Dear Senators Bayh and Lugar and Mr. Souder:
Good job... to a point.
The proposed Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act is an improvement over Sen. Hollings's earlier drafts of the bill formerly known as SSSCA, but it still leaves much to be desired.
The entertainment industry is a $4 billion industry and one of the United States' largest exporters. I can follow the Disney Company's reasoning in wanting to protect its constitutional monopoly (U.S. Const. 1.8.8, implemented by 17 USC) on its copyrighted works. But the electronics industry is a $40 billion dollar industry. I see the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act as potentially hurting technology more than it helps entertainment, leading to a net *reduction* in the GDP and a shift in the terms of trade not favorable to the United States.
I'm afraid that the entertainment industry will ignore the parts of the bill that protect fair use, just as it has ignored similar provisions in 17 USC 1201 (part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). A $2,500 maximum penalty for encoding a work so as to unduly restrict fair use? Give me a break; that's pocket change to Hollywood. Giving the copyright industry a loophole around fair use will serve only to erode the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press.
I also fear that the courts may interpret the definition of a "digital media device" too loosely so as to include any computer no matter its purpose. This may compromise what useful work can be done with a computer. Just look at the fallout from the DMCA: it has had a significant chilling effect on encryption and security research, forcing professors to shut up lest they accidentally reveal some secret on how to circumvent the trivial protections that Hollywood places on media.
Plus, contrary to its title, this bill does little to further consumer broadband. Specifically, it does not address how to create an infrastructure for competition in the Internet access market when the local telephone monopolies control the telephone lines and the local cable monopolies control the cable lines, an oligopoly that only hurts American consumers.
Many other American citizens share my views, and we vote. We remember what happened in late October 1998 (namely the enactment of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), we're not impressed, and we vote. If you vote for the interests of Disney rather than the interests of the American people as expressed by civil rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you're not doing your job as an elected representative of the people of the State of Indiana, and you'll pay dearly for it come Election Day. Or you can gain the respect of your constituents by opposing excessive monopoly rights for copyright holders.
Please do the right thing for America and don't vote for the CBDTPA without first strengthening the fair use protections and properly narrowing the definition of a "digital media device."
Sincerely,
[image]
Damian Yerrick
The requirements for such a system are on pages 8 and 9. I have bolded some of the portions that I see as representing a significant weakening of the most disturbing parts of the bill:
In achieving the goals of setting open security system standards that will provide effective security for copyrighted works, the security system standards shall ensure, to the extent practicable, that
the standard security technologies are
reliable;
renewable;
resistant to attack;/* is this possible? */
readily implemented;
modular;
applicable to multiple technology platforms;
extensible;
upgradable;
not cost prohibitive; and
any software portion of such standards is based on open source code.
In achieving the goal of promoting as many lawful uses of copyrighted works as possible, while preventing as much infringement as possible, the encoding rules shall take into account the limitations on the exclusive rights of copyright owners, including the fair use doctrine.
Later in the bill, starting on page 13:
IN GENERAL, a manufacturer, importer, or seller of digital media devices may not [place into interstate commerce] a digital media device unless the device [follows the standards].
The definition of a "digital media device" on pages 15 and 16 seem to apply not to the computer itself but the Windows Media Player software and the DVD decoder card.
No person may knowingly apply to a copyrighted work, that has been distributed to the public, a security measure that uses a standard security technology in violation of the encoding rules adopted under section 3.
Those encoding rules are limited by the limitations on a copyright holder's exclusive rights.
Better yet: A well-reasoned, non-hysterical actual snail-mail letter, printed and signed and stuck in an envelope.
No. Faxes are better. Do you think that the fallout from the anthrax scare has fully left the minds of those who handle mail sent to members of Congress?
Hollings said that "any device that can legitimately play, copy, or electronically transmit one or more categories of media also can be misused for illegal copyright infringement, unless special protection technologies are incorporated."
We'll just have to tell Congress that "any device that can legitimately hit a baseball can be misused for illegal murder. How do you think MLB would react if the state legislatures tried to outlaw the game of baseball?"
One bright spot for free software advocates: Any software that implements the standards must be "based on open source code." Hardware copy-protection schemes can remain proprietary.
I'd assume that a rational judge would consider "open source" to mean what the community thinks it means. So unless the standards require hardware (which Silicon Valley will vehemently object to), the GNU/Linux system may still be able to decode SSS^H^H^H CBDTPA encoded material.
