I agree wholeheartedly with Linus when he says that Newton, Einstein and countless others have done more for mankind and todays level of scientific achievement than any modern company - theirs are the shoulders that modern scientists stand on.
But there are very few examples of scientists creating consumer goods for the love of discovery. One or two perhaps - I'm not sure what the intention behind invention of the lightbulb was.
But nobody creates a passenger aircraft, or an automobile, or a new, nicer design of personal computer for pure creative self-actualising joy.
I think that whilst the great discoveries of our time and times gone by will more often be found by scientists and visionaries of the academic kind, it takes a profit incentive to push discovery into the final phases of development, manufacture, distribution and sale.
So I think that governments should be extremely careful when they give patents away, and the more general the patent, the more value it ties up by preventing the development of those ideas by third parties.
But where discoveries require significant investment to bring them to a consumer-ready stage, compensation must be guaranteed for that investment, otherwise there is no incentive other than charity to undertake the work, and the most intelligent minds may not have the funds to obtain the necessary equipment and assistance to leverage their genius - they will need to leverage a future asset to borrow those funds in the present.
I agree with the fair use defence, but when I think about this outside the direct context of the law, I worry more about the control the MPAA is trying to get over the channel being used to distribute the content I have bought.
I think that this is also covered by fair use.
When I buy the content, I have the right to view it - in its purest, unadulterated form, on any device capable of reading the medium I bought it on.
If I choose to have a Linux box reading my DVD and exporting a digital quality signal to a projector, I should have the right to do that - after all, I am just watching the content I have fair use rights to in an attempt to enjoy it.
But now I have no choice over the medium I use - I have to use a DVD player that is licensed by the MPAA - and if they choose not to give a license to my faviourite distributor of hardware/software (in my case the Open Source Movement), then I have no choice but to go to someone who has been "vetted" by the MPAA.
This is bad.
Choice has an economic value - if you limit the choices people have, you impose limits on their enjoyment because you impose upon them a limited set of options. Capitalist economics provides a huge amount of choice to people because when something people want doesn't exist, someone goes and creates it because that creation will generate value - people will be willing to pay for it if it is a good alternative to what is currently available on the market.
The DMCA as it currently stands is an economic aberration as it allows a company that traditionally only makes content, to extend it's economic and legal reach vertically into the distribution devices downstream of it's market area.
I believe that were these companies to try to do this by acquiring the companies that make the hardware, they would be blocked (or at least investigated) via Anti-Trust legislation, but this provides them with a nice way of controlling the distribution channel all the way to the box in the customers house without having too much attention drawn to the power they are obtaining.
This is anti-competitive, and anti-consumer. If I buy the content, then I have a right to watch it - the link back to the maker of the film is not, in my opinion, strong enough, for them to be allowed to force me to buy an Orwellian television set that will tell me what I can and can't watch/clip/copy/manipulate - and then impose upon me the added restriction of not being allowed to figure out how the device that controls what I can watch works, because reverse engineering is illegal.
There are some extremely weird goings-on in the moderation of this thread. At worst, the post I am replying to was offtopic, in fact it was also informative because it pointed out the extreme stupidity of whoever moderated down the comment it is in reply to.
Guys - read an article, engage brain, hesitate, consider whether you are about to commit a fuck-up, and then, when you're sure you've covered all the bases, moderate.
I pray that when I get my next 5 points fate and self-respect protect me from making stupid moderation mistakes that piss readers off.
Re:1 hour 'Wasted' managing email??
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Buried in email?
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I don't think the argument is that by abolishing email you can increase productivity. I think the message is that by getting people to follow a few guidelines in both sending emails and dealing with the stuff they receive, you can increase productivity even further.
Email is great because it improves communication, but some of that improvement is swallowed up by the time it takes to go through all the additional communication, and the overuse of communication because its become so easy to pass on anything you care to think of to everyone in your company. Exercising a little judgement before hitting the Send button can save a company a lot of time. Mine is going through exactly this kind of exercise at the moment and the increase in efficiency is really a "low hanging fruit" in terms of efficiency gains.
Re:It will affect the wrong people
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Hash Cash
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No, it doesn't say that.
I think the problem sort of implies the necessity - not all email sent to multiple recipients is Spam, and you therefore need a way to cater for people sending emails to lists of approved recipients (in the opt-in sense). To do this, they may be willing to pay the price of calculating 80,000 square roots on the basis of sending a confirmation email to each email address the day it is registered, but calculating the whole lot every time a message is sent may be seen as an excessive overhead
Don't yell at me - I say burn the fuckers, and to hell with it costing legitimate services a fortune to send me email so long as it clears my inbox of all the junk - but they're businesses, and they will, quite justifiably, be dead against it.
I also think that the handshake has to occur on the individual's computer rather than at server level.
1. Servers are overloaded as it is, and the additional processing power required to send email messages that require legitimacy confirmation would be an unacceptable capital cost to firms running the email servers
2. If it's not on the individual computer, then you have failed to push the cost of the spam back to the spammer, you've just shifted it to your ISP, which means its going to get charged right back to you and you have solved nothing.
It's a good idea, but it needs a lot of thought regarding how this should be implemented before anything gets rolled out.
Perhaps making it so that it's a service you can choose to turn on or leave off in your current email program is the first step - this has the virtue of making it your choice whether you want to make it difficult for people to send you email, and would allow the less clued-in to gradually adopt the functionality as it gets streamlined, and as more people migrate to "always-on" internet access.
I'm not very different from you - because I can, I tend to look before I buy, but I'd still buy the albums/singles if I couldn't browse them this way because I can listen to them in shops or on CDNow or Amazon or anywhere without downloading the whole thing.
You don't have to have a digital version of the entire song to decide if you want to buy it.
But where the damage really starts is that there are very few people in the world with your integrity - most people won't bother to buy something if they can have it for free. Honesty does not prevail - take a look at shareware.
"No your honor. The DMCA was not meant to be used this way."
The DMCA was not meant to be used to enforce customer segmentation either, but that's what the CSS does. The CSS does *not* copy-protect.
I don't disagree with you that this system can't stand up for long - my argument is that it makes an excellent point about the DMCA and the way in which it has been interpreted.
Interesting, yes. Intellegent? I'm not sure. There is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Aimster, from a certain standpoint, is breaking the spirit of the law. I'm simply not convinced that this legal "hack" would stand up in court.
