(Although, were I an admin here on slashdot, I would be reviewing corporate policy on potential evidence of a crime being posted. That troll was a little over the edge, and if it were not a troll,...)
Either you are extremely obtuse, or you don't understand the purpose and meaning of the US Constitution.
If you are not a USAian, I suppose we should give you some slack. If you are, we should give you a lot of flack.
While it is true that James Stewart is not a USAian, and it is true that the specifics of the US Constitution are specific to the US context, the principles are universal.
If you give a person absolute rights over any intangible, you might as well grant that person a title of nobility along with power to supercede any Constitution your government may claim to be established under. Yeah, yeah, you're now thinking "nutcase!" etc.
How does a person prove beyond doubt that the forbidden thing is not in his/her head?
Absolute power over intangibles is tantamount to power over private thought.
Therefore, the US Constitution provides for limits on rights over what we know call "intellectual property", specifically, unspecified time limits. The Constitution specified time limits because other limits would be inherent in the context of the rights and responsibilities of a person getting a lease on a piece of the public commons, and trying to put more than that into the Constitution would have tread seriously on the rights reserved to the individual states.
I haven't read the Berne convention carefully enough, I suppose I should, but if it were to be interpreted to make copyright absolute and immutable, it would be a declaration of war against every country in the world. So they have to tread carefully.
If you don't understand that much, shut up before you hurt yourself. Go back and read the copyright laws and read up on the fundamental theories under which they are interpreted. Then re-read the post.
What the OP said was only that the copyright owner has no right to absolute control, and that copyright is not going to _prevent_ pirating. (I think that he implicitly acknowledged that this might be a real case of pirating, to the extent that "pirating" is a valid description of the activity of making illicit profit from another person's creation.)
It is now the copyright owner's job to go after the guy selling what appears to be a copy, prove it's a copy in court, and get the court to take corrective/punitive action as necessary. The current copyright laws will, however, get in his way because of the so-called "artists' associations" efforts to establish effective absolute rights.
It's also the responsibility of passersby (such as we) to log into lulu if we have an account and tell them that there may be a problem here.
(Emphasis on _may_, as it turns out. There may not be a slam-dunk case of infringement here.)
But no amount of legitimate copyright law can prevent illegal/illicit/immoral copying until after the illegal activity has occured at least once, and that is precisely where those (not-) artists' associations are going way too far.
And the real irony here is that they are cutting off their (members') noses to spite their (members') faces.
Yeah, it's the right of the author/artist/inventor to be emphatic that he or she doesn't want any copying at all, but that kind of attitude taken too far tends to cut them off from their potential customers.
My opinion here, and I think I am not alone, is that we should allow the artists/authors/inventors a bit more than their legal right for moral reasons, but that still doesn't alter the fact that you can't sell a work no one knows about. That is their right to paint themselves, individually, into such a corner if they so desire, and it should be, for a realistically limited time.
Those (anti-) artists' associations (and the patent trolls, as well) should not be given any slack, because they are trying to enforce their regime on the whole market (which is now an international market). This is a huge, huge power grab, nothing more, nothing less.
Now, if you want to talk about natural rights, just remember that nothing is created/invented in a vacuum. No one has much
Didn't miss the point, was just using your post as the handiest place to suggest, wishfully/sarcastically, that Apple might do their 3rd party devs a service by laying down defensive patents on stuff like this and letting their 3rd party devs have the fun of implementing them.
You know, daydreaming?
Later, I went back up the article with all the subthreads expanded and discovered my comment was redundant. Oh, well.
I know more or less what the current practice is. What I'm saying is that it shouldn't work that way.
Software patents have been justified on the basis of "There's a machine in there somewhere!" But source code, which is the real diagrams and spec of the machine, is kind of hard to judge about how close is infringing and how different is safe. So they excused the verbal descriptions, which, with physical devices, would not be enough.
I would allow software patents if the patent required the code and could only claim the code. But copyrights are obviously better for code, and nobody seems to want to deal with a patent that ends up part copyright.
Patenting software opened the door for business methods. That should be an obvious signal that we've gone too far, since business method patents take us back to the old days of patronage, when patents weren't about inventing new stuff, but were mostly about providing the gentry with a guaranteed source of income. Supposedly, they were also supposed to provide some specific service of value to the public, but that seemed to be hit-and-miss in practice.
Anyway, I wouldn't have much issue with the patent if Apple had source to back it up, and the patent were limited to their source code on their iphone. That would comprise a real machine, if they properly describe the machine. Copyright would protect the source code, and a separate implementation that used non-derivative source code would only be covered by the patent to the extent that it would be implemented on the iPhone.
