If one of the manufacturers of dvd equipment had not gotten careless with the encryption technology, is there any reason to believe that we would be able to rip DVDs today?
The DVD encryption game was over the instant that the first PC DVD player software was released. From that moment on, all of the secrets of DVD decryption were published and available for purchase... and it was only a matter of time before someone with the ability to read machine language translated those secrets into something more accessable to the general public.
But yes, had the DVD taken a hard line and absolutely refused to license DVD technology for computers, DeCSS would probably not exist.
Contrast DVD encryption/decryption to DirecTV, where the decryption function is encapsulated in a smart card. Although people have created workarounds, allowing them to manipulate the smartcard to get free TV service, no one has yet determined the decryption algorithm contained in the chip itself. If they have, they are keeping it a secret.
Encryption is a bit of a red herring though. The real issue is player feature control. There have been DVD rippers for years, but all of them required modification of a licensed DVD player. What made DeCSS dangerous to the DVDCCA was that it was a complete, standalone, unlicensed implementation of CSS. Being in the DVDCCA carries advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that you have access to the decryption algorithms, and are able to produce DVD players. The disadvantages are that you are subject to a licensing agreement, and you may not manufacture players with unencrypted digital outputs, and your player must impose macrovision distortion on the video signal.
If DeCSS were not suppressed, then non-DVDCCA licensed hardware manufacturers would be able to start manufacturing and selling DVD players with no macrovision, and unencrypted digital outputs. This would place the entire existing DVD player industry at a self-imposed marketplace disadvantage, because they all entered into a "suicide pact" not to include those features.
DeCSS is being suppressed not because of the danger of ripping DVDs, but because of the danger of the entire DVD player industry being usurped by a superior product -- that they have all sworn in blood to never provide for themselves. Internet file trading is just a smokescreen.
I also disagree that DVD will be too entrenched for a new high definition medium. The marketplace would accept and require new "HDTV DVD" players to play "legacy" DVDs, and the new format would be noticably superior in a side-by-side comparison (on those big screens at Best Buy, for instance.) No need to ditch your DVD collection, but the new ones would look much better.
Plus, for the first time, for digitally-originated movies at least, individuals would be able to own movies in their original theatrical format. That's a very nice incentive indeed. If nothing else, it would fuel the market for video projectors.
My main fear about a new format is that it gives the studios renewed control - they are not likely to make the same mistake twice (re allowing DeCSS to happen).
Well, obviously they would go with a new encryption algorithm in place of CSS, but I have full confidence and faith that our next generation of young people will be as up to the task of cracking the encryption as the current generation was up to the task of cracking CSS. In the end, it won't matter. People have had the capability of copying movies since the introduction of the betamax. Time and again it has been shown that the vast, vast majority of people would prefer to watch a movie in a theatre, rent, or purchase a legitimate, guaranteed copy then take a chance on a probably-inferior bootleg.
As I said, the DeCSS war is all about keeping macrovision-free players with digital outputs off the market. It is not about internet piracy, or anything else.
Lots of talk here about how this could be the "ultimate bootlegging product." On the other hand, if the movie industry is smart, this could be the "ultimate bootleg killer."
The movie studios are very nervous about internet piracy, but there's a good reason why the vast majority see movies in theatres and rent or purchase DVDs instead of acquiring bootleg VCDs. The simple truth is that low bitrate videos suck. They have motion artifacts. They have substandard audio.
They don't meet our quality expectations. A DVD is vastly superior. So is a 35mm print in a theatre. That's why Spiderman and Clones made over a hundred million dollars each in their first weekends, in spite of the fact that vastly inferior bootlegs were available "for free" on the internet.
As the electronics industry begins to retool their equipment from CDR manufacture to DVD-R manufacture, the movie industry is going to run into the same problem as the music industry -- they are going to be selling a $15.00 product that can be trivially copied perfectly onto a $1.00 piece of media. Over the next decade or so, as internet bandwidth increases, we will begin to see file-sharing of actual DVD images.
How can the movie industry make file-sharing of DVD images undesirable?
The answer is by providing something much, much better. Current "digital movies", as projected in theatres, provide a vastly superior image to DVD, and require approximately 70-100 gigabytes of storage space. The movie industry should be preparing to transition away from DVD to a new "super DVD" format that offers at least HDTV resolution, and most importantly, a big, whomping data rate that is completely impractical for internet streaming, and completely impractical for copying to DVD without downgrading the video quality.
Such a technology, available for the home, would quickly relegate DVD-quality recordings into the "low end" of video, at the same time that the price barrier on DVD-recording equipment falls through the cellar.
The industry should also realize that copy protection is worthless. It will always be broken, and the longer it goes unbroken, the more severe the market effect once it is broken. The real solution to the piracy problem of inferior bootleg recordings is the age-old tactic of the salesman. Offer a vastly better product, and your customers will follow.
[switching to hardware modems] may not seem like it's very significant, but it is. Consider this: One of the world's largest retailers has decided that the Open Source community may be a viable marketplace. Wal-Mart has promoted products aimed at us. And that has opened the door for us to be heard, not as techies, but as consumers.
All true, and it also occurred to me that changing to a Linux-friendly modem is a very, very smart move on the part of Microtel.
If Microsoft were to sue Microtel and Walmart under some theory of contributory copyright infringement -- inducing people to buy computers for the purpose of pirating Windows, it would be difficult for Microtel or Walmart to make the argument that those computers were intended for Linux use, if they contained hardware that is designed to only work under Windows.
A better solution would be to tie copyright duration to tax depreciation. Here's a proposal:
o All works are protected for an initial term of one year upon fixation.
o A copyright term may last for any term between 1 and 100 years.
o In order to qualify for copyright protection past the first year, the copyright holder must register the work with the copyright office, and specify the term desired. The life of the copyright becomes, for tax purposes, the lifetime value of the work.
o The copyright holder may then deduct the cost of producing the work over the term of the copyright.
For instance, a movie costs $100,000,000 to produce. If the studio opts, at the end of the first year, for a 100 year copyright, they could then deduct $1,000,000 per year for the next hundred years.
If the studio were to opt for a 5 year copyright, they could then deduct $20,000,000 per year for the five year period.
If the movie were an absolute dud, the studio could simply allow the one year copyright to expire, and deduct the entire $100,000,000 at once.
This would quickly bring copyright terms into line with the actual market performance of works.
With legal protection of serial numbers on digital content, lawsuits against the people who illegally release pirated content are possible. It's hard to sue every kid who has a pirated Brittney Spears CD, but this would help you sue the kid who made the original illegal copy.
What if the original kid removed the serial number? How would you ever find him?
Even if he didn't remove the serial number, how are you going to find him? Assume he paid cash for the CD and proceed from there.
Assume that an airtight system is designed where every CD is tracked, and every CD purchase results in a record of the serial number and the purchaser. Isn't this a disincentive to purchase CDs? Wouldn't it be safer to get a pirated copy, so you can't be traced by the RIAA?
The entertainment folks can then negotiate with the hardware manufacturers to get some sort of serial number scheme thet would be difficult to bypass... and the law would help stop the few people with the ability to bypass the technology.
All it takes is for ONE person to successfully bypass the technology, and post the software to do so somewhere on the net. Then anyone can bypass the technology. What do you propose to do about that problem?
bzip2 was never designed for compressing audio, and it doesn't do a very good job of it.
However, there *are* compression schemes designed specifically for lossless digital audio compression, and they work fairly well.
For instance, the "shorten" codec can consistantly compress digital audio to a little over half it's original size -- not quite 50%, but about 55%. The codec works equally well on studio and live recordings. and is extensively used by Grateful Dead/Phish/etc music traders.
Check out etree.org for more information.
But yes, this new media uses lossy compression, which will send the early adopters away in droves.