Precisely - the spirit of the law was that the DMCA should protect certain types of intellectual property rights in the light of new technology, but by applying the letter of the law and a few obfuscation techniques, it has been used to enforce a system of market segmentation the sole purpose of which is to drive greater profits by staggering cinematic and home-view media releases across the globe, and to limit the group of companies that can manufacture DVDs to those that receive licenses to use the technology, therefore controlling not only the media but also the manufacture and distribution of the delivery device.
If the DMCA is used in a way that defeats it's spirit, you can't reinterpret it in a way that does not flow from the language of the act itself just because it's convenient - if it has been misformulated and can therefore be exploited in this way, it has to be reformulated or amended - not even the highest court in the land can choose to interpret it in a way that does not flow from it's language - it can only declare it unconstitutional. "It wasn't intended to be used in this way" is exactly the point I think needs to be made - it's formulation and it's interpretation have gone too far, and in my opinion have infringed on constitutional rights (although the courts disagree with me so far on that one).
Aimster have not only used the DMCA to protect themselves, but they've used the same interpretation of it that was used to protect CSS and to whack 2600. You seem to think I'm saying Aimster is wonderful and I hope it stays open forever - that's not my opinion (as should be clear from the end of my last post) - I think it makes a point - and a valid one. Don't you?
I suggest you look at the recent cover of Fortune magazine.
Just did - interesting, nice to see what happens on the other side of the pond, but as you correctly state, you don't know what country I'm in, and it's not the US.
I said : All we've really done is said: "Look, the DMCA allows us to prevent you from proving that people are breaking the law", and that's a really good point proving that the DMCA goes much too far.
To which you replied : Again, I don't buy this.
Don't buy what? That this is the statement being made? If what you're saying is that Aimster isn't and shouldn't be legal, then you're not disagreeing with me - what I said was that it was making a good point - of course it's a "flim flam job" it's a caricature of legality, but the nature of a caricature is to throw certain aspects of something into a more extreme contrast - in this case, certain aspects of the DMCA interpretation.
I didn't say the relationship was proven as causal, although in my opinion it is - in a strengthening economy, I see no other reason for the drop. But my point was "If there is a problem there", not "this is the problem".
I've heard the logic that "Napster will actually increase sales because the music will be more accessible that way". There's no word that describes how badly that argument smells - who's going to pay for a song they can get for free? People don't even pay for parking spaces although that's one area where they're actually quite likely to get caught! I don't see how Napster can possible NOT harm music sales - anyone who wants to steal music can do it now, at zero risk and almost zero cost.
I read an interview with a Napster user who said, "I really like Napster - they shouldn't shut it down, it's great, I can download all the music I want and I don't even have to go to the store". It didn't even seem to occur to them that it was illegal.
I suppose, but the argument often used to explain why Napster is so popular is that people don't want to buy entire albums, they only want the 1 or 2 songs on that album that they like, and CD singles don't cost a proportionately reduced cost - they sell at a premium, or they still lump 2 bad songs along with the good one and make you pay for them.
If that argument holds, then you would expect any corresponding drop in sales to be felt most in the sale of CD singles rather than in the sale of albums.
What you mean is that it's dubious that their system will be used for legal purposes - what they're doing is no more illegal than enabling a corporate network unless their model is dependent upon pirating music in the same way as Napster does.
This is really smart for quite a few reasons, I can think of 2 that are so cool they give me goosebumps.
The first thing is that they're making the point, implicitly, but quite clearly, that the DMCA was a law passed to serve a certain group of people rather than the people as a whole - and now that they've used its provisions to protect themselves, the law has to either take the bullet, accept that it's there to serve the interests of the RIAA and cohorts, or feign ignorance and let this happen.
Secondly, for this to be illegal, it has to be proven that it is being used to copy music/films/copyrighted information. This cannot be done without someone finding out about the content being transferred - and this cannot be broken without invalidating the case against DeCSS.
It's an interesting cross-over of the DeCSS case with the Napster case, and it uses the law very intelligently to say that if these provisions can protect one party, they can protect all parties.
But let's not lose sight of the ball here - although the DMCA is bad and the case against DeCSS should rot and die, the case against Napster still provides a conundrum - sales of singles are down something like 10% in a strengthening economy, which begs the question, "was it Napster?" (my personal opinion : Yes it was). If there is a problem there, and sales are being reduced because people are pirating records - then there's still something illegal going on, and just because it's illegal to get around our obfuscation because we've been smart doesn't make us any better than the MPAA using the DMCA to crush DeCSS.
All we've really done is said: "Look, the DMCA allows us to prevent you from proving that people are breaking the law", and that's a really good point proving that the DMCA goes much too far. It doesn't make obtaining songs without paying for them any more legal than before, and that's got nothing to do with the DMCA.
First off - I am a management accountant who did an employment law course as part of his accounting qualification, therefore IANAL !!
Basic contract law - if you didn't sign it, it's not really a contract (a few exceptions exist but none of them seem relevant here)
On the other hand, you will have signed some other things as part of your contract including non-disclosure agreements and documents handing over to your employer all "rights and benefits of inventions or patentable concepts that you may create during the course of your employment that are directly arising from your participation in this industry as a member of this company" or something of that ilk.
In legal terms, you have a "duty of loyalty" to your employer that is an implicit part of any employment contract (whether written or not) and you can't use knowledge gained about Oracle to directly damage Oracle in another company.
If sufficient time has passed (usually a year unless you were a very senior individual in the company), then the court would probably rule that any knowledge you may have had will have passed it's useful life and you therefore cannot be guilty of anything.
Aside from whatever the law says, the court looks at the facts of the case, and will apply a rule called "Res ipsa loquitur" (I think - this is old knowledge) which means "the facts speak for themselves", if the facts really do speak for themselves and you really have screwed your ex-employer using inside knowledge, then they'll award your ex-employer damages accordingly.
In any case where there's a doubt in your mind, it's probably worth the $100 to get legal advice before making a decision.
I covered this during my employment law courses in the UK (what follows will therefore probably not apply elsewhere).
A non-competition clause in a contract is enforceable so long as it does not fall under the definitions of a bunch of other laws, among them the "Unfair contract terms act", and a few others more specifically dealing with employment law.
A non-competition clause must be
- Limited and reasonable in time - it cannot exceed a period that the court deems "reasonable"
- Limited and reasonable in scope - this is complex and I'll cover it below
- Fair - you can't cripple a person's future career unless the compensation is there, kind of like a waiver to the usual consideration laws - here consideration has to be both present AND sufficient, whereas usually it only has to be present.
