No, no, this isn't flamebait or outright dismissal, but really - a "5 year contract" to develop what their description seems to portray as super Anime' Battle Armor(tm)? Somehow, I think this will end up being a big money pit for a long time before anything that flashy comes anywhere near to reality...
On a less cynical note, though, I imagine a lot of more "down-to-earth" inventions may come out of the program (advances in polymer science, immunoassay-like tests, and so on) if the people running it can refrain from wasting the money too badly in attempts to impress clueless legislators with flashy gadgets when the 5 year budget is over...
When are we going to trust the government. The big business interests [...]
You forget the "The Government" IS a "big business interest" itself. (Specifically, I think of it as a gigantic, somewhat shady insurance company that charges mandatory premiums based on your income. ANd property ownership. And purchases (sales tax). And "unemployment insurance". And "Social Security". And...well, you get the idea. You pay your premiums, and the government offers some legetimate insurance (i.e. as with medical insurance, "if something bad happens, we'll pay to deal with it", e.g. if a foreign country were to invade, the US Federal Government Insurance Company would pay for the military to deal with it, and so on). Unfortunately, they also offer some not-so-legitimate insurace, evidently ("If your business model gets outdated, US Federal Government Insurance Company will prop it up with laws"...)
Your point about making reasonable counter-suggestions for current trends in "Intellectual Property" laws is, I think, completely right. It's just that it seems silly to ask why we don't trust the government in the first sentence, and them immediately answer it by explaining that Government will do as "big business" tells it to regardless...
I love the idea. Though I doubt we'll ever see such a proposal seriously considered, I think it'd be workable if it were designed carefully...
The "ransom" should REPLACE the existing "time-based" copyright, with perhaps a short "minimum copyright time" (say, 5-10 years) that the artist could keep control of the work (if he/she wanted to) even after the ransom was met. There would have to be some sort of legal "cap" on the ransom to prevent "eternal copyrights" (i.e. "Okay, I declare the ransom on 'Song of the South' to be $50,000,000,000,000" says Eisner...), and the cap should be based on the GNP rather than an absolute amount (so that congress doesn't end up either shortchanging future artists or coming back and over-increasing the amount every few years) so that it automatically is in line with the economy without interference by congress) - some small fraction of a percent of the GNP.
This would greatly encourage popular artists, who find they can rapidly get rewarded as they create more works that the public wants. Unpopular artists would still have plenty of time to try to get their work to be profitable (and still an "unpopular" work might be "bailed out" by a wealthy eccentric who likes it). And the public who pays for the organizations that write the laws and enforce copyright restrictions and so on get more material available for them...
Not extreme enough profit for the distribution corporations that currently control the availability and use of "art", unfortunately, so it'd never show up in congress for debate, but it's a good idea anyway. (Though on the other hand, such a scheme would give Hollywood et al a way of better controlling and predicting the profits from a work, which I gather from their business perspective would be very valuable indeed...when they can tell their stockholders "we're due to release x films this year, which WILL be worth $y,000,000,000 in total..." they may be interested...)
I wonder if one could convincingly argue that current abuses of the DMCA amount to potentially illegal anti-competetive practices?
I was thinking about the concept of "fansubs" (typically Japanese Anime' that is not being made available in English, which is being translated and made available by volunteer amateurs)...
Realistically, the "amateur subtitles" ought, I think, to constitute "fair use" of the original copyright-protected work, so setting the potential "unauthorized derivative work" part of it aside, we come to the fact that someone who wants a "fansub" should really be legally buying an original from overseas, and adding the subtitles themselves. With DVD content, this shouldn't be difficult - just read the video stream from the disk and use e.g. "Transcode" to render the amateur English subtitles into the picture, and burn the result to either SVCD or DVD-R(?).
Here's the important part - in the US, as I understand things currently, you CAN'T do this. For one thing, the MPAA's special "Region Coding" on DVD's means that conceivably, if I tried to import a "Regionless" DVD player to watch the original on, I'd be breaking the law (Region coding DOES constitute an "access-control device", evidently). In addition, although the "transcoding" of the legally-paid-for video mentioned above is blatantly obvious fair use, even if you can smuggle in a DVD drive that can read that disk's region, even POSESSING software that can decode the video for re-coding is illegal under the DMCA...
The end result, as I see it, is harmful in two main ways - firstly, it of necessity deprives overseas filmmakers of US business for digital media, and at the same time it greatly limits US citizen's access to works from other countries...
Two sides of the same problem - non-US filmmakers lose money and Hollywood is "protected" from the small amount of competition they might otherwise get from them, and US Citizens lose access to international "perspectives" on issues (i.e. the way movies from other cultures portray various things) because they can no longer find a reasonable, legal way of observing them. Somehow, this doesn't seem like a good way to maintain a mentally healthy, informed populace...
(Conspiracy theorists may not reply with "they actively don't WANT a healthy, informed populace"...what's scares me is that I'm starting to agree...)
Well, there's MY rant for the day...
(OT - Bad Pun) Re:Grazed the point
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butter knives are illegal because they could be used to kill or at the very least commit battery
"We find the defendant guilty of felony assault and Buttery..."
(Your point is completely correct and valid, in my opinion, I just couldn't resist the pun. I'm so ashamed...)
Re:Vote with your money
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The unfortunate problem with this is that is it gives them fuel for going to Congress and saying "Our profits did not grow 10% this year. See, everyone is a pirate and not buying our stuff and stealing it online."
I was thinking exactly the same thing. There IS a way to deal with this, but it involves a little more inconvenience...
In addition to not buying RIAA/MPAA material, people need to write (physically, paper and everything) to their legislators, and cc the "content providers", explaining that they are not buying NOR pirating the material, and the reasons why (which boils down to "there product no longer meets my needs", whether those "needs" are "to listen to/watch material that isn't mass-market crap" or "to be able to make fair use of the material", or both.)