The first glimpse of Skywalker's desert homeworld, Tatooine, evokes the setting of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel "Dune"; Lucas even throws in a shot of a skeletal desert serpent reminiscent of Herbert's gigantic sandworms. The amazing visuals suggest an eye nourished by the magazine art of Frank R. Paul, John Schoenherr, Kelly Freas and Chesley Bonestell.
The giant-skeleton scene is nearly identical to a scene in the 1966 film "One Million Years BC."
In 1MYBC, John Richardson portrays "Tumak", a caveman who is expelled from his tribe, and wanders through the desert. En route to discovering Raquel Welch's tribe of blond-haired, blue-eyed cavemen, he passes by a giant half-buried skeleton. Once you've seen both films, the homage is unmistakable. Similar skeleton, identical visual composition, even the MUSIC sounds similar.
I wonder how much Google has been feeding the "blog" phenemonon. Most bloggers have extensive links to each other's websites, and google is designed to specifically rank sites based on how many other sites link to those sites.
Don't forget that the broadcast version is packed with commercials, "station bugs", was edited for time, and has all of the cuss words badly overdubbed.
I don't even watch movies on TV anymore. Why should I put up with all that, when I can just rent the DVD for a few bucks instead?
I give it about six months before the device driver layer is disassembled, and new device drivers start to appear that allow full access to the hardware.
The current generation of routers is simply incapable of doing what the law demands.
An ISP, when ordered to disable access to a URL on a web site that they do not control, has two options:
1) Block access to the entire host.
2) Attempt to block access to that specific URL.
The first is, in theory, easy. A router connection can have an "access list", which specifies what is and isn't allowed to pass through the router. However, access lists are avoided whenever possible because they cause massive performance hits on routers. How large will this access list be? The article says there are about 100,000 web sites which could be censored. So, taking this list for starters, every single packet transmitted by an ISP in Pennsylvania would have to be compared to a 100,000 entry blacklist, and that's just for starters. There is no provision in the law for entries to be removed from the blacklist, so the legally-required access filters will simply grow and grow, dragging down ISP router performance.
Speaking as someone who has programmed access lists, that's absolutely nuts. It's preposterous. The hardware won't do it. It won't work.
Here's an article describing how much of a performance hit can be expected if all internet traffic in Pennsylvania must be packet-filtered:
... In fact, the modern, very high performance routers here at the University [of Rochester] are extremely highly optimized for routing, and do it very well and very quickly. They are not, however, optimized for packet filtering. Estimates vary, and will depend on exact network use, but
the first filter on a network port reduces the available bandwidth by 10-30 percent. The problem is that the packets are no longer able to pass through the high speed hardware routing path, but are instead shunted into slower, more cpu-intensive software filters. That big performance hit is only for the first filter, subsequent ones add in the range.5-1 percent reduction per filter, enough to be noticeable on high-bandwidth transactions.
Many network users aren't using their router interfaces to their full capacity anyway, and can take the 30 percent reduction without convenience. Unfortunately, there are two flaws in that reasoning. First, the hit isn't just to that interface, but to the whole router. One interface filter won't noticeably affect overall router performance, but if there were filters on every interface, the router would be significantly degraded. Second, the trend in networking is to increase bandwidth use, and in fact UTD is currently working on multiplying the backbone capacity by a factor of over ten times. So when the network users eventually need more bandwidth, the filters will become noticeable. And simply going to faster networks won't help, because the filtering speed of the routers isn't increasing as fast as the networks themselves are. (emphasis added)
Moving on to the second method:
2) Attempt to block access to that specific URL.
This is even worse, performance-wise, and probably impossible, given the current internet architecture. In order to block access to a specific URL, you would need to:
a) Collect all packets bound for that IP address. Remember that under TCP/IP, the text of a URL might be split into multiple IP packets, which might even pass through different routers, or out of order, or both, and take different paths to the target machine. b) Reassemble the IP packets, that you magically collected, into TCP packets c) See if that packet looks like an HTTP GET request d) Compare the URL to the 100,000 entry blacklist e) Assuming that the request is to a non-blacklisted URL, retransmit the packets.
Unfortunately, I don't think that there are any routers on the market that can do this, and I'm not even sure that it could be made to work anyhow. The only technical way to make it work might well be to proxy each and every web page request, which would both require insanely massive amounts of computing power, and the complete centralization of all IP traffic entering and exiting Pennsylvania.
As a result, ISPs won't use this method. The only tool that will be available to them is IP address blocking, which will cause a massive hit on the router infrastructure.
I haven't even gotten into the issues of server farms, where one hostname might correspond to two or more IP addresses. I'm sure that anyone with networking experience can come up with another dozen reasons why an ISP can't feasibly block access to URLs on machines that aren't under their control in a scalable way.
If this law stands, the only effect discernable to the day-to-day internet user is that internet performance in Pennsylvania will be significantly poorer than anywhere else in the country, or world.
Alternately, Pennsylvania internet users may see their charges skyrocket, as the ISPs are forced to purchase millions of dollars of new, ultra-high performance routers, just to implement the child-porn access lists.
A third scenario is that ISPs will simply stop doing business in Pennsylvania, due to the insane cost of doing business there.
Next question... can it stream uncompressed audio. I have a large collection of lossless.shn files. Can this unit receive an uncompressed stream, or is it restricted to receiving MP3s and WMAs?
Presumably I'd have to do some hacking to jreceiver or the like in order to decode the.shns, but what I'm really interested in is whether the player can accept an uncompressed stream. It would be pointless to take my nice, lossless files, and convert them to lossy.mp3 format just to listen to them.
Any liability law should offer an exemption for software that is distributed along with buildable, commented source code.
The reason is simple. The end-users of open source software are in a position to verify the integrity and correctness of the software. Even if such an end-user is not a programmer, they could, if they were concerned, pay someone else to inspect the code. They have been provided with the ability to protect themselves, because the source code accurately describes the actual operation of the product.
The end-users of proprietary software are in no such position. They are absolutely dependant on the software vendor to verify the integrity and correctness of the software. They are powerless to protect themselves, and without the source code, they are only left with a representation of the operation of the product. This is far less information then the source code, which specifies the actual operation of the software.
Therefore, only proprietary software vendors should be held liable for bugs in their software.
It seems obvious to me why the "big 5" want the rates to be so high...
... This is how they plan to steal the entire market for internet radio and put everyone else out of business...
... if the same five corporations that hold the vast majority of the important musical copyrights in modern popular culture all have "internet radio" divisions, then it doesn't matter how much the royalties are -- in fact, the higher, the better, for them.
No matter what the rate is per song per listener, it won't put those five corporations out of business, because, for that specific list of five corporations that dominate the recording industry, royalty payments comprise what is very close to an in-house money transfer. They are in the unique position to be proportionally both the payer and the receiver, and if these royalty rates go through, they will have a guaranteed instant monopoly over internet radio. No one else could possibly afford to go into the business.
Such an outsider -- someone else who wants to start an internet radio station. will have to pay the royalties, but unlike the big 5, who get most of the money back, they won't get ANY of the money back, because they aren't the copyright holders.
Now don't get me wrong, the copyright holder should be paid... but charging per-listener will create an instant monopoly. Like broadcast radio, the charge should be per-performance, irrespective of the exact listener count, and the rates should be identical to the broadcast rates. If anything, they should be lower, because internet broadcasts have markets that are smaller then radio broadcasts by orders of magnitude. Sky-high internet radio royalties serve no other purpose but to make internet radio uneconomical for everyone...
... except for the "big 5", who are being handed a brand new monopoly on a silver platter.
Levy's newest book... helps demonstrate one of the key hypocrisis in the mind of the common SlashDotter (like I picture myself). Which is that while we respect (even worship) the ownership of data when it comes to privacy considerations, we abhor that very same ownership when it is expressed by others (like the RIAA & MPAA) in the form of copyrights.
