If Napster truly did not want people to use their service for piracy, they could easy stop it. How hard would it be for Napster to hire a couple of people to police their service? Just go around looking for pirated songs and ban anyone who has pirated songs offered (after a warning to remove the pirated material, of course).
Not their job. The DMCA makes it clear that it is the responsibility of the copyright holder to notify Napster of violations.
That's what's so delicious about this. The law is malfunctioning exactly as designed.
I'm sure the RIAA would be more than happy to provide them with a list of copyrighted songs.
Song titles are not copyrightable. Next time you're in a record store, thumb through the Phonolog. Most song titles have multiple entries -- because songwriters tend to re-use the same song titles over and over again for different songs.
Or, on the other hand, they could just sue you anyway. You don't need the permission of someone to sue them. Otherwise, our courts would be very, very empty places.
That "notice" was propaganda, designed to frame the issue as Metallica vs Users, instead of Metallica vs Napster. Unfortunately for Metallica, and especially bad for the RIAA, the badly written DMCA appears to be firmly on Napster's side. They are complying with the law fully.
When the RIAA wrote the DMCA and presented it to Congress to rubber stamp, the ISP provision was intended to protect themselves, and the rest of the members of the long-established good-old-boys media-conglomerate club. They never imagined that an outsider company like Napster would be able to use it to protect themselves against attack by the Entertainment Trust.
Not their first mistake, and probably not their last.
Honestly, it's a little disingenuous for Napster to claim that they can't block individual music at the directory level. They certainly could look for all the Dr. Dre songs and block those individual titles.
While lyrics and music may be copyrighted, song titles are not copyrightable, and are re-used all the time by different bands for different songs.
The effect of such a title-based ban would be to block other bands' songs because they happened to have the same, or similar name to Dr Dre's songs.
From what I understand, IBM didn't even consider supporting TCP/IP until about ten years ago or so -- for a very Microsoft reason: they don't want to support any protocols they can't control
I don't think that was why they ignored TCP/IP for so long. IBM wasn't playing the undocumented protocols game at the time, at least not on their mainframes. You can order manuals from IBM that exactly describe each and every detail of their communications protocols -- enough information to actually implement the protocols, and there were third-party hardware vendors who did just that.
The issue with TCP/IP was more likely that it's a very CPU intensive protocol. It kills your performance. TCP/IP peppers the processor with a constant stream of little interrupts for each packet, and the internal design of OS/390 (and VM also) is optimized for a small number of interrupts that each do a lot of work. For instance, you can tell the hardware to scatter-read 200 blocks from disk into non-consecutive memory, then generate a single interrupt when finished. IBM terminals are designed so that the terminal buffers everything you type until you press the send key, then the terminal creates a single data stream that describes all the changes you made to the screen data, and sends it all at once, generating a single interrupt.
It works a lot like slashdot. I'm typing away in the Comment window, making lots of changes as I go, but I'm not echoing each character off of the slashdot server. Instead, when I press preview or submit, everything I've typed is forwarded at once.
The heavy interrupt rate of TCP/IP is a big issue. The main reason that a mainframe can support thousands of users, all sitting at 3270-like terminals, is that most people tend to spend their time doing things like moving their cursor around the screen, backspacing, using the arrow keys, and typing a lot of text, only pressing enter/send occasionally. When you're using ordinary telnet over TCP/IP, each time someone presses a key, the CPU is interrupted, has to wake up that user's editor process to handle the incoming character, and most likely echo the character back out. When you are using a 3270 editor like XEDIT, you can busily type an entire page, moving the cursor around the screen, inserting and deleting text, all the while your user process is completely idle -- maybe even swapped out -- on the mainframe, until you press return. This lets mainframes support much larger numbers of interactive users and TCP/IP would have broken that.
Back then, IBM had their own networks, and they were all running mainframes and mainframe networking protocols. Educational sites like ours were mostly on an IBM hardware network called BITNET with some cool features of its' own, (we had instant messaging in 1982!) and TCP/IP just wasn't important. The internet hadn't become important yet, and no one would have even considered degrading their mainframe performance by adding a TCP/IP stack, unless there was a damn good reason, and there wasn't. IBM had devised more efficient protocols, optimized for their hardware model, and everyone was using them.
One of the "features" of unix-like systems is that the TCP/IP stack is buried in the kernel, and the TCP/IP overhead is buried in the kernel overhead. On VM, the TCP/IP stack runs as its own process, and shows up in the process list, so you can see just how much of your CPU is being wasted on receiving and reassembling packets. It's a lot.
When IBM finally started seriously supporting TCP/IP, they had a lot of trouble getting good performance, because it breaks their interrupt model. One of the products that came out of that was an outboard TCP/IP coprocessor -- a dedicated PC with an ethernet card and an IBM channel card. The PC would receive data from the ethernet, reassemble the packets, batch them up, and present a bunch of them to the processor at once, reducing the number of interrupts. TN3270 also helped -- TN3270 does what the 3270 hardware did -- buffers all of the user's screen changes, and keeps track of the cursor, lets you do inserts and deletes, and sends a summary of all the changes when you press return.
IBM's spent more time and effort on their TCP/IP stacks now that they have become more important.
There are several thousand supported instructions on IBM's assembler for OS/390. This is because there was such a huge number of assembler programmers for OS/390 IBM kept adding instructions to make programming easier. If I understand correctly, I think there is even a "print" instruction in OS/390 assembler.
The 370 instruction set is a fairly standard instruction set. It does have a handful of really oddball instructions, but certainly doesn't have thousands of instructions. What you are describing are the macro libraries. The traditional programming language for the IBM mainframes is and has always been 370 assembly language. The operating system provides extensive assembler macro libraries, and when you are programming, you use those macros in-line, so they look like instructions. There's an entire, fairly powerful programming language just for writing macros, because they are used so heavily by application code.
But describing the contents of all those macro libraries as instructions is like decrying the C programming language for having thousands of instructions like printf() and strcpy(). Those macro libraries are the equivalent of the ".h" files in/usr/include.
Yah, there are a lot of acronyms. If you thought you had a lot of macro names to keep track of, you should have tried a little VM internals programming. There is a two-volume, 1500 page book with dense text, describing tens of thousands of eight character macro definitions and equates like "VMDIORBK" and subroutines with eight character names like "HCPDSPCH"
Why?
It took IBM until the 1990s to release an assembler that could handle symbols with more then 8 characters.
Back in 1993, I downloaded whatever the latest Linux kernel was at the time (0.99pl10, I think), and just for grins, ran the IBM C compiler against the source. It truncated all of the function names down to 8 characters, and of the modules that did compile, the load module had over a thousand duplicate symbols. I started writing a huge macro with entries like:
#define insert_vm_struct MMINSVMS
to map each and every function name down to 8 characters. Eventually, I gave up in disgust. I knew that it wouldn't have worked without a huge amount of rework, but I just wanted to see how hard it would be to get a clean compile. Never got one.
There was one news story in the last day that may prove to be extremely important, although it was not in slashdot. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Violence Against Women act, because they said that Congress had no authority to pass the act. Congress said that the law derived its authority from the instetstate commerce clause, and the Supreme Court said, in effect, "no way."
Congress regularly uses the Interstate Commerce Clause -- which says that Congress has the right to regulate interstate commerce -- to pass laws that really have nothing to do with interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has gone along with this practice for a long time, but the current court appears ready to impose limits.
If the court has in fact decided to end the "interstate commerce loophole", then huge bodies of federal law will be vulnerable and may be challenged, as much of federal law has no constitutional basis besides the thinly stretched doctrine of "it somehow affects interstate commerce."
