Very good point. We should not be in an uproar because this is new. We should be in an uproar because it is such a tremendous threat to innovation and individual inventiveness. And, perhaps, we should be in an uproar because this wasn't brought to our attention earlier (or, if it was, we weren't listening very well).
In any event, the TRIPS agreement, what it represents, and what it will do to innovation, is deserving of a tremendous uproar, whatever the underly catalyst.
One hopes that resistance hasn't become futile because of its belatedness.
One also wonders how one mounts effective resistence to international bodies of power with absolutely no democratic accountability and such tremendous authority, backed by the armed might of entire international alliances.
History is repleat: Patents stifle development
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Nicely worded, but completely wrong. The alternative to patents is for corporate entities or individuals to keep all of their internal research as secret as possible to prevent competitor's copying their work. This practice of keeping everything possible a close secret is in fact what patent law was designed to abolish in the early 18th century.
Actually, history offers much stronger support of my contention than it does of yours (recall, for example, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, the numerous inventors who had their ideas. and rights to said ideas, stolen by Thomas Edisson, etc. etc. etc.).
While you are correct in that the original purpose of patent law was to insure that new ideas be published and thereby the knowledge not lost, you are very incorrect to imply that the patenting system actually encourages technological development, and that it would not occur without it.
Whether or not a patent is issued, a company will produce a product if it feels it can make a profit on it. It will do so, even knowing that foreign competitors will copy and sell the product, though of course it will cry foul at the prospect (who wouldn't). A good example of this is the software industry, which thrived in the US without patents for quite some time and thrives outside the US in places without software patents, despite the ease with which not only their ideas, but their very products, can and are copied by others. Not only have patents proven to be unnecessary to the prosperity of the software industry, they have been very destructive to progress in the industry in recent years. Worse, they have had absolutely no effect on limiting the kind of copying (of ideas, algorithms, or even product) which they purport to protect the "inventor" against.
Another example is any industry in countries which have a, shall we say, less than optimal (in the West's eyes) enforcement policy of patents. Those industries produce and improve upon products, despite the fact that their improvements will also be "stolen" and copied by others. Odd, that these industries thrive so well without any significant "protection" through patents, isn't it?
Similarly negative effects on innovation and related problems to those suffered by the software industry arise in other fields such a biotechnology and even traditionally patent-friendly fields such as automotive engineering. The negative ramifications are merely less evident to the casual observer, though if you give it some thought, you'll think of numerous examples where either the technology itself was stifled or even suppressed (e.g. hydrogen burning motors, etc.) or the inventor was not only not protected, but actually victimized by the patenting system (intermittent windshield wipers, etc). Even in areas where few of us question the concept of patents one can, with only a little observation, see the active and ongoing harm that the patenting system has on the industry and the stifling effect it has on technological innovation.
With modern reverse engineering techniques (which until very recently were legal in the US, and still are legal most other places) the actual publishing of patented information is much less of an issue than the stifling effect a government sanctioned monopoly on ideas has. By expanding this to software, genetics, mathetmatics, and numerous other fields of scientific endeavor this negative impact will become greater. As past progress in these areas shows, patents are not only not needed, but detrimental.
Trading Exponential Progress for Short Term Profit
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This is a terrible development. Clearly Corporate Earth (i.e. international corporations and big business) is able to have a much greater impact on international agendas and accords than any (other) constituents. Alas, it matters little to such entities that the exponential progress in technology and human knowledge to which we have grown acustomed could be severely curtailed by such draconian privatization of knowledge and so-called intellectual property. What is far more important to them are their short (and to a lesser degree) medium term profits. The larger picture (much slower technological growth, squandering of the intellectual capacity of humankind by limiting what we're allowed to invent because of patents which have already closed off access to the concepts and ideas, etc.) means little when the primary, indeed in most cases the only, goal is immediate profit. It is here that the profit motive truly does break down and begin to cause significant harm to society as a whole.
I can only see three possible outcomes of this, one of which is unthinkable, one merely bad, and only one good.
(The Good News First)
1) This could wake people up, and perhaps lead to reform in the entire patenting process (extremely unlikely IMHO)
2) There could be some resisitence, resulting in compromises which result in worldwide patents extending to broader areas than are currently permitted, but not "everything." This would be bad -- things are bad enough now, but if there is no where in the world for progress to be made when absurd patents are, say, granted by the US Patent Office, then the stifling effect of patents will become far more acute and immediate. Still, things could be much worse...
3) The proposal could go through largely unchanged, resulting in a draconian, world-wide net of patent law which stifles and ultimately kills most innovation, except that by large corporate entities which can afford licensing fees or leverage their existing patent portfolios. The result would almost certainly be a dramatic slow-down of technological progress on nearly every front, as any promising research idea or direction is fenced off by numerous patent applications, most of which, given the recent history of the US Patent Office, would probably be granted.
More insidiously, the individual would be cut off from taking any significant part in any technological developments, except as an employee or lackey of some large firm. This could result in the very best minds simply losing interest in persuing any field of endeavor where their ability to invent and achieve has been so severely limited before the fact, resulting in a shrinking intellectual pool of (active) talent from which even the largest and best financed corporations could benefit. The potential damage to Universities and other open scientific forums for research doesn't bear thinking about.
I've never heard of anyone worrying about the NSA spying on their Sun workstation.
In light of recent comments by Sun's CEO ("you don't have any privacy, get over it.") yes, one should worry about it. The fact that no one does is an entirely different issue than whether or not one should. FWIW I think Sun probably bears even closer watching than the NSA, but I wouldn't consider either one to be particularly strong advocates of individual rights, particularly when it comes to privacy.
Personally, I think the benefits outweigh the problems; it's really, really infuriating to have to look up codes to re-enable software after, say, upgrading one's operating system or getting a new hard drive or whatever.
It is even more irritating to swap out a bad CPU (or upgrade to a faster one, or add a second one on an MP board), and have all of your licenses suddenly become invalid. When you lose a hard drive there is no way (short of RAID) to avoid reinstalling some software, but when all you want to do is swap out a CPU it really shouldn't become necessary to do so simply for licensing purposes. Reinstalling a serialized program over an existing, original installation may or may not work anyway, depending on what has been left lying around in various subdirectories, the registry, etc. It is far, far easier to look up and type in a serial number (usually printed on the CD case or documentation title-page) than to try and retroactively undo and redo whatever licensing shinnanigans the software has done behind your back.