Sure Sun isn't being nice to open source, but I highly doubt they would charge for the jdk or implement costly licensing.
If Sun Microsystems owns stock in at least one European telephone company, then Sun is (indirectly) charging for access to the J2SDK. The license for the J2SDK does not permit redistribution outside an organization. The J2SDK is available free of charge over the Internet, but it takes an hour and a half to download over a 56K connection, and many European telcos bill local telephone calls (e.g. to ISPs) by the minute at rates approaching $2/hour in some areas. If the telco turns a profit, and Sun owns part of the telco, then Sun gets part of the dividends.
Anti-trollbait disclaimer: Yes, trolls, I know that such charges are a drop in the bucket, but parent stated that Sun is probably not charging at all. No, trolls, I don't know whether or not Sun has any European telco holdings.
It's OK as long as it isn't called TETRIS�
on
SedSokoban
·
· Score: 1
Me too, until I got a Cease and Desist order from the Tetris company!
As long as you don't call it TETRIS®, you should be fine. Games in and of themselves cannot be copyrighted, and falling tetrominoes aren't patented in the US or the EU. Call it something weird like BinaryBlocks Game or freepuzzlearena or something, and The Tetris Company will have no grounds for a trademark lawsuit. Sorry Henk...
Imagine the new iPod announcement there: US$599 gets you a 0-gig iPod, a $100 expense voucher for driving to the US border, and a $100 budget to buy a 10-gig drive there.
The proposed CA$21/GB levy applies only to recording devices on which no sounds have ever been fixed. Apple could just cut a deal with Vivendi to put an MP3.com sampler on each unit before shipping it.
The fact that anyone would even CONSIDER signing contracts like that (or that they are legally allowable or at all enforceable, or even morally comprehensible), is disturbing.
Three words: Standard Industry Contract. In some professions, all employers' contracts may all have the same reprehensible and non-negotiable terms (non-compete, all your IP are belong to us, etc). The major record labels are among such employers; indies don't count because unlike the major labels, they don't have the money to buy four minutes of expensive ad time on every Clear Channel station in the USA.
If they weren't enough of an invention, they wouldn't be patentable, right?
Grandparent was referring to code, which is copyrighted far more often than it is patented. Under U.S. law, the term "invention" relates to patents, whereas copyrighted things are called "works."
It'd be interesting to have an agency that you could send your e-mail address and preferences to that could be checked by potential buyers of e-mail lists.
s/agency/single point of failure/g
It could serve as a free service to the people who care enough to act on their need not to recieve spam.
And watch it get DOSsed off the Net by the real spammers.
Any reputible company would check their databases with the 3rd party database and remove the e-mail addresses of people who opted out of all spam.
How would the 3rd party database recoup its bandwidth costs?
A dozen or so simulataneous downloads? Dont think that is going to help prevent the slashdor effect.
Slashdot linked sites that use BitTorrent technology will respond an order of magnitude faster, and that's never a bad thing. However, it might not exactly ease slashdottings until they release a Netscape plug-in for all major operating systems, as a larger than average proportion of Slashdot readers use Mozilla and non-Windows desktop environments.
Yeah, but that's $105 _Canadian_, which is, what,
a buck-seventy-five US $?
Actually, US$70. The ratio is very close to 3 to 2, so under the proposed tax^H^H^Hlevies, each gigabyte of space on a portable music player costs CA$21 == US$14.
actually the clause was intentionally worded in such a way as to ban virtual kiddie porn eg CG porn
CG porn != cartoon porn.
the key phrase was "or appears to be"
CG tries to look like a human. (See also Final Fantasy VII.) Cel animated cartoons don't. Perhaps I was unclear in referring to cel animation rather than photorealistic animation.
So I go look up 18 USC 2256(8)(B) and find the definition of kid porn to apply only to "visual depiction". This means kid porn is OK in novels. Also, the definition requires that that "such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct". It goes on to define a "minor" as "any person under the age of eighteen years". According to 1 USC 1, "persons" are "corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals". I don't see "cartoon character" included in the definition of a person (otherwise, copyright would be slavery, and 18 USC chapter 77 implements the Thirteenth Amendment which bans slavery); therefore, presenting hentai (animated kid porn) to adults remains lawful under Federal law.
Qt's non commercial edition does not work on Mac OS X.
Besides, QT 2.3 non-commercial for Windows works only with Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, whose MSRP is $550. That's six months' wages for some people I know. It does not work with popular Win32 compilers MinGW (free software based on GCC) or LCC (free as in beer).