An undeniable pile of paper mail saying "I'm neither pirating NOR buying the stuff" sitting on a legislator's desk (especially if they include "and if you try to criminalize my ability to get material that DOES meet my needs, I'll be doing everything legal that I can to get your political career ended") is going to make it a lot more difficult (or at the very least, a lot more blatantly expensive in terms of contributions and lobbying) for Jack "We're all going to go bankrupt, no really, I mean it this time, never mind the VCR issue" Valenti to push the "pirates are the sole reason our business is slightly less ridiculously profitable this year, so you must criminalize our customers" line...
Honestly, after the slashdot article on the "interview with Scott Draeker", I commented on Draeker's statement that his plans were to "recharge" for a while before looking for work again, wondering how it was that he had enough money to "goof off" for a while when many of the employees weren't getting paid (and one of them had to pay salary with his own credit card while Draeker was, evidently, sitting on plenty of his own money...)
I was kind of hoping that the answer was "Mr. Draeker was a millionaire before he started Loki", or at least confirmation of my suspicions. I got one "he was probably just being careful with his savings" (a reasonable answer), and a bunch of "-1 flamebait" moderations...
Reading this article, it looks like things are even worse than I thought. Yuck. Any chance that the employees (who actually did the WORK of making these games I bought from Loki available for me) have any legal recourse to get at least SOME of their money from Draeker?
If nothing else, it'd be nice if someone like "linuxgamepublishing.com" (who appears at the moment, if nothing else, to need a web programmer:-) [currently getting a PHP error on their main page as I write this]) could pick up a few of the employees.
The most tragic part of the Loki affair, in my opinion, is the fact that in effect, a bunch of talented people are being "punished" for working with a Linux game company...
I noticed this complaint reported on Sourceforge yesterday. All I can say is, based on my experimentation with RC2 and relatively recent CVS's, things don't seem to be anywhere near as bad as the complaint implies.
Realistically, what I found was only ONE serious bug that keeps me from using the KDE3 CVS release as my current desktop - and the reply to the complaint mentioned it:
Except for khtml problems I would say KDE is in a pretty good shape right now
The big problem right now, from what *I* have noticed (there may be others, but I haven't stumbled on them) is the broken focus. I couldn't write this post in KDE3, for example, because while in the textarea, the "focus" is actually still on the links in the page. Pressing the Enter key while typing here in KDE3 would cause the browser to jump to the currently focussed link (the first one on the page) instead of putting an "enter" into the textarea...
While the fact that this huge focus problem has been in khtml for so long and (as far as I can tell from what I get out of "cvs update kde" from anoncvs.kde.org) isn't being addressed at all disturbs me (bugs.kde.org now even has a bug entry set up to track all of the 'duplicates' that are all permutations of "keyboard focus in khtml is broken"!), the fact is that other than this ONE bug (which may conceivably only still be there because of the feature freeze preventing a reworked set of khtml focus code from being committed to fix it), KDE3 was looking like it was actually in quite good shape...
[...]'welfare state' accusation. That was more a reference to the article[...]
I read the article. I didn't get THAT from it at all...
What I got from it was the notion that "ideas" and expressions are not, and should not, be "property" (in the same sense that my car, my house, etc. are "property"), but that the laws governing what is currently, sadly, referred to as "intellectual property" are intended to "bend" the definition of property JUST ENOUGH to encourage the flow of "intellectual" expressions.
In the case of patents, for example, the CONCEPT is that without protection, someone could do a lot of work coming up with an invention, only to have it stolen by a non-innovative but powerful entity (person or corporation), and said inventor might instead keep his or her invention secret, rather than sharing it with the rest of the world. The "loss" that Patent grants is supposed to protect the country from is the loss of widespread access to the ideas contained in the invention (I don't think ANYBODY is arguing that the physical "thing" that has been invented isn't actual "property"). The REASON this is a loss, is because ideas fuel other ideas. Therefore, patent law makes a bargain - "We'll 'bend' the definition of property for a little while, so that you can be protected for a limited time to keep control of, and make profit from if you so desire, your invention, but in return, the ideas embodied in this invention will become available to the rest of the country for use, study, and reworking once this 'limited time' is up".
The point of the article is that the purpose of Copyright law is the same - to PROMOTE THE RELEASE OF IDEAS AND EXPRESSIONS, on the basis that the better "flow" of idea exchange there is, the better the rate and quality of new ideas that will result (and that, obviously, the country as a whole will benefit from this).
The fundamental flaw with the apparently perpetual copyright grant extensions is that the length of time now being used to define "limited" has gone WAY beyond the point where there is a "net benefit" to the Country as a whole in exchange - which I think is true at this point...especially considering the additional impact of making criminals out of people who common sense says are NOT criminals. (example - I have a Linux machine. I buy DVD's. I've watched some of these DVD's on my linux machine. The DMCA says I'm a criminal, because I had to use a "circumvention device" to do so, but I think most people's common sense would say "watching a movie that you've paid for doesn't sound like a criminal act to me...")
I mean, honestly, would Disney REALLY quit making movies and go out of business if they were limited to, say, even 50 years of exclusive rights to material they've hired? If not, then the extension of copyright to well beyond a normal human lifespan has no benefit to "the progress of science and the useful arts", and in fact, may make Disney complacent - with some of their material growing up and heading out on it's own into the public domain, Disney would likely be encouraged to produce MORE new material to maintain their profit levels (resulting in more stimulation of the economy overall).
I don't see anywhere in this that says "everything should be free-of-charge to everyone and everyone should be living in a commune"...