If looking up serial numbers is too much work, use StarOffice or Excel and make a spreadsheet, print the think out, and tape it up next to your monitor. My God man, you have a computer to help make these kinds of tasks easier. Use it. Don't give up what little remaining privacy and anonymouty you have just for a little convinience.
It was once said (I don't recall the attribution) that those who give up their freedoms in exchange for security wind up being neither free nor secure. Even at their most cynical our forfathers never dreamed we'd be giving up the liberties they worked so hard to achieve, all for just for a little convinience.
If the NSA/Intel connection does in fact exist, or their is sufficient circumstantial evidence to suggest that it does, then the European Union is only acting to protect their own (inter)national security and economic interests in banning the product. Their concern isn't necessarilly that the numbers exist, but the reason they were put there. Remember, they have already had industrial secrets stolen from their companies and given to their US competitors by the NSA, costing them real money and real jobs. With no sign that the NSA is at all repentant about what they've done, but rather that to all appearances they are pushing forward with even more intrusive and draconian approaches to gathering information, their concern is entirely warrented and their reaction very reasonable, even (one might argue) quite muted.
Why would Intel serailize the CPU, with all these other "unique numbers on hardware" already present in every computer sold? Why on earth create yet another number for no (apparent) reason? The answer is obvious: serializing the CPU makes not just the computer, but the work that has ever been done on it, easilly traceable in ways MMAC addresses and HD serial numbers cannot. A word document written five years in the past can, on a serialized PII/PIII, be traced to a particular computer. It was this misfeature that led to the identification and arrest of the author of Melissa Virus. While I'm glad he was arrested, I must confess I am much more concerned about my own loss of privacy than I am in offsetting the terrible threat the Melissa idiot ever posed to me.
An MMAC address, BIOS or HD serial number, is at most only traceable while the machine is on-line. They do not get embedded into the aforementioned word document the way the intel CPU serialization did. This demonstrates that the "big brother" ramifications of CPU serialization are quite different (and apparently more significant) than those associated with unique MMAC or IP addresses, or BIOS serial numbers. And who is to say future generations of PIII hardware will even allow the OS to disable their serialization functions?
The Europeans are rightly concerned with respect to their privacy and attempts by our secret organizations to subvert it. They are also very lucky, in that, unlike us, they have governments which actively work to protect their rights and liberties.
Marking this post down as flaimbait was a little harsh. Perhaps "overrated" would have been more appropriate, if one feels that BeOS fans are disproportionately upgrading the article's rating, but I really don't think the poster was trying to do anything but ask a question and make a polite request that their favorite OS get supported.
I agree with others that BeOS suffers from many of the disadvantages of other proprietary OSes. It is terribly vulnerable to orphaning should Be go under, it is pricy, it is much less polished in many respects than Linux, etc. etc. Still, it does do some things very nicely and, if nothing else, is a fun toy to play around with.
In any case, while I don't agree with the idea that BeOS should be getting support prior to Linux, I don't think the poster deserves getting nuked as "flaimbait," even though I do happen to agree with the resulting +1 score (but that may just be my pro-Linux bias speaking as much as anything).
If you have a credit card, own a home, rent an apartment, have a drivers liscense[sic], or even a social security number, you've given up your privacy. It's just a matter of time until someone wants to take advantage of that fact.
I haven't "given up" jack. Had take from me, through deception, coercion, or force perhaps, but I in no way "willingly and knowingly" gave anyone permission to poke around in my private affairs, much less give or sell that information to others. But, living in the US of A, my privacy was sold against my will to every mass mailer and spammer on the planet long ago. (Indeed, I was getting junk mail years before I was an adult, and therefor too young by law to enter into any agreement allowing anything of the kind. Not that that stopped them, mind you.)
If you think I'm going to take such invasions of my privacy lying down, you have a rather nasty surprise in store.
See Private Citizen on how to at least curb one particular invasion of privacy which is all too common. (My only affiliation with them is as a very satisfied, paying "member"). It was the best $30.00 I ever spent, eliminating all of my junk mail and junk phone calls in one fell swoop.
Yes, what he did was illegal (and collassally stupid -- poke a grizzly in the eye and you'll probably get mauled), BUT the severity of the sentance (and of sentencing requirements) for cracking into web sites is completely out of line with the seriousness of the crime.
1) If someone "breaks into" a computer it is not the same as breaking into a person's home. There is no physical threat present, and monetary damages have other aveneus for recompense.
2) A government or corporation operates on a completely different fiscal scale than an individual. $40,000 in damages to a large corporation is tiny (even microscopic when the government, with its $5 trillion budget, is the target. Whereas for an individual that is allot of money -- often more than one makes in a year. It is bad enough that corporate America is the recipient of enormous tax breaks, development grants, and other forms of corporate welfare, not to mention preferred status when it comes to legal and economic rights, but to eqaute a $10,000,000 corporations $40k loss with an average individual's $40k loss is really absurd.
3) Most of the "damages" this particular cracker is being accused of amount to fixing security flaws which already needed fixing. How would it have been if, instead of a punk teenager, cybersquadrons working for Slobodan Milosovic had cracked the site instead? They needed to fix their security regardless of what this kid did -- the only "damage" they can reasonably accuse him of causing is the time needed to recover the old web pages from backup and put them back on the server. The rest was work they needed to do, anyway -- sticking this cracker with the bill is extremely unjust.
4) Oh, they didn't have backups? Well, to blame that level of stupidity, incompetence, even negligence, on a cracker (however malicious) goes well beyond absurd.
Cracking is wrong. It should be punished. But to equate it with real-world breaking and entering, and to argue that financial damages which are miniscule to a large corporation and governments are the same as those for an individual of modest means and should be punished the same, is to toss justice to the winds and replace it with an ugly form of modern corporate witchburning.
Alas, while cruel, this kind of crushing penalty for individual misdeeds against a large corporate or government entity is hardly unusual in this country, so it is unlikely that this cracker will succeed in appealing his sentence on the grounds that it is "cruel and unusual."
The existence of a proof of the full Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was announced at a conference by Kenneth Ribet on June, 21 1999 (Knapp 1999), and reported on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition on July 31, 1999. The proof was completed by Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond, and Richard Taylor, building on the earlier work of Wiles and Taylor.
Before everybody starts screaming "this is old news" remember,/. posts what we submit. Though, I think monitoring NPR would be a good source for stories -- they reported this one a while back. Perhaps links like this one to the real-audio recordings of their broadcasts might be a nice touch.