In cases that have been tried, what usually makes the clause non-enforceable is the scope argument. The scope is a kind of function of the type of industry, the role the person had in their last company, the size and presence of that company and the number or market size of the markets in which the individual is prohibited from exercising those skills.
For example, if you were chief technology officer of a tiny development company that worked off a single product, they can't enforce a clause preventing you from working in the IT implementation industry in an entire country, because the broadness of the exclusion is far greater than the broadness of the role given up.
This rule seems to be constantly open to re-interpretation, but in almost all cases the court leans towards individual rights rather than those of the company. My guess is that this is because the companies rarely need the clause to protect themselves - if they have proprietary technology, then their copyrights and patents ought to protect them, and they shouldn't need specific individuals, and the loss of those individuals should not be a threat. Where the courts back the companies up is where the leaver takes with them a huge list of contacts that were developed using the prior employer's resources and services, or where the leaver takes with them a knowledge of the industry that is significantly ahead of it's time because the company they joined gave it to them - then an exclusion clause for that specific area will be enforced. Of course it can only be enforced for a few months because technology moves on, and it can only be enforced over very specific and narrowly-defined areas otherwise it's not considered fair.
Writing clauses like this for key personnel is very difficult and it is done for two reasons. Firstly and most usually, they are to scare people into staying. Secondly and more rarely, they are there to protect what is seen as an "excellence in thinking" in a specific area of expertise. For example, the head of technology development for Oracle probably has some clauses about working on web-enabled enterprise database delivery systems or some such junk because Oracle will have stuff in pre-patent conceptual phases of development that they want to protect, that is insufficiently defined to be awarded a patent or copyright.
The ILOVEYOU virus and its infinite children. Though MS didn't write the virus, the existence of the hole combined with the monopoly they have in the OS market are what really caused the problem. If somebody wrote a virus for a tiny hole in BeOS would it have affected the world like this one did?
Bullshit. No other word for it.
You receive a perl script on your linux box that says, "save me and execute me", and the code is "rm -rf/". You're screwed - it wont even ask you "are you sure" - unless, of course, you're not the administrator on your machine.
Now you may say that's exactly the point - you're the Administrator on your windows machine, but not on a Linux machine. Bullshit again - people choose be to Administrator on a windows machine, the difference between the two is that the average Linux user is much more computer savvy than a Windows user.
Can you imagine a complete IT newbie who needs a spreadsheet program, a wordprocessor and a web browser running an internet-connected Linux machine? It would be hopelessly insecure, you can't just plug in Linux and expect it to work securely. There's nothing out there that provides the same ease of rollout and level of support as Windows. I hate the damn thing because I *like* X-Windows, but there's nothing I can do about it because there's nothing in the open source domain or anywhere else that is as plug-and-play friendly as a Windows computer.
Incompatible file formats between its own products year after year. I love it when Office97 tells me "Oh, not everyone has Office97, you should save in Office95 format.
That's because they develop the functionality of their software all the time - a few years ago you didn't really have programmable spreadsheets, but now a spreadsheet can be underpinned with an entire programming language - this means that that program has to be saved alongside the spreadsheet - new standard required.
Machines that you expect to have to reboot every day.
Actually, most Windows distributions are quite stable provided you run them quite raw - it's when you start adding lots of software on them that they start getting a little wonky. I haven't had a crash since I was ungraded to windows 2000 myself, although not being the administrator on my own machine is a bit of a bummer, but that's what our company has had to do to prevent idiots running viruses with administrator priviledges - this is because not every intelligent person happens to be aware of how viruses spread and what a vbs file is when it comes running down the pipeline alongside a dozen data files from colleagues.
Not sure exactly what in JonKatz's article you are disagreeing with - I found a lot at the other end of your link that had been included in his article. Are you saying he is making fundamental mistakes in his interpretation of the case?
If so, what are they?
I don't only ask to be antagonistic (although I am a little tired of the "ooh - a JonKatz article, let's insult it" attitude), but because if you could be a little more specific about what it is you disagree with in his article, I might learn something - not being an expert on the subject myself.
computer reliant services (eg. telephone, water treatment) would go largely untouched, as again these services reach a desperate few.
Having lived and worked in Mali, Burkina Faso, Sengal, the Ivory Coast and Kenya, I can tell you that this is not the case regarding telephones. Even the most far-flung reaches of the Ivory Coast are accessible by telephones that use extremely tall directional antennas to relay very scratchy but perfectly usable telephone connections to each other, to the capital and abroad.
Even in these countries, people live not very far from telephones, and understand how to use them even if many of them are barely literate. The problem is that they don't really know anyone far enough away to make it worth their while to contact them, and those who leave their communities to go to the cities rarely try to get in touch whilst they are away because the although the telephone is there, the culture of the telephone hasn't really penetrated their daily lives.
In the heart of the Marrakech Souk, between a shop selling dead fried unidentifiable animal and another selling sandals, you can find an Internet Cafe, and the same is true of almost all densely populated areas in Africa, from Ouagadougou to Bamako.
Now if you're talking about a continent other than Africa - I have no idea.
Microsoft want software piracy because it drives legit users to buying MS products for compatibility's sake - yes.
But they want to control the extent of the piracy - it's a tool when they can control it and a threat when they can't. So they create "keys" that go on the back of CD boxes and other such "copy-protection" systems, the goal of which is not really to protect, but just to make it that little bit more difficult so that some people will actually go out and buy the stuff.
Then of course them make millions off the lemmings who have no choice but to register because they need the online support to circumvent the obscureware interface.
But now that they've got the market penetration they need, they may well decide it's time to capitalise on it, and they can do this by implementing a system which forces you to register the software over the internet with a unique key before it can be used, for example (oh, wait, they've already proposed that...). In other words, if it's useful we'll use it, and when it's use has run out, we'll label everyone who does it as a criminal who has been shamefully stealing their revenues from us for the past x years.
Had they been truly against the pirating of their software from the start, I'd have more sympathy, but as they've used it to spread their progeny like a virus, I find it hard to shed tears for them.
Seeing as circumvention is the modern Robin Hood's main weapon - anyone want to set up a high-speed huge capacity storage device just over the border and charge Canadians a cost plus 5% fee for its use? Not only is it multi-purpose, but it'll stream the media to you over a Canadian government-subsidised broadband internet link, thus effectively recouping for the public the 21c they stol.. sorry, taxed all of those budding artists who now face having their blank media purchases subsidise the revenues of articsts who have already made it.
I think you're right, speech is protected for a very good reason, but you have to broaden the issue.