The unalienable right to pursue hapiness should not be challenged by your perspective on what hapiness
Exactly...and one thing that makes ME happy is being able to make use of material that grows up into a public domain work, after my tax money (and of course, that of my parents and relatives and so on, and even other corporations) pays to maintain its "owner's" monopoly (can't really say "author" or "inventor" here, in light of "works for hire"). You DO realize its our tax money that pays for criminal investigation of "blatantly criminal" copyright violation (e.g. bulk sales of copies of material made without authorization by someone besides the current copyright holder), pays the judges' salaries, pays Congress' salaries (etc etc), as well as the fact that WE are the ones serving on juries when these issues reach the level of a criminal trial.
From my perspective, WE have a duty to take up material that finally reaches the end of its long journey to the public domain, and use those works to create new things, generate new ideas, and so on (the "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" part of the constitution.) "Promoting" this progress is the law's job, but GENERATING it is ours...and certain corporations (who I'm pretty sure don't fall into the category the writers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote "men") are using their influence to interfere with this duty of ours.
A strange way of looking at it, maybe, but it's an angle that seems to have been completely overlooked so far...
Hmmm - this doesn't seem to be TOTALLY off-topic. In fact, it reminds me of another reason Disney inc keeps frantically strangling any ancient work that might grow up and go off on its own into the public domain...
I have to wonder how much of the control has to do with maintaining a "politically correct" image? Here we have Steamboat Willie portraying animal cruelty (Yes, *I* know it's just a cartoon, but a lot of loud people take this sort of thing seriously). Similarly - when was the last time you could find a VHS of "Song of the South" to rent or purchase?
If "Song of the South" escaped Disney's clutches into the public domain, the few copies floating around out there would be distributable, and of course, Disney would be embarassed to no end (and probably harassed by race-related groups to no end). By keeping a stranglehold on what works are available and what works the public isn't allowed access to, Disney has another tool to manipulate the public's perception of them...
Just a casual conspiracy theory...
"Daddy, maybe we can use Linux to fix Windows?" --my daughter, age 3
(Okay, this part is off-topic but - I've actually done this - booted from Linux to copy data from horribly dead or damaged Windows installations that wouldn't boot enough for me to do so...)
what happens if anonymous cash and purchases are no longer common?
Well, provided there is still a LITTLE freedom in the "free market", businesses will pop up to provide a replacement.
I just can't see "anonymous" cash transactions going away. If physical "cash" gets hard to use (e.g. a lot more automated-only services), you will see banks offering "anonymous cash accounts", where you dump money (in one form or another) into it via an ATM-like setup (or through "paypal" or something of the sort), and access it through a "bank card" that has no associated name. Somewhat like they use in some places (Washington DC uses, or used to use, this, if I recall correctly) for mass transit - you plug cash into a machine, and it spits out a paper card with a magnetic strip, encoded with the amount of money you gave it, and you use this card (which has no personally identifying information on it) to pay for bus fare, and so on.
Browsing on Speedpass' own website, it appears that there is NO security other than needing physical possession of the "speedpass" device. (Their "Question and Answer" section specifically states that you don't even need to type in a PIN number)
So...who's going to be the first to build a directional "Pringles(tm) Can" antenna to record SpeedPass exchanges, and publish schematics for programmable speedpass "emulators"?
The only way I'd consider bothering with this is if I could get a "buffer" account to tie it to, and dump, say, $50 in it at a time from my real account (so that if my "Speedpass" gets stolen and is used before I have a chance to transfer the money back out of the "buffer" account, I wouldn't be able to lose more that $50 or so...) Tying it to a Credit Card just seems completely insane to me, especially since other posts say that YOU are liable for unauthorized charges on the thing...
.what is this "liberty" thing you Americans keep saying you're so proud of?
It's that ever-scarcer attribute that some of us are fighting for, perhaps ineffectively at times, but that the rest of the world (including, sadly, much of the US as well) is content to pretend that it will always have and occasionally make snide remarks where it doesn't immediately concern them...until it's too late.
Sorry, I just re-read that and it sounds a lot harsher than it is intended to - but it fits. Every time something like this comes up, a few non-USAians will smugly proclaim "Ha ha, Americans!", forgetting that the US Government has a frightening tendency to export Greed for Control (either for itself or on behalf of major corporations) to the rest of the world.
There ARE a few of us over here doing what little we can to try to get the rampaging legislative beast under control, but at the moment all we're accomplishing is to slow it down, just a little. That's all that WILL be accomplished if everyone else is going to be content to point and laugh, "Ha, ha, stupid Americans can't even control their own Government" (and in the US, "Ha, ha, look at the silly whackos being dragged around by the government") as said government drags itself inexorably in their direction...
This sort of thing isn't "comic relief", it's a serious "disease", and it's contagious.
Almost totally off-topic question, but I was wondering, does anyone in Germany (or perhaps German-speaking Austria, etc.) produce cartoons of some sort (i.e. a Germanic equivalent to "Anime", rather than dubbed versions of other countries' cartoons)?
(At the moment, German is the one language, other than English, that I can speak/understand more than a handful of words and phrases of...)
It's a sad state of affairs that such a thing is the FIRST interpretation of something like this. (Yes, I thought the same thing, and was wondering who Senator Chihiro was, and who this Lasseter person was who was reporting it to "Dubya"....
Disney's really making a reputation for themselves, aren't they...
Re:home movies:non-geeks::free software:geeks
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I've been thinking about this, actually. I've been thinking one step further even, and wishing that people interested in free-as-in-speech content would start "mining" the public domain and producing derivative works based on them. At the moment, we can TALK about this sort of thing squashing independents and "start-ups" and public-domain-based works, but unless this starts becoming visible, nobody is going to realize how important that is...
(Anybody know if there's a good way to tell if "Metropolis" has matured into the public domain yet? While watching it recently, it occurred to me that with a bit of judicious subtitling or dubbing, it could very easily be turned into an allegorical political satire of current trends in IP laws...and POLITICAL speech is arguably the one form of speech that the first amendment was SPECIFICALLY intended to protect...)