He wasn't terribly articulate perhaps, but he does have a very valid point. If patents continue to hamper innovation and development in the United States, places with less draconian patent legislation, or even just more responsible patent offices, will benefit. This could result in the United States falling quickly behind our overseas counterparts.
Gratuitious MS-slam: It doesn't help that MS products are giving the US a reputation for producing shoddy software, either...:-)
The problem with assuming the internet is an unassailable bastion of liberty, that it inherently "routes around censorship" and so forth, is that its human users reside in the physical world and are subject to physical coercion, such as losing their jobs, their homes, their freedoms, or (in extreme cases, in extreme locations) their lives.
Others have mentioned the importance of very strong, easy to use encryption. This is important. However, I think a far better approach would be to design the underlying protocols to allow for transparent use of strong encryption, strong authentication, and double-blind anonymouty.
This may sound at first absurd, the idea of having both strong authentication capabilities coupled with (ideally) unassailable anonymouty. However, the key is that one's cyberspace handle, while an authenticable on-line identity, should not be able to be matched up with a real-world, physical being without that person explicitly identifying themselves willingly and deliberately.
Project's like "freenet" are important, though I would suggest going further and redesigning the lower protocols (e.g. an ip protocol - perhaps a variant of ipv6) which would incorporate these characteristics at the lowest level. Obviously this is not a panacea -- traffic analysis could for example be used to trace messages to a particular, physical location despite whatever electronic anonymouty has been designed into the system. These and other problems would of course need to be addressed. Even if they couldn't all be solved, a great many of our existing difficulties and vulnerabilities would be alleviated.
I think that, as long as the technology makes an all-intrusive, omnipotent state possible, it is only a question of time (apparently not a very long time at that) before such becomes a reality. Echelon, the litigation of the RIAA and MPAA, the censorship imposed by the Scientologiest on their critics, and so forth, are only the tip of an emerging iceberg. Redisign the technology to make that sort of thing impossible, very, very difficult, or unacceptably expensive, and you go a long way toward preventing it from ever happening. After all, what good is a court order if the physical and logical infrastructure make it impossible to carry out?
From my reading of the law, one of the things the ISP has to do is TAKE DOWN the offending material. If they fail to do this they themselves are liable. In this way, the law has abridged their status as "common carriers." While additional clauses are there to limit their liability should someone, unbeknownst to them, violate copyright using their facilities, once they have been informed they are compelled to remove the objectionable material. In this way the DMCA has facilitated the abridgement of individual rights to free speach by codifying into law an avenue for wealthy entities to coerce providors to remove content without any due process.
The problem is that the mere allegation of wrongdoing, even when completely unfounded (such as in the Co$ case), is enough to scare ISPs into removing the material and essentially silencing a voice of criticism. The new law lends new weight to this, by clarifying that ISPs do NOT enjoy common carrier status. This is unfortunate as, if I recall correctly, the courts had begun finding just the opposite.
As was noted in The Economist (August 07th issue), and elsewhere, Microsoft has a great deal of undisclosed financial liability, including US$60 billion (yes, with a "B") worth of options debt to their employees that is coming due in the next few years. Were it not for the penchant of humans to live in denial for extended periods of time, the stock would be valued significantly lower, not higher.
Breaking up M$ might make them more valuable than they already are, by diluting the pryamid and allowing them to benefit from the "Baby Bell" phenominon, but it is unlikely that such benefits will come anywhere close to equalling the liability Microsoft has already taken on. In addition, such a breakup will not shield their "offspring" companies from lawsuits (both pending and yet to be filed), many of which, given the Findings of Fact, stand a good chance of going against Microsoft (or its predicessors).
The last thing the Linux/*BSD communities should want is for Windows source code to become available. Snide, if accurate, comments regarding the source code quality aside , one of the major (if not the major) advantages Open Source OSes like Linux and *BSD is that the source code is available. The GPL and BSD licenses offer other advantages as well, but I fear if the Windows source became available, subject to peer review and contributed fixes, etc. we might actually lose one of our strategic advantages, one which allows the free OSes to outperform (both speed and stability wise -- contrived benchmarks aside) their M$ equivelents. This is not to say the Free OSes don't have other advantages (licensing, etc.), but it would be unfortunate to lose any advantage we have, especially when taking on Goliath.
Of course, there is a (strong) likelihood the hypotheticly "free" Windows source would meet the same fate as the Netscape source -- being scrapped in favor of a rewrite from the ground up.
Fortunately, it looks as though making the source code available is unlikely to happen. This is actually very good news for the emerging Free OSes IMHO.
... copyright infringement under the UK law, i.e. a civil offence. However under the DMA it will be a criminal offence.
I wasn't aware of this disparity. I agree, the US law is much more draconian in making such expanded definitions of copyright violation a criminal rather than civil violation. The UK law appears to me to be marginally more broad in what it defines as a copyright violation than the US law (hence my earlier allusion to "more draconian"), but in light of the potential punishment you are right -- the US law is much worse.
I agree with you, suicide is under the vast majority of conditions a terrible and stupid choice, for the reasons you and others have stated. Nevertheless, the right to end one's life is IMHO one of the most fundamental rights one can have. I don't have to agree with a person's choice to respect their right to make it.
While we were all distracted, arguing over whether or not Bill Clinton should be impeached and admiring the off-color stain on Monica's dress, congress quietly, and with no opportunity for public debate or comment, passed the Digital Millenium Copyright act into Law. They did this on a voice vote, so that no individual congress person had to go on record as having supported this legislation.
The result? Broad, sweeping, and hitherto unprecedented powers and rights were granted to so-called intellectual property holders, at the expense of individual rights of expression.
In this context, the first amendment to the US Constition (the right of Free Speach) has been effectively made null and void on the internet. This serves both the interests of government and large corporations, as it effectively silences undesirable speach in the one mass medium which they, prior to enacting this law, could not control.
Now, if anyone speaks out against any entity (government, corporate, or private) with money, the mere threat of litigation against them and their ISP is enough to silence them. With the new, broad rights this law grants, the litigation has much greater potential to succeed (though one would hope juries and judges would be smart enough to overturn the law were it to ever go so far). No individual, with house payments to make, children to feed, and a job to attend to, can afford this kind of risk, either monetarilly or in terms of time lost and possible effects on their career. The result: any entity with money now has an easy, well-defined, institutionalized method for denying the "average" (read: not wealthy) person of their constitutional right to freedom of speach, with any recourse and appeal denied to that individual through financial leverage.