(1) Prohibition. When alcohol was banned, people still produced, transported, and consumed it. "But it was the law!" The amendment was withdrawn by a subsequent amendment. Work through proper channels? Write your representatives? Convince legislators through proper means? Didn't happen. And the people were REWARDED for their disregard of an unjust law.
(1a) Drug Prohibition. When drugs like marijuana were banned, people still produced, transported, and consumed it. "But it was the law!" The laws were made harsher and harsher, until by the year 2000, a defacto "drug exception" had been carved out of the bill of rights, over two million Americans were in prison, about half of them on mandatory minimums for non-violent drug crimes, the economies of most Central American countries had been destabilized, and back in the U.S., the police in New York and Los Angeles had been transformed into roving gangs of death squads. Police were given the power to seize any and all property belonging to anyone accused of a drug crime without any process or trial. The citizens of a few states, in general elections, legalized marijuana use for medical purposes, but the federal government declared that the state laws were invalid, and began an intensive campaign to intimidate, arrest, and prosecute doctors and patients who tried to exercise their rights. At the local level, the police simply refused to obey the new laws. Children were removed from core classes such as reading and math, in favor of mandatory drug propaganda classes tought by uniformed police officers, where they were encouraged to turn in their parents "for their own good." Still, all that the legislatures could or would do was pass harsher and harsher laws, and in May 2000 a law passed Congress that would create an explicit "drug exception" to the first amendment itself.
It is a common myth that alcohol prohibition was ended by civil disobedience. In fact, ending prohibition was part of a national political strategy, orchestrated by a group of New York lawyers, who were trying to save the United States from the disaster that it destroying it now. It was a strategy that helped propel FDR into power and in the process, reshaped Congress, and our entire government.
For the real story of how alcohol prohibition was ended, read here. It's quite interesting.
As well he should. Patents are not cheap, and if someone is going to contribute their patent to GPL projects, I have absolutely no problem with their retention of patent rights for non-GPL works. After all, if one or more of these patents were to be incorporated into a GPL'ed "Killer App" that takes the world by storm -- that everyone wants -- then the Microsofts of the world should have to open their wallets.
What is interesting is what happens if lots of people were to GPL license their patents. In effect, the "GPL pool" would function as a vast cross-licensing arrangement, giving GPL authors vast resources not available to proprietary software companies.
An interesting situation would arise if more people decided to license their patents for GPL projects only. If enough key patents were to be restricted to this terms, such as patents on new audio/video codecs, it could make proprietary operating systems, for all practical purposes, illegal to use.
Make no mistake, the fight of proprietary vs free software is a fight to the death. As Microsoft has proved with their kerberos "trade secrets", the two cannot live in harmony.
Eventually, if the right critical patents were to be licensed this way, we could find ourselves in the interesting situation where it becomes nearly impossible to develop proprietary software without infringing on on one or more "GPL patents."
Exactly. Once all of the factories that are currently churning out CD recorders and CDR blanks retool and start churning out DVD recorders and DVD blanks, the price of both will fall through the floor. The current high prices are irrelevant.
Interesting to see this recorder released right in the middle of the CSS controversy.
One of the points in the press release was that the recorder was designed to not copy CSS material. This doesn't make sense technically, because the recorder has no digital input, so how would the recorder identify CSS content through the analog inputs?
However, one of the main legal tactics in the fight over CSS is the argument that DeCSS cannot be used for piracy, because there are no consumer DVD recorders on the market. Perhaps the strategy here is to get a DVD recorder on the market, so that they can legitimately argue that DeCSS can be used to copy DVDs, and must therefore be suppressed.
Anyway, who wants to take bets on how long it takes before the first person successfully removes the copy controls on a consumer DVD recorder. I give them one year before it all comes apart.
It does seem like the inforation could be put to use by the Samba team for talking to Win2000, though.
WRONG! Read the EULA carefully. The license explicitly forbids implementing the specification. Now the Samba team must be VERY careful not to allow anyone who has seen the specification to ever touch the Samba code, or the Samba programmers could face a federal felony lawsuit, and receive up to 10 years in federal prison for "theft of trade secrets." Hopefully none of the Samba programmers went ahead and examined the specification before they realized the implications of the "license."
Of course, the fact that it's not so secret makes one wonder why MS has their panties all in a bunch. I guess they believe in absolute enforcement.
Yes, in theory you are correct, but when you're faced with a federal indictment charging you with theft of trade secrets, you are in a bit of a tough position, aren't you?
Bear in mind that theft of trade secrets is a felony in the U.S., punishable by fines of up to $500,000 or imprisonment of up to 10 years. I didn't know that until I just looked it up, and I bet you didn't either.
That's why this is such an appalling tactic. Theft of trade secrets is an extremely serious crime, penalty-wise, and Microsoft has essentially used it to bait a trap for its competitors.
It's your word against Microsoft's money and lawyers.
A- ha! If, as you say, you wrote it yourself and did not copy from the plaintiff, why then, Sir, does every single typographical error of the plaintiff's code show up in yours? Huh? And why, Sir, did the plaintiff's superfluous 3 tabs on the otherwise blank line 164 of the file also show up in yours, eh monkey boy?!?"
Something very similar to this happened in a programming class I was in. We were learning the lisp language, and were using an oddball interpreter.
This interpreter had an idiosyncrasy where you would type in your function, and then when you used a procedure to decompile your function and send it out to the printer, to hand in, your function would include a little bit of internal boilerplate code that didn't do anything. I couldn't get rid of it, so I just turned in the assignment.
The next class, our instructor came in and handed back the papers. Everyone had an "F"!
She then explained to us that we had all obviously copied our assignment from one person, because almost of the assignments were nearly identical, with similar logical errors, but used different variable names, which was usual for this sort of assignment, but what had tipped her off to the cheating ring was that each and every program had the same, identical piece of meaningless, non-functional code! It took about 10 minutes to convince here that that little bit of meaningless code had been inserted by the compiler, and wasn't a sign of cheating.
The next thing she said came as a complete shock.
It turns out that there was a cheating ring going on. After our instructor made the incorrect assumption that that little no-op in each function was a sign of cheating, she went through the email spool, and actually found that most of the class were cheating! One student was selling completed homework assignments over email to the rest of the class, and the evidence was all there. Someone had the gall to complain that she had read their private email, and here response was, "Everyone who wants to contest this, see me after class, and we'll go to the Dean with the email printouts, your graded assignments, and see what happens." I approached her after class, ready to go the mat, because, goddammit, I wasn't cheating, and she immediately told me that she hadn't thought I had been in on the cheating ring, because my code was different from the people who did cheat, but I had been included in the 'F' list because my functions all had the same tell-tale code as the cheaters. I got my 'A'. To this day, I'm amazed that out of about 30 people, 25+ were cheating. Damn!
Legislating against circumvention and reverse engineering is so misguided, I hardly know where to begin.
Back in 1982, my parents bought me my first computer -- an Apple II. They also bought me a bunch of games. I was immediately frustrated by how much better the commercial games were then my BASIC programs were. I quickly figured out that if I ever wanted to write "the good stuff", I would need to learn 6502 assembly language. Fortunately, Apple had included a source listing of the monitor ROM, which, along with a 6502 reference card, was enough information to pick up the language and start writing programs.
But the real way that I learned 6502 assembly language was by removing the copy protection from those games. The games were expensive, and the copy protected disks worked poorly, wore out quickly, and were murder on the disk drives. Clearly these games could be "improved" by turning them into small files, which I could more easily carry around on a single disk in my backpack -- a similar motivation as people have in creating MP3s out of their CDs.
