Fewer than 20% of the population bothered to turn out for the last election. How many do you really expect to pressure their reps to make the changes? Nothing substantial is going to happen until a lot more people get dragged into court.
It's was an off year election. I didn't vote in the last election because there wasn't anything to vote for where I live, not even dogcatcher. And yes people will care because if the RIAA wins this one it would mean that they can be held legally liable for a crimes committed by others.
The jurors are supposed to and expected to vote based on the laws. That's why the judge's instructions specifically instruct them to consider the evidence and detemine whether the defendant broke the law.
From the Juror's handbook found at the above referenced fija.org:
"As recently as 1972, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the jury has an " unreviewable and irreversible power... to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge.... (US vs Dougherty, 473 F 2d 1113, 1139 (1972))
Or as this same truth was stated in a earlier decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Maryland: "We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision." (US vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969))."
The loophole is that there is no punishment for jurors who blatantly disregard the law when considering their verdict. Therefore, jurors do have th power to decide based on their conscience, or their political viewpoint, or their mood of the day, or a flip of a coin. (Perhaps someone should set up a website describing your right and duty to flip a coin to decide a verdict - then that would make it the right thing to do!)
Jury nullification is not a loophole, it exists to remind the government that it has a fourth branch..."The People".
It demends on the circumstances - which is exactly what the lawyers did not want to hear. I can imagine circumstances where touching a toe might warrant a felony conviction.
In Kentucky crimes have degrees and such an offense would be a misdemeanor and the defendent might at worse get a 30 day suspended sentence if he had no prior history. Sure it may sound weird for someone to be convicted of touching a toe, but the defendent not only wasn't given consent he was actually told not to do it. If you haven't learned "to keep your hands to yourself" and that "no means no" by time that your an adult then the state owes you an education.
Congress is expressly required to create and protect what we now call Intellectually Property Rights by the US Constitution. See Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
Section 8 is the "Shall have the power to..." section, not the "Is required to..." section.
Have you been selected to jury duty? I remember being screened for a jury in a trial where one of the lawyers asked the jury whether they would pass a guilty verdict for battery if a defendent had touched the toe of someone that had asked them not to touch it. Everyone, but me, said they would. Felony conviction for touching someone's toe. I think you grossly overestimate the free thinking capabilities of your fellow citizens.
So are you saying you would have convicted the defendent of something else are do you feel that he should be allowed to go around fondling people against their will?
If the record industry loses the case then they will have no legitimacy, if they win parents will pressure their representatives to change the laws that give them legitimacy. Copyright protection is a legislated right, not an inalienable one.
You are not free to give away a copies lot of things unless you are either the author of said work or the author has released their work under a license which grants distribution rights to other people.
The DMCA takes away the constitutionally guaranteed rights of all to protect the legislated rights of a few by restricting what authors are allowed to create and distribute.
You can't because you would never pay for it because it cannot possibly fulfill all your requirements (mainly that it costs money and that at least parts of it would have to be closed source). I'm not trying to attack your personally; I'm generalizing the Linux user community.
If content creators keep trying to protect their property by taking away the rights of others to theirs then the Window's community may very well turn to open source too. I swear I have never had so many people ask me about Linux as I have had since the Sony DRM thing and I'm a nurse, not a "techie".
In the U.S., at least, we believe in equal rights. Just because the public (majority) wants free access to movies/games/music doesn't mean that we should trump creators' (minority) rights.
Actually you are quite wrong. If the majority elects enough critters willing to change copyright and patent law then the laws will be changed. Congress having the power to do something does not mean that Congress must excercise it. The rights given to creators are entirely legislated, there are no amendmendments guaranteeing them nor or they inalienable.
Publishers and artists should think deeply on this before trying stunts such as Sony's DRM rootkit again. If they piss off a large enough amount of "The People" they could very well end up being pissed on instead.
There are linux DVD players just that none are free. There are no free legal DVD players ON ANY OS.
