So by this ruling if I made a cover song and distributed CDs paying the mechanical licensing fees, I wouldn't be permitted to distribute that cover song over the internet without a negotiated license. That's bullshit.
Radio stations have to pay to be able to air music. So do supermarkets, discotheques, or anyone that plays copyrighted music for large audiences. So, why should websites all of a sudden form an exception?
Radio stations have to pay, but they don't have to get a license. There is a statutory license provided to them. Why should websites all of a sudden form an exception?
I think you misunderstood the intent of my original post. I meant to say that I *don't* believe that cracking can kill people.
I agree with you completely. I was just saying that even if it were possible to kill someone by cracking, it would still be stupid to make extra laws about it, because the current ones already cover it.
Personally I can't come up with a scenario where cracking (over the internet or other public systems) can kill people, but it's always possible to artificially create one.
Anyway, let's not argue, I think we're on the same side here:).
This is simply not the case, cracking cannot actually get people killed.
Moreover, cracking for the purpose of killing is murder, and cracking with the unintentional side effect of killing is negligent homicide. I'm not sure exactly how terrorism is defined, but I would bet that cracking and killing people for the purposes of terror would be terrorism.
What did the victim lose - ok try prestige, good will (these BTW are measured and worth money to a business)
WTF prestige or good will did the victim lose? I don't even know who the hell the victim was. Besides, are you saying he "stole" good will? I think that's a ridiculous argument.
Its still illegal
So is going 56 in a 55 mph zone. So is buying something over the internet without paying a tax to your state (in most states). What's your point? My point is that he did nothing which should be illegal, because he did not harm anyone. Even if he did harm someone's prestige, or good will, like you say, he did that only by stating true facts about them. Stating true facts about someone and harming their prestige is not illegal, nor should it be.
Its still theft - the minute he copied the data it was theft.
So I just copied your writeup, was that theft? Was it theft when I copied, or when I pasted?
Nahh our opinions on theft are different beacuse i have to spend money and time keeping pieces of work like this out of my systems
As do I. I'm just not selfish about it. Do lawyers copyright their court arguments? They spend money and time creating those arguments, and they are "stolen" (your words) all the time in other cases referencing them. I don't see lawyers going out of business. Why? Because they are paid for their ability to make new arguments, to adapt to new situations, not to copy and paste things which they've already created. The software industry should be no different. I have no need to be paid over and over again for a program I write. Once is enough, thank you. The time I'd save being able to "steal" (your words) other people's code would more than make up for the money I'd lose because some idiot knows how to copy and paste.
Besides all of that, whether or not this is theft is not an opinion. It is a fact. And my belief as to whether or not what this guy did should be illegal has nothing to do with the fact that is not theft. Those who try to imply that it should be illegal, such as yourself, sometimes claim that it is theft to make it sound a lot worse than it is. Copying is not theft. It's not murder, it's not rape, it's not treason, it's not terrorism. It might be copyright infringement. It might be industrial espionage (in this case it wasn't though).
But hey, if it really is theft, I guess we can get rid of copyright law, since it's redundant. Theft is already illegal, so why bother making it illegal again. (I'll give you a hint, because no jury would convict someone of theft just because they made a copy of something).
No, the code was never resold to anyone. It would be like finding someone's wallet, copying down the credit card numbers with the intent to defraud, and then returning the wallet. Which isn't illegal unless there were more than 15 numbers. See US Code Section 1029:
Whoever - (3) knowingly and with intent to defraud possesses fifteen or more devices which are counterfeit or unauthorized access devices;
FWIW, Brian West broke that one too, since the passwords are access devices (although if they were encrypted, he only broke it if 15 of them were cracked, I suppose).
Nor should it ever be illegal to possess a number. It's only a number. I give my credit card number to strangers all the time. I haven't yet had something stolen from me, and even if I did I would simply refuse to pay for it. Sure, the reason for that is mainly the law, but I don't have any problem with a law against fraudulently misrepresenting another person to buy on that person's credit. If I go into a bar and say that I'm you and ask them to put it on your tab, you have no responsibility to pay for my bill. If I get caught, I've committed fraud, and if I don't, then the bartender loses that money.
What if someone finds someone's wallet and memorizes the credit card numbers? Should we make that illegal too? I'm sorry, I don't buy this intellectual property bullshit. If you don't want your information being public, don't put it on a public network.