The difference is between published works and unpublished data.
The purpose of the copyright laws is to establish a set of rules governing the use of published works. In exchange for consenting to the act of publication -- which makes the work vulnerable to copying, and commits the work to eventually entry into the public domain, the publisher receives a government-protected monopoly for a limited time. This is the copyright bargain.
This is completely different from the protection of unpublished, personal secrets. In the case of my personal data, I never agreed to publish the data. I am not seeking copyright protection, or to enter into a social bargain. I am trying to protect my privacy -- to AVOID publication and disclosure. These are completely different situations in every way.
The very same poster can easily find himself posting in one thread that users need good encryption technology to protect their personal data; then later that same day argue that tools that break encryption in the form of DeCSS etc. are our God given right to own and use as we see fit to break the encryption of other people's data.
You are making a common mistake -- conflating the ownership of a copyright with the ownership of a copy. The two are not the same. Copyright law is very clear about this. There's an entire section of copyright law that makes this very important differentiation:
17 USC 202. - Ownership of copyright as distinct from ownership of material object
Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied. Transfer of ownership of any material object, including the copy or phonorecord in which the work is first fixed, does not of itself convey any rights in the copyrighted work embodied in the object; nor, in the absence of an agreement, does transfer of ownership of a copyright or of any exclusive rights under a copyright convey property rights in any material object.
When you obtain a legally made copy of a work, that copy is your property. The right to break the encryption using tools like DeCSS comes not from the "God given right to own and use as we see fit to break the encryption of other people's data.", but from the right to use and enjoy our personal property -- our own privately owned DVDs that we paid for.
The decryption and copy protection issues are all about property rights -- the right to personally use and enjoy your DVDs and CDs as you see fit, without interference from record and movie publishers, who are seeking to control how you use your own personal property after you've paid for it.
Before you flame me, I realize there is a distinction in that supposedly you paid for that DVD you only want to make a backup copy of. But if the seller of the DVD and law say that is not what you paid for, then why are you arguing with the seller? You should only be arguing with law.
We are arguing with the seller because the seller is abusing the copyright laws. When you purchase a book or DVD, you have certain expectations. You expect that you will be able to use the book or DVD. That's very basic. If you purchased a book, and the book turned out to have blank pages, you would certainly return the book and expect a replacement or refund. When you purchase a DVD, you expect that, by paying the $20.00 purchase price, you now have all the authority you need to view that DVD. What the MPAA/DVDCCA are trying to do is change the rules after the fact -- they argued in court that the purchaser of a DVD is only authorized to view that DVD on industry-approved viewing devices. The defendants claim was that the purchaser of a DVD has the right to view that DVD on a viewing device of his own choosing.
The problem with the law, the DMCA in this instance, is that it broadly interferes with property rights. The DMCA proports to extend to copyright holders the legal authority to interfere with other people's property rights. It's very destructive, and very overreaching.
So maybe that's the commonality of the two opinions, both advocate that the law should be changed in the consumer's favor. One to allow consumers access to strong encryption, one to to allow consumers the common law right of fair use to DVDs they have purchased.
As I said, the two issues are completely unrelated. The DeCSS advocates are not arguing for the right to break into the movie studios and copy unpublished works. They are not arguing for the right to gather private information about other people. The DeCSS argument is simple. The studios publish a work. The purchaser pays to purchase a copy. That purchaser has the right to watch that DVD any damn way he pleases -- even on equipment that isn't sanctioned by the publisher.
Linux on the mainframe can't respond to the workload demands of Web serving with high utilization--something IBM touted at the time of its z800 announcement. Horizontally scaled Linux farms are designed to handle unpredictable demand with above average peak loads. As demand rises, a load balancer distributes the traffic evenly across servers, which increases utilization. Because design capacity needs to handle peak demand, server farms often have a low utilization.
If you have a VM system with two virtual machines, and one of them is nearly idle, and the other virtual machine is very busy, VM will automatically take resources away from the less busy machine and devote it to the more busy machine.
This means that you don't need load-balancing software. VM is the load-balancing software.
Given the relatively low cost of hardware, some organizations find this trade-off acceptable to ensure appropriate service levels. Contrary to what many believe, consolidating a Linux farm into multiple images on a mainframe would not change the demand pattern. Although z/VM can start and stop Linux images, it cannot dynamically add resources to match demand.
Of course it can! The VM kernel will parcel out memory and CPU on demand.
As a result, a mainframe would need to size for peak demand just as the Linux farm would;
All computer systems need to size for peak demand. The difference is that with a mainframe, you can size one machine for the peak demand of the busiest of a large number of virtual machines, and get rid of the overhead caused by the load-balancing software, because you don't need it anymore.
high utilization is a myth.
VM systems can utilize 90-95% of the native computer resources. The overhead on a VM system is very, very small.
Since the birth of copyright law. Remember, the whole thing started as a way to gaurantee business for publishers, so that they could safely invest the money to support the original work.
Actually, the first copyright laws came as a response to the invention of the first digital copying technology -- Movable type. Before movable type, there was no such thing as a professional writer. Writing was something that you did with pen and ink, and if you were very lucky, some scribe somewhere might painstakingly hand-copy your work, and a second copy would exist. The original purpose of copyright was censorship. In exchange for submitting to censorship by the crown, publishers were given a monopoly over printing. They had the right to seek out and destroy unlicensed printing presses and books. Only when copyright was on the verge of being abolished, due to publisher excesses, was it reinvented as an "author's benefit."
This isn't about our rights, it's about theirs. Fair use is a specific and limited exception to their right to control their copyrighted material; in a sense, it's a 'privilege' granted to us by the courts.
Absolutely wrong, and a dangerous meme. Fair use, far from being an arbitrarily created "privilege", is actually a consequence of the First Amendment. Remember that Exclusive Rights clause is part of the original Constitution. It authorizes Congress to grant speech monopolies. A copyright is really the right to exclude others from repeating or building upon your speech. One of the basic principles of law is that if a newly passed law conflicts with a previous law, then the new law supercedes the old. The First Amendment bans Congress from passing any laws abridging speech. After the passage of the Bill of Rights, the courts had to wrestle with the question of whether the First Amendment prohibition against speech control superceeded Congress' authority to grant copyrights. The doctrine of Fair Use was invented to save copyright in the face of the First Amendment. Fair use is an attempt to separate the commercial aspects of speech from the non-commercial aspects. Fair use was only codified into copyright law in 1976. It is not a "privilege" -- it is part of the First Amendment right of freedom of speech.
The public benefit of open source and free software has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with learning and progress, and free access to source code is the key to advancing past the current stagnant backwater that computer science has become.
Let me explain.
Imagine that you're a young student who wants to become a writer. You ask your teacher, "What do I need to do in order to become a great writer."
Your teacher, if she has a bit of sense about her, will tell you to read all the works that you can, by the best writers, and learn from them. By recreationally reading and studying the works of great writers, as a young person, you will learn to recognize and understand, from experience, what differentiates good writing from bad writing. This is the educational process that, if you are both diligent and lucky, will turn you into a talented writer.
Contrast this advice with the world of computer programming. In the world of software, programs are distributed as object code -- meaning that you can't learn from them by reading them. Plus, they contain "licenses" that proport to deny you the right to study them to learn from them. Any programmer who obtains surreptitious access to some major program's source code is running a serious risk of being unemployable -- as a legal liability.
It is as if our original hypothetical budding author were told:
"If you want to be come a author, you must be sure to never, ever read anyone else's books, especially popular books by great authors. The way to become an author is to wait until you are of college age, then enroll in a two year "writing school", where you will learn grammar and spelling, sentence structure, and then write a series of short essays. For your final project, you will write a single chapter of a book co-authored by the entire class. Once you are completed with this two year course, you will have your degree, and, having only studied textbooks, will be fully qualified and ready to join the workforce as a writer, uncontaminated by exposure to real-world writing experience.