Sure there are, and that was the main point of the article. Just because the US makes something illegal doesn't mean the rest of the world will follow suit, and as with Prohibition, people will get what they want either by importing (rum running) or creating it themselves (bathtub gin). As for that legal in the US player, is the source included? Sony has proven that even "trusted" companies will take advantage of their closedness to take control of a system.
Nice thought, but perhaps you're being overly broad with the phrase "opensource community."
Some people consider end users to be part of the "opensource community" too so choose the GPL to ensure that they will never be charged simply for running their software.
In fact I'd be amazed if you can even build glibc from the sources yourself, its build system is notiorusly arcane and undocumented - often requiring CVS builds of binutils/gcc, at some points it's even required custom patches not available to the public.
This is actually the least interesting part of the discussion, because the answer is well-settled. Legislatively dealing with porn (and defining it) is nothing new; laws are already in place limiting what newstands can sell, at what age consumers can purchase it, what penalties exist for selling it to people beneath that age, etc.
Which jurisdiction? Or did you forget that in some places it is illegal to show a picture of woman's face, in others the age of consent is twelve.
I realise that restricting access to porn may not be a subject dear to the heart of all/.ers, but I have the impression that most of the rest of this thread is going to boil down to "no-one can do a thing about porn, la la la la I can't hear you", when the reality is that a lot of people around the world would like to see the present situation changed, and, one way or another, sooner or later, that will result in legislation. And if a solution is finally imposed, it may well turn out to be as draconian as the French government's anti-nazi legislation, which has been successfully imposed on Yahoo.
But there is an answer to porn and that is to create a domain that refuses to allow anything that you consider obscene.
Is to implement a special top-level-domain for porn, something like the.xxx domain that was proposed (and rejected IIRC).
So who decides just what is porn and how to you force every site that fits that definition into your little cubby hole? If you want a "safe" place to surf then create a "safe" place to surf. Call it "womenwithbagsovertheirheads" or whatever if you like. The.xxx domain is just as stupid as this one.
...is a title that Madonna has used for both an album and a song, which seems to make using Kazaa for anything "interesting" kind of pointless.
Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success
on
GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 1
I don't know what your problem is but the information I posted was to point out that Gentoo does indeed install a precompiled toolchain by default, something of which the other poster seems not to be aware.
I guess I didn't make myself clear: I don't download any movies or music from P2P or any other networks. When I want to watch something (on my computer, since I have no TV,) I'll buy it on DVD.
And I guess your missing the point. Suppose in your pursuit of gaining scientic knowledge you come upon a freely distributable file about Mars called "The Red Planet", download it, view it, and sometime later delete it to save disk space. Then a month later, after reviewing your ISP's records, the copyright police come knocking at your door to arrest you for infringement. Now just how are you going to prove to them you were innocent?
Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success
on
GCC 4.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
Looks just like the Gentoo installation process to me.
Not anymore. Gentoo has deprecated building the system from scratch and only supports binary installs now. Add on software is still compiled from source though.
I honestly firmly don't care about music, songs, movies and enterntainment in general. But I do care about things like biological/technical/scientific advances. But for those advances I am against patents, not copyrights. In fact I am pro-copyrights because they let me control how my work is distributed. So for me what music industry is doing sounds reasonable.
Just remember how reasonable you think they are when they come knocking on your door for downloading a study of Mars called "The Red Planet" or a treatise on metamorphisis called "The Butterfly Effect".
Re:You have no idea what you are talking about.
on
JPEG Patent Challenged
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Software is indeed patentable. This was decided in the Diamond v. Diehr case over 20 years ago. Thousands of software patents have been granted since then, and the requirements have gotten weaker over that time. Whether they ought to be allowed is very debatable, but the fact of the law isn't.
"Diamon v. Diehr" is only law in the US and does not apply to rest of the world, which is what I suspect the other poster is trying to say. The long term effects that software patents will have on our country's economy is going to be devastating if our developers have to fear being sued for using ideas here that programmers elsewhere are free build upon.
counter question: why should the US government decide to engage in censorship and prohibit the.xxx domain from being put into place? Why restrict content to it at all? Just make it available.
