Yes. But putting aside the issue of who owns the CueCat, their license doesn't even makes sense. The entire purpose of a barcode reader is to scan barcodes and spit out characters into the input stream. Exactly like the entire purpose of keyboard is to detect keypressed and spit out the characters to the underlying software.
Pursuing the analogy further, does having a MS keyboard mean that the code I type belongs to MS now? It is my effort, my code, my computer. Even if MS wraps a license around the keyboard, they can not be allowed to extend that license to my ownership of other things. In exactly the same manner, if I use the cuecat to catalog the books I own, the books are mine. the database software is mine (or some other company's) The barcodes are on the book - they are public. The ISBN is not a proprietry system. Which part of the whole thing does cuecat own? Nothing.
That the encryption is weak or it is encrypted makes no difference. I could use it to generate pseudorandom numbers. Does it mean that CueCat owns the random numbers now?
Exactly. But just like playing a piano, there are master pianists and there are casual players. And unlike the piano, we desperate need the talented programmers to work on genuinely useful software.
And to answer your question directly: no. the Hong Kong pirates weren't copying the DVDs. They were merely writing them, encrypted content and player keys - everything!
If and when Hong Kong adopts the DMCA, it may not be the case that these DVD stamping factories are illegal. They merely stamp. Who circumvented the copy protection on the original DVD? The real culprit is unknown, and the MPAA would probably never know. Nevermind - let's persecute these guys under the DMCA becuase they are copying.
Face it. DMCA + CSS = screwed up, half-assed legislation.
You are right. But additionally, people attempting to view the DVDs on licensed players are also intent on circumventing copy protection. Why? Becuase it was a US customer trying to view a Japanese DVD!
The legitimate players giving customers a way to break the rgion encoding too, is a circumvention device.
The old Xing player, which cannot view newly produced DVDs (becuase of the revocation of the player keys) is also attempting to circumvent copy protection.
When licensed players view unencrypted content, it is circumventing the copy protection. (Becuase the Content happens to be GPLed, and cannot be subject to restrictions imposed by the MPAA cartel.)
Weaselly streetlawyer vs slashdot geek - who will win?
The Hong Kong pirate was an example raised by me to answer the technical point: how does one make a bit-by-bit copy of a DVD?
It is to point out that CSS does nothing to actually control copying, and everything to control access. If these pirates can copy DVD's without circumventing any copy-protection, then Why is CSS necessary? Why does the MPAA not go after the Big Time Pirates (they are certainly rich enough to do this) but instead go after the people who have bought DVD's, and (by using DeCSS), desire to buy more DVDs?
Point 1. In other words, more arguing needs to be done. I understand you are confining yourself to the points of law. But if you step back and take the big picture, why was the monopolistic behaviour not debated in the public, but the DVDCCA allowed make such a device to control public viewing?
Should the exercise of copyright enable monopolistic behaviour? This is an ethical issue, not a point of law.
Point 2. The pirates who have done this are in many circumstances are operating outside of the jurisdiction of the DMCA. And they did their reverse engineering before the DMCA took effect.
Which leads to another point. Simplying XORing the data-stream would have been sufficient, if all you wanted was legal protection using this anti-reverse-engineering clause. As it stands, CSS session keys are simply too weak. Software players exist to brute force the key and they work, I am told.
The DMCA itself also allows for the reverse-engineering for interoperability. As it is, LiViD is a effort to do so for the Linux platform. That it had to use code suggested by DeCSS should not detract from this goal.
Oh, streetlawyer, do you really think you can pass that by a techie?
... it is impossible to copy the session key tracks without specialised equipment.
That's very clever phrasing. Now what is entailed in COPYING? One must read the session key tracks, and be able to write them!
Why is copying difficult? Becuase the DVD hardware reads the key (it must do this, or decoding cannot proceed), but does not pass it out to software control. If the software controlling the DVD player could obtain the session key there is no problem with writing it out!
In other words, that is how a licensed player must operate. Who specified this behaviour? The DVDCCA.
There - the evidence for player lock-in, and anticompetitive behaviour is out now.
How specialized is this equipment to read this session key? Not more specialized by far. You just need to get rid of that chip is that not passing on the session keys, and substitute it for one that passes the entire raw DVD sectors on. It would be trivial to reverse engineer the hardware to figure out which piece of electronics is disrupting the hardware stream. It seems that some piracy cartels in HongKong have figured this out and are pressing DVDs in masses.
Good point. But students are smart. As educational institutes, the schools should always start with education first. Engineering solutions such as prioritizing network traffic should be employed, in the long term. A short-term solution such as closing down napster for a week might work too to give the students the idea that non-academic activities really should tempered with common sense.