Separate source code on the Android would be outside the patent unless Apple specifically claimed it (and could show a more-or-less functional prototype).
Separate source code on a new portable terminal designed from scratch without reference to the iPhone should be outside the patent.
Actually, a software patent that claimed its dependency on the run-time environment (closed ecosystem) would be about as close to a "good" software patent as is possible.
Of course, software patents that are not too-general tend not to be too valuable, either, which is part of the reason copyright works better for software.
<wishful-thinking> Unless their entire intent is to lay down defensive patents for the people that put stuff in their app store. </wishful-thinking>
<sigh/>
Software patents are evil, unless the patent is restricted to a specific implementation (thus, the "diagrams" are the source code), in which case copyright works better anyway.
Filtering the DNS should be at the bridge to the LAN, and/or the end-user's machine.
Reputation belongs on reputation servers. We don't have many of those yet, and what we do have are implemented wrong, but that's where they belong.
It would be good in many cases for the user's machine to be able to pop up a notice on first access to a domain:
"This domain has a reputation for attacking visitors with malware."
or that kind of thing. But that's not DNS, that's reputation, and people should be able/required to choose whom they depend on concerning reputation, generally choosing more than one reputation server.
Just like when you access your bank, you don't want to depend on the DNS to tell you it's your bank. The best thing there would be to have the bank run three security responders to exchange encrypted tokens with and confirm the server that you are connecting to is the bank's server. Three for redundancy, and encrypted tokens because even the Mac address is not dependable.
Most of the time, when you're just surfing, you would not need or even want you reputation service to be encrypted. Only when you explicitly tell the browser to check.
On the other hand, it would be nice to have automatic following redundancy in your DNS path, just to raise the bar against the MIM: your LAN's internal DNS would go ahead and return the IP address given, but then check a different DNS server while you are downloading the first page from that server.
I suppose a reputation might be useful in determining between a following check and a preceding check.
Okay, the Linux kernel is not actually GNU, even though it is (GNU-)GPL-licensed. That is, the copyright is not owned by the FSF.
But I worry that people will read such statements as yours and misunderstand that it would be possible to distribute a Linux distribution under another license.
How about your DNS resolvers? Does your ISP charge you extra for resolving a domain name to your IP? Is the charge reasonable for an individual who isn't making money on it?
Cell phone? Great idea, two limitations. One, the airwaves are not infinitely compressible. (Although, if INTEL had not squelched the UWB solution that would have worked, we could have a lot more headroom.)
Portable phones will be part of the future, sure. But not the chained-to-the-floor portables we have now. Toys are easy to sell, but they drive the price below the floor after the first boom.
Tools make a real market. Cell phones that depend on the ISP never get beyond being a toy. (The other limitation.)
You have to have your own data server. Maybe you contract it out. Maybe you contract it to your ISP, maybe to a competitor, maybe to a 3rd party. But if you can't control your own data at some level, you don't have a tool.
As to why the home phone should be a server, that question stands the world on its head. There is no reason to keep phones dumb. Not even financial reasons are valid any more.
The house phone will become a server, it will run asterisk, and it will host the family/indvidual website and bulletin board.
Diaspora appears to be the bulletin board part.
Phone companies really don't get it. What they should be developing is a backup system for individual servers, and default configurations for customers who prefer trusting the phone companies over trusting themselves.
The servers should be left to the community to develop, since the phone companies simly can't understand this kind of decentralization.
Or are are you just saying that the entire old law is done away with?
Or are you talking about "gay" in the other senses? Happy, liberal, talkative, ostentatious, wearing pink shirts, generally able to share (specifically, non-sexual) affection with people regardless of gender?
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations, you just got trolled.
(Although, were I an admin here on slashdot, I would be reviewing corporate policy on potential evidence of a crime being posted. That troll was a little over the edge, and if it were not a troll, ...)
Either you are extremely obtuse, or you don't understand the purpose and meaning of the US Constitution.
If you are not a USAian, I suppose we should give you some slack. If you are, we should give you a lot of flack.
While it is true that James Stewart is not a USAian, and it is true that the specifics of the US Constitution are specific to the US context, the principles are universal.
If you give a person absolute rights over any intangible, you might as well grant that person a title of nobility along with power to supercede any Constitution your government may claim to be established under. Yeah, yeah, you're now thinking "nutcase!" etc.
How does a person prove beyond doubt that the forbidden thing is not in his/her head?
Absolute power over intangibles is tantamount to power over private thought.
Therefore, the US Constitution provides for limits on rights over what we know call "intellectual property", specifically, unspecified time limits. The Constitution specified time limits because other limits would be inherent in the context of the rights and responsibilities of a person getting a lease on a piece of the public commons, and trying to put more than that into the Constitution would have tread seriously on the rights reserved to the individual states.