Because it will inevitably lead to censorship just as "M" rated games. Once such a domain is created people will expect all "obscene" content to move there.
I consider exchanging the rights to distribute my code in order to build on millions of lines of code created by others as very profitable! Barter is capitalism in its purest form!
Slashdot Mirror
Fewer than 20% of the population bothered to turn out for the last election. How many do you really expect to pressure their reps to make the changes? Nothing substantial is going to happen until a lot more people get dragged into court.
It's was an off year election. I didn't vote in the last election because there wasn't anything to vote for where I live, not even dogcatcher. And yes people will care because if the RIAA wins this one it would mean that they can be held legally liable for a crimes committed by others.
The jurors are supposed to and expected to vote based on the laws. That's why the judge's instructions specifically instruct them to consider the evidence and detemine whether the defendant broke the law.
From the Juror's handbook found at the above referenced fija.org:
"As recently as 1972, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the jury has an " unreviewable and irreversible power... to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge.... (US vs Dougherty, 473 F 2d 1113, 1139 (1972))
Or as this same truth was stated in a earlier decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Maryland: "We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision." (US vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969))."
The loophole is that there is no punishment for jurors who blatantly disregard the law when considering their verdict. Therefore, jurors do have th power to decide based on their conscience, or their political viewpoint, or their mood of the day, or a flip of a coin. (Perhaps someone should set up a website describing your right and duty to flip a coin to decide a verdict - then that would make it the right thing to do!)
Jury nullification is not a loophole, it exists to remind the government that it has a fourth branch..."The People".
It demends on the circumstances - which is exactly what the lawyers did not want to hear. I can imagine circumstances where touching a toe might warrant a felony conviction.
In Kentucky crimes have degrees and such an offense would be a misdemeanor and the defendent might at worse get a 30 day suspended sentence if he had no prior history. Sure it may sound weird for someone to be convicted of touching a toe, but the defendent not only wasn't given consent he was actually told not to do it. If you haven't learned "to keep your hands to yourself" and that "no means no" by time that your an adult then the state owes you an education.
Congress is expressly required to create and protect what we now call Intellectually Property Rights by the US Constitution. See Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
Section 8 is the "Shall have the power to..." section, not the "Is required to..." section.
Have you been selected to jury duty? I remember being screened for a jury in a trial where one of the lawyers asked the jury whether they would pass a guilty verdict for battery if a defendent had touched the toe of someone that had asked them not to touch it. Everyone, but me, said they would. Felony conviction for touching someone's toe. I think you grossly overestimate the free thinking capabilities of your fellow citizens.
So are you saying you would have convicted the defendent of something else are do you feel that he should be allowed to go around fondling people against their will?
If the record industry loses the case then they will have no legitimacy, if they win parents will pressure their representatives to change the laws that give them legitimacy. Copyright protection is a legislated right, not an inalienable one.
You are not free to give away a copies lot of things unless you are either the author of said work or the author has released their work under a license which grants distribution rights to other people.
The DMCA takes away the constitutionally guaranteed rights of all to protect the legislated rights of a few by restricting what authors are allowed to create and distribute.
You can't because you would never pay for it because it cannot possibly fulfill all your requirements (mainly that it costs money and that at least parts of it would have to be closed source). I'm not trying to attack your personally; I'm generalizing the Linux user community.
If content creators keep trying to protect their property by taking away the rights of others to theirs then the Window's community may very well turn to open source too. I swear I have never had so many people ask me about Linux as I have had since the Sony DRM thing and I'm a nurse, not a "techie".
In the U.S., at least, we believe in equal rights. Just because the public (majority) wants free access to movies/games/music doesn't mean that we should trump creators' (minority) rights.
Actually you are quite wrong. If the majority elects enough critters willing to change copyright and patent law then the laws will be changed. Congress having the power to do something does not mean that Congress must excercise it. The rights given to creators are entirely legislated, there are no amendmendments guaranteeing them nor or they inalienable.