(For the curious, the trick was to load the boot sector, which couldn't be copy protected, into memory, then disassemble the boot code and change the JMP instruction that transferred control to the second stage boot loader into a breakpoint. Next, I would execute the boot sector code, allowing the program to drop back into the monitor once the copy protected boot loader had finished loading. Then I would explore memory to see what had been loaded. There were some devilish tricks -- sometimes the byte right before the starting instruction would deliberately contain an opcode designed to trick the disassembler into printing gibberish. Sometimes, the boot loader would load the program into memory, then run an algorithm that XORed one part of the program with another part of the program -- descrambling it. Inevitably, by repeating the process over and over, I would eventually reach a point where the entire program had been loaded into memory and was ready to execute. Then, I would copy all of the individual chunks of the program into a contiguous region, usually in the HIRES memory area, and reboot the machine. Rebooting the machine would leave the contents of the HIRES memory intact, so once DOS had booted up, one could easily BSAVE the program image into a file. Next step was to write a short assembly routine that would copy all of the program sections back into their original location, and branch to the starting instruction of the game. Finally, this was all combined together and BSAVED as a single executable program. There were many other tricks -- like overlaying the RWTS (read/write track/sector) routine (I accumulated an entire disk full of those!), but the main approach of attack was almost always reverse engineering. Doing this, I could fit 5-15 games on a single, unprotected disk, I could back up my games, and they weren't so hard on the disk drive.)
Each game was a battle between the programmer who had tried to protect the game, and myself, and I almost always had more fun cracking the game then from playing it. I used to borrow games I didn't care about, just for the fun of breaking them down into a file.
I was 15 years old at the time, and although it may have seemed like a waste of valuable high school study time to do this, I have found that I use similar techniques to this day. All that reverse engineering work gave me the basic analytical skills that I use to this day, both on the job and off, and if I had been dissuaded from doing so because it was illegal, I don't know what I'd be doing with my life right now, but I doubt it would have been for the better.
The valuable practical experience and education that comes from unauthorized reverse engineering is what the DMCA seeks to deny to the next generation of American computer programmers.
If reverse engineering is now held to be illegal, the effect will not be to stop reverse engineering. Instead, we will criminalize an entire generation of bright young people who are doing nothing other then exploring the world around them, trying to understanding how it works -- applying the scientific method to the things that matter to them -- their music, movies, and computers -- and trying to make them more useful to themselves. It wasn't a heavily financed organization that broke CSS, or reverse-engineered Mattel's encryption scheme... it was kids, working alone, or in small groups of friends. It wasn't done for profit -- it was done for the challenge.
The danger is that if you tell a kid that he or she is a criminal for doing something that is not immoral or unethical, you run the risk that that kid will accept that he or she is a criminal. The real danger of record company executives, and especially ignorant musicians making poor-mouth declarations that "downloading an MP3 is just a wrong as stealing a CD from Tower Records", is that a kid believes it. That's not what this is about, they know it, and they are teaching a very, very bad lesson to the next generation, in a doomed effort to stop something that's about as stoppable as the incoming tide. They don't care what damage they are doing, and that should bother everyone.
The way things are going, the main effect of the DMCA is going to be the creation of a new generation of extremely smart young people with contempt for the law, because the law has contempt for them. It will be exactly what our country deserves for passing laws like the DMCA.
Microsoft is playing very dirty pool with this "specification."
The purpose of releasing the specification under this sort of "license" is NOT for the benefit of the user or programming community. This license is specifically crafted to provide a weapon that Microsoft can use against people trying to write programs that are compatable with Microsoft's interfaces.
The license only authorizes the use of the interface specification "for the sole purpose of allowing review of the Specification for security analysis." The license does not authorize the use of the interface specification for the purpose of utilizing the interface by third-party programs.
If you were planning to work on a program to interface to Microsoft's Kerberos, and you have seen these documents... congratulations. You are now legally ineligable to work on them because you have been "contaminated" by exposure to Microsoft's trade secrets.
Microsoft is attempting to create a new legal classification... an API that is published, yet illegal to use. If they are successful with this, expect to see future APIs released in this fashion. At least when Microsoft kept their secret APIs secret, people could reverse engineer them, safe in the knowledge that they could not be sued by Microsoft. Anyone who utilizes an API that has been published under these conditions is in danger of having to defend themselves against an accusation of breach of contract, and having to prove that they did not see the poisoned API document.
Microsoft is playing a fast, loose game with the concept of a "trade secret" in a way that completely violates the spirit of the law.
As for the question of whether to remove the posts, I would argue that the posts that contained complete, verbatim copies of the program files should be removed, but the rest of the posts, especially the posts that describe how to open the files without agreeing to the EULA, should be left intact. Microsoft did not ensure that persons receiving the API specification could not access the specification without agreeing to the licensing terms, their trade secret has been revealed, and is no longer a trade secret. This is what Microsoft is trying to whitewash in asking that these posts be removed. They are attempting to establish that they can publicly publish an API, yet identify it as a "trade secret", then use it as a weapon against competitors.
Make no mistake, this new tactic is a direct attack on open source projects that compete with Microsoft's products, and we as of yet have no effective defense because we have been taken by surprise.
I hope that the outcome of this is that a court eventually finds that Microsoft lost trade secret status when it publicly published the specification, and I hope that whatever Andover decides to do in this case advances this goal.
Only the loss of trade secret status will stop Microsoft from pulling this dirty trick in the future. If they win this, expect all future Microsoft APIs to be similarly poisoned.
Another thought... If someone could somehow put an SPDIF input/output on this machine, or replace the soundblaster ADC with a high grade chip, it would make an absolutely kick ass digital audio recorder.
12 gigs = 20 hours uncompressed stereo at 44.1KHz. Who needs portable DAT anymore with that sort of capacity?
So what's the next step? If I were in Napster's shoes, right now I'd do the following:
1) Block all 335,435 users from Napster, but make sure that those 335,435 users received either email or were directed to a web page that made it clear that they have each personally been cut off from Napster at the specific direction of Metallica and their lawyers, and also provide the phone number, mailing address, and email address of Metallica's lawyers, and the feedback email address for the band.
After all, Metallica isn't asking that Napster block only their songs. Metallica is asking Napster to completely cut off 335,435 people from the entire Napster service.
Metallica has made the mistake of dragging their fans into this mess, and if Napster actually bans those 335,435 users, the end result will be that Metallica has about 335,435 fewer fans.
2) A few days later, after the madness dies down, provide a web page where those banned users could click on a button to certify that they have removed the files, and be instantly unbanned.
I don't think that Metallica or the RIAA have a particularly good strategy here.
The reason that artists create albums is because that's the basic unit that music is sold in.
Before CDs displaced records, an artist had the option of selling 45 rpm singles, with two songs. Hence the "singles charts."
Since the demise of the 45, an artist no longer has the option of releasing singles. In order to join the party, to get your one or two songs into the record store, you have to crank out an hour of filler so that you can release a CD. Granted there are some musicians who use the CD format to "create a coherent/cohesive mood and statement", but there are plenty of albums that are one or two good songs, plus a whole lot of filler.
Another effect of the music distribution monopoly.
Every time I read about the RIAA or the MPAA flailing against internet media distribution, it reminds me of a quote from the 1939 Robert Heinlein story, "Life-line".
In Life-line, an inventor has built a machine that can accurately determine the day a person will die. He is sued by the entire life insurance industry, who want to put him out of business because they are being bankrupted by his accurate predictions.
In rejecting the claims of the insurance company lawyer, the judge says:
Before we leave this matter I wish to comment on the theory implied by [the insurance trust lawyer], when you claimed damage to your client. There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all.