I've given a few lessons to teenagers and it's not easy - primarily, their disrespect of you comes not from any personal dislike for you as a person, or for the content of the lesson, but because if they show you disrespect in a public and obvious way, it makes them look cool in the eyes of their peers.
Most of the disruptive kids in a classroom are actually quite easy to get on with outside of it - it's only when they have an audience of peers that they become insufferable.
Now I don't know if this is the case here, but if the kid said a whole load of offensive things about a member of staff to look cool to his peers, and then that member of staff suffered some harm or other (however you care to define it) as a consequence, then reinforcing the child's behaviour isn't solving any problems, nor is it "standing up for constitutional rights". Perhaps the punishment was too severe, then the teacher ought to be put right, but you don't reward this kind of behaviour unless you want to see it again and again.
In my scenario the kid wasn't "exercising a constitutional freedom" as far as he was concerned. He was making himself look good at someone else's expense - a behaviour common in children that we ought to encourage them grow out of.
I'm not saying there's a miscarriage of justice here - I don't know enough about the facts, but the above is an argument that seemed to be missing from the discussion so far. The devil is in the detail (yes, I know, and my high school maths teacher - probably).
Thats a pretty broad ranging statment, I would like to see something to back it up.
The economic argument isn't an emotional one - it's a basic necessity, a threshold argument - it doesn't make something right or wrong it merely describes a necessity. It's not the only argument, but you're not going to get very far in implementing any ideas you may have unless you can prove that they are economically workable.
Saying "the entire industry would be turned on its head" is something people do when they redefine an industry and actually know where they're going with it. You give a starting point, but don't explain where we end up and how things will work once we get there - you can't advocate jumping off a cliff because you don't like the way things are - where's the ledge you're jumping onto? HOW will people get paid for the work they produce? WHO will provide the money? HOW will we ensure that the people that derive the benefit of that work are the people that pay for it?
You define your proposals as the absence of something rather than the creation of something. You are basically advocating the abolition of an industry and providing nothing to replace it - not even a germ of a proposal, and when pushed on the subject, you repeat certain things...
1.) You think IP rights are immoral. We hear you.
2.) You don't think there's such a thing as IP rights (but they're immoral anyway).
3.) You want to turn an industry on it's head - but my argument is that if you do this it will break it's neck...
Your proposals affect more than musicians you know. They affect the R&D of every industry in existence. They change the capital investment model for every business, they remove the basis for technology or "blue sky" research, they stifle innovation, they destroy economic value and reduce the academic and research fields to the point at which nobody will be willing to finance them. The world becomes a place where you wait for someone else to discover something and then you make it and sell it.
Pharmaceuticals, car design, communications technologies, microchip design, film-making, brand-based marketing - all these things go out he window.
And does America do this unilaterally and then unilaterally stop repecting the copyrights and patents of the rest of the world? Or do you convince every country in the world to implement your idea at exactly the same time?
There's no currently proposed alternative to IP rights that can't be shot down in flames in 30 seconds by anyone who knows elementary economics
Thats a pretty broad ranging statment, I would like to see something to back it up.
Show me a model that you think will work - I'll shoot it down. You have yet to explain how money gets paid to artists for their work.
Another thing you say, which I'm sure would piss artists and academics off the world over (I'm not one so I don't care), is that "artists would need to get day jobs". Were I an artist, that would be an amazingly offensive thing to say!
I'll reply here but I'm actually replying to the last 4 posts - you're in a different time-zone to me and we only share about 2 hours or so of online time in my late afternoon, so I have some catching up to do!
But the case at hand is more like someone being able to make perfect copies of currency using a scanner or copier. I'm not taking your money away from you -- I'm just making more! What, this technology devalues your $20 bills? Well sorry, but you don't have a God-given right for those pieces of paper to be worth anything! It's just an arbitrary thing that's unenforceable now that we have new technology!
Ooh - good example!
As to the "IP doesn't exist" argument, I think what he means is that IP is not a legally defined term. It certainly does exist because we're talking about it, and according to RMS it's a catch-all phrase that includes all types of intellectual property from Copyrights to Patents.
To answer the point about Copyrights being limited monopolies to encourage the creator of something to create more, in certain countries that is part of the definition, but it is not meant to mean that once you've created something they're going to encourage you to create the next thing. The knowledge that there was a copyright benefit is what encourages you to create in the first place because it guarantees you the credit (both economic and social) for the invention/creation in the first place.
There's no currently proposed alternative to IP rights that can't be shot down in flames in 30 seconds by anyone who knows elementary economics - it's an argument that goes round and round because as information becomes the most valuable commodity of the day, and technologies that enable it's dissemination with no economic credit to its creator spring up all over the place at the same time, the conundrum becomes : how do we convince big companies to invest millions in R&D or development of commodities that exist only as a stream of bits if their commodity can be freely copied by anyone who doesn't feel like paying for it?
Whether you solve that conundrum by finding a way to *make* people pay, or whether you develop another system for rewarding the creators doesn't really matter. At the moment, however, the former is more feasible than the latter, because the money has to come from somewhere and big corporations aren't simply going to burn their owners money to develop their products for no reward - that's what charities do, and if you can afford a computer and an internet connection fast enough to run Napster - you're not the kind of person who requires charity.
As most of the rest of your reply amounts to thinly veiled personal attacks via misrepresenting my views and a few small straw men, I don't feel any need to reply to them.
Oh grow up. --- that's an attack, the rest of my post was illustrating why I disagreed with the points you made in yours - you provided me with the examples, so I used them to illustrate why I disagreed. By getting all defensive, you conveniently avoid needing to respond to the points made.
"System that forces". Therein lies my problem.
So pick on phraseology then, I could have said system that enforces, or system that protects the rights of... and meant the same thing, thus circumventing your response - I'm trying to argue a point, not use of semantics.
which is what a law is - a threat of force
I just had a straw poll round my office asking people if they thought that was a valid description of a law - nobody believed that it was. The best reply I got was that a law is not designed to threaten at all - it is designed to protect, to see a law as a threat is to percieve yourself as likely to be on the wrong side of it, and the question you should be asking is: what are you threatening that people consider worth protecting?
The threat of force should ONLY be used to stop the use of illegitimate force.
The use of Napster or whatever to copy the work of an individual without paying the going price for it is the use of force - force that has been given to the user by the creation of this new copying mechanism. It's force used to circumvent the legal rights that someone has over their own work. There may be no violence involved, but the law won't use violence in return either - the only blood that will be shed is by lawyers getting paper cuts.
