threat to security, then it's the victim of a multi-government conspiracy, then it's the noble banner over coordinated multinational attacks, and now it's the victim of sabotage, and perpetrator of its own slander campaign!
The theatrics continue.
The small faint glimmer of hope that I still hold wants Google to use this pool as a shopping list.
It was a computer programming job. If a programmer's first instinct is "Gather lots of details, then write a specific solution from scratch" his programs will be buggy, bloated, and take far longer to produce than they should. A programmer whose first instinct is to check for pre-built solutions saves time and money.
I should have noted it was my first answer. The second answer (delivered immediately without further prompting) was a process of estimation pretty similar to what you described.
I actually agree with this, to an extent. Religion aside, my understanding (as an atheist) is that confession is supposed to be an admission of guilt, and reflects an internal acceptance of the church's morality. I'm not saying that morality is particularly right, but I digress. I think the actual visit with another person is a vital part of that admission and acceptance. With a quick look through any online forum, it's quite clear that people are inclined to be aggressive and dishonest if they think they are anonymous.
Remove the personal contact, and sincerity vanishes as well.
Stories are often a delivery method for propaganda (even the good-safe-happy Aesop kind), and almost any bit of propaganda can be framed into a narrative story. The effects and influence of propaganda campaigns have been studied well previously. Start there.
I call bullshit, and I mean that literally. As I read the headline, I said "bullshit". It may have confused those around me, but they're used to that by now...
Because someone else wrote it, so they have exclusive rights over its use.
That's assuming you own the work in question. You do not own the movie. You own the DVD that contains the movie, so you can copy and display that. Then there's also the issue of how closed a home has to be to be considered private, but even I'm not going to go there...
They sold you silicon and a license to use the software, just like they said they would. If you choose to reject half of what you bought, it's not their fault.
Let's (hypothetically) get rid of licensing, then.
I'm a software developer. I write a program, and sell it (in a legal sense) to one customer. He turns around, copies it at no cost to himself, and distributes it for free. Since I sold him the original, I'm screwed. I can't sell my work anymore. So much for eating next week. Maybe I should just keep producing. I'll make another program, and have the same experience. Now, this one took me three months to make, but at least I made $10 off of it. That ought to help well with the three months of food and shelter. I could go get a different job making something physical, but then why would I bother programming anything significant?
Or, I could keep copyright control of my work, and license it to each customer. Since I maintain exclusive control of each product, i don't have to worry about rampant copying.
The key difference between a creative work and a physical work is the cost of copying. An exact replica of a physical object still costs a significant amount to copy, just for raw materials and manufacturing. A creative work costs effectively nothing to reproduce today, and hasn't since the invention of the printing press. Following basic economics, that leads to rampant devaluation of the works, to the point where nobody can make a living producing them.
Fortunately for me, society has decided for the past few hundred years that creative works are valuable, and deserve protection from assholes.
I might have misunderstood you... Regardless, I think there's a misunderstanding here.
If your doodle could, as a whole, be separated from the literary work contained with it in the book, then there would not be any infringement. You do own the book. Since you do not own the literary work that the book contains, any use of that work would be derivative.
When I read your post initially, I took it to mean that the picture and page 57 would be a work of art together. Since page 57 would likely contain words, those words (and the part of the literary work they represent) would be an inseparable part of the cat picture, and could be reasonable justification for a lawsuit.
If you draw the picture such that it is separable from the words and story (such as in the margins then torn out), there is no copyright infringement.
Agreed. The computer landscape is a bit different, for now, mostly because of the effort of open-source advocates with the same position as you and I. For what it's worth, I also have no consoles, but I do keep a Windows XP machine around for occasional use. I know exactly how little I can do with it, and I stay within those bounds.
The nominal consideration would be that you get to use the software.
Agreed. I have ADHD. It's rather hard to meet deadlines when the assignment is to "write a simulated filesystem" and the only thing I can think about is how the consistency of cream cheese changes with temperature.
I've also never cheated on any assignment, opting instead to take reduced grades, visit professors during office hours, going to secluded interior rooms to work, and even skipping easier classes to do work for harder ones. I missed grade points, honors, and an internship opportunity because of my incomplete work and refusal to cheat, and I'm proud of it.
I once went to a job interview, and got one of those problem-solving questions: How would you determine the number of gas stations in the USA?
My answer was simple: I'd search on Google, because there's probably a news article or government report with a better estimate than I could produce on my own. That got me a nice scowl from the interviewer, who expected me to perform extrapolation based on a sample. My guess is that the guy had never left the New England state he worked in, and had never seen a stretch of 150 miles between gas stations on a Great Plains highway.
The rest of the interview was pretty standard, but that one question still annoys me.
"This DVD is licensed for private home viewing only. It is not licensed for any other use. Any public performance, copying or other use is strictly prohibited. All other rights reserved."
A movie, being clearly an audiovisual work, can only be displayed in any form anywhere by the copyright holder or the entities that the copyright holder has licensed to make such a display. That exclusivity is one of the basic provisions of copyright law.
You can buy any DVD you want, and it has a copy of the movie on it. You can't display the movie, even within your own home, without the proper license.
If software were sold, you'd just be granted the additional right to make an archive copy, resell it to someone else, and a few other trivial things. It's not that big a deal, because you certainly aren't being sold the copyrights to the software.
There is no such requirement in any jurisdiction I've looked at. A contract is just a formal agreement between parties. It can be a note on a cocktail napkin signed in a bar, and it's still legal (though drunkenness/competence affects the validity, but that varies by jurisdiction). There are some limits, but they're usually defined vaguely and differ for each jurisdiction. A contract requiring you to pay a friend $10,000 each day for no reason and no return is probably legitimate. A contract requiring you to change your name to Bob and move to Madagascar is probably not legitimate everywhere.
I suggest you never buy something labeled "some assembly required." You're in for a very bad surprise.