Mirroring is a nice, feel-good short term solution to this (and it does do good, don't stop!), but realize this: there is similar, pending legislation in many countries we currently think of as "friendly". What will the net be like when there is no longer any place to run and mirror?
Our top priortiy should be the repeal of the Digital Millenium act in the US, the even more draconian legislation in the UK, and the prevention of such bills becoming law elsewhere in the world. This attack of speach is more subtle, more dangerous, and much more effective than the CDA ever was, and has effectively made the right to free speach on-line a farce of the worst kind.
If id did make the mistake of releasing a hybrid CD the results would skew the sales results distributors are watching in a way disasterous for those advocating the porting of games to Linux.
How? Linux users are by and large more technically savvy than Windows users are on average. While the Windows gamer may not realize (or care) that they could play their copy of Quake 3 under Linux, if Linux users were in fact able to do this, many would impatiently run out and buy the hybrid version labelled Windows, because it was in the store earlier, and then load up the Linux version. Fine for them, but bad for Linux, as their purchase has just inflated the Windows sales results and deflated the Linux sales result. The net result is that that one Linux gamer's purchase has widened the Linux/Windows sales gape by TWO (-1 Linux, +1 Windows). This is not what we want, and id has wisely chosen a way to prevent this. Have a little patience -- it will likely be rewarded in coming months and years as venders and other game manufacturers begin to take Linux more seriously and come out with Linux products, with any luck in a more timely fashion.
If only people with extreme amounts of fame receive attention, eventually everyone will be worshipping the exact same set of people, and there will be less and less variety and flavor in life.
Myself, the only person I worship is my Dominatrix. And then only when I'm horny, or when she demands it, or I see her in those sexy, skintight black leather pants that so deliciously accentuate her... ahem, sorry.
:-)
In all seriousness though, suicide is a terrible tragedy, as is all death for that matter (terrorists and serial killers aside). There is simply no way around it: mortality sucks. My thoughts go out to her family and friends, who will be very hard hit by this.
However, we should remember that suicide is her right. Perhaps not legally, under our less than just legal system, but ethicly and morally it is her decision to make. While this is hardly comforting or joyous (and I personally really wish she hadn't made that particular choice), it is nevertheless IMHO an important point that often gets ignored and forgotten. Whether she was diagnosed with a painful or perhaps undignified disease, or just unhappy with her life in general, the decision to end her life, while tragic, was her's and her's alone. A choice we may all regret, but one we should respect nevertheless. Of course, those local representatives of the religious right will almost certainly pull out their flamethrowers and moderate me down to -1 for expressing this opinion, but that's alright -- I wore my asbestos underware this morning anyway.
1) A jilted lover plans to kill his ex-girlfriend and does so.
2) A white racist plans to kill a black and does so.
Most people (including me) would say these two crimes deserve the same punishment.
Do you have statistics to back that up? I for one would be surprised to hear that most people feel the punishment should be identical. The second crime not only harms the obvious victim, but an entire segment of the population. What is more, it harms our entire society by tearing at the social fabric and stirring up hatred between the races that could, if unabated, lead to America resembling Kosovo or Bosnia. Based on the added threat to our society that hate crimes represent, versus similar crimes without the "hate" aspect, it is not unreasonable that the punishment is harsher.
This is easier to see if you consider crimes less drastic than murder, such as, say, intimidation, assault, or vandalism. Burning a cross does allot more than deface one's yard -- it terrorizes an entire household, a neighborhood, indeed (with enough press coverage) an entire segment of the American public. Not quite the same as a couple of malicious kids who light a bush on fire playing with matches because they don't like the old lady who won't let them eat her apples, nor should it be treated the same.
If motiviation is truly irrelevant, than one should have identical punishments for all murders (for example), whether deliberate, accidental, premiditated, or spontaneous. As another noted, the difference isn't in the act, but in the degree of thought that went into it. I leave it as an excersize to the class to recognize the aburdity of that approach.
On the other hand, if motivation is relevant, the motive of terrorizing an entire segment of the population (be it based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, or whatever) and the associated social and cultural damage that does to our entire society as a whole, must be taken into consideration, which is precisely what hate crime legislation does.
It is my hope that the absurd patenting of business models, mathematics, and science continues unabated until business, science, and the software industry is brought to a crawl.
Why? Because maybe when it starts making it impossible to do business or science and the resulting financial and technological losses become so obvious to the powers that be that they can no longer ignore it, maybe the cheap whores... excuse me, congresspersons... will be forced to address the serious problems patents are causing, and with any luck scrap the system altogether.
The worst thing for everybody would be a situation in which business as usual would be able to continue unabated while innovation outside of Redmond and other centers of corporate America who can afford to swap patent portfolios is completely stifled. We are rapidly moving in this direction -- the only hope to prevent it is to make sure the patenting system does significant damage to the very industries in which the abusers of the system are profiting. Anything that can be done to encourage the system to eviscerate itself should be encouraged.
The idea was to prevent the wholesale copying of DVDs like the CD problem they have in Asia.
No, you are wrong.
Wholesale pirates have access to commercial grade DVD copying and pressing equipment, which as another poster noted is not affected by CSS at all.
Furthermore, wholesale DVD pirates have the option of recording from the analog output, redigitizing the result with only a small loss in quality, and pressing as many unencrypted DVDs as they wish. Minimal effort, minimal cost. Given the kinds of pirated movies that have been sold in the past (taken with a video camera in front of a screen for crying out loud!), quality is not a very important issue to pirates.
CSS is designed to restrict playback and limit fair use as provided for under the law, including but not limited to making backup copies or moving the data to a more convenient medium.
The MPAA has plenty of legal recourse, and muscle, to go after wholesale pirates. CSS is an effort to make an end-run around laws permitting individuals fair use, something the MPAA and movie studios can't stand, but have absolutely no LEGAL method of stopping (except by encryption and excersizing the draconian new rights they have been granted in the US through the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which was snuck through on a voice vote during the height of the Clinton/Monica sex scandal.)
As I noted in another post, I will not be giving any money, directly or indirectly, to Hollywood until such a time as DVD is supported under Linux and their witch hunts stop. Yes, this means I'm making allot of use of the public library, local book stores, and local theaters and comedy clubs. Now that I'm hooked on the latter, I will probably be much less inclined to watch movies again even after the MPAA cleans up their act (should that optomistic expectation actually ever happen), as plays and comedy acts have actually turned out to be much more entertaining than any movie I've seen in the last several years. But that's another story altogether...