A point made by TenHertzHorn in another post was one of the best points I've heard so far - it has similarities to the open source discussion in another thread, and I'm going to expand on it a bit - You can decide to make your own content and creations free, and if you're happy to do that, you can use something like the GPL to ensure that no-one can use your creations and create something that is not free that incorporates them. But you have no right to unilaterally decide that something created by someone else ought to be free, and therefore no right to make a thousand copies of Windows 2000 and hand them out on street corners. If you think intellectual property of any specific kind should be free to distribute and share, then you go create that intellectual property and distribute it, but don't use the work of others without their consent.
Disclaimer : I used "you" in the above paragraph to illustrate a theoretical person who may want to behave in this way. It is not a personal attack so don't get fussed, I have no idea if you are the kind of person who would go distribute Windows on street corners - all I know about you is that you believe the right to do so should exist.
Sorry to ask the stupid questions - I did know the answers but it was beginning to seem unbelievable so I just wanted a sanity check to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding something crucial.
Cool - glad that's confirmed - so what's the case about?
Are we really talking about the MPAA misleading the courts about the purpose of DeCSS and the CSS itself in order to enforce a region coding with a copy-protection argument?
This is what it's always seemed like to me, but can the courts actually be that easily misled?
Why do you need DeCSS to copy a DVD? I was under the impression that any licensed DVD player could do the work of DeCSS, and that therefore all you needed to do was copy it - encrypted byte for encrypted byte, and then run it through another DVD player and voila!
So I thought that DeCSS was a "viewer-enabler" but not a copying system.
The court obviously doesn't agree with me and I can't figure out why not - either I have the technology wrong or I've misunderstood what the court's argument is - how is CSS a copy-protection system?
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But there are very few examples of scientists creating consumer goods for the love of discovery. One or two perhaps - I'm not sure what the intention behind invention of the lightbulb was.
But nobody creates a passenger aircraft, or an automobile, or a new, nicer design of personal computer for pure creative self-actualising joy.
I think that whilst the great discoveries of our time and times gone by will more often be found by scientists and visionaries of the academic kind, it takes a profit incentive to push discovery into the final phases of development, manufacture, distribution and sale.
So I think that governments should be extremely careful when they give patents away, and the more general the patent, the more value it ties up by preventing the development of those ideas by third parties.
But where discoveries require significant investment to bring them to a consumer-ready stage, compensation must be guaranteed for that investment, otherwise there is no incentive other than charity to undertake the work, and the most intelligent minds may not have the funds to obtain the necessary equipment and assistance to leverage their genius - they will need to leverage a future asset to borrow those funds in the present.
I think that this is also covered by fair use.
When I buy the content, I have the right to view it - in its purest, unadulterated form, on any device capable of reading the medium I bought it on.
If I choose to have a Linux box reading my DVD and exporting a digital quality signal to a projector, I should have the right to do that - after all, I am just watching the content I have fair use rights to in an attempt to enjoy it.
But now I have no choice over the medium I use - I have to use a DVD player that is licensed by the MPAA - and if they choose not to give a license to my faviourite distributor of hardware/software (in my case the Open Source Movement), then I have no choice but to go to someone who has been "vetted" by the MPAA.
This is bad.
Choice has an economic value - if you limit the choices people have, you impose limits on their enjoyment because you impose upon them a limited set of options. Capitalist economics provides a huge amount of choice to people because when something people want doesn't exist, someone goes and creates it because that creation will generate value - people will be willing to pay for it if it is a good alternative to what is currently available on the market.
The DMCA as it currently stands is an economic aberration as it allows a company that traditionally only makes content, to extend it's economic and legal reach vertically into the distribution devices downstream of it's market area.
I believe that were these companies to try to do this by acquiring the companies that make the hardware, they would be blocked (or at least investigated) via Anti-Trust legislation, but this provides them with a nice way of controlling the distribution channel all the way to the box in the customers house without having too much attention drawn to the power they are obtaining.
This is anti-competitive, and anti-consumer. If I buy the content, then I have a right to watch it - the link back to the maker of the film is not, in my opinion, strong enough, for them to be allowed to force me to buy an Orwellian television set that will tell me what I can and can't watch/clip/copy/manipulate - and then impose upon me the added restriction of not being allowed to figure out how the device that controls what I can watch works, because reverse engineering is illegal.
Guys - read an article, engage brain, hesitate, consider whether you are about to commit a fuck-up, and then, when you're sure you've covered all the bases, moderate.
I pray that when I get my next 5 points fate and self-respect protect me from making stupid moderation mistakes that piss readers off.
Email is great because it improves communication, but some of that improvement is swallowed up by the time it takes to go through all the additional communication, and the overuse of communication because its become so easy to pass on anything you care to think of to everyone in your company. Exercising a little judgement before hitting the Send button can save a company a lot of time. Mine is going through exactly this kind of exercise at the moment and the increase in efficiency is really a "low hanging fruit" in terms of efficiency gains.
I think the problem sort of implies the necessity - not all email sent to multiple recipients is Spam, and you therefore need a way to cater for people sending emails to lists of approved recipients (in the opt-in sense). To do this, they may be willing to pay the price of calculating 80,000 square roots on the basis of sending a confirmation email to each email address the day it is registered, but calculating the whole lot every time a message is sent may be seen as an excessive overhead
Don't yell at me - I say burn the fuckers, and to hell with it costing legitimate services a fortune to send me email so long as it clears my inbox of all the junk - but they're businesses, and they will, quite justifiably, be dead against it.
I also think that the handshake has to occur on the individual's computer rather than at server level.
1. Servers are overloaded as it is, and the additional processing power required to send email messages that require legitimacy confirmation would be an unacceptable capital cost to firms running the email servers
2. If it's not on the individual computer, then you have failed to push the cost of the spam back to the spammer, you've just shifted it to your ISP, which means its going to get charged right back to you and you have solved nothing.
It's a good idea, but it needs a lot of thought regarding how this should be implemented before anything gets rolled out.
Perhaps making it so that it's a service you can choose to turn on or leave off in your current email program is the first step - this has the virtue of making it your choice whether you want to make it difficult for people to send you email, and would allow the less clued-in to gradually adopt the functionality as it gets streamlined, and as more people migrate to "always-on" internet access.
You don't have to have a digital version of the entire song to decide if you want to buy it.
But where the damage really starts is that there are very few people in the world with your integrity - most people won't bother to buy something if they can have it for free. Honesty does not prevail - take a look at shareware.