I have addressed only the limitations of the current Qt distributions. To answer trolls who may try to poke holes in my argument as it applies to OpenOffice.org: Yes, I already know that the current build processes for OpenOffice.org and Mozilla also require MSVC. Yes, I already know that cheaper versions of MSVC exist, but MSVC Professional is the cheapest available version that performs even minimal optimization. The cheaper versions of MSVC don't optimize the code at all; some don't even permit redistribution of binaries compiled with the software.
It's probably more like 6,000 words in each of 10 languages.
Just wait for audio compression technology and storage technology to advance, and you'll be able to fit six million forms of communication into one protocol droid, model C3PO.
I knew that, but Disney's Pinocchio does belong to Disney. The last non-Disney feature film to feature Pinocchio (that is, New Line's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996) starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas as the wooden boy, which incidentally stayed closer to the novel than Disney's version did) flopped at the box office because American consumers do not want Pinocchio; they want Disney's Pinocchio.
I dare you to name one good Disney movie that they didn't rip off from someone else
60k words?... not too many people have a spoken vocabulary that large.
Humans don't really need thousands of words to communicate. Some spoken languages have about 1000 words; others have fewer than 150. Indian Sign Language has about 200 words in common use.
Use BWT instead of LZ for even more diffusion
on
Optical Cryptography
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
How does one hide messages in reandom noise, though? Would it work to LZ-compress them, to make them appear random?
LZ+Huffman (i.e. deflate, the core of gzip and pkzip) works, but you get more compression in a Burrows-Wheeler based scheme such as bzip2. More compression => more entropy per coded symbol => more resistance to known plaintext attacks.
It was a weak attempt at humor because the ten user limit ON THEIR SERVER just happened to match MSFT's hard coded limit on the MSFT workstation OS.
Actually, if I recall right, Windows NT, 2K, and XP workstation operating systems don't limit incoming TCP connections to ten but rather incoming connections to IIS Personal Edition. (Note that IIS serves HTTP 403.9 error messages instead of "connection refused" messages.) If you're using Apache and friends instead of IIS, you can not only handle more connections but also protect yourself from Revenge of Son of CV.
* Ports for P2P apps, AIM, ICQ, etc., are blocked for everyone but IT.
You can save hundreds of dollars a month by switching from long distance to AOL Instant Messenger, especially if you have numerous contacts in faraway lands.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Senators Bayh and Lugar and Mr. Souder: Good job... to a point. The proposed Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act is an improvement over Sen. Hollings's earlier drafts of the bill formerly known as SSSCA, but it still leaves much to be desired. The entertainment industry is a $4 billion industry and one of the United States' largest exporters. I can follow the Disney Company's reasoning in wanting to protect its constitutional monopoly (U.S. Const. 1.8.8, implemented by 17 USC) on its copyrighted works. But the electronics industry is a $40 billion dollar industry. I see the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act as potentially hurting technology more than it helps entertainment, leading to a net *reduction* in the GDP and a shift in the terms of trade not favorable to the United States. I'm afraid that the entertainment industry will ignore the parts of the bill that protect fair use, just as it has ignored similar provisions in 17 USC 1201 (part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). A $2,500 maximum penalty for encoding a work so as to unduly restrict fair use? Give me a break; that's pocket change to Hollywood. Giving the copyright industry a loophole around fair use will serve only to erode the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press. I also fear that the courts may interpret the definition of a "digital media device" too loosely so as to include any computer no matter its purpose. This may compromise what useful work can be done with a computer. Just look at the fallout from the DMCA: it has had a significant chilling effect on encryption and security research, forcing professors to shut up lest they accidentally reveal some secret on how to circumvent the trivial protections that Hollywood places on media. Plus, contrary to its title, this bill does little to further consumer broadband. Specifically, it does not address how to create an infrastructure for competition in the Internet access market when the local telephone monopolies control the telephone lines and the local cable monopolies control the cable lines, an oligopoly that only hurts American consumers. Many other American citizens share my views, and we vote. We remember what happened in late October 1998 (namely the enactment of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), we're not impressed, and we vote. If you vote for the interests of Disney rather than the interests of the American people as expressed by civil rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you're not doing your job as an elected representative of the people of the State of Indiana, and you'll pay dearly for it come Election Day. Or you can gain the respect of your constituents by opposing excessive monopoly rights for copyright holders. Please do the right thing for America and don't vote for the CBDTPA without first strengthening the fair use protections and properly narrowing the definition of a "digital media device." Sincerely, [image] Damian Yerrick
When is the code used in hardware no longer software?