I haven't read the Berne convention carefully enough, I suppose I should, but if it were to be interpreted to make copyright absolute and immutable, it would be a declaration of war against every country in the world. So they have to tread carefully.
If you don't understand that much, shut up before you hurt yourself. Go back and read the copyright laws and read up on the fundamental theories under which they are interpreted. Then re-read the post.
What the OP said was only that the copyright owner has no right to absolute control, and that copyright is not going to _prevent_ pirating. (I think that he implicitly acknowledged that this might be a real case of pirating, to the extent that "pirating" is a valid description of the activity of making illicit profit from another person's creation.)
It is now the copyright owner's job to go after the guy selling what appears to be a copy, prove it's a copy in court, and get the court to take corrective/punitive action as necessary. The current copyright laws will, however, get in his way because of the so-called "artists' associations" efforts to establish effective absolute rights.
It's also the responsibility of passersby (such as we) to log into lulu if we have an account and tell them that there may be a problem here.
(Emphasis on _may_, as it turns out. There may not be a slam-dunk case of infringement here.)
But no amount of legitimate copyright law can prevent illegal/illicit/immoral copying until after the illegal activity has occured at least once, and that is precisely where those (not-) artists' associations are going way too far.
And the real irony here is that they are cutting off their (members') noses to spite their (members') faces.
Yeah, it's the right of the author/artist/inventor to be emphatic that he or she doesn't want any copying at all, but that kind of attitude taken too far tends to cut them off from their potential customers.
My opinion here, and I think I am not alone, is that we should allow the artists/authors/inventors a bit more than their legal right for moral reasons, but that still doesn't alter the fact that you can't sell a work no one knows about. That is their right to paint themselves, individually, into such a corner if they so desire, and it should be, for a realistically limited time.
Those (anti-) artists' associations (and the patent trolls, as well) should not be given any slack, because they are trying to enforce their regime on the whole market (which is now an international market). This is a huge, huge power grab, nothing more, nothing less.
Now, if you want to talk about natural rights, just remember that nothing is created/invented in a vacuum. No one has much
Come to think of it, the server portions wouldn't run on the iPhone.
heh.
Didn't miss the point, was just using your post as the handiest place to suggest, wishfully/sarcastically, that Apple might do their 3rd party devs a service by laying down defensive patents on stuff like this and letting their 3rd party devs have the fun of implementing them.
You know, daydreaming?
Later, I went back up the article with all the subthreads expanded and discovered my comment was redundant. Oh, well.
I know more or less what the current practice is. What I'm saying is that it shouldn't work that way.
Software patents have been justified on the basis of "There's a machine in there somewhere!" But source code, which is the real diagrams and spec of the machine, is kind of hard to judge about how close is infringing and how different is safe. So they excused the verbal descriptions, which, with physical devices, would not be enough.
I would allow software patents if the patent required the code and could only claim the code. But copyrights are obviously better for code, and nobody seems to want to deal with a patent that ends up part copyright.
Patenting software opened the door for business methods. That should be an obvious signal that we've gone too far, since business method patents take us back to the old days of patronage, when patents weren't about inventing new stuff, but were mostly about providing the gentry with a guaranteed source of income. Supposedly, they were also supposed to provide some specific service of value to the public, but that seemed to be hit-and-miss in practice.
Anyway, I wouldn't have much issue with the patent if Apple had source to back it up, and the patent were limited to their source code on their iphone. That would comprise a real machine, if they properly describe the machine. Copyright would protect the source code, and a separate implementation that used non-derivative source code would only be covered by the patent to the extent that it would be implemented on the iPhone.
Separate source code on the Android would be outside the patent unless Apple specifically claimed it (and could show a more-or-less functional prototype).
Separate source code on a new portable terminal designed from scratch without reference to the iPhone should be outside the patent.
That's not how it is, but it's how it should be.
Actually, a software patent that claimed its dependency on the run-time environment (closed ecosystem) would be about as close to a "good" software patent as is possible.
Of course, software patents that are not too-general tend not to be too valuable, either, which is part of the reason copyright works better for software.
Well, they ought to be junk.
Until some starving (or greed-crazed) lawyer gets a hold of them.
Yes it is an example of their evil behavior.
<wishful-thinking>
Unless their entire intent is to lay down defensive patents for the people that put stuff in their app store.
</wishful-thinking>
<sigh/>
Software patents are evil, unless the patent is restricted to a specific implementation (thus, the "diagrams" are the source code), in which case copyright works better anyway.