Actually, they don't. If people are selling drugs in my establishment, I have no more responsibility to stop them than any other witness.
Actually, in this case your establishment would be subject to civil forfeiture, meaning that the government could confiscate your establishment without even having to provide any evidence of wrongdoing on your part. Your only recourse would be to post 10% of the value of your establishment, then go to court and prove that your establishment wasn't used to sell drugs. Under the tortured logic of our "drug" laws, your property is presumed guilty unless you can prove it innocent.
Don't presume that your constitutional rights apply when you are charged with a drug crime. They don't anymore.
Eric Raymond has some interesting theories about the motivation behind open source, but his emphasis is misplaced. I believe that the best arguments for open source projects have nothing to do with establishing communities, or earning prestige among peers. Instead, it comes from a basic understanding of the value of software, and the desire to maximize the value of one's own work.
What's the value of a piece of software, as a physical commodity, in the sense that a piece of software is something that sits on your hard drive, takes up space, and hopefully does something that you find useful.
Here's one possible heirarchy for software value, in order from most worthless to most valuable:
1) A binary that no longer works is worthless. It has negative value in that it is a waste of disk space. Maybe the operating system API changed, or the hardware vendor changed the architecture slightly and broke the binary, or perhaps an intractable bug has come to light. Doesn't matter. The value of this software is zero. You can't use it, or you wouldn't want to. This is the fate of most commercial software in the long run, especially commercial software that runs on propriatary operating systems.
2) An unsupported binary is slightly more valuable, but not in the long run. Someday it will most likely enter category one, especially if it runs on a proprietary operating system. There's a lot of software, especially freeware, created and released with the best intentions, that exists in a publically available form only as MSDOS or obsolete Windows binaries. Relying on this sort of software is like being a passenger on an airplane with a dead pilot soaring through the sky on autopilot. So far, so good, you're getting from point A to point B, but you'd better have a parachute.
3) Supported binaries are more valuable. Commercial, shrink-wrapped software makes up most of this category. Of course, when you depend on binary level support, you know that any time you may be forced to upgrade, or your software supplier may discontinue the product, and your existing binary will enter category two, which you don't want.
Hardware with closed source drivers is also in category three.
One danger of category three software is that sometimes it slips into category two without notice. When we upgraded one of our Sun workstations to Solaris 7, for Y2K purposes, for instance, we had to eliminate a $1500.00 third-party ATM interface, not because of any problem with the interface, but because the vendor had, without our knowledge, discontinued driver support. The interface makes a nice, if expensive, paperweight.
The conventional wisdom in the software publishing world is that commercial software belongs in category three. Category three provides the most leverage by the software provider over the users of the software, and hence, the most opportunity for revenue. As part of one operating system upgrade, we had to re-purchase thousands of dollars worth of binary application software, because of changes to the operating system that broke the applications. This vendor made a lot of money off of us, and the new versions of the software had no new features -- they had just been recompiled to work with the new kernel.
4) Software with restrictive source code availability is more valuable. In this case, you have the source code, but few, if any other people have the source code, and in any event, you are unable to effectively collaborate with them, This includes both source code obtained under an NDA, and, more importantly, software you've written yourself but never published.
You have, at least in theory, the ability to keep this type of software working yourself, but you run the risk of having to actually put the theory into practice, and in a worst case scenario, you may find yourself having to dedicate tremendous resources to keeping the software working, and who wants that?
In fact ANY content that was shot on film could be turned into a high resolution HDTV master if the studio wanted too, even old tv series.
Let me second this. Before the widespread use of videotape and satellite downloads as distribution media, networks used to film their television shows on 16mm or 35mm film and ship the film prints to the television stations, where they were broadcast by projecting them through a telecine projector into a video camera. Many series, such as Buffy and NYPD Blue are still shot on film, but distributed on video, so film prints of recent shows don't turn up on the collector's market, but episodes of shows like MASH and I Love Lucy were discarded by television stations by the truckload, and now turn up regularly on eBay. Try a search on "16mm TV" if you're interested.
The film prints are generally full cinema quality, since they were shot on film, just like movies. Seeing an episode of "Love, American Style" on a 12 foot diagonal screen in razor sharp resolution is, um, an experience... I'll leave it at that.
I remember the Salon article on musicians' anger toward Napster and MP3 in general, on the grounds of "How are we supposed to make money? Selling T-shirts? I'm already in debt!"
Yeah. The article featured quotes from musicians who thought that the record company was paying for their studio time, promotion, tour expenses, etc, instead of them.
They dug around until they found musicians who don't understand the basic concept of an advance, then trotted them out to complain about how they aren't making any money, so they must be being ripped off, but it can't be by their kind, loving, generous record companies, so it must be by their fans.
Pure industry propaganda. If the record companies really wanted artists to make money off their work, they'd offer them contracts that didn't rip them off.
The concept is even older. The original Ultima game for the Apple II featured a first-person perspective as you walked through a maze killing monsters. The program was written in Applesoft BASIC, and the maze was drawn v-e-r-y v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
I'm really dating myself here. Who remembers playing Eamon?:-)
Re:patent "problem" is part of something much bigg
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Do Patents Still Work?
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· Score: 2
Eldred v Reno has been appealed. The judge who heard the case wrote an extremely poorly thought out and nearly indefensible opinion. My impression on reading his decision was that he either didn't take the case seriously, or that he basically punted the case to the appeals court, possibly because he was afraid of the tremendous consequences of making even the smallest finding in favor of the plaintiffs.
The "problem" with this case is that if the judge were to accept the premise of the suit -- that retroactive extension of copyright is in and of itself unconstitutional -- then logically, ALL retroactive extensions of copyright would be also unconstitutional. Removal of all retroactive copyright extensions would place all works created prior to 1944 in the public domain, and restart the currently-stopped copyright clock, with tremendous political consequences, since the most powerful and influential corporations in the world are film studios, record companies, and especially media corporations, which obtain much of their power and income from their extensive copyright holdings.
In other words, he tossed the hot potato to the appeals court. I fully expect this case to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
I suspect that public disclosure and comment on patent applications would work very well and would go an especially long way towards alleviating the software patent problem. Right now, a patent examiner picks up a new patent application, and researches the prior art. The examiner may not be familiar with the prior art. However, if that application was posted on the USPTOs web site for six months, and received even one comment from the public that cited invalidating prior art, the job of the examiner is essentially done, and more time can be spent on truly original patent applications, for which no one can produce prior art, and are perhaps more deserving of patent protection.
The current system of patent secrecy encourages the filing of questionable patents. A company has nothing to lose besides the costs of preparing and filing the patent. If the patent is granted, the company obtains a monopoly. If the patent is not granted, the application is not disclosed, and the company retains the trade secret status on their idea.
A system where patent applications were disclosed would deter companies from filing these "trial balloon" patents. A company would have to make the hard decision whether to give up their trade secret in exchange for a chance at a patent. Instead of just writing up a patent application and filing it, a smart company would perform a prior art search first, and if obvious prior art came up, they would not file for the patent, figuring that if they found the prior art, someone else probably will too. This would reduce the number of trivial patent applications, and reduce the USPTO's work load.
I think that there is a strong public interest in studying pending patents. I believe that both companies and the general public would participate in such a system. Companies would participate both to keep up with the state of the art, and in order to prevent their own publically disclosed, non-patented inventions from being patented by rivals, and individuals would participate because studying patents is educational and interesting, and an excellent way to keep current with the state of the art in one's fields of interest.
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If Napster truly did not want people to use their service for piracy, they could easy stop it. How hard would it be for Napster to hire a couple of people to police their service? Just go around looking for pirated songs and ban anyone who has pirated songs offered (after a warning to remove the pirated material, of course).