Slashdot Mirror
Very good point. We should not be in an uproar because this is new. We should be in an uproar because it is such a tremendous threat to innovation and individual inventiveness. And, perhaps, we should be in an uproar because this wasn't brought to our attention earlier (or, if it was, we weren't listening very well).
In any event, the TRIPS agreement, what it represents, and what it will do to innovation, is deserving of a tremendous uproar, whatever the underly catalyst.
One hopes that resistance hasn't become futile because of its belatedness.
One also wonders how one mounts effective resistence to international bodies of power with absolutely no democratic accountability and such tremendous authority, backed by the armed might of entire international alliances.
Nicely worded, but completely wrong. The alternative to patents is for corporate entities or individuals to keep all of their internal research as secret as possible to prevent competitor's copying their work. This practice of keeping everything possible a close secret is in fact what patent law was designed to abolish in the early 18th century.
Actually, history offers much stronger support of my contention than it does of yours (recall, for example, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, the numerous inventors who had their ideas. and rights to said ideas, stolen by Thomas Edisson, etc. etc. etc.).
While you are correct in that the original purpose of patent law was to insure that new ideas be published and thereby the knowledge not lost, you are very incorrect to imply that the patenting system actually encourages technological development, and that it would not occur without it.
Whether or not a patent is issued, a company will produce a product if it feels it can make a profit on it. It will do so, even knowing that foreign competitors will copy and sell the product, though of course it will cry foul at the prospect (who wouldn't). A good example of this is the software industry, which thrived in the US without patents for quite some time and thrives outside the US in places without software patents, despite the ease with which not only their ideas, but their very products, can and are copied by others. Not only have patents proven to be unnecessary to the prosperity of the software industry, they have been very destructive to progress in the industry in recent years. Worse, they have had absolutely no effect on limiting the kind of copying (of ideas, algorithms, or even product) which they purport to protect the "inventor" against.
Another example is any industry in countries which have a, shall we say, less than optimal (in the West's eyes) enforcement policy of patents. Those industries produce and improve upon products, despite the fact that their improvements will also be "stolen" and copied by others. Odd, that these industries thrive so well without any significant "protection" through patents, isn't it?
Similarly negative effects on innovation and related problems to those suffered by the software industry arise in other fields such a biotechnology and even traditionally patent-friendly fields such as automotive engineering. The negative ramifications are merely less evident to the casual observer, though if you give it some thought, you'll think of numerous examples where either the technology itself was stifled or even suppressed (e.g. hydrogen burning motors, etc.) or the inventor was not only not protected, but actually victimized by the patenting system (intermittent windshield wipers, etc). Even in areas where few of us question the concept of patents one can, with only a little observation, see the active and ongoing harm that the patenting system has on the industry and the stifling effect it has on technological innovation.
With modern reverse engineering techniques (which until very recently were legal in the US, and still are legal most other places) the actual publishing of patented information is much less of an issue than the stifling effect a government sanctioned monopoly on ideas has. By expanding this to software, genetics, mathetmatics, and numerous other fields of scientific endeavor this negative impact will become greater. As past progress in these areas shows, patents are not only not needed, but detrimental.
This is a terrible development. Clearly Corporate Earth (i.e. international corporations and big business) is able to have a much greater impact on international agendas and accords than any (other) constituents. Alas, it matters little to such entities that the exponential progress in technology and human knowledge to which we have grown acustomed could be severely curtailed by such draconian privatization of knowledge and so-called intellectual property. What is far more important to them are their short (and to a lesser degree) medium term profits. The larger picture (much slower technological growth, squandering of the intellectual capacity of humankind by limiting what we're allowed to invent because of patents which have already closed off access to the concepts and ideas, etc.) means little when the primary, indeed in most cases the only, goal is immediate profit. It is here that the profit motive truly does break down and begin to cause significant harm to society as a whole.
...
I can only see three possible outcomes of this, one of which is unthinkable, one merely bad, and only one good.
(The Good News First)
1) This could wake people up, and perhaps lead to reform in the entire patenting process (extremely unlikely IMHO)
2) There could be some resisitence, resulting in compromises which result in worldwide patents extending to broader areas than are currently permitted, but not "everything." This would be bad -- things are bad enough now, but if there is no where in the world for progress to be made when absurd patents are, say, granted by the US Patent Office, then the stifling effect of patents will become far more acute and immediate. Still, things could be much worse
3) The proposal could go through largely unchanged, resulting in a draconian, world-wide net of patent law which stifles and ultimately kills most innovation, except that by large corporate entities which can afford licensing fees or leverage their existing patent portfolios. The result would almost certainly be a dramatic slow-down of technological progress on nearly every front, as any promising research idea or direction is fenced off by numerous patent applications, most of which, given the recent history of the US Patent Office, would probably be granted.
More insidiously, the individual would be cut off from taking any significant part in any technological developments, except as an employee or lackey of some large firm. This could result in the very best minds simply losing interest in persuing any field of endeavor where their ability to invent and achieve has been so severely limited before the fact, resulting in a shrinking intellectual pool of (active) talent from which even the largest and best financed corporations could benefit. The potential damage to Universities and other open scientific forums for research doesn't bear thinking about.
I've never heard of anyone worrying about the NSA spying on their Sun workstation.
In light of recent comments by Sun's CEO ("you don't have any privacy, get over it.") yes, one should worry about it. The fact that no one does is an entirely different issue than whether or not one should. FWIW I think Sun probably bears even closer watching than the NSA, but I wouldn't consider either one to be particularly strong advocates of individual rights, particularly when it comes to privacy.
Personally, I think the benefits outweigh the problems; it's really, really infuriating to have to look up codes to re-enable software after, say, upgrading one's operating system or getting a new hard drive or whatever.
It is even more irritating to swap out a bad CPU (or upgrade to a faster one, or add a second one on an MP board), and have all of your licenses suddenly become invalid. When you lose a hard drive there is no way (short of RAID) to avoid reinstalling some software, but when all you want to do is swap out a CPU it really shouldn't become necessary to do so simply for licensing purposes. Reinstalling a serialized program over an existing, original installation may or may not work anyway, depending on what has been left lying around in various subdirectories, the registry, etc. It is far, far easier to look up and type in a serial number (usually printed on the CD case or documentation title-page) than to try and retroactively undo and redo whatever licensing shinnanigans the software has done behind your back.
If looking up serial numbers is too much work, use StarOffice or Excel and make a spreadsheet, print the think out, and tape it up next to your monitor. My God man, you have a computer to help make these kinds of tasks easier. Use it. Don't give up what little remaining privacy and anonymouty you have just for a little convinience.