When it's implemented as a netlist in silicon (e.g. from verilog or vhdl source code) rather than as instructions for
When it's eligible for mask work protection (17 USC chapter 9) rather than standard copyright.
Read the bill; an AC has posted the link to its text.
The definition of a "digital media device" on pages 15 and 16 seem to apply not to the computer itself but the Windows Media Player software and the DVD decoder card.
Those encoding rules are limited by the limitations on a copyright holder's exclusive rights.
Better yet: A well-reasoned, non-hysterical actual snail-mail letter, printed and signed and stuck in an envelope.
No. Faxes are better. Do you think that the fallout from the anthrax scare has fully left the minds of those who handle mail sent to members of Congress?
Because this bill will not pass. It will not. I bet you five dollars.
Four years ago, when we were in this position with regard to the DMCA, Slashdot regulars were saying the same thing.
They lost their bets.
Please send your five dollars to the EFF instead.
--Damian Yerrick, card-carrying member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Hollings said that "any device that can legitimately play, copy, or electronically transmit one or more categories of media also can be misused for illegal copyright infringement, unless special protection technologies are incorporated."
We'll just have to tell Congress that "any device that can legitimately hit a baseball can be misused for illegal murder. How do you think MLB would react if the state legislatures tried to outlaw the game of baseball?"
One bright spot for free software advocates: Any software that implements the standards must be "based on open source code." Hardware copy-protection schemes can remain proprietary.
I'd assume that a rational judge would consider "open source" to mean what the community thinks it means. So unless the standards require hardware (which Silicon Valley will vehemently object to), the GNU/Linux system may still be able to decode SSS^H^H^H CBDTPA encoded material.
Sure Sun isn't being nice to open source, but I highly doubt they would charge for the jdk or implement costly licensing.
If Sun Microsystems owns stock in at least one European telephone company, then Sun is (indirectly) charging for access to the J2SDK. The license for the J2SDK does not permit redistribution outside an organization. The J2SDK is available free of charge over the Internet, but it takes an hour and a half to download over a 56K connection, and many European telcos bill local telephone calls (e.g. to ISPs) by the minute at rates approaching $2/hour in some areas. If the telco turns a profit, and Sun owns part of the telco, then Sun gets part of the dividends.
Anti-trollbait disclaimer: Yes, trolls, I know that such charges are a drop in the bucket, but parent stated that Sun is probably not charging at all. No, trolls, I don't know whether or not Sun has any European telco holdings.
Me too, until I got a Cease and Desist order from the Tetris company!
As long as you don't call it TETRIS®, you should be fine. Games in and of themselves cannot be copyrighted, and falling tetrominoes aren't patented in the US or the EU. Call it something weird like BinaryBlocks Game or freepuzzlearena or something, and The Tetris Company will have no grounds for a trademark lawsuit. Sorry Henk...
Imagine the new iPod announcement there: US$599 gets you a 0-gig iPod, a $100 expense voucher for driving to the US border, and a $100 budget to buy a 10-gig drive there.
The proposed CA$21/GB levy applies only to recording devices on which no sounds have ever been fixed. Apple could just cut a deal with Vivendi to put an MP3.com sampler on each unit before shipping it.
The fact that anyone would even CONSIDER signing contracts like that (or that they are legally allowable or at all enforceable, or even morally comprehensible), is disturbing.
Three words: Standard Industry Contract. In some professions, all employers' contracts may all have the same reprehensible and non-negotiable terms (non-compete, all your IP are belong to us, etc). The major record labels are among such employers; indies don't count because unlike the major labels, they don't have the money to buy four minutes of expensive ad time on every Clear Channel station in the USA.
If they weren't enough of an invention, they wouldn't be patentable, right?
Grandparent was referring to code, which is copyrighted far more often than it is patented. Under U.S. law, the term "invention" relates to patents, whereas copyrighted things are called "works."
It'd be interesting to have an agency that you could send your e-mail address and preferences to that could be checked by potential buyers of e-mail lists.
s/agency/single point of failure/g
It could serve as a free service to the people who care enough to act on their need not to recieve spam.
And watch it get DOSsed off the Net by the real spammers.
Any reputible company would check their databases with the 3rd party database and remove the e-mail addresses of people who opted out of all spam.
How would the 3rd party database recoup its bandwidth costs?
A dozen or so simulataneous downloads? Dont think that is going to help prevent the slashdor effect.