The DMCA was not meant to be used to enforce customer segmentation either, but that's what the CSS does. The CSS does *not* copy-protect.
I don't disagree with you that this system can't stand up for long - my argument is that it makes an excellent point about the DMCA and the way in which it has been interpreted.
Interesting, yes. Intellegent? I'm not sure. There is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Aimster, from a certain standpoint, is breaking the spirit of the law. I'm simply not convinced that this legal "hack" would stand up in court.
Precisely - the spirit of the law was that the DMCA should protect certain types of intellectual property rights in the light of new technology, but by applying the letter of the law and a few obfuscation techniques, it has been used to enforce a system of market segmentation the sole purpose of which is to drive greater profits by staggering cinematic and home-view media releases across the globe, and to limit the group of companies that can manufacture DVDs to those that receive licenses to use the technology, therefore controlling not only the media but also the manufacture and distribution of the delivery device.
If the DMCA is used in a way that defeats it's spirit, you can't reinterpret it in a way that does not flow from the language of the act itself just because it's convenient - if it has been misformulated and can therefore be exploited in this way, it has to be reformulated or amended - not even the highest court in the land can choose to interpret it in a way that does not flow from it's language - it can only declare it unconstitutional. "It wasn't intended to be used in this way" is exactly the point I think needs to be made - it's formulation and it's interpretation have gone too far, and in my opinion have infringed on constitutional rights (although the courts disagree with me so far on that one).
Aimster have not only used the DMCA to protect themselves, but they've used the same interpretation of it that was used to protect CSS and to whack 2600. You seem to think I'm saying Aimster is wonderful and I hope it stays open forever - that's not my opinion (as should be clear from the end of my last post) - I think it makes a point - and a valid one. Don't you?
I suggest you look at the recent cover of Fortune magazine.
Just did - interesting, nice to see what happens on the other side of the pond, but as you correctly state, you don't know what country I'm in, and it's not the US.
I said : All we've really done is said: "Look, the DMCA allows us to prevent you from proving that people are breaking the law", and that's a really good point proving that the DMCA goes much too far.
To which you replied : Again, I don't buy this.
Don't buy what? That this is the statement being made? If what you're saying is that Aimster isn't and shouldn't be legal, then you're not disagreeing with me - what I said was that it was making a good point - of course it's a "flim flam job" it's a caricature of legality, but the nature of a caricature is to throw certain aspects of something into a more extreme contrast - in this case, certain aspects of the DMCA interpretation.
I've heard the logic that "Napster will actually increase sales because the music will be more accessible that way". There's no word that describes how badly that argument smells - who's going to pay for a song they can get for free? People don't even pay for parking spaces although that's one area where they're actually quite likely to get caught! I don't see how Napster can possible NOT harm music sales - anyone who wants to steal music can do it now, at zero risk and almost zero cost.
I read an interview with a Napster user who said, "I really like Napster - they shouldn't shut it down, it's great, I can download all the music I want and I don't even have to go to the store". It didn't even seem to occur to them that it was illegal.
If that argument holds, then you would expect any corresponding drop in sales to be felt most in the sale of CD singles rather than in the sale of albums.
And anyway, vinyl sounds better.
What you mean is that it's dubious that their system will be used for legal purposes - what they're doing is no more illegal than enabling a corporate network unless their model is dependent upon pirating music in the same way as Napster does.
This is really smart for quite a few reasons, I can think of 2 that are so cool they give me goosebumps.
The first thing is that they're making the point, implicitly, but quite clearly, that the DMCA was a law passed to serve a certain group of people rather than the people as a whole - and now that they've used its provisions to protect themselves, the law has to either take the bullet, accept that it's there to serve the interests of the RIAA and cohorts, or feign ignorance and let this happen.
Secondly, for this to be illegal, it has to be proven that it is being used to copy music/films/copyrighted information. This cannot be done without someone finding out about the content being transferred - and this cannot be broken without invalidating the case against DeCSS.
It's an interesting cross-over of the DeCSS case with the Napster case, and it uses the law very intelligently to say that if these provisions can protect one party, they can protect all parties.
But let's not lose sight of the ball here - although the DMCA is bad and the case against DeCSS should rot and die, the case against Napster still provides a conundrum - sales of singles are down something like 10% in a strengthening economy, which begs the question, "was it Napster?" (my personal opinion : Yes it was). If there is a problem there, and sales are being reduced because people are pirating records - then there's still something illegal going on, and just because it's illegal to get around our obfuscation because we've been smart doesn't make us any better than the MPAA using the DMCA to crush DeCSS.
All we've really done is said: "Look, the DMCA allows us to prevent you from proving that people are breaking the law", and that's a really good point proving that the DMCA goes much too far. It doesn't make obtaining songs without paying for them any more legal than before, and that's got nothing to do with the DMCA.
Basic contract law - if you didn't sign it, it's not really a contract (a few exceptions exist but none of them seem relevant here)
On the other hand, you will have signed some other things as part of your contract including non-disclosure agreements and documents handing over to your employer all "rights and benefits of inventions or patentable concepts that you may create during the course of your employment that are directly arising from your participation in this industry as a member of this company" or something of that ilk.
In legal terms, you have a "duty of loyalty" to your employer that is an implicit part of any employment contract (whether written or not) and you can't use knowledge gained about Oracle to directly damage Oracle in another company.
If sufficient time has passed (usually a year unless you were a very senior individual in the company), then the court would probably rule that any knowledge you may have had will have passed it's useful life and you therefore cannot be guilty of anything.
Aside from whatever the law says, the court looks at the facts of the case, and will apply a rule called "Res ipsa loquitur" (I think - this is old knowledge) which means "the facts speak for themselves", if the facts really do speak for themselves and you really have screwed your ex-employer using inside knowledge, then they'll award your ex-employer damages accordingly.
In any case where there's a doubt in your mind, it's probably worth the $100 to get legal advice before making a decision.
A non-competition clause in a contract is enforceable so long as it does not fall under the definitions of a bunch of other laws, among them the "Unfair contract terms act", and a few others more specifically dealing with employment law.
A non-competition clause must be
- Limited and reasonable in time - it cannot exceed a period that the court deems "reasonable"
- Limited and reasonable in scope - this is complex and I'll cover it below
- Fair - you can't cripple a person's future career unless the compensation is there, kind of like a waiver to the usual consideration laws - here consideration has to be both present AND sufficient, whereas usually it only has to be present.