Not their job. The DMCA makes it clear that it is the responsibility of the copyright holder to notify Napster of violations.
That's what's so delicious about this. The law is malfunctioning exactly as designed.
I'm sure the RIAA would be more than happy to provide them with a list of copyrighted songs.
Song titles are not copyrightable. Next time you're in a record store, thumb through the Phonolog. Most song titles have multiple entries -- because songwriters tend to re-use the same song titles over and over again for different songs.
Or, on the other hand, they could just sue you anyway. You don't need the permission of someone to sue them. Otherwise, our courts would be very, very empty places.
That "notice" was propaganda, designed to frame the issue as Metallica vs Users, instead of Metallica vs Napster. Unfortunately for Metallica, and especially bad for the RIAA, the badly written DMCA appears to be firmly on Napster's side. They are complying with the law fully.
When the RIAA wrote the DMCA and presented it to Congress to rubber stamp, the ISP provision was intended to protect themselves, and the rest of the members of the long-established good-old-boys media-conglomerate club. They never imagined that an outsider company like Napster would be able to use it to protect themselves against attack by the Entertainment Trust.
Not their first mistake, and probably not their last.
Honestly, it's a little disingenuous for Napster to claim that they can't block individual music at the directory level. They certainly could look for all the Dr. Dre songs and block those individual titles.
While lyrics and music may be copyrighted, song titles are not copyrightable, and are re-used all the time by different bands for different songs.
The effect of such a title-based ban would be to block other bands' songs because they happened to have the same, or similar name to Dr Dre's songs.
From what I understand, IBM didn't even consider supporting TCP/IP until about ten years ago or so -- for a very Microsoft reason: they don't want to support any protocols they can't control
/usr/include.
I don't think that was why they ignored TCP/IP for so long. IBM wasn't playing the undocumented protocols game at the time, at least not on their mainframes. You can order manuals from IBM that exactly describe each and every detail of their communications protocols -- enough information to actually implement the protocols, and there were third-party hardware vendors who did just that.
The issue with TCP/IP was more likely that it's a very CPU intensive protocol. It kills your performance. TCP/IP peppers the processor with a constant stream of little interrupts for each packet, and the internal design of OS/390 (and VM also) is optimized for a small number of interrupts that each do a lot of work. For instance, you can tell the hardware to scatter-read 200 blocks from disk into non-consecutive memory, then generate a single interrupt when finished. IBM terminals are designed so that the terminal buffers everything you type until you press the send key, then the terminal creates a single data stream that describes all the changes you made to the screen data, and sends it all at once, generating a single interrupt.
It works a lot like slashdot. I'm typing away in the Comment window, making lots of changes as I go, but I'm not echoing each character off of the slashdot server. Instead, when I press preview or submit, everything I've typed is forwarded at once.
The heavy interrupt rate of TCP/IP is a big issue. The main reason that a mainframe can support thousands of users, all sitting at 3270-like terminals, is that most people tend to spend their time doing things like moving their cursor around the screen, backspacing, using the arrow keys, and typing a lot of text, only pressing enter/send occasionally. When you're using ordinary telnet over TCP/IP, each time someone presses a key, the CPU is interrupted, has to wake up that user's editor process to handle the incoming character, and most likely echo the character back out. When you are using a 3270 editor like XEDIT, you can busily type an entire page, moving the cursor around the screen, inserting and deleting text, all the while your user process is completely idle -- maybe even swapped out -- on the mainframe, until you press return. This lets mainframes support much larger numbers of interactive users and TCP/IP would have broken that.
Back then, IBM had their own networks, and they were all running mainframes and mainframe networking protocols. Educational sites like ours were mostly on an IBM hardware network called BITNET with some cool features of its' own, (we had instant messaging in 1982!) and TCP/IP just wasn't important. The internet hadn't become important yet, and no one would have even considered degrading their mainframe performance by adding a TCP/IP stack, unless there was a damn good reason, and there wasn't. IBM had devised more efficient protocols, optimized for their hardware model, and everyone was using them.
One of the "features" of unix-like systems is that the TCP/IP stack is buried in the kernel, and the TCP/IP overhead is buried in the kernel overhead. On VM, the TCP/IP stack runs as its own process, and shows up in the process list, so you can see just how much of your CPU is being wasted on receiving and reassembling packets. It's a lot.
When IBM finally started seriously supporting TCP/IP, they had a lot of trouble getting good performance, because it breaks their interrupt model. One of the products that came out of that was an outboard TCP/IP coprocessor -- a dedicated PC with an ethernet card and an IBM channel card. The PC would receive data from the ethernet, reassemble the packets, batch them up, and present a bunch of them to the processor at once, reducing the number of interrupts. TN3270 also helped -- TN3270 does what the 3270 hardware did -- buffers all of the user's screen changes, and keeps track of the cursor, lets you do inserts and deletes, and sends a summary of all the changes when you press return.
IBM's spent more time and effort on their TCP/IP stacks now that they have become more important.
There are several thousand supported instructions on IBM's assembler for OS/390. This is because there was such a huge number of assembler programmers for OS/390 IBM kept adding instructions to make programming easier. If I understand correctly, I think there is even a "print" instruction in OS/390 assembler.
The 370 instruction set is a fairly standard instruction set. It does have a handful of really oddball instructions, but certainly doesn't have thousands of instructions. What you are describing are the macro libraries. The traditional programming language for the IBM mainframes is and has always been 370 assembly language. The operating system provides extensive assembler macro libraries, and when you are programming, you use those macros in-line, so they look like instructions. There's an entire, fairly powerful programming language just for writing macros, because they are used so heavily by application code.
But describing the contents of all those macro libraries as instructions is like decrying the C programming language for having thousands of instructions like printf() and strcpy(). Those macro libraries are the equivalent of the ".h" files in
Yah, there are a lot of acronyms. If you thought you had a lot of macro names to keep track of, you should have tried a little VM internals programming. There is a two-volume, 1500 page book with dense text, describing tens of thousands of eight character macro definitions and equates like "VMDIORBK" and subroutines with eight character names like "HCPDSPCH"
Why?
It took IBM until the 1990s to release an assembler that could handle symbols with more then 8 characters.
Back in 1993, I downloaded whatever the latest Linux kernel was at the time (0.99pl10, I think), and just for grins, ran the IBM C compiler against the source. It truncated all of the function names down to 8 characters, and of the modules that did compile, the load module had over a thousand duplicate symbols. I started writing a huge macro with entries like:
#define insert_vm_struct MMINSVMS
to map each and every function name down to 8 characters. Eventually, I gave up in disgust. I knew that it wouldn't have worked without a huge amount of rework, but I just wanted to see how hard it would be to get a clean compile. Never got one.
There was one news story in the last day that may prove to be extremely important, although it was not in slashdot. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Violence Against Women act, because they said that Congress had no authority to pass the act. Congress said that the law derived its authority from the instetstate commerce clause, and the Supreme Court said, in effect, "no way."
Congress regularly uses the Interstate Commerce Clause -- which says that Congress has the right to regulate interstate commerce -- to pass laws that really have nothing to do with interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has gone along with this practice for a long time, but the current court appears ready to impose limits.
If the court has in fact decided to end the "interstate commerce loophole", then huge bodies of federal law will be vulnerable and may be challenged, as much of federal law has no constitutional basis besides the thinly stretched doctrine of "it somehow affects interstate commerce."
and that would have enormous consequences.
(1) Prohibition. When alcohol was banned, people still produced, transported, and consumed it. "But it was the law!" The amendment was withdrawn by a subsequent amendment. Work through proper channels? Write your representatives? Convince legislators through proper means? Didn't happen. And the people were REWARDED for their disregard of an unjust law.