If this were the way we taught writing, then our novels would show the same lack of quality -- and lack of progress as our software does right now!
So how do we fix this problem?
I believe that the answer is to reform copyright law. The current system of closed source, proprietary programming technology -- and the lack of any noticable progress in the craft of programming -- reflects the complete failure of copyright law brought on by the extension of copyright protection to proprietary software.
Patent and Copyright law are supposed to promote progress by placing the best examples of science and technology into the public domain, where they can be studied and learned from. If I want to learn about any physical science or engineering discipline -- if I want to catch up to the current state of the art, all I need do is go to the patent databases and -- right there, are thousands of examples of the latest, real-world scientific technology, written by actual scientists working in actual companies on actual products -- all there for me to study and learn from, and, 17-20 years after disclosure, to freely draw upon and use.
This is the public benefit of the patent system -- the dissemenation of practical engineering and scientific knowledge. This is supposed to be the public benefit of the copyright system. Copyright is supposed to be a tradeoff. Copyright is supposed to provide monopoly benefits in exchange for publication -- public disclosure. This works just fine in the case of natural language writings, because the source code is the product, but not for object code, where the product can only, for all practical purposes, be used -- not studied and learned from.
Copyright law could and should be used to leverage a similar public benefit, however, in the case of software, our legislators have completely missed the point of having copyright in the first place. The purpose of copyright is not to protect authors. The purpose of copyright is to create the next generation of authors -- to "promote progress" -- by encouraging the publication of works.
Imagine an alternate universe in which copyright protection were only afforded to software that was distributed in conjunction with full, buildable source code. Companies would have to choose between copyright protection, and DRM protection, instead of the current dysfunctional system, where they are able to effectively obtain copyrights on works that are at the same time, in effect, trade secrets.
In such an alternate universe, young programmers would start out as computer users. However, if they became curious about how their software worked, they would find the source code to their programs waiting for them.
Like the young, would-be writer with a library full of books, they would have the entire world of software to read, study, analyze, and learn from.
One objection to the source code requirement for copyright protection that I have heard is that it would encourage code theft. If companies distributed the source code to their products, I have heard it said, other companies will steal their work and incorporate it into their own code.
The answer to this objection is that, under such a system, they would not be able to do that because it would be trivially easy to detect such theft. If I were to steal a portion of the Windows source code and add it to my program, then went to market my program, in order to obtain copyright protection, I would be forced to distribute my source code -- with the stolen Windows source code imbedded. Microsoft would discover it and shut me down.
In this way, mandatory disclosure of source code would severely limit, or effectively end the practice of code theft. Who's to say who is stealing code today? It's nearly impossible to tell, when only object code is published.
Fortunately, free software, and to a lesser extent open source software is bridging this gap. Yesterday's young budding software writers had little to work from. The new generation of young software writers -- and I am talking about high-school age students -- have the entire GNU/Linux/Gnome/KDE system to study and learn from. Free software is the only software that earns its copyright. It's the only software that "promotes progress", because it's the only software that can be freely studied by the general public. It's a functional replacement for the public domain that has been lost/destroyed by misguided, failed copyright law.
In other words, just as having access to a library of great books is everything to a young, budding writer, having access to quality, real-world source code is everything to a young, budding programmer.
In a certain sense, it's probably the only thing that really matters.
Minidisc? Sorry, but I have no interest in lossy compression.
Yes, the decks are more expensive. But...
For about $5.00, you can get a DDS tape (functionally identical to DAT) with 2 hours of continuous recording time. You really notice this advantage about 70 minutes into the set, when the DAT people are smiling and enjoying the music, while the minidisc people are praying for the song to end and for there to be enough time to swap discs without losing any music.
What a strange statement... like saying that free people are anathema to slavery.
If the public domain is such a bad thing, and copyrights are such a good thing, then why did the authors of the Constitution specifically require that copyrights expire? Why create an obligation to turn a good thing into a bad thing?
The answer is that monopolies are really the "bad thing", . They were considered dangerous and destructive to the drafters of the Constitution. There was considerable debate as to whether monopolies should be permitted at all. One of the bitter lessons learned by the colonists from England was the danger of permitting government to grant monopolies to individuals.
Copyright is intended to allow a work to be available to the public, while simultaneously allowing the author to profit.
Copyright is intended to incite publication. That is the end. That is the public benefit.
In exchange for the public benefit of the work being published and available for the general public to read and learn from, copyright creates conditions that allow the author to profit.
You have it exactly backwards. Copyright is the means to achieve a better public domain.
Of course where a company might loose out is that other companies would download and use the engine without paying them for it
No they wouldn't. They couldn't, because in order to publish their game under copyright, the second company would have to disclose their source. The original author of the plagerized code would easily discover the theft, and sue the other companies for copyright infringement.
Actually, this would be an improvement over the current situation. Who can say whether program "A" has code stolen from program "B", when both programs are only available as object code?
Mandatory source disclosure as a condition of copyright would reduce code theft.
You do bring up the GPL but while it does fulfill one of these purposes, it does not fulfill the larger goal of copyright. That is, it does not protect the producer of the software, not without combining it with dual licensing which kind of defeats the purpose of such a discussion.
Ah, but the larger goal of copyright is to place works in the public domain. The copyright clause has an purpose and a means. The purpose is to "promote progress" and the means is by protecting the economic interests of software producers. Good copyright laws can do both. Right now we don't have very good copyright laws.
What I'd like to see is software distributed in a fashion that if I buy a copy I can obtain the source code. I find that very appealing and very useful.
That provision alone would probably solve most of the problems with software copyright law.
Plus, it would create enormous benefits, especially among young people. If you're a kid who has a Windows computer and a handful of games, about all you can do with the computer and software is play with it, and you don't learn anything. On the other hand, if all software came with complete, buildable source code, those same kids would get tired of just playing the games, and they would start exploring the source code to make the software do what they wanted it to do.
After all, what better way for a young geek to show off to his friends then to hack up their favorite game!
In about five years, we'd have an entire new generation of kids who learned to program, starting as young teenagers, by studying all of the best, state-of-the-art software in the world. We would see an explosion in computer literacy and blossoming of programming talent that is hard to even imagine. Contrast this with the current situation where it is nearly impossible to buy and install a piece of software without clicking a button that says that you agree that you will never read the software, "reverse-engineer" being a fancy term for "read".
However, to protect the creator of the software there must still be limitations. But I envision those limitations as being similar to other copyrighted works today, like books, maps, pictures, etc. You cannot redistribute the software to others who have not bought it.
This is already the law with respect to all copyrighted works, including computer programs.
You may transfer the license that you bought, but you cannot retain a copy when you do so.
Better yet, forbid any licenses on mass-market software at all as a condition of copyright. Copyright was designed to replace private licensing of works. In reality, most people simply ignore all of the insane "licensing agreements" included with software anyhow and use software according to common sense -- you buy the software, and you use it. You only get rid of your store-bought copy after you stop using the software.
If a software company chose to reject copyright protection in favor of a licensing contract -- say they feel that they require the authority to enter your home and search your computers -- then they would have to enter into a trade-secret arrangement with all of their customers, and would do so at the risk of their code leaking out, where it would enter the public domain with no copyright protection. This would strongly deter software licensing, except in cases where it is really economically necessary.
Even better, how about just sticking with existing copyright law, which says that you may transfer the copy that you bought, but you cannot retain a copy when you do so.