In cases that have been tried, what usually makes the clause non-enforceable is the scope argument. The scope is a kind of function of the type of industry, the role the person had in their last company, the size and presence of that company and the number or market size of the markets in which the individual is prohibited from exercising those skills.
For example, if you were chief technology officer of a tiny development company that worked off a single product, they can't enforce a clause preventing you from working in the IT implementation industry in an entire country, because the broadness of the exclusion is far greater than the broadness of the role given up.
This rule seems to be constantly open to re-interpretation, but in almost all cases the court leans towards individual rights rather than those of the company. My guess is that this is because the companies rarely need the clause to protect themselves - if they have proprietary technology, then their copyrights and patents ought to protect them, and they shouldn't need specific individuals, and the loss of those individuals should not be a threat. Where the courts back the companies up is where the leaver takes with them a huge list of contacts that were developed using the prior employer's resources and services, or where the leaver takes with them a knowledge of the industry that is significantly ahead of it's time because the company they joined gave it to them - then an exclusion clause for that specific area will be enforced. Of course it can only be enforced for a few months because technology moves on, and it can only be enforced over very specific and narrowly-defined areas otherwise it's not considered fair.
Writing clauses like this for key personnel is very difficult and it is done for two reasons. Firstly and most usually, they are to scare people into staying. Secondly and more rarely, they are there to protect what is seen as an "excellence in thinking" in a specific area of expertise. For example, the head of technology development for Oracle probably has some clauses about working on web-enabled enterprise database delivery systems or some such junk because Oracle will have stuff in pre-patent conceptual phases of development that they want to protect, that is insufficiently defined to be awarded a patent or copyright.
Bullshit. No other word for it.
You receive a perl script on your linux box that says, "save me and execute me", and the code is "rm -rf /". You're screwed - it wont even ask you "are you sure" - unless, of course, you're not the administrator on your machine.
Now you may say that's exactly the point - you're the Administrator on your windows machine, but not on a Linux machine. Bullshit again - people choose be to Administrator on a windows machine, the difference between the two is that the average Linux user is much more computer savvy than a Windows user.
Can you imagine a complete IT newbie who needs a spreadsheet program, a wordprocessor and a web browser running an internet-connected Linux machine? It would be hopelessly insecure, you can't just plug in Linux and expect it to work securely. There's nothing out there that provides the same ease of rollout and level of support as Windows. I hate the damn thing because I *like* X-Windows, but there's nothing I can do about it because there's nothing in the open source domain or anywhere else that is as plug-and-play friendly as a Windows computer.
Incompatible file formats between its own products year after year. I love it when Office97 tells me "Oh, not everyone has Office97, you should save in Office95 format.
That's because they develop the functionality of their software all the time - a few years ago you didn't really have programmable spreadsheets, but now a spreadsheet can be underpinned with an entire programming language - this means that that program has to be saved alongside the spreadsheet - new standard required.
Machines that you expect to have to reboot every day.
Actually, most Windows distributions are quite stable provided you run them quite raw - it's when you start adding lots of software on them that they start getting a little wonky. I haven't had a crash since I was ungraded to windows 2000 myself, although not being the administrator on my own machine is a bit of a bummer, but that's what our company has had to do to prevent idiots running viruses with administrator priviledges - this is because not every intelligent person happens to be aware of how viruses spread and what a vbs file is when it comes running down the pipeline alongside a dozen data files from colleagues.
If so, what are they?
I don't only ask to be antagonistic (although I am a little tired of the "ooh - a JonKatz article, let's insult it" attitude), but because if you could be a little more specific about what it is you disagree with in his article, I might learn something - not being an expert on the subject myself.
Having lived and worked in Mali, Burkina Faso, Sengal, the Ivory Coast and Kenya, I can tell you that this is not the case regarding telephones. Even the most far-flung reaches of the Ivory Coast are accessible by telephones that use extremely tall directional antennas to relay very scratchy but perfectly usable telephone connections to each other, to the capital and abroad.
Even in these countries, people live not very far from telephones, and understand how to use them even if many of them are barely literate. The problem is that they don't really know anyone far enough away to make it worth their while to contact them, and those who leave their communities to go to the cities rarely try to get in touch whilst they are away because the although the telephone is there, the culture of the telephone hasn't really penetrated their daily lives.
In the heart of the Marrakech Souk, between a shop selling dead fried unidentifiable animal and another selling sandals, you can find an Internet Cafe, and the same is true of almost all densely populated areas in Africa, from Ouagadougou to Bamako.
Now if you're talking about a continent other than Africa - I have no idea.
But they want to control the extent of the piracy - it's a tool when they can control it and a threat when they can't. So they create "keys" that go on the back of CD boxes and other such "copy-protection" systems, the goal of which is not really to protect, but just to make it that little bit more difficult so that some people will actually go out and buy the stuff.
Then of course them make millions off the lemmings who have no choice but to register because they need the online support to circumvent the obscureware interface.
But now that they've got the market penetration they need, they may well decide it's time to capitalise on it, and they can do this by implementing a system which forces you to register the software over the internet with a unique key before it can be used, for example (oh, wait, they've already proposed that...). In other words, if it's useful we'll use it, and when it's use has run out, we'll label everyone who does it as a criminal who has been shamefully stealing their revenues from us for the past x years.
Had they been truly against the pirating of their software from the start, I'd have more sympathy, but as they've used it to spread their progeny like a virus, I find it hard to shed tears for them.
Fantastic political logic there....
I've given a few lessons to teenagers and it's not easy - primarily, their disrespect of you comes not from any personal dislike for you as a person, or for the content of the lesson, but because if they show you disrespect in a public and obvious way, it makes them look cool in the eyes of their peers.
Most of the disruptive kids in a classroom are actually quite easy to get on with outside of it - it's only when they have an audience of peers that they become insufferable.
Now I don't know if this is the case here, but if the kid said a whole load of offensive things about a member of staff to look cool to his peers, and then that member of staff suffered some harm or other (however you care to define it) as a consequence, then reinforcing the child's behaviour isn't solving any problems, nor is it "standing up for constitutional rights". Perhaps the punishment was too severe, then the teacher ought to be put right, but you don't reward this kind of behaviour unless you want to see it again and again.
In my scenario the kid wasn't "exercising a constitutional freedom" as far as he was concerned. He was making himself look good at someone else's expense - a behaviour common in children that we ought to encourage them grow out of.
I'm not saying there's a miscarriage of justice here - I don't know enough about the facts, but the above is an argument that seemed to be missing from the discussion so far. The devil is in the detail (yes, I know, and my high school maths teacher - probably).