Metallica and Dr. Dre would like to know your position and instructions with respect to access to Napster through your network.
Why should these universities have any kind of position with respect to Napster? These musicians really need to have a larger view of Life, The Universe and Everything.
How about this hypothetical position, Lars. You might not like it, but I think this is one that you would find to be very likely:
The University provides network access to students for the purposes for academic research and learning. Insofar as the frivolous use of the network bandwidth does not exclude other students from academic activities, we will allow it. Insofar as these frivolous lawsuits does not impinge upon the academic freedom of the students,
according to our judgement, not yours, we will play nice an pretend that you actually have a case against us. True, the university does not condone copyright violation. True, the university will suspend any student who violates the laws of the country. But your private grieviances have nothing to do with this university and the administration. Please take this up the individual students. To us, napster is just like any other software program - it deserves it's place, as long it by itself violates no law, and does not interfere with our activities. We take no position with regards to the legality of Napster. That is not for us, or you, but the courts to decide.
Interesting. So you are saying that becuase the computers actions are totally predictable (deterministic), it should not qualify as a con?
I have to disagree. There is nothing about humans which says they are not deterministic too. If I could give you a truth serum, then get you to reveal your password, is that not placing you into a deterministic state of mind, before "conning" you?
Or what about exploits that make use of race conditions in file locking and such to penetrate the system? There is an element of chance in such exploits - so that makes it a con game?
Actually, I was just pissed at the bad analogies that plague the whole issue. IMHO, saying cracking computers like lock picking is only accurate up to a certain point. A computer is not a house. Neither it is totally a con game. But anyone who want to equate cracking computers with housebreaking is probably not examining their metaphors enough to refute my con game analogy. I claim in fact, it is _slightly_ better.
And no, I don't approve of either house-breaking, cons or cracking.
Do you consider hacking a computer to be equivalent to housebreaking? IMHO, they are not the same thing at all.
I consider hacking a computer to be more a con-game really. You see, your computer is chatty - when hooked up to the internet, it talks to other computers. Just that it could be untrusting or trusting about who to talk to, what to say, etc. Any computer that is naive can be tricked to reveal it's secrets, just like you can trick a idiot to telling you his mother's name, so you can use it to take money from his bank account.
I say this analogy is more accurate than housebreaking. Who do you say?
CD's are not a perfectly competitive market because they are not perfectly substitubable. You cannot
substitute a Patsy Cline CD for an Eminem CD.
This is true, but let us look at Books. Writers hold the copyright on books, and copyright laws enshrine this right. This law gives them leverage in negotiating book deals with publishers. The publishers sign a contract which allows them to publish the book. Rare is the author who assigns the copyright to the publishing house. Becuase of this, sometimes, you can find the same book by the same author published by different publishers with different covers. The readers have a choice in such a case, and the author was obviously signed a nonexlusive contract (or the contract with one publisher ran out, and the writer signed a different one with some other publisher).
You see, the book publishing business is many times more ethical than the music publishing business. This as a result of it being a far more mature industry.
It is definitely NOT a given that goods are not perfectly substitutable. If the MPAA companies respected copyright law and actually allowed the artistes to exercise their rights (or if the artistes are not lazy bums), there would be some choice for consumers to choose which publisher they want to go with. But no - as a I recall, there was even some legislation (now repealed) where the RIAA tried to make the works out to be work for hire. Think about that.
If you learn to read carefully, then you should know that he acknowledges that this is not prohibited currently.
But I have no doubts that the RIAA is going to overreach itself. Somehow, they will setup a law so draconian in their frenzy to protect their own asses, that they will outlaw their competitors. This anti-competitive behaviour will be their downfall.
Guess what, Chris Johnson is already doing all of the above - sending his music to MP3.com and hosting his own music. He knows where is rights end and the RIAA's start. And we should all support artists like him, especially when the RIAA starts overreaching.
What rubbish. We are just worrying about the scale here. What does it matter if you try to use GM or c to grok it?
Granted, it is meaningful to talk about changes of G over time, but if the speed of light changes, you will run in all sorts of problems with emission spectra, nevermind if that G changes or not!
You sound like a creationist moron. Oh wait - Setterfield?! Ah that explains this crap.
While in principle, this sounds like a good idea, having a Antipatent database just makes two databases instead of one. How will one police or regulate the other? Already patent holders are reluctant to do a comprehensive prior-art search - why should the presence of the "anti-patent" database change things?
The central problem with the patent system is not the idea behind it, but the stupidity of the people granting that patent, and the rights it gives the patent holder. That should be fixed. It's hard to see how having another database would change things.
No. There is no such universal scaling constant. It takes more than more one number to describe physics. Let me try to give you an idea of what I mean.