You must buy a copy for each person who will be using the software. etc.
or, more simply, you must buy a copy in order to use the software. Should a family with five kids have to buy five copies of the same software, one for each child? The idea of "one copy per user is an artifact of the "personal license" model, which is the model I'd like to eliminate. The correct model for copyright is "Physical copies as chattel" If you own a book, you have the right to read it, regardless of whether you bought the book from the publisher, borrowed it from the library, or bought it on eBay. Software should be no different.
Copyright law was designed to deal with the reproduction and distribution of physical copies. It ties rights to those copies. Most software is packaged on distribution CDs, so the physical-copy copyright model remains valid and functional.
Useful change to copyright can be accomplished without completely abandoning it and the purposes it should serve.
Agreed. I'd go so far as to say that useful change to copyright can best be accomplished by returning to the purposes that it was designed to serve.
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If one of the manufacturers of dvd equipment had not gotten careless with the encryption technology, is there any reason to believe that we would be able to rip DVDs today?
... and it was only a matter of time before someone with the ability to read machine language translated those secrets into something more accessable to the general public.
The DVD encryption game was over the instant that the first PC DVD player software was released. From that moment on, all of the secrets of DVD decryption were published and available for purchase
But yes, had the DVD taken a hard line and absolutely refused to license DVD technology for computers, DeCSS would probably not exist.
Contrast DVD encryption/decryption to DirecTV, where the decryption function is encapsulated in a smart card. Although people have created workarounds, allowing them to manipulate the smartcard to get free TV service, no one has yet determined the decryption algorithm contained in the chip itself. If they have, they are keeping it a secret.
Encryption is a bit of a red herring though. The real issue is player feature control. There have been DVD rippers for years, but all of them required modification of a licensed DVD player. What made DeCSS dangerous to the DVDCCA was that it was a complete, standalone, unlicensed implementation of CSS. Being in the DVDCCA carries advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that you have access to the decryption algorithms, and are able to produce DVD players. The disadvantages are that you are subject to a licensing agreement, and you may not manufacture players with unencrypted digital outputs, and your player must impose macrovision distortion on the video signal.
If DeCSS were not suppressed, then non-DVDCCA licensed hardware manufacturers would be able to start manufacturing and selling DVD players with no macrovision, and unencrypted digital outputs. This would place the entire existing DVD player industry at a self-imposed marketplace disadvantage, because they all entered into a "suicide pact" not to include those features.
DeCSS is being suppressed not because of the danger of ripping DVDs, but because of the danger of the entire DVD player industry being usurped by a superior product -- that they have all sworn in blood to never provide for themselves. Internet file trading is just a smokescreen.
I also disagree that DVD will be too entrenched for a new high definition medium. The marketplace would accept and require new "HDTV DVD" players to play "legacy" DVDs, and the new format would be noticably superior in a side-by-side comparison (on those big screens at Best Buy, for instance.) No need to ditch your DVD collection, but the new ones would look much better.
Plus, for the first time, for digitally-originated movies at least, individuals would be able to own movies in their original theatrical format. That's a very nice incentive indeed. If nothing else, it would fuel the market for video projectors.
My main fear about a new format is that it gives the studios renewed control - they are not likely to make the same mistake twice (re allowing DeCSS to happen).
Well, obviously they would go with a new encryption algorithm in place of CSS, but I have full confidence and faith that our next generation of young people will be as up to the task of cracking the encryption as the current generation was up to the task of cracking CSS. In the end, it won't matter. People have had the capability of copying movies since the introduction of the betamax. Time and again it has been shown that the vast, vast majority of people would prefer to watch a movie in a theatre, rent, or purchase a legitimate, guaranteed copy then take a chance on a probably-inferior bootleg.
As I said, the DeCSS war is all about keeping macrovision-free players with digital outputs off the market. It is not about internet piracy, or anything else.
Lots of talk here about how this could be the "ultimate bootlegging product." On the other hand, if the movie industry is smart, this could be the "ultimate bootleg killer."
The movie studios are very nervous about internet piracy, but there's a good reason why the vast majority see movies in theatres and rent or purchase DVDs instead of acquiring bootleg VCDs. The simple truth is that low bitrate videos suck. They have motion artifacts. They have substandard audio.
They don't meet our quality expectations. A DVD is vastly superior. So is a 35mm print in a theatre. That's why Spiderman and Clones made over a hundred million dollars each in their first weekends, in spite of the fact that vastly inferior bootlegs were available "for free" on the internet.
As the electronics industry begins to retool their equipment from CDR manufacture to DVD-R manufacture, the movie industry is going to run into the same problem as the music industry -- they are going to be selling a $15.00 product that can be trivially copied perfectly onto a $1.00 piece of media. Over the next decade or so, as internet bandwidth increases, we will begin to see file-sharing of actual DVD images.
How can the movie industry make file-sharing of DVD images undesirable?
The answer is by providing something much, much better. Current "digital movies", as projected in theatres, provide a vastly superior image to DVD, and require approximately 70-100 gigabytes of storage space. The movie industry should be preparing to transition away from DVD to a new "super DVD" format that offers at least HDTV resolution, and most importantly, a big, whomping data rate that is completely impractical for internet streaming, and completely impractical for copying to DVD without downgrading the video quality.
Such a technology, available for the home, would quickly relegate DVD-quality recordings into the "low end" of video, at the same time that the price barrier on DVD-recording equipment falls through the cellar.
The industry should also realize that copy protection is worthless. It will always be broken, and the longer it goes unbroken, the more severe the market effect once it is broken. The real solution to the piracy problem of inferior bootleg recordings is the age-old tactic of the salesman. Offer a vastly better product, and your customers will follow.
[switching to hardware modems] may not seem like it's very significant, but it is. Consider this: One of the world's largest retailers has decided that the Open Source community may be a viable marketplace. Wal-Mart has promoted products aimed at us. And that has opened the door for us to be heard, not as techies, but as consumers.
All true, and it also occurred to me that changing to a Linux-friendly modem is a very, very smart move on the part of Microtel.
If Microsoft were to sue Microtel and Walmart under some theory of contributory copyright infringement -- inducing people to buy computers for the purpose of pirating Windows, it would be difficult for Microtel or Walmart to make the argument that those computers were intended for Linux use, if they contained hardware that is designed to only work under Windows.
A better solution would be to tie copyright duration to tax depreciation. Here's a proposal:
o All works are protected for an initial term of one year upon fixation.
o A copyright term may last for any term between 1 and 100 years.
o In order to qualify for copyright protection past the first year, the copyright holder must register the work with the copyright office, and specify the term desired. The life of the copyright becomes, for tax purposes, the lifetime value of the work.
o The copyright holder may then deduct the cost of producing the work over the term of the copyright.
For instance, a movie costs $100,000,000 to produce. If the studio opts, at the end of the first year, for a 100 year copyright, they could then deduct $1,000,000 per year for the next hundred years.
If the studio were to opt for a 5 year copyright, they could then deduct $20,000,000 per year for the five year period.
If the movie were an absolute dud, the studio could simply allow the one year copyright to expire, and deduct the entire $100,000,000 at once.
This would quickly bring copyright terms into line with the actual market performance of works.
With legal protection of serial numbers on digital content, lawsuits against the people who illegally release pirated content are possible. It's hard to sue every kid who has a pirated Brittney Spears CD, but this would help you sue the kid who made the original illegal copy.
What if the original kid removed the serial number? How would you ever find him?
Even if he didn't remove the serial number, how are you going to find him? Assume he paid cash for the CD and proceed from there.
Assume that an airtight system is designed where every CD is tracked, and every CD purchase results in a record of the serial number and the purchaser. Isn't this a disincentive to purchase CDs? Wouldn't it be safer to get a pirated copy, so you can't be traced by the RIAA?
The entertainment folks can then negotiate with the hardware manufacturers to get some sort of serial number scheme thet would be difficult to bypass... and the law would help stop the few people with the ability to bypass the technology.