The argument over intellectual property is so much crap - they were on a secured password protected section of a server he had no legal access to and also i will point out one belonging to a competitor of his - and he stole them thus commiting theft.
theft - The act or an instance of stealing; larceny
steal - To take (the property of another) without right or permission
larceny - The unlawful taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of permanently depriving the owner; theft.
This was not theft. Copyright infringement perhaps, unlawful computer access definately, but not theft.
Re:read the story folks
on
Brian West Update
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Nothing is missing. It's more like if you saw a pinball machine which had unlimited free games, played for an hour, and then reported it to the owner.
May I ask what company that would be? I thought all the networks were owned by larger companies which subsidized them. I also thought that they got royalties from the cable companies under the statutory licensing of the secondary transmissions.
Judging from your post, I'll assume that you believe memories, knowledge, and "soul" don't result merely from complex physical processes.
Define physical. A soul has the ability to act on physical objects. This is evidenced by my typing this. A soul is acted upon by physical objects. This is evidenced by my replying to your writeup. If something can be acted upon by physical objects, and acts upon physical object, what about it is different from a physical object itself?
Is an electron physical? Why? No one has ever seen one. Sure, it can be observed indirectly, but so can a soul. Sure, it follows a predictable probability pattern, but so does a soul. You could define a soul as that which cannot be descibed by any mathematical formula, but then you're including just about every elementary particle, since they all exhibit random behavior at some planck's scale.
I fully agree they wouldn't serve for teleportation, but hundreds of years from now there may be ways to selectively interact with the interior without any destructive consequences.
Umm, wouldn't that violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
The reason that they are dirt cheap was the reason for my original post. People ignore them. Thus, advertisers are not willing to pay much to have them posted. Thus, dot-coms that rely on being paid to post them are failing.
Most mainstream dot-coms that rely on advertising as their only revenue source are failing, just like most mainstream newspapers and magazines which rely on advertisments as their only revenue source fail (or a road which relied on billboard ads as its only revenue source). Even broadcast television gets revenues from places other than advertising nowadays.
The biggest problem with advertising on the internet is that it tries to be interactive. Sure that works if you have a really unique idea or have the lowest prices, but most companies' advertising relies on repetition. They blast you with the same thing over and over and over again and eventually a larger percentage will buy their product. College screen savers are good for this, and the college will make a little extra money off it. They won't be able to fund the college, or even the computer lab, with it, of course.
I know this may sound like a foreign concept to some...but you're in class to learn.
Maybe that's supposed to be the point, but I went to class to get a degree, not to learn. Maybe 25% of my classes I benefitted from actually attending. Maybe another 25% I went to merely because attendence was required. Then the other 50% I never went to at all.
Depending on what school you're going to, using the internet during class time might be the best way to learn.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just have the professor ask any student bothering other students to leave? I don't see why any sort of technical solution has to come into play.
What are the legitimate uses of encrypted email for those without something to hide?
To overthrow the new government if the Taliban captures Washington and gains access to all U.S. communications. If Afghanistan had country-wide, free, unrestricted information, it would have been much harder for the Taliban to take over in the first place.
Why even make the site 'public'? Restrict access, and don't have a link on your main page pointing to a hyper-secret-photo.
Because that would defeat the whole point of using steganography. The idea is that terrorists can talk to each other without the government knowing that they're even talking to each other. If only one person visits the site, you might as well just email the encrypted data.
If 10,000 people all view the picture, how do you know which one is actually receiving the information? It's just one more layer of "security".
Very difficult to do, especially if it's a startup company.
If it's a startup company you're taking a big risk by working there. If you want stability, work for Microsoft, and even then, put a few months pay into a low risk savings account. On the other hand, if you can afford to take the risk, many of these startup companies are the most fun and highest paying jobs to work for.
If the risk is really a problem for you, find out about the main investors and executives. When I started working for my first internet company, a simple search on Yahoo showed lots of information about the previous investments that our lead investor made, and I even found out some information about the former companies of our CEO. If I had particularly cared (I didn't mind risk, so I didn't), I could have contacted those previous companies and asked for even more information.
Above all, remember that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Maybe you really have won the lottery by getting that company to choose you over all the other candidates, or maybe that company has just found the biggest sucker. Ultimately you always have to take some risk, but there are ways you can minimize it.
All it takes to show "intent to distribute" is whatever the agents/judge think is more than one person can consume...
What is your argument here, that someone who doesn't have intent to distribute will be considered by a judge to have it? Show me one single case of an individual who spent a single day in jail over federal drug charges without distributing those drugs. Let alone life.