Suppose you doubled everything in size. You are two times large. Since everything doubles in size, it must mean that you can't tell the difference between now and before right? Wrong.
Since everything is doubled, the force of gravitation between say two planets would drop (increased distance). Nevermind, let's keep the force the same you say. So we have to increase the masses between any two objects (F = GMm/r^2 - remeber?). But having increased mass, do we now keep the forces between charges the same? If you do, then the charge to mass ratio of the elctrons and protons will change - this effect is measureable. Lots of physics - emission spectra of atoms and molecules would be different as a result. We might not even be around to observe this.
That was just playing around with distance. It does not work for time as well. Some combination of the two? Not even that.
In other words, if something was different in the past, we should be able to see that effect physcially as we look backword in time at the stars. The people who are selling this idea are not thinking broadly enough about the entirety of physical phenomena.
In biology, fusion refers to the merging of two
gametes, basically, Fusion through persuasion means something else.
Bio geeks, please don't laugh too hard.
It never ceases to amaze me how lame some people are. A few months ago, I bought some bedside tables from IKEA, and used them a bedside table, a phone table, and a small table for working. Does IKEA get to sue to me for using a bedside table as something else?
In eactly the same fashion, Radioshack gives you a barcode scanner and they expect you to use it on their catalogues and their catalogues only. Nevermind that it could be used elsewhere. You should stop doing it now, and get ANOTHER barcode scanner for that. If cuecat was so unimaginative as to think that are as unimaginative as they are, trying to make a lame business out of these kind of artificial restrictions, they should find something else to do - really.
Slashdot Mirror
Pursuing the analogy further, does having a MS keyboard mean that the code I type belongs to MS now? It is my effort, my code, my computer. Even if MS wraps a license around the keyboard, they can not be allowed to extend that license to my ownership of other things. In exactly the same manner, if I use the cuecat to catalog the books I own, the books are mine. the database software is mine (or some other company's) The barcodes are on the book - they are public. The ISBN is not a proprietry system. Which part of the whole thing does cuecat own? Nothing.
That the encryption is weak or it is encrypted makes no difference. I could use it to generate pseudorandom numbers. Does it mean that CueCat owns the random numbers now?
Exactly. But just like playing a piano, there are master pianists and there are casual players. And unlike the piano, we desperate need the talented programmers to work on genuinely useful software.
Read carefully. He is talking about software, not technology in general.
It is a physically simpler device. It is not inherent more special than the licensed DVD player itself.
If and when Hong Kong adopts the DMCA, it may not be the case that these DVD stamping factories are illegal. They merely stamp. Who circumvented the copy protection on the original DVD? The real culprit is unknown, and the MPAA would probably never know. Nevermind - let's persecute these guys under the DMCA becuase they are copying.
Face it. DMCA + CSS = screwed up, half-assed legislation.
The legitimate players giving customers a way to break the rgion encoding too, is a circumvention device.
The old Xing player, which cannot view newly produced DVDs (becuase of the revocation of the player keys) is also attempting to circumvent copy protection.
When licensed players view unencrypted content, it is circumventing the copy protection. (Becuase the Content happens to be GPLed, and cannot be subject to restrictions imposed by the MPAA cartel.)
Weaselly streetlawyer vs slashdot geek - who will win?
It is to point out that CSS does nothing to actually control copying, and everything to control access. If these pirates can copy DVD's without circumventing any copy-protection, then Why is CSS necessary? Why does the MPAA not go after the Big Time Pirates (they are certainly rich enough to do this) but instead go after the people who have bought DVD's, and (by using DeCSS), desire to buy more DVDs?
eGads!
Should the exercise of copyright enable monopolistic behaviour? This is an ethical issue, not a point of law.
Point 2. The pirates who have done this are in many circumstances are operating outside of the jurisdiction of the DMCA. And they did their reverse engineering before the DMCA took effect.
Which leads to another point. Simplying XORing the data-stream would have been sufficient, if all you wanted was legal protection using this anti-reverse-engineering clause. As it stands, CSS session keys are simply too weak. Software players exist to brute force the key and they work, I am told.
The DMCA itself also allows for the reverse-engineering for interoperability. As it is, LiViD is a effort to do so for the Linux platform. That it had to use code suggested by DeCSS should not detract from this goal.
Why is copying difficult? Becuase the DVD hardware reads the key (it must do this, or decoding cannot proceed), but does not pass it out to software control. If the software controlling the DVD player could obtain the session key there is no problem with writing it out!
In other words, that is how a licensed player must operate. Who specified this behaviour? The DVDCCA. There - the evidence for player lock-in, and anticompetitive behaviour is out now.