It was once said (I don't recall the attribution) that those who give up their freedoms in exchange for security wind up being neither free nor secure. Even at their most cynical our forfathers never dreamed we'd be giving up the liberties they worked so hard to achieve, all for just for a little convinience.
If the NSA/Intel connection does in fact exist, or their is sufficient circumstantial evidence to suggest that it does, then the European Union is only acting to protect their own (inter)national security and economic interests in banning the product. Their concern isn't necessarilly that the numbers exist, but the reason they were put there. Remember, they have already had industrial secrets stolen from their companies and given to their US competitors by the NSA, costing them real money and real jobs. With no sign that the NSA is at all repentant about what they've done, but rather that to all appearances they are pushing forward with even more intrusive and draconian approaches to gathering information, their concern is entirely warrented and their reaction very reasonable, even (one might argue) quite muted.
Why would Intel serailize the CPU, with all these other "unique numbers on hardware" already present in every computer sold? Why on earth create yet another number for no (apparent) reason? The answer is obvious: serializing the CPU makes not just the computer, but the work that has ever been done on it, easilly traceable in ways MMAC addresses and HD serial numbers cannot. A word document written five years in the past can, on a serialized PII/PIII, be traced to a particular computer. It was this misfeature that led to the identification and arrest of the author of Melissa Virus. While I'm glad he was arrested, I must confess I am much more concerned about my own loss of privacy than I am in offsetting the terrible threat the Melissa idiot ever posed to me.
An MMAC address, BIOS or HD serial number, is at most only traceable while the machine is on-line. They do not get embedded into the aforementioned word document the way the intel CPU serialization did. This demonstrates that the "big brother" ramifications of CPU serialization are quite different (and apparently more significant) than those associated with unique MMAC or IP addresses, or BIOS serial numbers. And who is to say future generations of PIII hardware will even allow the OS to disable their serialization functions?
The Europeans are rightly concerned with respect to their privacy and attempts by our secret organizations to subvert it. They are also very lucky, in that, unlike us, they have governments which actively work to protect their rights and liberties.
Marking this post down as flaimbait was a little harsh. Perhaps "overrated" would have been more appropriate, if one feels that BeOS fans are disproportionately upgrading the article's rating, but I really don't think the poster was trying to do anything but ask a question and make a polite request that their favorite OS get supported.
I agree with others that BeOS suffers from many of the disadvantages of other proprietary OSes. It is terribly vulnerable to orphaning should Be go under, it is pricy, it is much less polished in many respects than Linux, etc. etc. Still, it does do some things very nicely and, if nothing else, is a fun toy to play around with.
In any case, while I don't agree with the idea that BeOS should be getting support prior to Linux, I don't think the poster deserves getting nuked as "flaimbait," even though I do happen to agree with the resulting +1 score (but that may just be my pro-Linux bias speaking as much as anything).
If you have a credit card, own a home, rent an apartment, have a drivers liscense[sic], or even a social security number, you've given up your privacy. It's just a matter of time until someone wants to take advantage of that fact.
I haven't "given up" jack. Had take from me, through deception, coercion, or force perhaps, but I in no way "willingly and knowingly" gave anyone permission to poke around in my private affairs, much less give or sell that information to others. But, living in the US of A, my privacy was sold against my will to every mass mailer and spammer on the planet long ago. (Indeed, I was getting junk mail years before I was an adult, and therefor too young by law to enter into any agreement allowing anything of the kind. Not that that stopped them, mind you.)
If you think I'm going to take such invasions of my privacy lying down, you have a rather nasty surprise in store.
See Private Citizen on how to at least curb one particular invasion of privacy which is all too common. (My only affiliation with them is as a very satisfied, paying "member"). It was the best $30.00 I ever spent, eliminating all of my junk mail and junk phone calls in one fell swoop.
Yes, what he did was illegal (and collassally stupid -- poke a grizzly in the eye and you'll probably get mauled), BUT the severity of the sentance (and of sentencing requirements) for cracking into web sites is completely out of line with the seriousness of the crime.
1) If someone "breaks into" a computer it is not the same as breaking into a person's home. There is no physical threat present, and monetary damages have other aveneus for recompense.
2) A government or corporation operates on a completely different fiscal scale than an individual. $40,000 in damages to a large corporation is tiny (even microscopic when the government, with its $5 trillion budget, is the target. Whereas for an individual that is allot of money -- often more than one makes in a year. It is bad enough that corporate America is the recipient of enormous tax breaks, development grants, and other forms of corporate welfare, not to mention preferred status when it comes to legal and economic rights, but to eqaute a $10,000,000 corporations $40k loss with an average individual's $40k loss is really absurd.
3) Most of the "damages" this particular cracker is being accused of amount to fixing security flaws which already needed fixing. How would it have been if, instead of a punk teenager, cybersquadrons working for Slobodan Milosovic had cracked the site instead? They needed to fix their security regardless of what this kid did -- the only "damage" they can reasonably accuse him of causing is the time needed to recover the old web pages from backup and put them back on the server. The rest was work they needed to do, anyway -- sticking this cracker with the bill is extremely unjust.
4) Oh, they didn't have backups? Well, to blame that level of stupidity, incompetence, even negligence, on a cracker (however malicious) goes well beyond absurd.
Cracking is wrong. It should be punished. But to equate it with real-world breaking and entering, and to argue that financial damages which are miniscule to a large corporation and governments are the same as those for an individual of modest means and should be punished the same, is to toss justice to the winds and replace it with an ugly form of modern corporate witchburning.
Alas, while cruel, this kind of crushing penalty for individual misdeeds against a large corporate or government entity is hardly unusual in this country, so it is unlikely that this cracker will succeed in appealing his sentence on the grounds that it is "cruel and unusual."
The existence of a proof of the full Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was announced at a conference by Kenneth Ribet on June, 21 1999 (Knapp 1999), and reported on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition on July 31, 1999. The proof was completed by Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond, and Richard Taylor, building on the earlier work of Wiles and Taylor.
/. posts what we submit. Though, I think monitoring NPR would be a good source for stories -- they reported this one a while back. Perhaps links like this one to the real-audio recordings of their broadcasts might be a nice touch.
Before everybody starts screaming "this is old news" remember,
He wasn't terribly articulate perhaps, but he does have a very valid point. If patents continue to hamper innovation and development in the United States, places with less draconian patent legislation, or even just more responsible patent offices, will benefit. This could result in the United States falling quickly behind our overseas counterparts.