Publishers and artists should think deeply on this before trying stunts such as Sony's DRM rootkit again. If they piss off a large enough amount of "The People" they could very well end up being pissed on instead.
There are linux DVD players just that none are free. There are no free legal DVD players ON ANY OS.
Sure there are, and that was the main point of the article. Just because the US makes something illegal doesn't mean the rest of the world will follow suit, and as with Prohibition, people will get what they want either by importing (rum running) or creating it themselves (bathtub gin). As for that legal in the US player, is the source included? Sony has proven that even "trusted" companies will take advantage of their closedness to take control of a system.
Nice thought, but perhaps you're being overly broad with the phrase "opensource community."
Some people consider end users to be part of the "opensource community" too so choose the GPL to ensure that they will never be charged simply for running their software.
In fact I'd be amazed if you can even build glibc from the sources yourself, its build system is notiorusly arcane and undocumented - often requiring CVS builds of binutils/gcc, at some points it's even required custom patches not available to the public.
LFS manages to compile glibc just fine.
This is actually the least interesting part of the discussion, because the answer is well-settled. Legislatively dealing with porn (and defining it) is nothing new; laws are already in place limiting what newstands can sell, at what age consumers can purchase it, what penalties exist for selling it to people beneath that age, etc.
Which jurisdiction? Or did you forget that in some places it is illegal to show a picture of woman's face, in others the age of consent is twelve.
The xxx tld was a better idea.
You mentioned
I realise that restricting access to porn may not be a subject dear to the heart of all
But there is an answer to porn and that is to create a domain that refuses to allow anything that you consider obscene.
Is to implement a special top-level-domain for porn, something like the
So who decides just what is porn and how to you force every site that fits that definition into your little cubby hole? If you want a "safe" place to surf then create a "safe" place to surf. Call it "womenwithbagsovertheirheads" or whatever if you like. The
...is a title that Madonna has used for both an album and a song, which seems to make using Kazaa for anything "interesting" kind of pointless.
I don't know what your problem is but the information I posted was to point out that Gentoo does indeed install a precompiled toolchain by default, something of which the other poster seems not to be aware.
I guess I didn't make myself clear: I don't download any movies or music from P2P or any other networks. When I want to watch something (on my computer, since I have no TV,) I'll buy it on DVD.
And I guess your missing the point. Suppose in your pursuit of gaining scientic knowledge you come upon a freely distributable file about Mars called "The Red Planet", download it, view it, and sometime later delete it to save disk space. Then a month later, after reviewing your ISP's records, the copyright police come knocking at your door to arrest you for infringement. Now just how are you going to prove to them you were innocent?
Looks just like the Gentoo installation process to me.
Not anymore. Gentoo has deprecated building the system from scratch and only supports binary installs now. Add on software is still compiled from source though.
I honestly firmly don't care about music, songs, movies and enterntainment in general. But I do care about things like biological/technical/scientific advances. But for those advances I am against patents, not copyrights. In fact I am pro-copyrights because they let me control how my work is distributed. So for me what music industry is doing sounds reasonable.
Just remember how reasonable you think they are when they come knocking on your door for downloading a study of Mars called "The Red Planet" or a treatise on metamorphisis called "The Butterfly Effect".
Software is indeed patentable. This was decided in the Diamond v. Diehr case over 20 years ago. Thousands of software patents have been granted since then, and the requirements have gotten weaker over that time. Whether they ought to be allowed is very debatable, but the fact of the law isn't.
"Diamon v. Diehr" is only law in the US and does not apply to rest of the world, which is what I suspect the other poster is trying to say. The long term effects that software patents will have on our country's economy is going to be devastating if our developers have to fear being sued for using ideas here that programmers elsewhere are free build upon.
counter question: why should the US government decide to engage in censorship and prohibit the
Because it will inevitably lead to censorship just as "M" rated games. Once such a domain is created people will expect all "obscene" content to move there.
I think it might already have started with the US not allowing
Just what is the purpose of a
I consider exchanging the rights to distribute my code in order to build on millions of lines of code created by others as very profitable! Barter is capitalism in its purest form!