Here in Idaho, I've noticed a number of places selling "Edited Movies". Presumably, these are legally-purchased originals, with "objectionable" material edited or "bleeped" out (I haven't been inside any of these shops nor watched an "edited movie", so I'm assuming here.)
While VHS is still available, one still has the basic ability to physically "cut" out "objectionable" portions. Once VHS fades from the market, though, under current DMCA and even more so under legislation like this, created "edited movies" will be ILLEGAL, regardless of the "first sale" doctrine, because to create an "edited" movie from digital media, you must COPY it.
While I personally wouldn't touch an "edited" movie, I think allowing someone to "edit" legally purchased material - and even re-sell it (emphasis there - I'm talking about selling the original material (which even under the proposed law is, so far, still legal) along with the "edited" fair-use copy, not keeping the original and only selling the "edited" copy) is plainly "fair use". Face it - squeamish or prudish citizens are still citizens nonetheless, and deserve their fair-use rights.
Re:Thank God I don't live in the States....
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That's not enough. Do you truly think that "content providers" in your own country aren't interested in keeping a stranglehold on access to their "intellectual property"?
Don't be complacent - if the US actually passes this hideous law, this will affect manufacturers all over the world, and certainly media companies in other countries will add their voices to pressure from the US Government to get your country to implement similar laws...as is currently happening with DMCA-like laws and software-patent laws in Europe.
The time to act against this is NOW, not after a few months of smugness that "it only affects the US", before these travesties of legislation start getting exported to the rest of the world.
Much like the situation where everyone refers to material escaping from its copyright protections as "falling into the public domain", I think "copy protection" is a bit euphemistic.
I think instead it should be referred to as what it is - "copy prevention" (prevention of copies, legitimate or otherwise) or "read prevention". Anyone have any better, more accurate euphemisms?...
This is why I plan to vote for Green party candidates for the forseeable future
On the one hand, I strongly disagree with the basic premise of this party - "Big Corporations have too much power and control over individuals. Therefore, we should take the power away from them...and give it to ONE Gigantic, Powerful corporation in the US (the Federal Government)".
On the other hand, however, I have to say - "Good for you. ANY vote for someone other than "the Two Parties(tm)" is, in my opinion, a good start. Anyone who takes off their "I hate 'The Other Party'" blinders for a few minutes can't help but notice that both of the "mainstream" parties are firmly in the pockets of major corporations (Republicans seem to tend towards 'old-school' corporations like oil and steel, Democrats tend towards "intellectual property" and media companies) and neither having power can really be good for the country. (Remember the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act of Sonny Bono's? Check the congressional record, and you'll find John Conyers (Democrat) on record complaining that Republicans(!) are forcing them to compromise to get the extension passed [despite the fact that it was a Republican who introduced the measure]. BOTH mainstream parties wanted this extension.)
Even if the Greens or the Libertarians (the two parties most likely to win anything, besides the "mainstream" parties) don't take control, even getting one or two of them into positions of influence where they can be seen, and perhaps encourage policy to move in slightly more rational directions can only improve things, and perhaps encourage more people in future to vote for "the candidates who best represent their views" rather than "the candidate opposite the one that I hate in the two 'mainstream' parties."
unless you run a web server on your localhost, for whatever reason.
Actually, even then. I just set the 404 error message to the simple text "Nonexistent file or thwarted ad". It always makes me feel happy to see a little image box with that printed in it while I'm browsing...
If someone (congress) takes a rival (bnetd) of mine (Blizzard, inc.) who doesn't really hurt me but does annoy me or cramp my style, knocks said rival unconcious and dumps them on my lawn, knocks on my door, and hands me a gun (the DMCA) and a shovel (lawyers), and says "Do whatever you think you should with these"....does that make it okay if I shoot the rival in the back of the head and bury them? After all, I just got implied permission to do so from the legal system!
Blizzard, inc, has just metaphorically taken the gun and shovel, said "Hey, great!", pulled the trigger, and started digging...
Yes, we should definitely end the practice of having the government metaphorically handing out guns and shovels to corporations...but that doesn't excuse Blizzard for their abuses.
(Well, okay, the metaphor is BIT flawed - Blizzard and the other corporations already had the shovels (lawyers), but you get the idea...)
WarCraft II didn't have battle.net support until WELL after Starcraft came out
Actually, this helps ADD to the impact of the letter, I think. It helps drive home the point that it's not JUST about "battle.net" (i.e. whether the games used battle.net or not were not motivating factors in their purchase) but about liking the games - and NOT liking the thuggery and insult to their players that Blizzard has just shown. That way the letter can't be interpreted to just mean he's upset because he has to use battle.net.
WTF is the problem here, really? Blizzard has EVERY right! I totally support them!
The problem is that Blizzard has just joined the ranks of companies who feel that bullying people with lawyers and laws of questionable constitutionality, regardless of their involvement in any actual crime, is perfectly acceptable behavior.
I'm slightly shocked to see BLIZZARD (who I formerly didn't see in the same category as the MPAA and RIAA and so on) casually stroll in and say "the software that you've all 'worked LONG AND HARD on' might, someday, conceivably, be used by a 'pirate' to play an illegal copy of one of our games. We have more money for lawyers than you, and they read the DMCA. Give up your project and do as we say, or we'll sue you into bankruptcy - even if you were to eventually win the suit."
From other comments on the board here, it sounds like most people who used bnetd did so because "battle.net" was inadequate, not to get around authentication (and, ironically, to be able to play legitimately purchased games that battle.net wouldn't let them play because copyright infringers were playing with a faked copy of the owner's legitimate key). In short, regardless of the invocation of the "evil software pirate' bogeyman, this is a transparent and desperate attempt to force people to use only their battle.net server. Ad revenue on battle.net down that much, Blizzard?