The economic argument isn't an emotional one - it's a basic necessity, a threshold argument - it doesn't make something right or wrong it merely describes a necessity. It's not the only argument, but you're not going to get very far in implementing any ideas you may have unless you can prove that they are economically workable.
Saying "the entire industry would be turned on its head" is something people do when they redefine an industry and actually know where they're going with it. You give a starting point, but don't explain where we end up and how things will work once we get there - you can't advocate jumping off a cliff because you don't like the way things are - where's the ledge you're jumping onto? HOW will people get paid for the work they produce? WHO will provide the money? HOW will we ensure that the people that derive the benefit of that work are the people that pay for it?
You define your proposals as the absence of something rather than the creation of something. You are basically advocating the abolition of an industry and providing nothing to replace it - not even a germ of a proposal, and when pushed on the subject, you repeat certain things...
1.) You think IP rights are immoral. We hear you.
2.) You don't think there's such a thing as IP rights (but they're immoral anyway).
3.) You want to turn an industry on it's head - but my argument is that if you do this it will break it's neck...
Your proposals affect more than musicians you know. They affect the R&D of every industry in existence. They change the capital investment model for every business, they remove the basis for technology or "blue sky" research, they stifle innovation, they destroy economic value and reduce the academic and research fields to the point at which nobody will be willing to finance them. The world becomes a place where you wait for someone else to discover something and then you make it and sell it.
Pharmaceuticals, car design, communications technologies, microchip design, film-making, brand-based marketing - all these things go out he window.
And does America do this unilaterally and then unilaterally stop repecting the copyrights and patents of the rest of the world? Or do you convince every country in the world to implement your idea at exactly the same time?
There's no currently proposed alternative to IP rights that can't be shot down in flames in 30 seconds by anyone who knows elementary economics
Thats a pretty broad ranging statment, I would like to see something to back it up.
Show me a model that you think will work - I'll shoot it down. You have yet to explain how money gets paid to artists for their work.
Another thing you say, which I'm sure would piss artists and academics off the world over (I'm not one so I don't care), is that "artists would need to get day jobs". Were I an artist, that would be an amazingly offensive thing to say!
But the case at hand is more like someone being able to make perfect copies of currency using a scanner or copier. I'm not taking your money away from you -- I'm just making more! What, this technology devalues your $20 bills? Well sorry, but you don't have a God-given right for those pieces of paper to be worth anything! It's just an arbitrary thing that's unenforceable now that we have new technology!
Ooh - good example!
As to the "IP doesn't exist" argument, I think what he means is that IP is not a legally defined term. It certainly does exist because we're talking about it, and according to RMS it's a catch-all phrase that includes all types of intellectual property from Copyrights to Patents.
To answer the point about Copyrights being limited monopolies to encourage the creator of something to create more, in certain countries that is part of the definition, but it is not meant to mean that once you've created something they're going to encourage you to create the next thing. The knowledge that there was a copyright benefit is what encourages you to create in the first place because it guarantees you the credit (both economic and social) for the invention/creation in the first place.
There's no currently proposed alternative to IP rights that can't be shot down in flames in 30 seconds by anyone who knows elementary economics - it's an argument that goes round and round because as information becomes the most valuable commodity of the day, and technologies that enable it's dissemination with no economic credit to its creator spring up all over the place at the same time, the conundrum becomes : how do we convince big companies to invest millions in R&D or development of commodities that exist only as a stream of bits if their commodity can be freely copied by anyone who doesn't feel like paying for it?
Whether you solve that conundrum by finding a way to *make* people pay, or whether you develop another system for rewarding the creators doesn't really matter. At the moment, however, the former is more feasible than the latter, because the money has to come from somewhere and big corporations aren't simply going to burn their owners money to develop their products for no reward - that's what charities do, and if you can afford a computer and an internet connection fast enough to run Napster - you're not the kind of person who requires charity.
Oh grow up. --- that's an attack, the rest of my post was illustrating why I disagreed with the points you made in yours - you provided me with the examples, so I used them to illustrate why I disagreed. By getting all defensive, you conveniently avoid needing to respond to the points made.
"System that forces". Therein lies my problem.
So pick on phraseology then, I could have said system that enforces, or system that protects the rights of... and meant the same thing, thus circumventing your response - I'm trying to argue a point, not use of semantics.
which is what a law is - a threat of force
I just had a straw poll round my office asking people if they thought that was a valid description of a law - nobody believed that it was. The best reply I got was that a law is not designed to threaten at all - it is designed to protect, to see a law as a threat is to percieve yourself as likely to be on the wrong side of it, and the question you should be asking is: what are you threatening that people consider worth protecting?
The threat of force should ONLY be used to stop the use of illegitimate force.
The use of Napster or whatever to copy the work of an individual without paying the going price for it is the use of force - force that has been given to the user by the creation of this new copying mechanism. It's force used to circumvent the legal rights that someone has over their own work. There may be no violence involved, but the law won't use violence in return either - the only blood that will be shed is by lawyers getting paper cuts.
A point made by TenHertzHorn in another post was one of the best points I've heard so far - it has similarities to the open source discussion in another thread, and I'm going to expand on it a bit - You can decide to make your own content and creations free, and if you're happy to do that, you can use something like the GPL to ensure that no-one can use your creations and create something that is not free that incorporates them. But you have no right to unilaterally decide that something created by someone else ought to be free, and therefore no right to make a thousand copies of Windows 2000 and hand them out on street corners. If you think intellectual property of any specific kind should be free to distribute and share, then you go create that intellectual property and distribute it, but don't use the work of others without their consent.
Disclaimer : I used "you" in the above paragraph to illustrate a theoretical person who may want to behave in this way. It is not a personal attack so don't get fussed, I have no idea if you are the kind of person who would go distribute Windows on street corners - all I know about you is that you believe the right to do so should exist.
Thanks.
Are we really talking about the MPAA misleading the courts about the purpose of DeCSS and the CSS itself in order to enforce a region coding with a copy-protection argument?
This is what it's always seemed like to me, but can the courts actually be that easily misled?
Why do you need DeCSS to copy a DVD? I was under the impression that any licensed DVD player could do the work of DeCSS, and that therefore all you needed to do was copy it - encrypted byte for encrypted byte, and then run it through another DVD player and voila!
So I thought that DeCSS was a "viewer-enabler" but not a copying system.
The court obviously doesn't agree with me and I can't figure out why not - either I have the technology wrong or I've misunderstood what the court's argument is - how is CSS a copy-protection system?