Filtering the DNS should be at the bridge to the LAN, and/or the end-user's machine.
Reputation belongs on reputation servers. We don't have many of those yet, and what we do have are implemented wrong, but that's where they belong.
It would be good in many cases for the user's machine to be able to pop up a notice on first access to a domain:
"This domain has a reputation for attacking visitors with malware."
or that kind of thing. But that's not DNS, that's reputation, and people should be able/required to choose whom they depend on concerning reputation, generally choosing more than one reputation server.
Just like when you access your bank, you don't want to depend on the DNS to tell you it's your bank. The best thing there would be to have the bank run three security responders to exchange encrypted tokens with and confirm the server that you are connecting to is the bank's server. Three for redundancy, and encrypted tokens because even the Mac address is not dependable.
Most of the time, when you're just surfing, you would not need or even want you reputation service to be encrypted. Only when you explicitly tell the browser to check.
On the other hand, it would be nice to have automatic following redundancy in your DNS path, just to raise the bar against the MIM: your LAN's internal DNS would go ahead and return the IP address given, but then check a different DNS server while you are downloading the first page from that server.
I suppose a reputation might be useful in determining between a following check and a preceding check.
You sound just like my brother.
I don't know.
It seems to me a bit like trying to eliminate spam by engineering internet users who aren't interested in sex or money.
As you, yourself, point out, there's no way to do enough analysis.
Hmmm.
My initial response was, "Huh? BSD is not Linux."
Okay, the Linux kernel is not actually GNU, even though it is (GNU-)GPL-licensed. That is, the copyright is not owned by the FSF.
But I worry that people will read such statements as yours and misunderstand that it would be possible to distribute a Linux distribution under another license.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think this explains why Apple as in a rush to get the iPad out?
Negroponte may be in the process of out-Steving Jobs.
Yeah, and how far down did I have to scroll, to find a post mentioning sourceforge?
Many of the opensource projects hosts have a place to post help-wanted notices. Many projects post requests for help.
My projects don't have requests for help because I'm not sure what kind of help I want with them, but anyone interested is welcome to volunteer.
640K is all the memory a user should ever need.
But, really, why a 24 station analog card? A lot of homes will have no analog phone terminals at all, unless you call a cell phone analog.
AOL? Nope. Did spend six months on Delphi sometime around '87. Craigslists? If I ever had got a user name, I've never used it. Etc.
The big boys are trying to ransom every seat at the table. Their greed is going to kill them.
I'd rather the phone companies came to their senses before Rome burns again.
Oh, yeah, it looks, well, not too bad.
Can you write/install your own CGIs or webapps?
Do you have static IP?
How about your DNS resolvers? Does your ISP charge you extra for resolving a domain name to your IP? Is the charge reasonable for an individual who isn't making money on it?
Home server isn't required?
Cell phone? Great idea, two limitations. One, the airwaves are not infinitely compressible. (Although, if INTEL had not squelched the UWB solution that would have worked, we could have a lot more headroom.)
Portable phones will be part of the future, sure. But not the chained-to-the-floor portables we have now. Toys are easy to sell, but they drive the price below the floor after the first boom.
Tools make a real market. Cell phones that depend on the ISP never get beyond being a toy. (The other limitation.)
You have to have your own data server. Maybe you contract it out. Maybe you contract it to your ISP, maybe to a competitor, maybe to a 3rd party. But if you can't control your own data at some level, you don't have a tool.
As to why the home phone should be a server, that question stands the world on its head. There is no reason to keep phones dumb. Not even financial reasons are valid any more.
Decentralization.
And too bad the conversation has moved on.
I don't exactly agree with you, but your AC comments are worth the reading.
The house phone will become a server, it will run asterisk, and it will host the family/indvidual website and bulletin board.
Diaspora appears to be the bulletin board part.
Phone companies really don't get it. What they should be developing is a backup system for individual servers, and default configurations for customers who prefer trusting the phone companies over trusting themselves.
The servers should be left to the community to develop, since the phone companies simly can't understand this kind of decentralization.
How do you get around ch. 20 v. 13?
Or are are you just saying that the entire old law is done away with?
Or are you talking about "gay" in the other senses? Happy, liberal, talkative, ostentatious, wearing pink shirts, generally able to share (specifically, non-sexual) affection with people regardless of gender?
Just asking.
... this will require devices on each end to use codecs and video to/from packets, raising costs for consumer electronics.
Then what's the technical reason to require HDCP in the first place?
INTEL's profit margin.
Valens Semiconductor's HDBaseT Receives HDCP Certification From Intel's DCP LLC
Now I see why there is a "USB" signal in this spec.
Intel can't keep their hands out of anything, can they?