Most importantly in my mind, this is yet another corporation pushing the notion that instead of fighting a crime, we should just fight the potential to commit a crime. This is not a notion we should allow to become acceptable! While I don't think it's likely that male genitalia will be outlawed (because, after all, they can be used to commit rape and related crimes, and in fact are KNOWN to be the favored tool for such crimes), I REALLY don't feel comfortable with the creeping notion that everyone should be put in a little sealed box so that they don't commit crimes. I just can't imagine that attitude is going to do anything but make the legal situation worse for individuals and small groups (non-profit or businesses). It Must Be Fought!
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, this isn't flamebait or outright dismissal, but really - a "5 year contract" to develop what their description seems to portray as super Anime' Battle Armor(tm)? Somehow, I think this will end up being a big money pit for a long time before anything that flashy comes anywhere near to reality...
On a less cynical note, though, I imagine a lot of more "down-to-earth" inventions may come out of the program (advances in polymer science, immunoassay-like tests, and so on) if the people running it can refrain from wasting the money too badly in attempts to impress clueless legislators with flashy gadgets when the 5 year budget is over...
You forget the "The Government" IS a "big business interest" itself. (Specifically, I think of it as a gigantic, somewhat shady insurance company that charges mandatory premiums based on your income. ANd property ownership. And purchases (sales tax). And "unemployment insurance". And "Social Security". And...well, you get the idea. You pay your premiums, and the government offers some legetimate insurance (i.e. as with medical insurance, "if something bad happens, we'll pay to deal with it", e.g. if a foreign country were to invade, the US Federal Government Insurance Company would pay for the military to deal with it, and so on). Unfortunately, they also offer some not-so-legitimate insurace, evidently ("If your business model gets outdated, US Federal Government Insurance Company will prop it up with laws"...)
Your point about making reasonable counter-suggestions for current trends in "Intellectual Property" laws is, I think, completely right. It's just that it seems silly to ask why we don't trust the government in the first sentence, and them immediately answer it by explaining that Government will do as "big business" tells it to regardless...
I love the idea. Though I doubt we'll ever see such a proposal seriously considered, I think it'd be workable if it were designed carefully...
The "ransom" should REPLACE the existing "time-based" copyright, with perhaps a short "minimum copyright time" (say, 5-10 years) that the artist could keep control of the work (if he/she wanted to) even after the ransom was met. There would have to be some sort of legal "cap" on the ransom to prevent "eternal copyrights" (i.e. "Okay, I declare the ransom on 'Song of the South' to be $50,000,000,000,000" says Eisner...), and the cap should be based on the GNP rather than an absolute amount (so that congress doesn't end up either shortchanging future artists or coming back and over-increasing the amount every few years) so that it automatically is in line with the economy without interference by congress) - some small fraction of a percent of the GNP.
This would greatly encourage popular artists, who find they can rapidly get rewarded as they create more works that the public wants. Unpopular artists would still have plenty of time to try to get their work to be profitable (and still an "unpopular" work might be "bailed out" by a wealthy eccentric who likes it). And the public who pays for the organizations that write the laws and enforce copyright restrictions and so on get more material available for them...
Not extreme enough profit for the distribution corporations that currently control the availability and use of "art", unfortunately, so it'd never show up in congress for debate, but it's a good idea anyway. (Though on the other hand, such a scheme would give Hollywood et al a way of better controlling and predicting the profits from a work, which I gather from their business perspective would be very valuable indeed...when they can tell their stockholders "we're due to release x films this year, which WILL be worth $y,000,000,000 in total..." they may be interested...)
I wonder if one could convincingly argue that current abuses of the DMCA amount to potentially illegal anti-competetive practices?
I was thinking about the concept of "fansubs" (typically Japanese Anime' that is not being made available in English, which is being translated and made available by volunteer amateurs)...
Realistically, the "amateur subtitles" ought, I think, to constitute "fair use" of the original copyright-protected work, so setting the potential "unauthorized derivative work" part of it aside, we come to the fact that someone who wants a "fansub" should really be legally buying an original from overseas, and adding the subtitles themselves. With DVD content, this shouldn't be difficult - just read the video stream from the disk and use e.g. "Transcode" to render the amateur English subtitles into the picture, and burn the result to either SVCD or DVD-R(?).
Here's the important part - in the US, as I understand things currently, you CAN'T do this. For one thing, the MPAA's special "Region Coding" on DVD's means that conceivably, if I tried to import a "Regionless" DVD player to watch the original on, I'd be breaking the law (Region coding DOES constitute an "access-control device", evidently). In addition, although the "transcoding" of the legally-paid-for video mentioned above is blatantly obvious fair use, even if you can smuggle in a DVD drive that can read that disk's region, even POSESSING software that can decode the video for re-coding is illegal under the DMCA...
The end result, as I see it, is harmful in two main ways - firstly, it of necessity deprives overseas filmmakers of US business for digital media, and at the same time it greatly limits US citizen's access to works from other countries...
Two sides of the same problem - non-US filmmakers lose money and Hollywood is "protected" from the small amount of competition they might otherwise get from them, and US Citizens lose access to international "perspectives" on issues (i.e. the way movies from other cultures portray various things) because they can no longer find a reasonable, legal way of observing them. Somehow, this doesn't seem like a good way to maintain a mentally healthy, informed populace...
(Conspiracy theorists may not reply with "they actively don't WANT a healthy, informed populace"...what's scares me is that I'm starting to agree...)
Well, there's MY rant for the day...
"We find the defendant guilty of felony assault and Buttery..."
(Your point is completely correct and valid, in my opinion, I just couldn't resist the pun. I'm so ashamed...)
I was thinking exactly the same thing. There IS a way to deal with this, but it involves a little more inconvenience...
In addition to not buying RIAA/MPAA material, people need to write (physically, paper and everything) to their legislators, and cc the "content providers", explaining that they are not buying NOR pirating the material, and the reasons why (which boils down to "there product no longer meets my needs", whether those "needs" are "to listen to/watch material that isn't mass-market crap" or "to be able to make fair use of the material", or both.)