(1a) Drug Prohibition. When drugs like marijuana were banned, people still produced, transported, and consumed it. "But it was the law!" The laws were made harsher and harsher, until by the year 2000, a defacto "drug exception" had been carved out of the bill of rights, over two million Americans were in prison, about half of them on mandatory minimums for non-violent drug crimes, the economies of most Central American countries had been destabilized, and back in the U.S., the police in New York and Los Angeles had been transformed into roving gangs of death squads. Police were given the power to seize any and all property belonging to anyone accused of a drug crime without any process or trial. The citizens of a few states, in general elections, legalized marijuana use for medical purposes, but the federal government declared that the state laws were invalid, and began an intensive campaign to intimidate, arrest, and prosecute doctors and patients who tried to exercise their rights. At the local level, the police simply refused to obey the new laws. Children were removed from core classes such as reading and math, in favor of mandatory drug propaganda classes tought by uniformed police officers, where they were encouraged to turn in their parents "for their own good." Still, all that the legislatures could or would do was pass harsher and harsher laws, and in May 2000 a law passed Congress that would create an explicit "drug exception" to the first amendment itself.
It is a common myth that alcohol prohibition was ended by civil disobedience. In fact, ending prohibition was part of a national political strategy, orchestrated by a group of New York lawyers, who were trying to save the United States from the disaster that it destroying it now. It was a strategy that helped propel FDR into power and in the process, reshaped Congress, and our entire government.
For the real story of how alcohol prohibition was ended, read here. It's quite interesting.
As well he should. Patents are not cheap, and if someone is going to contribute their patent to GPL projects, I have absolutely no problem with their retention of patent rights for non-GPL works. After all, if one or more of these patents were to be incorporated into a GPL'ed "Killer App" that takes the world by storm -- that everyone wants -- then the Microsofts of the world should have to open their wallets.
What is interesting is what happens if lots of people were to GPL license their patents. In effect, the "GPL pool" would function as a vast cross-licensing arrangement, giving GPL authors vast resources not available to proprietary software companies.
An interesting situation would arise if more people decided to license their patents for GPL projects only. If enough key patents were to be restricted to this terms, such as patents on new audio/video codecs, it could make proprietary operating systems, for all practical purposes, illegal to use.
Make no mistake, the fight of proprietary vs free software is a fight to the death. As Microsoft has proved with their kerberos "trade secrets", the two cannot live in harmony.
Eventually, if the right critical patents were to be licensed this way, we could find ourselves in the interesting situation where it becomes nearly impossible to develop proprietary software without infringing on on one or more "GPL patents."
... become the system!
Don't fight the system
Exactly. Once all of the factories that are currently churning out CD recorders and CDR blanks retool and start churning out DVD recorders and DVD blanks, the price of both will fall through the floor. The current high prices are irrelevant.
Interesting to see this recorder released right in the middle of the CSS controversy.
One of the points in the press release was that the recorder was designed to not copy CSS material. This doesn't make sense technically, because the recorder has no digital input, so how would the recorder identify CSS content through the analog inputs?
However, one of the main legal tactics in the fight over CSS is the argument that DeCSS cannot be used for piracy, because there are no consumer DVD recorders on the market. Perhaps the strategy here is to get a DVD recorder on the market, so that they can legitimately argue that DeCSS can be used to copy DVDs, and must therefore be suppressed.
Anyway, who wants to take bets on how long it takes before the first person successfully removes the copy controls on a consumer DVD recorder. I give them one year before it all comes apart.
It does seem like the inforation could be put to use by the Samba team for talking to Win2000, though.
WRONG! Read the EULA carefully. The license explicitly forbids implementing the specification. Now the Samba team must be VERY careful not to allow anyone who has seen the specification to ever touch the Samba code, or the Samba programmers could face a federal felony lawsuit, and receive up to 10 years in federal prison for "theft of trade secrets." Hopefully none of the Samba programmers went ahead and examined the specification before they realized the implications of the "license."
Of course, the fact that it's not so secret makes one wonder why MS has their panties all in a bunch. I guess they believe in absolute enforcement.
Things becoming clearer? This is still Microsoft.
Yes, in theory you are correct, but when you're faced with a federal indictment charging you with theft of trade secrets, you are in a bit of a tough position, aren't you?
Bear in mind that theft of trade secrets is a felony in the U.S., punishable by fines of up to $500,000 or imprisonment of up to 10 years. I didn't know that until I just looked it up, and I bet you didn't either.
That's why this is such an appalling tactic. Theft of trade secrets is an extremely serious crime, penalty-wise, and Microsoft has essentially used it to bait a trap for its competitors.
It's your word against Microsoft's money and lawyers.
Want to roll the dice?
A- ha! If, as you say, you wrote it yourself and did not copy from the plaintiff, why then, Sir, does every single typographical error of the plaintiff's code show up in yours? Huh? And why, Sir, did the plaintiff's superfluous 3 tabs on the otherwise blank line 164 of the file also show up in yours, eh monkey boy?!?"
Something very similar to this happened in a programming class I was in. We were learning the lisp language, and were using an oddball interpreter.
This interpreter had an idiosyncrasy where you would type in your function, and then when you used a procedure to decompile your function and send it out to the printer, to hand in, your function would include a little bit of internal boilerplate code that didn't do anything. I couldn't get rid of it, so I just turned in the assignment.
The next class, our instructor came in and handed back the papers. Everyone had an "F"!
She then explained to us that we had all obviously copied our assignment from one person, because almost of the assignments were nearly identical, with similar logical errors, but used different variable names, which was usual for this sort of assignment, but what had tipped her off to the cheating ring was that each and every program had the same, identical piece of meaningless, non-functional code! It took about 10 minutes to convince here that that little bit of meaningless code had been inserted by the compiler, and wasn't a sign of cheating.
The next thing she said came as a complete shock.
It turns out that there was a cheating ring going on. After our instructor made the incorrect assumption that that little no-op in each function was a sign of cheating, she went through the email spool, and actually found that most of the class were cheating! One student was selling completed homework assignments over email to the rest of the class, and the evidence was all there. Someone had the gall to complain that she had read their private email, and here response was, "Everyone who wants to contest this, see me after class, and we'll go to the Dean with the email printouts, your graded assignments, and see what happens." I approached her after class, ready to go the mat, because, goddammit, I wasn't cheating, and she immediately told me that she hadn't thought I had been in on the cheating ring, because my code was different from the people who did cheat, but I had been included in the 'F' list because my functions all had the same tell-tale code as the cheaters. I got my 'A'. To this day, I'm amazed that out of about 30 people, 25+ were cheating. Damn!
Legislating against circumvention and reverse engineering is so misguided, I hardly know where to begin.
... it was kids, working alone, or in small groups of friends. It wasn't done for profit -- it was done for the challenge.
Back in 1982, my parents bought me my first computer -- an Apple II. They also bought me a bunch of games. I was immediately frustrated by how much better the commercial games were then my BASIC programs were. I quickly figured out that if I ever wanted to write "the good stuff", I would need to learn 6502 assembly language. Fortunately, Apple had included a source listing of the monitor ROM, which, along with a 6502 reference card, was enough information to pick up the language and start writing programs.
But the real way that I learned 6502 assembly language was by removing the copy protection from those games. The games were expensive, and the copy protected disks worked poorly, wore out quickly, and were murder on the disk drives. Clearly these games could be "improved" by turning them into small files, which I could more easily carry around on a single disk in my backpack -- a similar motivation as people have in creating MP3s out of their CDs.