Slashdot linked sites that use BitTorrent technology will respond an order of magnitude faster, and that's never a bad thing. However, it might not exactly ease slashdottings until they release a Netscape plug-in for all major operating systems, as a larger than average proportion of Slashdot readers use Mozilla and non-Windows desktop environments.
Yeah, but that's $105 _Canadian_, which is, what, a buck-seventy-five US $?
Actually, US$70. The ratio is very close to 3 to 2, so under the proposed tax^H^H^Hlevies, each gigabyte of space on a portable music player costs CA$21 == US$14.
actually the clause was intentionally worded in such a way as to ban virtual kiddie porn eg CG porn
CG porn != cartoon porn.
the key phrase was "or appears to be"
CG tries to look like a human. (See also Final Fantasy VII.) Cel animated cartoons don't. Perhaps I was unclear in referring to cel animation rather than photorealistic animation.
I am not a lawyer.
See subsection 8 specifically subsection 8B.
So I go look up 18 USC 2256(8)(B) and find the definition of kid porn to apply only to "visual depiction". This means kid porn is OK in novels. Also, the definition requires that that "such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct". It goes on to define a "minor" as "any person under the age of eighteen years". According to 1 USC 1, "persons" are "corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals". I don't see "cartoon character" included in the definition of a person (otherwise, copyright would be slavery, and 18 USC chapter 77 implements the Thirteenth Amendment which bans slavery); therefore, presenting hentai (animated kid porn) to adults remains lawful under Federal law.
I am not a lawyer.
Qt's non commercial edition works on Windows.
Qt's non commercial edition does not work on Mac OS X.
Besides, QT 2.3 non-commercial for Windows works only with Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, whose MSRP is $550. That's six months' wages for some people I know. It does not work with popular Win32 compilers MinGW (free software based on GCC) or LCC (free as in beer).
I have addressed only the limitations of the current Qt distributions. To answer trolls who may try to poke holes in my argument as it applies to OpenOffice.org: Yes, I already know that the current build processes for OpenOffice.org and Mozilla also require MSVC. Yes, I already know that cheaper versions of MSVC exist, but MSVC Professional is the cheapest available version that performs even minimal optimization. The cheaper versions of MSVC don't optimize the code at all; some don't even permit redistribution of binaries compiled with the software.
It's probably more like 6,000 words in each of 10 languages.
Just wait for audio compression technology and storage technology to advance, and you'll be able to fit six million forms of communication into one protocol droid, model C3PO.
Pinocchio does not belong to Disney!
I knew that, but Disney's Pinocchio does belong to Disney. The last non-Disney feature film to feature Pinocchio (that is, New Line's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996) starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas as the wooden boy, which incidentally stayed closer to the novel than Disney's version did) flopped at the box office because American consumers do not want Pinocchio; they want Disney's Pinocchio.
I dare you to name one good Disney movie that they didn't rip off from someone else
Fantasia.
60k words? ... not too many people have a spoken vocabulary that large.
Humans don't really need thousands of words to communicate. Some spoken languages have about 1000 words; others have fewer than 150. Indian Sign Language has about 200 words in common use.
As long as it doesn't look like Haley Joel Osment [from "A.I." (2001)] I'll probably buy two.
But what about Jonathan Taylor Thomas?
Sony's not the only company attempting to recreate Pinocchio. It'll face competition from ZMP Inc's "Pino" robot.
Question: Who will get the Disney deal first?
How does one hide messages in reandom noise, though? Would it work to LZ-compress them, to make them appear random?
LZ+Huffman (i.e. deflate, the core of gzip and pkzip) works, but you get more compression in a Burrows-Wheeler based scheme such as bzip2. More compression => more entropy per coded symbol => more resistance to known plaintext attacks.
It was a weak attempt at humor because the ten user limit ON THEIR SERVER just happened to match MSFT's hard coded limit on the MSFT workstation OS.
Actually, if I recall right, Windows NT, 2K, and XP workstation operating systems don't limit incoming TCP connections to ten but rather incoming connections to IIS Personal Edition. (Note that IIS serves HTTP 403.9 error messages instead of "connection refused" messages.) If you're using Apache and friends instead of IIS, you can not only handle more connections but also protect yourself from Revenge of Son of CV.
* Ports for P2P apps, AIM, ICQ, etc., are blocked for everyone but IT.
You can save hundreds of dollars a month by switching from long distance to AOL Instant Messenger, especially if you have numerous contacts in faraway lands.