An undeniable pile of paper mail saying "I'm neither pirating NOR buying the stuff" sitting on a legislator's desk (especially if they include "and if you try to criminalize my ability to get material that DOES meet my needs, I'll be doing everything legal that I can to get your political career ended") is going to make it a lot more difficult (or at the very least, a lot more blatantly expensive in terms of contributions and lobbying) for Jack "We're all going to go bankrupt, no really, I mean it this time, never mind the VCR issue" Valenti to push the "pirates are the sole reason our business is slightly less ridiculously profitable this year, so you must criminalize our customers" line...
Honestly, after the slashdot article on the "interview with Scott Draeker", I commented on Draeker's statement that his plans were to "recharge" for a while before looking for work again, wondering how it was that he had enough money to "goof off" for a while when many of the employees weren't getting paid (and one of them had to pay salary with his own credit card while Draeker was, evidently, sitting on plenty of his own money...)
I was kind of hoping that the answer was "Mr. Draeker was a millionaire before he started Loki", or at least confirmation of my suspicions. I got one "he was probably just being careful with his savings" (a reasonable answer), and a bunch of "-1 flamebait" moderations...
Reading this article, it looks like things are even worse than I thought. Yuck. Any chance that the employees (who actually did the WORK of making these games I bought from Loki available for me) have any legal recourse to get at least SOME of their money from Draeker?
If nothing else, it'd be nice if someone like "linuxgamepublishing.com" (who appears at the moment, if nothing else, to need a web programmer :-) [currently getting a PHP error on their main page as I write this]) could pick up a few of the employees.
The most tragic part of the Loki affair, in my opinion, is the fact that in effect, a bunch of talented people are being "punished" for working with a Linux game company...
I noticed this complaint reported on Sourceforge yesterday. All I can say is, based on my experimentation with RC2 and relatively recent CVS's, things don't seem to be anywhere near as bad as the complaint implies.
Realistically, what I found was only ONE serious bug that keeps me from using the KDE3 CVS release as my current desktop - and the reply to the complaint mentioned it:
Except for khtml problems I would say KDE is in a pretty good shape right nowThe big problem right now, from what *I* have noticed (there may be others, but I haven't stumbled on them) is the broken focus. I couldn't write this post in KDE3, for example, because while in the textarea, the "focus" is actually still on the links in the page. Pressing the Enter key while typing here in KDE3 would cause the browser to jump to the currently focussed link (the first one on the page) instead of putting an "enter" into the textarea...
While the fact that this huge focus problem has been in khtml for so long and (as far as I can tell from what I get out of "cvs update kde" from anoncvs.kde.org) isn't being addressed at all disturbs me (bugs.kde.org now even has a bug entry set up to track all of the 'duplicates' that are all permutations of "keyboard focus in khtml is broken"!), the fact is that other than this ONE bug (which may conceivably only still be there because of the feature freeze preventing a reworked set of khtml focus code from being committed to fix it), KDE3 was looking like it was actually in quite good shape...
I read the article. I didn't get THAT from it at all...
What I got from it was the notion that "ideas" and expressions are not, and should not, be "property" (in the same sense that my car, my house, etc. are "property"), but that the laws governing what is currently, sadly, referred to as "intellectual property" are intended to "bend" the definition of property JUST ENOUGH to encourage the flow of "intellectual" expressions.
In the case of patents, for example, the CONCEPT is that without protection, someone could do a lot of work coming up with an invention, only to have it stolen by a non-innovative but powerful entity (person or corporation), and said inventor might instead keep his or her invention secret, rather than sharing it with the rest of the world. The "loss" that Patent grants is supposed to protect the country from is the loss of widespread access to the ideas contained in the invention (I don't think ANYBODY is arguing that the physical "thing" that has been invented isn't actual "property"). The REASON this is a loss, is because ideas fuel other ideas. Therefore, patent law makes a bargain - "We'll 'bend' the definition of property for a little while, so that you can be protected for a limited time to keep control of, and make profit from if you so desire, your invention, but in return, the ideas embodied in this invention will become available to the rest of the country for use, study, and reworking once this 'limited time' is up".
The point of the article is that the purpose of Copyright law is the same - to PROMOTE THE RELEASE OF IDEAS AND EXPRESSIONS, on the basis that the better "flow" of idea exchange there is, the better the rate and quality of new ideas that will result (and that, obviously, the country as a whole will benefit from this).
The fundamental flaw with the apparently perpetual copyright grant extensions is that the length of time now being used to define "limited" has gone WAY beyond the point where there is a "net benefit" to the Country as a whole in exchange - which I think is true at this point...especially considering the additional impact of making criminals out of people who common sense says are NOT criminals. (example - I have a Linux machine. I buy DVD's. I've watched some of these DVD's on my linux machine. The DMCA says I'm a criminal, because I had to use a "circumvention device" to do so, but I think most people's common sense would say "watching a movie that you've paid for doesn't sound like a criminal act to me...")
I mean, honestly, would Disney REALLY quit making movies and go out of business if they were limited to, say, even 50 years of exclusive rights to material they've hired? If not, then the extension of copyright to well beyond a normal human lifespan has no benefit to "the progress of science and the useful arts", and in fact, may make Disney complacent - with some of their material growing up and heading out on it's own into the public domain, Disney would likely be encouraged to produce MORE new material to maintain their profit levels (resulting in more stimulation of the economy overall).
I don't see anywhere in this that says "everything should be free-of-charge to everyone and everyone should be living in a commune"...