(For the curious, the trick was to load the boot sector, which couldn't be copy protected, into memory, then disassemble the boot code and change the JMP instruction that transferred control to the second stage boot loader into a breakpoint. Next, I would execute the boot sector code, allowing the program to drop back into the monitor once the copy protected boot loader had finished loading. Then I would explore memory to see what had been loaded. There were some devilish tricks -- sometimes the byte right before the starting instruction would deliberately contain an opcode designed to trick the disassembler into printing gibberish. Sometimes, the boot loader would load the program into memory, then run an algorithm that XORed one part of the program with another part of the program -- descrambling it. Inevitably, by repeating the process over and over, I would eventually reach a point where the entire program had been loaded into memory and was ready to execute. Then, I would copy all of the individual chunks of the program into a contiguous region, usually in the HIRES memory area, and reboot the machine. Rebooting the machine would leave the contents of the HIRES memory intact, so once DOS had booted up, one could easily BSAVE the program image into a file. Next step was to write a short assembly routine that would copy all of the program sections back into their original location, and branch to the starting instruction of the game. Finally, this was all combined together and BSAVED as a single executable program. There were many other tricks -- like overlaying the RWTS (read/write track/sector) routine (I accumulated an entire disk full of those!), but the main approach of attack was almost always reverse engineering. Doing this, I could fit 5-15 games on a single, unprotected disk, I could back up my games, and they weren't so hard on the disk drive.)
Each game was a battle between the programmer who had tried to protect the game, and myself, and I almost always had more fun cracking the game then from playing it. I used to borrow games I didn't care about, just for the fun of breaking them down into a file.
I was 15 years old at the time, and although it may have seemed like a waste of valuable high school study time to do this, I have found that I use similar techniques to this day. All that reverse engineering work gave me the basic analytical skills that I use to this day, both on the job and off, and if I had been dissuaded from doing so because it was illegal, I don't know what I'd be doing with my life right now, but I doubt it would have been for the better.
The valuable practical experience and education that comes from unauthorized reverse engineering is what the DMCA seeks to deny to the next generation of American computer programmers.
If reverse engineering is now held to be illegal, the effect will not be to stop reverse engineering. Instead, we will criminalize an entire generation of bright young people who are doing nothing other then exploring the world around them, trying to understanding how it works -- applying the scientific method to the things that matter to them -- their music, movies, and computers -- and trying to make them more useful to themselves. It wasn't a heavily financed organization that broke CSS, or reverse-engineered Mattel's encryption scheme
The danger is that if you tell a kid that he or she is a criminal for doing something that is not immoral or unethical, you run the risk that that kid will accept that he or she is a criminal. The real danger of record company executives, and especially ignorant musicians making poor-mouth declarations that "downloading an MP3 is just a wrong as stealing a CD from Tower Records", is that a kid believes it. That's not what this is about, they know it, and they are teaching a very, very bad lesson to the next generation, in a doomed effort to stop something that's about as stoppable as the incoming tide. They don't care what damage they are doing, and that should bother everyone.
The way things are going, the main effect of the DMCA is going to be the creation of a new generation of extremely smart young people with contempt for the law, because the law has contempt for them. It will be exactly what our country deserves for passing laws like the DMCA.
A quote from the Peacefire site:
It's not a crime to be smarter than your parents
Not until the DMCA made it a crime.
Microsoft is playing very dirty pool with this "specification."
... congratulations. You are now legally ineligable to work on them because you have been "contaminated" by exposure to Microsoft's trade secrets.
... an API that is published, yet illegal to use. If they are successful with this, expect to see future APIs released in this fashion. At least when Microsoft kept their secret APIs secret, people could reverse engineer them, safe in the knowledge that they could not be sued by Microsoft. Anyone who utilizes an API that has been published under these conditions is in danger of having to defend themselves against an accusation of breach of contract, and having to prove that they did not see the poisoned API document.
The purpose of releasing the specification under this sort of "license" is NOT for the benefit of the user or programming community. This license is specifically crafted to provide a weapon that Microsoft can use against people trying to write programs that are compatable with Microsoft's interfaces.
The license only authorizes the use of the interface specification "for the sole purpose of allowing review of the Specification for security analysis." The license does not authorize the use of the interface specification for the purpose of utilizing the interface by third-party programs.
If you were planning to work on a program to interface to Microsoft's Kerberos, and you have seen these documents
Microsoft is attempting to create a new legal classification
Microsoft is playing a fast, loose game with the concept of a "trade secret" in a way that completely violates the spirit of the law.
As for the question of whether to remove the posts, I would argue that the posts that contained complete, verbatim copies of the program files should be removed, but the rest of the posts, especially the posts that describe how to open the files without agreeing to the EULA, should be left intact. Microsoft did not ensure that persons receiving the API specification could not access the specification without agreeing to the licensing terms, their trade secret has been revealed, and is no longer a trade secret. This is what Microsoft is trying to whitewash in asking that these posts be removed. They are attempting to establish that they can publicly publish an API, yet identify it as a "trade secret", then use it as a weapon against competitors.
Make no mistake, this new tactic is a direct attack on open source projects that compete with Microsoft's products, and we as of yet have no effective defense because we have been taken by surprise.
I hope that the outcome of this is that a court eventually finds that Microsoft lost trade secret status when it publicly published the specification, and I hope that whatever Andover decides to do in this case advances this goal.
Only the loss of trade secret status will stop Microsoft from pulling this dirty trick in the future. If they win this, expect all future Microsoft APIs to be similarly poisoned.
Here's a 10.4" TFT Color LCD VGA Monitor that runs on 12 volts for those in-car applications.
... If someone could somehow put an SPDIF input/output on this machine, or replace the soundblaster ADC with a high grade chip, it would make an absolutely kick ass digital audio recorder.
Another thought
12 gigs = 20 hours uncompressed stereo at 44.1KHz. Who needs portable DAT anymore with that sort of capacity?
So what's the next step? If I were in Napster's shoes, right now I'd do the following:
1) Block all 335,435 users from Napster, but make sure that those 335,435 users received either email or were directed to a web page that made it clear that they have each personally been cut off from Napster at the specific direction of Metallica and their lawyers, and also provide the phone number, mailing address, and email address of Metallica's lawyers, and the feedback email address for the band.
After all, Metallica isn't asking that Napster block only their songs. Metallica is asking Napster to completely cut off 335,435 people from the entire Napster service.
Metallica has made the mistake of dragging their fans into this mess, and if Napster actually bans those 335,435 users, the end result will be that Metallica has about 335,435 fewer fans.
2) A few days later, after the madness dies down, provide a web page where those banned users could click on a button to certify that they have removed the files, and be instantly unbanned.
I don't think that Metallica or the RIAA have a particularly good strategy here.
The reason that artists create albums is because that's the basic unit that music is sold in.
Before CDs displaced records, an artist had the option of selling 45 rpm singles, with two songs. Hence the "singles charts."
Since the demise of the 45, an artist no longer has the option of releasing singles. In order to join the party, to get your one or two songs into the record store, you have to crank out an hour of filler so that you can release a CD. Granted there are some musicians who use the CD format to "create a coherent/cohesive mood and statement", but there are plenty of albums that are one or two good songs, plus a whole lot of filler.
Another effect of the music distribution monopoly.
Every time I read about the RIAA or the MPAA flailing against internet media distribution, it reminds me of a quote from the 1939 Robert Heinlein story, "Life-line".
In Life-line, an inventor has built a machine that can accurately determine the day a person will die. He is sued by the entire life insurance industry, who want to put him out of business because they are being bankrupted by his accurate predictions.