All it takes is for ONE person to successfully bypass the technology, and post the software to do so somewhere on the net. Then anyone can bypass the technology. What do you propose to do about that problem?
bzip2 was never designed for compressing audio, and it doesn't do a very good job of it.
However, there *are* compression schemes designed specifically for lossless digital audio compression, and they work fairly well.
For instance, the "shorten" codec can consistantly compress digital audio to a little over half it's original size -- not quite 50%, but about 55%. The codec works equally well on studio and live recordings. and is extensively used by Grateful Dead/Phish/etc music traders.
Check out etree.org for more information.
But yes, this new media uses lossy compression, which will send the early adopters away in droves.
The first glimpse of Skywalker's desert homeworld, Tatooine, evokes the setting of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel "Dune"; Lucas even throws in a shot of a skeletal desert serpent reminiscent of Herbert's gigantic sandworms. The amazing visuals suggest an eye nourished by the magazine art of Frank R. Paul, John Schoenherr, Kelly Freas and Chesley Bonestell.
The giant-skeleton scene is nearly identical to a scene in the 1966 film "One Million Years BC."
In 1MYBC, John Richardson portrays "Tumak", a caveman who is expelled from his tribe, and wanders through the desert. En route to discovering Raquel Welch's tribe of blond-haired, blue-eyed cavemen, he passes by a giant half-buried skeleton. Once you've seen both films, the homage is unmistakable. Similar skeleton, identical visual composition, even the MUSIC sounds similar.
I wonder how much Google has been feeding the "blog" phenemonon. Most bloggers have extensive links to each other's websites, and google is designed to specifically rank sites based on how many other sites link to those sites.
Don't forget that the broadcast version is packed with commercials, "station bugs", was edited for time, and has all of the cuss words badly overdubbed.
I don't even watch movies on TV anymore. Why should I put up with all that, when I can just rent the DVD for a few bucks instead?
I give it about six months before the device driver layer is disassembled, and new device drivers start to appear that allow full access to the hardware.
Six months or less.
An ISP, when ordered to disable access to a URL on a web site that they do not control, has two options:
1) Block access to the entire host.
2) Attempt to block access to that specific URL.
The first is, in theory, easy. A router connection can have an "access list", which specifies what is and isn't allowed to pass through the router. However, access lists are avoided whenever possible because they cause massive performance hits on routers. How large will this access list be? The article says there are about 100,000 web sites which could be censored. So, taking this list for starters, every single packet transmitted by an ISP in Pennsylvania would have to be compared to a 100,000 entry blacklist, and that's just for starters. There is no provision in the law for entries to be removed from the blacklist, so the legally-required access filters will simply grow and grow, dragging down ISP router performance.
Speaking as someone who has programmed access lists, that's absolutely nuts. It's preposterous. The hardware won't do it. It won't work.
Here's an article describing how much of a performance hit can be expected if all internet traffic in Pennsylvania must be packet-filtered:Moving on to the second method:
2) Attempt to block access to that specific URL.
This is even worse, performance-wise, and probably impossible, given the current internet architecture. In order to block access to a specific URL, you would need to:
a) Collect all packets bound for that IP address. Remember that under TCP/IP, the text of a URL might be split into multiple IP packets, which might even pass through different routers, or out of order, or both, and take different paths to the target machine.
b) Reassemble the IP packets, that you magically collected, into TCP packets
c) See if that packet looks like an HTTP GET request
d) Compare the URL to the 100,000 entry blacklist
e) Assuming that the request is to a non-blacklisted URL, retransmit the packets.
Unfortunately, I don't think that there are any routers on the market that can do this, and I'm not even sure that it could be made to work anyhow. The only technical way to make it work might well be to proxy each and every web page request, which would both require insanely massive amounts of computing power, and the complete centralization of all IP traffic entering and exiting Pennsylvania.
As a result, ISPs won't use this method. The only tool that will be available to them is IP address blocking, which will cause a massive hit on the router infrastructure.
I haven't even gotten into the issues of server farms, where one hostname might correspond to two or more IP addresses. I'm sure that anyone with networking experience can come up with another dozen reasons why an ISP can't feasibly block access to URLs on machines that aren't under their control in a scalable way.
If this law stands, the only effect discernable to the day-to-day internet user is that internet performance in Pennsylvania will be significantly poorer than anywhere else in the country, or world.
Alternately, Pennsylvania internet users may see their charges skyrocket, as the ISPs are forced to purchase millions of dollars of new, ultra-high performance routers, just to implement the child-porn access lists.
A third scenario is that ISPs will simply stop doing business in Pennsylvania, due to the insane cost of doing business there.
Next question ... can it stream uncompressed audio. I have a large collection of lossless .shn files. Can this unit receive an uncompressed stream, or is it restricted to receiving MP3s and WMAs?
.shns, but what I'm really interested in is whether the player can accept an uncompressed stream. It would be pointless to take my nice, lossless files, and convert them to lossy .mp3 format just to listen to them.
Presumably I'd have to do some hacking to jreceiver or the like in order to decode the
Any liability law should offer an exemption for software that is distributed along with buildable, commented source code.
The reason is simple. The end-users of open source software are in a position to verify the integrity and correctness of the software. Even if such an end-user is not a programmer, they could, if they were concerned, pay someone else to inspect the code. They have been provided with the ability to protect themselves, because the source code accurately describes the actual operation of the product.
The end-users of proprietary software are in no such position. They are absolutely dependant on the software vendor to verify the integrity and correctness of the software. They are powerless to protect themselves, and without the source code, they are only left with a representation of the operation of the product. This is far less information then the source code, which specifies the actual operation of the software.
Therefore, only proprietary software vendors should be held liable for bugs in their software.
It seems obvious to me why the "big 5" want the rates to be so high ...
... but charging per-listener will create an instant monopoly. Like broadcast radio, the charge should be per-performance, irrespective of the exact listener count, and the rates should be identical to the broadcast rates. If anything, they should be lower, because internet broadcasts have markets that are smaller then radio broadcasts by orders of magnitude. Sky-high internet radio royalties serve no other purpose but to make internet radio uneconomical for everyone ...
... This is how they plan to steal the entire market for internet radio and put everyone else out of business...
... if the same five corporations that hold the vast majority of the important musical copyrights in modern popular culture all have "internet radio" divisions, then it doesn't matter how much the royalties are -- in fact, the higher, the better, for them.
No matter what the rate is per song per listener, it won't put those five corporations out of business, because, for that specific list of five corporations that dominate the recording industry, royalty payments comprise what is very close to an in-house money transfer. They are in the unique position to be proportionally both the payer and the receiver, and if these royalty rates go through, they will have a guaranteed instant monopoly over internet radio. No one else could possibly afford to go into the business.
Such an outsider -- someone else who wants to start an internet radio station. will have to pay the royalties, but unlike the big 5, who get most of the money back, they won't get ANY of the money back, because they aren't the copyright holders.
Now don't get me wrong, the copyright holder should be paid
... except for the "big 5", who are being handed a brand new monopoly on a silver platter.
The difference is between published works and unpublished data.
The purpose of the copyright laws is to establish a set of rules governing the use of published works. In exchange for consenting to the act of publication -- which makes the work vulnerable to copying, and commits the work to eventually entry into the public domain, the publisher receives a government-protected monopoly for a limited time. This is the copyright bargain.
This is completely different from the protection of unpublished, personal secrets. In the case of my personal data, I never agreed to publish the data. I am not seeking copyright protection, or to enter into a social bargain. I am trying to protect my privacy -- to AVOID publication and disclosure. These are completely different situations in every way.
The very same poster can easily find himself posting in one thread that users need good encryption technology to protect their personal data; then later that same day argue that tools that break encryption in the form of DeCSS etc. are our God given right to own and use as we see fit to break the encryption of other people's data.