... :-)
Gratuitious MS-slam: It doesn't help that MS products are giving the US a reputation for producing shoddy software, either
The problem with assuming the internet is an unassailable bastion of liberty, that it inherently "routes around censorship" and so forth, is that its human users reside in the physical world and are subject to physical coercion, such as losing their jobs, their homes, their freedoms, or (in extreme cases, in extreme locations) their lives.
Others have mentioned the importance of very strong, easy to use encryption. This is important. However, I think a far better approach would be to design the underlying protocols to allow for transparent use of strong encryption, strong authentication, and double-blind anonymouty.
This may sound at first absurd, the idea of having both strong authentication capabilities coupled with (ideally) unassailable anonymouty. However, the key is that one's cyberspace handle, while an authenticable on-line identity, should not be able to be matched up with a real-world, physical being without that person explicitly identifying themselves willingly and deliberately.
Project's like "freenet" are important, though I would suggest going further and redesigning the lower protocols (e.g. an ip protocol - perhaps a variant of ipv6) which would incorporate these characteristics at the lowest level. Obviously this is not a panacea -- traffic analysis could for example be used to trace messages to a particular, physical location despite whatever electronic anonymouty has been designed into the system. These and other problems would of course need to be addressed. Even if they couldn't all be solved, a great many of our existing difficulties and vulnerabilities would be alleviated.
I think that, as long as the technology makes an all-intrusive, omnipotent state possible, it is only a question of time (apparently not a very long time at that) before such becomes a reality. Echelon, the litigation of the RIAA and MPAA, the censorship imposed by the Scientologiest on their critics, and so forth, are only the tip of an emerging iceberg. Redisign the technology to make that sort of thing impossible, very, very difficult, or unacceptably expensive, and you go a long way toward preventing it from ever happening. After all, what good is a court order if the physical and logical infrastructure make it impossible to carry out?
From my reading of the law, one of the things the ISP has to do is TAKE DOWN the offending material. If they fail to do this they themselves are liable. In this way, the law has abridged their status as "common carriers." While additional clauses are there to limit their liability should someone, unbeknownst to them, violate copyright using their facilities, once they have been informed they are compelled to remove the objectionable material. In this way the DMCA has facilitated the abridgement of individual rights to free speach by codifying into law an avenue for wealthy entities to coerce providors to remove content without any due process.
The problem is that the mere allegation of wrongdoing, even when completely unfounded (such as in the Co$ case), is enough to scare ISPs into removing the material and essentially silencing a voice of criticism. The new law lends new weight to this, by clarifying that ISPs do NOT enjoy common carrier status. This is unfortunate as, if I recall correctly, the courts had begun finding just the opposite.
ARGH!
...predicessors...
Of course, I meant successors. Short night -- I need some coffee (and a proof reader).
As was noted in The Economist (August 07th issue), and elsewhere, Microsoft has a great deal of undisclosed financial liability, including US$60 billion (yes, with a "B") worth of options debt to their employees that is coming due in the next few years. Were it not for the penchant of humans to live in denial for extended periods of time, the stock would be valued significantly lower, not higher.
Breaking up M$ might make them more valuable than they already are, by diluting the pryamid and allowing them to benefit from the "Baby Bell" phenominon, but it is unlikely that such benefits will come anywhere close to equalling the liability Microsoft has already taken on. In addition, such a breakup will not shield their "offspring" companies from lawsuits (both pending and yet to be filed), many of which, given the Findings of Fact, stand a good chance of going against Microsoft (or its predicessors).
Additional references here, here, and here.
The last thing the Linux/*BSD communities should want is for Windows source code to become available. Snide, if accurate, comments regarding the source code quality aside , one of the major (if not the major) advantages Open Source OSes like Linux and *BSD is that the source code is available. The GPL and BSD licenses offer other advantages as well, but I fear if the Windows source became available, subject to peer review and contributed fixes, etc. we might actually lose one of our strategic advantages, one which allows the free OSes to outperform (both speed and stability wise -- contrived benchmarks aside) their M$ equivelents. This is not to say the Free OSes don't have other advantages (licensing, etc.), but it would be unfortunate to lose any advantage we have, especially when taking on Goliath.
Of course, there is a (strong) likelihood the hypotheticly "free" Windows source would meet the same fate as the Netscape source -- being scrapped in favor of a rewrite from the ground up.
Fortunately, it looks as though making the source code available is unlikely to happen. This is actually very good news for the emerging Free OSes IMHO.
... copyright infringement under the UK law, i.e. a civil offence. However under the DMA it will be a criminal offence.
I wasn't aware of this disparity. I agree, the US law is much more draconian in making such expanded definitions of copyright violation a criminal rather than civil violation. The UK law appears to me to be marginally more broad in what it defines as a copyright violation than the US law (hence my earlier allusion to "more draconian"), but in light of the potential punishment you are right -- the US law is much worse.
I agree with you, suicide is under the vast majority of conditions a terrible and stupid choice, for the reasons you and others have stated. Nevertheless, the right to end one's life is IMHO one of the most fundamental rights one can have. I don't have to agree with a person's choice to respect their right to make it.
Well, I'm rather using it...
While we were all distracted, arguing over whether or not Bill Clinton should be impeached and admiring the off-color stain on Monica's dress, congress quietly, and with no opportunity for public debate or comment, passed the Digital Millenium Copyright act into Law. They did this on a voice vote, so that no individual congress person had to go on record as having supported this legislation.
The result? Broad, sweeping, and hitherto unprecedented powers and rights were granted to so-called intellectual property holders, at the expense of individual rights of expression.
In this context, the first amendment to the US Constition (the right of Free Speach) has been effectively made null and void on the internet. This serves both the interests of government and large corporations, as it effectively silences undesirable speach in the one mass medium which they, prior to enacting this law, could not control.
Now, if anyone speaks out against any entity (government, corporate, or private) with money, the mere threat of litigation against them and their ISP is enough to silence them. With the new, broad rights this law grants, the litigation has much greater potential to succeed (though one would hope juries and judges would be smart enough to overturn the law were it to ever go so far). No individual, with house payments to make, children to feed, and a job to attend to, can afford this kind of risk, either monetarilly or in terms of time lost and possible effects on their career. The result: any entity with money now has an easy, well-defined, institutionalized method for denying the "average" (read: not wealthy) person of their constitutional right to freedom of speach, with any recourse and appeal denied to that individual through financial leverage.