Exactly...and one thing that makes ME happy is being able to make use of material that grows up into a public domain work, after my tax money (and of course, that of my parents and relatives and so on, and even other corporations) pays to maintain its "owner's" monopoly (can't really say "author" or "inventor" here, in light of "works for hire"). You DO realize its our tax money that pays for criminal investigation of "blatantly criminal" copyright violation (e.g. bulk sales of copies of material made without authorization by someone besides the current copyright holder), pays the judges' salaries, pays Congress' salaries (etc etc), as well as the fact that WE are the ones serving on juries when these issues reach the level of a criminal trial.
From my perspective, WE have a duty to take up material that finally reaches the end of its long journey to the public domain, and use those works to create new things, generate new ideas, and so on (the "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" part of the constitution.) "Promoting" this progress is the law's job, but GENERATING it is ours...and certain corporations (who I'm pretty sure don't fall into the category the writers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote "men") are using their influence to interfere with this duty of ours.
A strange way of looking at it, maybe, but it's an angle that seems to have been completely overlooked so far...
Hmmm - this doesn't seem to be TOTALLY off-topic. In fact, it reminds me of another reason Disney inc keeps frantically strangling any ancient work that might grow up and go off on its own into the public domain...
I have to wonder how much of the control has to do with maintaining a "politically correct" image? Here we have Steamboat Willie portraying animal cruelty (Yes, *I* know it's just a cartoon, but a lot of loud people take this sort of thing seriously). Similarly - when was the last time you could find a VHS of "Song of the South" to rent or purchase?
If "Song of the South" escaped Disney's clutches into the public domain, the few copies floating around out there would be distributable, and of course, Disney would be embarassed to no end (and probably harassed by race-related groups to no end). By keeping a stranglehold on what works are available and what works the public isn't allowed access to, Disney has another tool to manipulate the public's perception of them...
Just a casual conspiracy theory...
"Daddy, maybe we can use Linux to fix Windows?" --my daughter, age 3(Okay, this part is off-topic but - I've actually done this - booted from Linux to copy data from horribly dead or damaged Windows installations that wouldn't boot enough for me to do so...)
Well, provided there is still a LITTLE freedom in the "free market", businesses will pop up to provide a replacement.
I just can't see "anonymous" cash transactions going away. If physical "cash" gets hard to use (e.g. a lot more automated-only services), you will see banks offering "anonymous cash accounts", where you dump money (in one form or another) into it via an ATM-like setup (or through "paypal" or something of the sort), and access it through a "bank card" that has no associated name. Somewhat like they use in some places (Washington DC uses, or used to use, this, if I recall correctly) for mass transit - you plug cash into a machine, and it spits out a paper card with a magnetic strip, encoded with the amount of money you gave it, and you use this card (which has no personally identifying information on it) to pay for bus fare, and so on.
Browsing on Speedpass' own website, it appears that there is NO security other than needing physical possession of the "speedpass" device. (Their "Question and Answer" section specifically states that you don't even need to type in a PIN number)
So...who's going to be the first to build a directional "Pringles(tm) Can" antenna to record SpeedPass exchanges, and publish schematics for programmable speedpass "emulators"?
The only way I'd consider bothering with this is if I could get a "buffer" account to tie it to, and dump, say, $50 in it at a time from my real account (so that if my "Speedpass" gets stolen and is used before I have a chance to transfer the money back out of the "buffer" account, I wouldn't be able to lose more that $50 or so...) Tying it to a Credit Card just seems completely insane to me, especially since other posts say that YOU are liable for unauthorized charges on the thing...
It's that ever-scarcer attribute that some of us are fighting for, perhaps ineffectively at times, but that the rest of the world (including, sadly, much of the US as well) is content to pretend that it will always have and occasionally make snide remarks where it doesn't immediately concern them...until it's too late.
Sorry, I just re-read that and it sounds a lot harsher than it is intended to - but it fits. Every time something like this comes up, a few non-USAians will smugly proclaim "Ha ha, Americans!", forgetting that the US Government has a frightening tendency to export Greed for Control (either for itself or on behalf of major corporations) to the rest of the world.
There ARE a few of us over here doing what little we can to try to get the rampaging legislative beast under control, but at the moment all we're accomplishing is to slow it down, just a little. That's all that WILL be accomplished if everyone else is going to be content to point and laugh, "Ha, ha, stupid Americans can't even control their own Government" (and in the US, "Ha, ha, look at the silly whackos being dragged around by the government") as said government drags itself inexorably in their direction...
This sort of thing isn't "comic relief", it's a serious "disease", and it's contagious.
Almost totally off-topic question, but I was wondering, does anyone in Germany (or perhaps German-speaking Austria, etc.) produce cartoons of some sort (i.e. a Germanic equivalent to "Anime", rather than dubbed versions of other countries' cartoons)?
(At the moment, German is the one language, other than English, that I can speak/understand more than a handful of words and phrases of...)
It's a sad state of affairs that such a thing is the FIRST interpretation of something like this. (Yes, I thought the same thing, and was wondering who Senator Chihiro was, and who this Lasseter person was who was reporting it to "Dubya"....
Disney's really making a reputation for themselves, aren't they...
I've been thinking about this, actually. I've been thinking one step further even, and wishing that people interested in free-as-in-speech content would start "mining" the public domain and producing derivative works based on them. At the moment, we can TALK about this sort of thing squashing independents and "start-ups" and public-domain-based works, but unless this starts becoming visible, nobody is going to realize how important that is...
(Anybody know if there's a good way to tell if "Metropolis" has matured into the public domain yet? While watching it recently, it occurred to me that with a bit of judicious subtitling or dubbing, it could very easily be turned into an allegorical political satire of current trends in IP laws...and POLITICAL speech is arguably the one form of speech that the first amendment was SPECIFICALLY intended to protect...)
Here in Idaho, I've noticed a number of places selling "Edited Movies". Presumably, these are legally-purchased originals, with "objectionable" material edited or "bleeped" out (I haven't been inside any of these shops nor watched an "edited movie", so I'm assuming here.)