You are making a common mistake -- conflating the ownership of a copyright with the ownership of a copy. The two are not the same. Copyright law is very clear about this. There's an entire section of copyright law that makes this very important differentiation:
When you obtain a legally made copy of a work, that copy is your property. The right to break the encryption using tools like DeCSS comes not from the "God given right to own and use as we see fit to break the encryption of other people's data.", but from the right to use and enjoy our personal property -- our own privately owned DVDs that we paid for.
The decryption and copy protection issues are all about property rights -- the right to personally use and enjoy your DVDs and CDs as you see fit, without interference from record and movie publishers, who are seeking to control how you use your own personal property after you've paid for it.
Before you flame me, I realize there is a distinction in that supposedly you paid for that DVD you only want to make a backup copy of. But if the seller of the DVD and law say that is not what you paid for, then why are you arguing with the seller? You should only be arguing with law.
We are arguing with the seller because the seller is abusing the copyright laws. When you purchase a book or DVD, you have certain expectations. You expect that you will be able to use the book or DVD. That's very basic. If you purchased a book, and the book turned out to have blank pages, you would certainly return the book and expect a replacement or refund. When you purchase a DVD, you expect that, by paying the $20.00 purchase price, you now have all the authority you need to view that DVD. What the MPAA/DVDCCA are trying to do is change the rules after the fact -- they argued in court that the purchaser of a DVD is only authorized to view that DVD on industry-approved viewing devices. The defendants claim was that the purchaser of a DVD has the right to view that DVD on a viewing device of his own choosing.
The problem with the law, the DMCA in this instance, is that it broadly interferes with property rights. The DMCA proports to extend to copyright holders the legal authority to interfere with other people's property rights. It's very destructive, and very overreaching.
So maybe that's the commonality of the two opinions, both advocate that the law should be changed in the consumer's favor. One to allow consumers access to strong encryption, one to to allow consumers the common law right of fair use to DVDs they have purchased.
As I said, the two issues are completely unrelated. The DeCSS advocates are not arguing for the right to break into the movie studios and copy unpublished works. They are not arguing for the right to gather private information about other people. The DeCSS argument is simple. The studios publish a work. The purchaser pays to purchase a copy. That purchaser has the right to watch that DVD any damn way he pleases -- even on equipment that isn't sanctioned by the publisher.
Who is this "JMS" and why is he using my initials?
:)
Linux on the mainframe can't respond to the workload demands of Web serving with high utilization--something IBM touted at the time of its z800 announcement. Horizontally scaled Linux farms are designed to handle unpredictable demand with above average peak loads. As demand rises, a load balancer distributes the traffic evenly across servers, which increases utilization. Because design capacity needs to handle peak demand, server farms often have a low utilization.
If you have a VM system with two virtual machines, and one of them is nearly idle, and the other virtual machine is very busy, VM will automatically take resources away from the less busy machine and devote it to the more busy machine.
This means that you don't need load-balancing software. VM is the load-balancing software.
Given the relatively low cost of hardware, some organizations find this trade-off acceptable to ensure appropriate service levels. Contrary to what many believe, consolidating a Linux farm into multiple images on a mainframe would not change the demand pattern. Although z/VM can start and stop Linux images, it cannot dynamically add resources to match demand.
Of course it can! The VM kernel will parcel out memory and CPU on demand.
As a result, a mainframe would need to size for peak demand just as the Linux farm would;
All computer systems need to size for peak demand. The difference is that with a mainframe, you can size one machine for the peak demand of the busiest of a large number of virtual machines, and get rid of the overhead caused by the load-balancing software, because you don't need it anymore.
high utilization is a myth.
VM systems can utilize 90-95% of the native computer resources. The overhead on a VM system is very, very small.
Since the birth of copyright law. Remember, the whole thing started as a way to gaurantee business for publishers, so that they could safely invest the money to support the original work.
Actually, the first copyright laws came as a response to the invention of the first digital copying technology -- Movable type. Before movable type, there was no such thing as a professional writer. Writing was something that you did with pen and ink, and if you were very lucky, some scribe somewhere might painstakingly hand-copy your work, and a second copy would exist. The original purpose of copyright was censorship. In exchange for submitting to censorship by the crown, publishers were given a monopoly over printing. They had the right to seek out and destroy unlicensed printing presses and books. Only when copyright was on the verge of being abolished, due to publisher excesses, was it reinvented as an "author's benefit."
This isn't about our rights, it's about theirs. Fair use is a specific and limited exception to their right to control their copyrighted material; in a sense, it's a 'privilege' granted to us by the courts.
Absolutely wrong, and a dangerous meme. Fair use, far from being an arbitrarily created "privilege", is actually a consequence of the First Amendment. Remember that Exclusive Rights clause is part of the original Constitution. It authorizes Congress to grant speech monopolies. A copyright is really the right to exclude others from repeating or building upon your speech. One of the basic principles of law is that if a newly passed law conflicts with a previous law, then the new law supercedes the old. The First Amendment bans Congress from passing any laws abridging speech. After the passage of the Bill of Rights, the courts had to wrestle with the question of whether the First Amendment prohibition against speech control superceeded Congress' authority to grant copyrights. The doctrine of Fair Use was invented to save copyright in the face of the First Amendment. Fair use is an attempt to separate the commercial aspects of speech from the non-commercial aspects. Fair use was only codified into copyright law in 1976. It is not a "privilege" -- it is part of the First Amendment right of freedom of speech.
You can have this free product, but you can't keep any modifications private.
Sure you can. You just can't distribute the modified product without also distributing the modifications as source code.
Nothing in the GPL prevents you from making private modifications to GPLed software.
The public benefit of open source and free software has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with learning and progress, and free access to source code is the key to advancing past the current stagnant backwater that computer science has become.
Let me explain.
Imagine that you're a young student who wants to become a writer. You ask your teacher, "What do I need to do in order to become a great writer."
Your teacher, if she has a bit of sense about her, will tell you to read all the works that you can, by the best writers, and learn from them. By recreationally reading and studying the works of great writers, as a young person, you will learn to recognize and understand, from experience, what differentiates good writing from bad writing. This is the educational process that, if you are both diligent and lucky, will turn you into a talented writer.
Contrast this advice with the world of computer programming. In the world of software, programs are distributed as object code -- meaning that you can't learn from them by reading them. Plus, they contain "licenses" that proport to deny you the right to study them to learn from them. Any programmer who obtains surreptitious access to some major program's source code is running a serious risk of being unemployable -- as a legal liability.
It is as if our original hypothetical budding author were told:
"If you want to be come a author, you must be sure to never, ever read anyone else's books, especially popular books by great authors. The way to become an author is to wait until you are of college age, then enroll in a two year "writing school", where you will learn grammar and spelling, sentence structure, and then write a series of short essays. For your final project, you will write a single chapter of a book co-authored by the entire class. Once you are completed with this two year course, you will have your degree, and, having only studied textbooks, will be fully qualified and ready to join the workforce as a writer, uncontaminated by exposure to real-world writing experience.
If this were the way we taught writing, then our novels would show the same lack of quality -- and lack of progress as our software does right now!
So how do we fix this problem?
I believe that the answer is to reform copyright law. The current system of closed source, proprietary programming technology -- and the lack of any noticable progress in the craft of programming -- reflects the complete failure of copyright law brought on by the extension of copyright protection to proprietary software.
Patent and Copyright law are supposed to promote progress by placing the best examples of science and technology into the public domain, where they can be studied and learned from. If I want to learn about any physical science or engineering discipline -- if I want to catch up to the current state of the art, all I need do is go to the patent databases and -- right there, are thousands of examples of the latest, real-world scientific technology, written by actual scientists working in actual companies on actual products -- all there for me to study and learn from, and, 17-20 years after disclosure, to freely draw upon and use.