Mirroring is a nice, feel-good short term solution to this (and it does do good, don't stop!), but realize this: there is similar, pending legislation in many countries we currently think of as "friendly". What will the net be like when there is no longer any place to run and mirror?
Our top priortiy should be the repeal of the Digital Millenium act in the US, the even more draconian legislation in the UK, and the prevention of such bills becoming law elsewhere in the world. This attack of speach is more subtle, more dangerous, and much more effective than the CDA ever was, and has effectively made the right to free speach on-line a farce of the worst kind.
And with good reason.
If id did make the mistake of releasing a hybrid CD the results would skew the sales results distributors are watching in a way disasterous for those advocating the porting of games to Linux.
How? Linux users are by and large more technically savvy than Windows users are on average. While the Windows gamer may not realize (or care) that they could play their copy of Quake 3 under Linux, if Linux users were in fact able to do this, many would impatiently run out and buy the hybrid version labelled Windows, because it was in the store earlier, and then load up the Linux version. Fine for them, but bad for Linux, as their purchase has just inflated the Windows sales results and deflated the Linux sales result. The net result is that that one Linux gamer's purchase has widened the Linux/Windows sales gape by TWO (-1 Linux, +1 Windows). This is not what we want, and id has wisely chosen a way to prevent this. Have a little patience -- it will likely be rewarded in coming months and years as venders and other game manufacturers begin to take Linux more seriously and come out with Linux products, with any luck in a more timely fashion.
If only people with extreme amounts of fame receive attention, eventually everyone will be worshipping the exact same set of people, and there will be less and less variety and flavor in life.
... ahem, sorry.
Myself, the only person I worship is my Dominatrix. And then only when I'm horny, or when she demands it, or I see her in those sexy, skintight black leather pants that so deliciously accentuate her
:-)
In all seriousness though, suicide is a terrible tragedy, as is all death for that matter (terrorists and serial killers aside). There is simply no way around it: mortality sucks. My thoughts go out to her family and friends, who will be very hard hit by this.
However, we should remember that suicide is her right. Perhaps not legally, under our less than just legal system, but ethicly and morally it is her decision to make. While this is hardly comforting or joyous (and I personally really wish she hadn't made that particular choice), it is nevertheless IMHO an important point that often gets ignored and forgotten. Whether she was diagnosed with a painful or perhaps undignified disease, or just unhappy with her life in general, the decision to end her life, while tragic, was her's and her's alone. A choice we may all regret, but one we should respect nevertheless. Of course, those local representatives of the religious right will almost certainly pull out their flamethrowers and moderate me down to -1 for expressing this opinion, but that's alright -- I wore my asbestos underware this morning anyway.
1) A jilted lover plans to kill his ex-girlfriend and does so.
2) A white racist plans to kill a black and does so.
Most people (including me) would say these two crimes deserve the same punishment.
Do you have statistics to back that up? I for one would be surprised to hear that most people feel the punishment should be identical. The second crime not only harms the obvious victim, but an entire segment of the population. What is more, it harms our entire society by tearing at the social fabric and stirring up hatred between the races that could, if unabated, lead to America resembling Kosovo or Bosnia. Based on the added threat to our society that hate crimes represent, versus similar crimes without the "hate" aspect, it is not unreasonable that the punishment is harsher.
This is easier to see if you consider crimes less drastic than murder, such as, say, intimidation, assault, or vandalism. Burning a cross does allot more than deface one's yard -- it terrorizes an entire household, a neighborhood, indeed (with enough press coverage) an entire segment of the American public. Not quite the same as a couple of malicious kids who light a bush on fire playing with matches because they don't like the old lady who won't let them eat her apples, nor should it be treated the same.
If motiviation is truly irrelevant, than one should have identical punishments for all murders (for example), whether deliberate, accidental, premiditated, or spontaneous. As another noted, the difference isn't in the act, but in the degree of thought that went into it. I leave it as an excersize to the class to recognize the aburdity of that approach.
On the other hand, if motivation is relevant, the motive of terrorizing an entire segment of the population (be it based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, or whatever) and the associated social and cultural damage that does to our entire society as a whole, must be taken into consideration, which is precisely what hate crime legislation does.
BEGIN RANT
... excuse me, congresspersons ... will be forced to address the serious problems patents are causing, and with any luck scrap the system altogether.
It is my hope that the absurd patenting of business models, mathematics, and science continues unabated until business, science, and the software industry is brought to a crawl.
Why? Because maybe when it starts making it impossible to do business or science and the resulting financial and technological losses become so obvious to the powers that be that they can no longer ignore it, maybe the cheap whores
The worst thing for everybody would be a situation in which business as usual would be able to continue unabated while innovation outside of Redmond and other centers of corporate America who can afford to swap patent portfolios is completely stifled. We are rapidly moving in this direction -- the only hope to prevent it is to make sure the patenting system does significant damage to the very industries in which the abusers of the system are profiting. Anything that can be done to encourage the system to eviscerate itself should be encouraged.
END RANT
No, you are wrong.
...
The idea was to prevent the wholesale copying of DVDs like the CD problem they have in Asia.
No, you are wrong.
Wholesale pirates have access to commercial grade DVD copying and pressing equipment, which as another poster noted is not affected by CSS at all.
Furthermore, wholesale DVD pirates have the option of recording from the analog output, redigitizing the result with only a small loss in quality, and pressing as many unencrypted DVDs as they wish. Minimal effort, minimal cost. Given the kinds of pirated movies that have been sold in the past (taken with a video camera in front of a screen for crying out loud!), quality is not a very important issue to pirates.
CSS is designed to restrict playback and limit fair use as provided for under the law, including but not limited to making backup copies or moving the data to a more convenient medium.
The MPAA has plenty of legal recourse, and muscle, to go after wholesale pirates. CSS is an effort to make an end-run around laws permitting individuals fair use, something the MPAA and movie studios can't stand, but have absolutely no LEGAL method of stopping (except by encryption and excersizing the draconian new rights they have been granted in the US through the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which was snuck through on a voice vote during the height of the Clinton/Monica sex scandal.)
As I noted in another post, I will not be giving any money, directly or indirectly, to Hollywood until such a time as DVD is supported under Linux and their witch hunts stop. Yes, this means I'm making allot of use of the public library, local book stores, and local theaters and comedy clubs. Now that I'm hooked on the latter, I will probably be much less inclined to watch movies again even after the MPAA cleans up their act (should that optomistic expectation actually ever happen), as plays and comedy acts have actually turned out to be much more entertaining than any movie I've seen in the last several years. But that's another story altogether