In rejecting the claims of the insurance company lawyer, the judge says:
Before we leave this matter I wish to comment on the theory implied by [the insurance trust lawyer], when you claimed damage to your client. There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all.
Same today as it was 61 years ago.
Actually, they don't. If people are selling drugs in my establishment, I have no more responsibility to stop them than any other witness.
Actually, in this case your establishment would be subject to civil forfeiture, meaning that the government could confiscate your establishment without even having to provide any evidence of wrongdoing on your part. Your only recourse would be to post 10% of the value of your establishment, then go to court and prove that your establishment wasn't used to sell drugs. Under the tortured logic of our "drug" laws, your property is presumed guilty unless you can prove it innocent.
Don't presume that your constitutional rights apply when you are charged with a drug crime. They don't anymore.
Check out fear.org
Eric Raymond has some interesting theories about the motivation behind open source, but his emphasis is misplaced. I believe that the best arguments for open source projects have nothing to do with establishing communities, or earning prestige among peers. Instead, it comes from a basic understanding of the value of software, and the desire to maximize the value of one's own work.
What's the value of a piece of software, as a physical commodity, in the sense that a piece of software is something that sits on your hard drive, takes up space, and hopefully does something that you find useful.
Here's one possible heirarchy for software value, in order from most worthless to most valuable:
1) A binary that no longer works is worthless. It has negative value in that it is a waste of disk space. Maybe the operating system API changed, or the hardware vendor changed the architecture slightly and broke the binary, or perhaps an intractable bug has come to light. Doesn't matter. The value of this software is zero. You can't use it, or you wouldn't want to. This is the fate of most commercial software in the long run, especially commercial software that runs on propriatary operating systems.
2) An unsupported binary is slightly more valuable, but not in the long run. Someday it will most likely enter category one, especially if it runs on a proprietary operating system. There's a lot of software, especially freeware, created and released with the best intentions, that exists in a publically available form only as MSDOS or obsolete Windows binaries. Relying on this sort of software is like being a passenger on an airplane with a dead pilot soaring through the sky on autopilot. So far, so good, you're getting from point A to point B, but you'd better have a parachute.
3) Supported binaries are more valuable. Commercial, shrink-wrapped software makes up most of this category. Of course, when you depend on binary level support, you know that any time you may be forced to upgrade, or your software supplier may discontinue the product, and your existing binary will enter category two, which you don't want.
Hardware with closed source drivers is also in category three.
One danger of category three software is that sometimes it slips into category two without notice. When we upgraded one of our Sun workstations to Solaris 7, for Y2K purposes, for instance, we had to eliminate a $1500.00 third-party ATM interface, not because of any problem with the interface, but because the vendor had, without our knowledge, discontinued driver support. The interface makes a nice, if expensive, paperweight.
The conventional wisdom in the software publishing world is that commercial software belongs in category three. Category three provides the most leverage by the software provider over the users of the software, and hence, the most opportunity for revenue. As part of one operating system upgrade, we had to re-purchase thousands of dollars worth of binary application software, because of changes to the operating system that broke the applications. This vendor made a lot of money off of us, and the new versions of the software had no new features -- they had just been recompiled to work with the new kernel.
4) Software with restrictive source code availability is more valuable. In this case, you have the source code, but few, if any other people have the source code, and in any event, you are unable to effectively collaborate with them, This includes both source code obtained under an NDA, and, more importantly, software you've written yourself but never published.
You have, at least in theory, the ability to keep this type of software working yourself, but you run the risk of having to actually put the theory into practice, and in a worst case scenario, you may find yourself having to dedicate tremendous resources to keeping the software working, and who wants that?
In fact ANY content that was shot on film could be turned into a high resolution HDTV master if the studio wanted too, even old tv series.
... I'll leave it at that.
Let me second this. Before the widespread use of videotape and satellite downloads as distribution media, networks used to film their television shows on 16mm or 35mm film and ship the film prints to the television stations, where they were broadcast by projecting them through a telecine projector into a video camera. Many series, such as Buffy and NYPD Blue are still shot on film, but distributed on video, so film prints of recent shows don't turn up on the collector's market, but episodes of shows like MASH and I Love Lucy were discarded by television stations by the truckload, and now turn up regularly on eBay. Try a search on "16mm TV" if you're interested.
The film prints are generally full cinema quality, since they were shot on film, just like movies. Seeing an episode of "Love, American Style" on a 12 foot diagonal screen in razor sharp resolution is, um, an experience
I remember the Salon article on musicians' anger toward Napster and MP3 in general, on the grounds of "How are we supposed to make money? Selling T-shirts? I'm already in debt!"
Yeah. The article featured quotes from musicians who thought that the record company was paying for their studio time, promotion, tour expenses, etc, instead of them.
They dug around until they found musicians who don't understand the basic concept of an advance, then trotted them out to complain about how they aren't making any money, so they must be being ripped off, but it can't be by their kind, loving, generous record companies, so it must be by their fans.
Pure industry propaganda. If the record companies really wanted artists to make money off their work, they'd offer them contracts that didn't rip them off.
The concept is even older. The original Ultima game for the Apple II featured a first-person perspective as you walked through a maze killing monsters. The program was written in Applesoft BASIC, and the maze was drawn v-e-r-y v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
:-)
I'm really dating myself here. Who remembers playing Eamon?
Eldred v Reno has been appealed. The judge who heard the case wrote an extremely poorly thought out and nearly indefensible opinion. My impression on reading his decision was that he either didn't take the case seriously, or that he basically punted the case to the appeals court, possibly because he was afraid of the tremendous consequences of making even the smallest finding in favor of the plaintiffs.
The "problem" with this case is that if the judge were to accept the premise of the suit -- that retroactive extension of copyright is in and of itself unconstitutional -- then logically, ALL retroactive extensions of copyright would be also unconstitutional. Removal of all retroactive copyright extensions would place all works created prior to 1944 in the public domain, and restart the currently-stopped copyright clock, with tremendous political consequences, since the most powerful and influential corporations in the world are film studios, record companies, and especially media corporations, which obtain much of their power and income from their extensive copyright holdings.
In other words, he tossed the hot potato to the appeals court. I fully expect this case to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
I suspect that public disclosure and comment on patent applications would work very well and would go an especially long way towards alleviating the software patent problem. Right now, a patent examiner picks up a new patent application, and researches the prior art. The examiner may not be familiar with the prior art. However, if that application was posted on the USPTOs web site for six months, and received even one comment from the public that cited invalidating prior art, the job of the examiner is essentially done, and more time can be spent on truly original patent applications, for which no one can produce prior art, and are perhaps more deserving of patent protection.
The current system of patent secrecy encourages the filing of questionable patents. A company has nothing to lose besides the costs of preparing and filing the patent. If the patent is granted, the company obtains a monopoly. If the patent is not granted, the application is not disclosed, and the company retains the trade secret status on their idea.
A system where patent applications were disclosed would deter companies from filing these "trial balloon" patents. A company would have to make the hard decision whether to give up their trade secret in exchange for a chance at a patent. Instead of just writing up a patent application and filing it, a smart company would perform a prior art search first, and if obvious prior art came up, they would not file for the patent, figuring that if they found the prior art, someone else probably will too. This would reduce the number of trivial patent applications, and reduce the USPTO's work load.
I think that there is a strong public interest in studying pending patents. I believe that both companies and the general public would participate in such a system. Companies would participate both to keep up with the state of the art, and in order to prevent their own publically disclosed, non-patented inventions from being patented by rivals, and individuals would participate because studying patents is educational and interesting, and an excellent way to keep current with the state of the art in one's fields of interest.
I would support the idea