This is the public benefit of the patent system -- the dissemenation of practical engineering and scientific knowledge. This is supposed to be the public benefit of the copyright system. Copyright is supposed to be a tradeoff. Copyright is supposed to provide monopoly benefits in exchange for publication -- public disclosure. This works just fine in the case of natural language writings, because the source code is the product, but not for object code, where the product can only, for all practical purposes, be used -- not studied and learned from.
Copyright law could and should be used to leverage a similar public benefit, however, in the case of software, our legislators have completely missed the point of having copyright in the first place. The purpose of copyright is not to protect authors. The purpose of copyright is to create the next generation of authors -- to "promote progress" -- by encouraging the publication of works.
Imagine an alternate universe in which copyright protection were only afforded to software that was distributed in conjunction with full, buildable source code. Companies would have to choose between copyright protection, and DRM protection, instead of the current dysfunctional system, where they are able to effectively obtain copyrights on works that are at the same time, in effect, trade secrets.
In such an alternate universe, young programmers would start out as computer users. However, if they became curious about how their software worked, they would find the source code to their programs waiting for them.
Like the young, would-be writer with a library full of books, they would have the entire world of software to read, study, analyze, and learn from.
One objection to the source code requirement for copyright protection that I have heard is that it would encourage code theft. If companies distributed the source code to their products, I have heard it said, other companies will steal their work and incorporate it into their own code.
The answer to this objection is that, under such a system, they would not be able to do that because it would be trivially easy to detect such theft. If I were to steal a portion of the Windows source code and add it to my program, then went to market my program, in order to obtain copyright protection, I would be forced to distribute my source code -- with the stolen Windows source code imbedded. Microsoft would discover it and shut me down.
In this way, mandatory disclosure of source code would severely limit, or effectively end the practice of code theft. Who's to say who is stealing code today? It's nearly impossible to tell, when only object code is published.
Fortunately, free software, and to a lesser extent open source software is bridging this gap. Yesterday's young budding software writers had little to work from. The new generation of young software writers -- and I am talking about high-school age students -- have the entire GNU/Linux/Gnome/KDE system to study and learn from. Free software is the only software that earns its copyright. It's the only software that "promotes progress", because it's the only software that can be freely studied by the general public. It's a functional replacement for the public domain that has been lost/destroyed by misguided, failed copyright law.
In other words, just as having access to a library of great books is everything to a young, budding writer, having access to quality, real-world source code is everything to a young, budding programmer.
In a certain sense, it's probably the only thing that really matters.
Minidisc? Sorry, but I have no interest in lossy compression.
...
Yes, the decks are more expensive. But
For about $5.00, you can get a DDS tape (functionally identical to DAT) with 2 hours of continuous recording time. You really notice this advantage about 70 minutes into the set, when the DAT people are smiling and enjoying the music, while the minidisc people are praying for the song to end and for there to be enough time to swap discs without losing any music.
A lot of bands have had to fight with the recording companies to ensure that they retain the right to authorize audience recording.
The recording companies always add a "no audience taping" clause to their recording contracts, and it's up to the band to negotiate that clause out.
No. The public domain is anathema to copyright.
... like saying that free people are anathema to slavery.
What a strange statement
If the public domain is such a bad thing, and copyrights are such a good thing, then why did the authors of the Constitution specifically require that copyrights expire? Why create an obligation to turn a good thing into a bad thing?
The answer is that monopolies are really the "bad thing", . They were considered dangerous and destructive to the drafters of the Constitution. There was considerable debate as to whether monopolies should be permitted at all. One of the bitter lessons learned by the colonists from England was the danger of permitting government to grant monopolies to individuals.
Copyright is intended to allow a work to be available to the public, while simultaneously allowing the author to profit.
Copyright is intended to incite publication. That is the end. That is the public benefit.
In exchange for the public benefit of the work being published and available for the general public to read and learn from, copyright creates conditions that allow the author to profit.
You have it exactly backwards. Copyright is the means to achieve a better public domain.
Of course where a company might loose out is that other companies would download and use the engine without paying them for it
No they wouldn't. They couldn't, because in order to publish their game under copyright, the second company would have to disclose their source. The original author of the plagerized code would easily discover the theft, and sue the other companies for copyright infringement.
Actually, this would be an improvement over the current situation. Who can say whether program "A" has code stolen from program "B", when both programs are only available as object code?
Mandatory source disclosure as a condition of copyright would reduce code theft.
You do bring up the GPL but while it does fulfill one of these purposes, it does not fulfill the larger goal of copyright. That is, it does not protect the producer of the software, not without combining it with dual licensing which kind of defeats the purpose of such a discussion.
Ah, but the larger goal of copyright is to place works in the public domain. The copyright clause has an purpose and a means. The purpose is to "promote progress" and the means is by protecting the economic interests of software producers. Good copyright laws can do both. Right now we don't have very good copyright laws.
What I'd like to see is software distributed in a fashion that if I buy a copy I can obtain the source code. I find that very appealing and very useful.
That provision alone would probably solve most of the problems with software copyright law.
Plus, it would create enormous benefits, especially among young people. If you're a kid who has a Windows computer and a handful of games, about all you can do with the computer and software is play with it, and you don't learn anything. On the other hand, if all software came with complete, buildable source code, those same kids would get tired of just playing the games, and they would start exploring the source code to make the software do what they wanted it to do.
After all, what better way for a young geek to show off to his friends then to hack up their favorite game!
In about five years, we'd have an entire new generation of kids who learned to program, starting as young teenagers, by studying all of the best, state-of-the-art software in the world. We would see an explosion in computer literacy and blossoming of programming talent that is hard to even imagine. Contrast this with the current situation where it is nearly impossible to buy and install a piece of software without clicking a button that says that you agree that you will never read the software, "reverse-engineer" being a fancy term for "read".
However, to protect the creator of the software there must still be limitations. But I envision those limitations as being similar to other copyrighted works today, like books, maps, pictures, etc. You cannot redistribute the software to others who have not bought it.
This is already the law with respect to all copyrighted works, including computer programs.
You may transfer the license that you bought, but you cannot retain a copy when you do so.
Better yet, forbid any licenses on mass-market software at all as a condition of copyright. Copyright was designed to replace private licensing of works. In reality, most people simply ignore all of the insane "licensing agreements" included with software anyhow and use software according to common sense -- you buy the software, and you use it. You only get rid of your store-bought copy after you stop using the software.
If a software company chose to reject copyright protection in favor of a licensing contract -- say they feel that they require the authority to enter your home and search your computers -- then they would have to enter into a trade-secret arrangement with all of their customers, and would do so at the risk of their code leaking out, where it would enter the public domain with no copyright protection. This would strongly deter software licensing, except in cases where it is really economically necessary.
Even better, how about just sticking with existing copyright law, which says that you may transfer the copy that you bought, but you cannot retain a copy when you do so.
You must buy a copy for each person who will be using the software. etc.
or, more simply, you must buy a copy in order to use the software. Should a family with five kids have to buy five copies of the same software, one for each child? The idea of "one copy per user is an artifact of the "personal license" model, which is the model I'd like to eliminate. The correct model for copyright is "Physical copies as chattel" If you own a book, you have the right to read it, regardless of whether you bought the book from the publisher, borrowed it from the library, or bought it on eBay. Software should be no different.
Copyright law was designed to deal with the reproduction and distribution of physical copies. It ties rights to those copies. Most software is packaged on distribution CDs, so the physical-copy copyright model remains valid and functional.
Useful change to copyright can be accomplished without completely abandoning it and the purposes it should serve.
Agreed. I'd go so far as to say that useful change to copyright can best be accomplished by returning to the purposes that it was designed to serve.