How specialized is this equipment to read this session key? Not more specialized by far. You just need to get rid of that chip is that not passing on the session keys, and substitute it for one that passes the entire raw DVD sectors on. It would be trivial to reverse engineer the hardware to figure out which piece of electronics is disrupting the hardware stream. It seems that some piracy cartels in HongKong have figured this out and are pressing DVDs in masses.
Some techies are not dumb too.
Theory 2: Neal Stephenson reads and talks to researchers on the forefront of research, assumes they achieve their goals and asks "then what"?
I'm betting on 1.
Good point. But students are smart. As educational institutes, the schools should always start with education first. Engineering solutions such as prioritizing network traffic should be employed, in the long term. A short-term solution such as closing down napster for a week might work too to give the students the idea that non-academic activities really should tempered with common sense.
How about this hypothetical position, Lars. You might not like it, but I think this is one that you would find to be very likely:
I have to disagree. There is nothing about humans which says they are not deterministic too. If I could give you a truth serum, then get you to reveal your password, is that not placing you into a deterministic state of mind, before "conning" you?
Or what about exploits that make use of race conditions in file locking and such to penetrate the system? There is an element of chance in such exploits - so that makes it a con game?
Actually, I was just pissed at the bad analogies that plague the whole issue. IMHO, saying cracking computers like lock picking is only accurate up to a certain point. A computer is not a house. Neither it is totally a con game. But anyone who want to equate cracking computers with housebreaking is probably not examining their metaphors enough to refute my con game analogy. I claim in fact, it is _slightly_ better.
And no, I don't approve of either house-breaking, cons or cracking.
I consider hacking a computer to be more a con-game really. You see, your computer is chatty - when hooked up to the internet, it talks to other computers. Just that it could be untrusting or trusting about who to talk to, what to say, etc. Any computer that is naive can be tricked to reveal it's secrets, just like you can trick a idiot to telling you his mother's name, so you can use it to take money from his bank account.
I say this analogy is more accurate than housebreaking. Who do you say?
You see, the book publishing business is many times more ethical than the music publishing business. This as a result of it being a far more mature industry.
It is definitely NOT a given that goods are not perfectly substitutable. If the MPAA companies respected copyright law and actually allowed the artistes to exercise their rights (or if the artistes are not lazy bums), there would be some choice for consumers to choose which publisher they want to go with. But no - as a I recall, there was even some legislation (now repealed) where the RIAA tried to make the works out to be work for hire. Think about that.
The RIAA is evil, copyrights or not.
But I have no doubts that the RIAA is going to overreach itself. Somehow, they will setup a law so draconian in their frenzy to protect their own asses, that they will outlaw their competitors. This anti-competitive behaviour will be their downfall.
Guess what, Chris Johnson is already doing all of the above - sending his music to MP3.com and hosting his own music. He knows where is rights end and the RIAA's start. And we should all support artists like him, especially when the RIAA starts overreaching.
Wrong. Both are accessries for the geeky and trendy.
Granted, it is meaningful to talk about changes of G over time, but if the speed of light changes, you will run in all sorts of problems with emission spectra, nevermind if that G changes or not!
You sound like a creationist moron. Oh wait - Setterfield?! Ah that explains this crap.
Problem solved. Pat. Pending.
The central problem with the patent system is not the idea behind it, but the stupidity of the people granting that patent, and the rights it gives the patent holder. That should be fixed. It's hard to see how having another database would change things.
What that? Patents not protons? The same.
Suppose you doubled everything in size. You are two times large. Since everything doubles in size, it must mean that you can't tell the difference between now and before right? Wrong.
Since everything is doubled, the force of gravitation between say two planets would drop (increased distance). Nevermind, let's keep the force the same you say. So we have to increase the masses between any two objects (F = GMm/r^2 - remeber?). But having increased mass, do we now keep the forces between charges the same? If you do, then the charge to mass ratio of the elctrons and protons will change - this effect is measureable. Lots of physics - emission spectra of atoms and molecules would be different as a result. We might not even be around to observe this.
That was just playing around with distance. It does not work for time as well. Some combination of the two? Not even that.
In other words, if something was different in the past, we should be able to see that effect physcially as we look backword in time at the stars. The people who are selling this idea are not thinking broadly enough about the entirety of physical phenomena.
In biology, fusion refers to the merging of two gametes, basically, Fusion through persuasion means something else. Bio geeks, please don't laugh too hard.
In eactly the same fashion, Radioshack gives you a barcode scanner and they expect you to use it on their catalogues and their catalogues only. Nevermind that it could be used elsewhere. You should stop doing it now, and get ANOTHER barcode scanner for that. If cuecat was so unimaginative as to think that are as unimaginative as they are, trying to make a lame business out of these kind of artificial restrictions, they should find something else to do - really.