While VHS is still available, one still has the basic ability to physically "cut" out "objectionable" portions. Once VHS fades from the market, though, under current DMCA and even more so under legislation like this, created "edited movies" will be ILLEGAL, regardless of the "first sale" doctrine, because to create an "edited" movie from digital media, you must COPY it.
While I personally wouldn't touch an "edited" movie, I think allowing someone to "edit" legally purchased material - and even re-sell it (emphasis there - I'm talking about selling the original material (which even under the proposed law is, so far, still legal) along with the "edited" fair-use copy, not keeping the original and only selling the "edited" copy) is plainly "fair use". Face it - squeamish or prudish citizens are still citizens nonetheless, and deserve their fair-use rights.
That's not enough. Do you truly think that "content providers" in your own country aren't interested in keeping a stranglehold on access to their "intellectual property"?
Don't be complacent - if the US actually passes this hideous law, this will affect manufacturers all over the world, and certainly media companies in other countries will add their voices to pressure from the US Government to get your country to implement similar laws...as is currently happening with DMCA-like laws and software-patent laws in Europe.
The time to act against this is NOW, not after a few months of smugness that "it only affects the US", before these travesties of legislation start getting exported to the rest of the world.
Much like the situation where everyone refers to material escaping from its copyright protections as "falling into the public domain", I think "copy protection" is a bit euphemistic.
I think instead it should be referred to as what it is - "copy prevention" (prevention of copies, legitimate or otherwise) or "read prevention". Anyone have any better, more accurate euphemisms?...
On the one hand, I strongly disagree with the basic premise of this party - "Big Corporations have too much power and control over individuals. Therefore, we should take the power away from them...and give it to ONE Gigantic, Powerful corporation in the US (the Federal Government)".
On the other hand, however, I have to say - "Good for you. ANY vote for someone other than "the Two Parties(tm)" is, in my opinion, a good start. Anyone who takes off their "I hate 'The Other Party'" blinders for a few minutes can't help but notice that both of the "mainstream" parties are firmly in the pockets of major corporations (Republicans seem to tend towards 'old-school' corporations like oil and steel, Democrats tend towards "intellectual property" and media companies) and neither having power can really be good for the country. (Remember the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act of Sonny Bono's? Check the congressional record, and you'll find John Conyers (Democrat) on record complaining that Republicans(!) are forcing them to compromise to get the extension passed [despite the fact that it was a Republican who introduced the measure]. BOTH mainstream parties wanted this extension.)
Even if the Greens or the Libertarians (the two parties most likely to win anything, besides the "mainstream" parties) don't take control, even getting one or two of them into positions of influence where they can be seen, and perhaps encourage policy to move in slightly more rational directions can only improve things, and perhaps encourage more people in future to vote for "the candidates who best represent their views" rather than "the candidate opposite the one that I hate in the two 'mainstream' parties."
Actually, even then. I just set the 404 error message to the simple text "Nonexistent file or thwarted ad". It always makes me feel happy to see a little image box with that printed in it while I'm browsing...
This is true, but...
If someone (congress) takes a rival (bnetd) of mine (Blizzard, inc.) who doesn't really hurt me but does annoy me or cramp my style, knocks said rival unconcious and dumps them on my lawn, knocks on my door, and hands me a gun (the DMCA) and a shovel (lawyers), and says "Do whatever you think you should with these"....does that make it okay if I shoot the rival in the back of the head and bury them? After all, I just got implied permission to do so from the legal system!
Blizzard, inc, has just metaphorically taken the gun and shovel, said "Hey, great!", pulled the trigger, and started digging...
Yes, we should definitely end the practice of having the government metaphorically handing out guns and shovels to corporations...but that doesn't excuse Blizzard for their abuses.
(Well, okay, the metaphor is BIT flawed - Blizzard and the other corporations already had the shovels (lawyers), but you get the idea...)
Actually, this helps ADD to the impact of the letter, I think. It helps drive home the point that it's not JUST about "battle.net" (i.e. whether the games used battle.net or not were not motivating factors in their purchase) but about liking the games - and NOT liking the thuggery and insult to their players that Blizzard has just shown. That way the letter can't be interpreted to just mean he's upset because he has to use battle.net.
The problem is that Blizzard has just joined the ranks of companies who feel that bullying people with lawyers and laws of questionable constitutionality, regardless of their involvement in any actual crime, is perfectly acceptable behavior.
I'm slightly shocked to see BLIZZARD (who I formerly didn't see in the same category as the MPAA and RIAA and so on) casually stroll in and say "the software that you've all 'worked LONG AND HARD on' might, someday, conceivably, be used by a 'pirate' to play an illegal copy of one of our games. We have more money for lawyers than you, and they read the DMCA. Give up your project and do as we say, or we'll sue you into bankruptcy - even if you were to eventually win the suit."
From other comments on the board here, it sounds like most people who used bnetd did so because "battle.net" was inadequate, not to get around authentication (and, ironically, to be able to play legitimately purchased games that battle.net wouldn't let them play because copyright infringers were playing with a faked copy of the owner's legitimate key). In short, regardless of the invocation of the "evil software pirate' bogeyman, this is a transparent and desperate attempt to force people to use only their battle.net server. Ad revenue on battle.net down that much, Blizzard?
Most importantly in my mind, this is yet another corporation pushing the notion that instead of fighting a crime, we should just fight the potential to commit a crime. This is not a notion we should allow to become acceptable! While I don't think it's likely that male genitalia will be outlawed (because, after all, they can be used to commit rape and related crimes, and in fact are KNOWN to be the favored tool for such crimes), I REALLY don't feel comfortable with the creeping notion that everyone should be put in a little sealed box so that they don't commit crimes. I just can't imagine that attitude is going to do anything but make the legal situation worse for individuals and small groups (non-profit or businesses). It Must Be Fought!