I don't agree with this nation's drugs laws, but they're simply not used to infringe upon your right to cultivate and consume cannibus in the privacy of your home without interference from the federal government. The constitution is cut and dry on this issue, the federal government does not have jurisdiction.
Further, I doubt there was ever a case where an individual spent life in prison based on state law for the private home cultivation and consumption of cannibus. Sure, it's technically illegal in some states, but so is doing 56 miles per hour in a 55 mile per hour zone. Hell, you could go to jail for failure to pay use tax on your internet purchases. Doesn't mean anyone ever has, or ever will.
I fully support repealing all drug laws on all levels of government. In fact, if I happened to live in one of those states which had jail time for personal home cultivation and consumption I'd be working on its repeal. But anyone who tries to tell you that you could spend life in federal prison over the private cultivation is simply pushing an agenda which I support through lies which I don't support.
I think I'm missing it. How is the GPL being subverted?
It is being subverted in the sense that it is essentially equivalent to the BSD license.
a GPL version of the library could be created if someone had an objection to paying for it.
Likewise a GPL version of Mac OS X could be created if someone had an objection to paying for it. The point is that enhancements can be made to a product without releasing those enhancements under the GPL. The only realistic legal difference I can see with the GPL and the BSD license would be for minor bug fixes which can't be realistically made into a library. And that's only one of the many legal holes in the GPL.
If I rip the copyright notice out of a book I buy and then resell it, that doesn't mean that the person I sold it to can then make as many copies as he likes.
First of all, I never said that the copyright notice was removed. The software is modified, copied, and distributed by person A under the permission of the copyright holder. Secondly, I never said that Person B was the one making the copies, Person A makes the copies, Person B only redistributes those copies.
Person B above *only* has first sale rights, and so does person C. They still don't have the right to distribute a single copy that has added to the original.
What is "the original" in this case? Person B can redistribute the single copy (or multiple copies, if s/he bought multiple copies) of whatever s/he received.
IOW, they can't pull out single pages and write a story around that page because it would be a derivitive work.
But if Person A pulls out those single pages and writes a story around that page under the permission of the copyright holder, then Person A sells a 100 copies of that story to Person B under the permission of the copyright holder, Person B has the first sale right to resell those copies under any conditions s/he chooses.
Each person down the chain of first sales would have less than or equal to the information that the previous person had.
On this point I agree. Personally I think that Person A would also have the right to distribute modified copies without distributing the original, but that point is much harder to argue because it comes down to the question of whether or not the GPL is a binding contract. So I have been forced to enter into the scenario multiple entities in order to get around that fact. It would be similar to a situation where a license prohibits reverse engineering, but because the reverse engineering is done by one entity and then his/her work is given to another entity in a clean room, that second entity cannot be held liable for breach of contract (since the second entity has never agreed to the contract).
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So by this ruling if I made a cover song and distributed CDs paying the mechanical licensing fees, I wouldn't be permitted to distribute that cover song over the internet without a negotiated license. That's bullshit.
Radio stations have to pay to be able to air music. So do supermarkets, discotheques, or anyone that plays copyrighted music for large audiences. So, why should websites all of a sudden form an exception?
Radio stations have to pay, but they don't have to get a license. There is a statutory license provided to them. Why should websites all of a sudden form an exception?
I think you misunderstood the intent of my original post. I meant to say that I *don't* believe that cracking can kill people.
I agree with you completely. I was just saying that even if it were possible to kill someone by cracking, it would still be stupid to make extra laws about it, because the current ones already cover it.
Personally I can't come up with a scenario where cracking (over the internet or other public systems) can kill people, but it's always possible to artificially create one.
Anyway, let's not argue, I think we're on the same side here :).
This is simply not the case, cracking cannot actually get people killed.
Moreover, cracking for the purpose of killing is murder, and cracking with the unintentional side effect of killing is negligent homicide. I'm not sure exactly how terrorism is defined, but I would bet that cracking and killing people for the purposes of terror would be terrorism.
"...as the inventor of PGP, I was 'overwhelmed with feelings of guilt'" - Phillip Zimmerman
What did the victim lose - ok try prestige, good will (these BTW are measured and worth money to a business)
WTF prestige or good will did the victim lose? I don't even know who the hell the victim was. Besides, are you saying he "stole" good will? I think that's a ridiculous argument.
Its still illegal
So is going 56 in a 55 mph zone. So is buying something over the internet without paying a tax to your state (in most states). What's your point? My point is that he did nothing which should be illegal, because he did not harm anyone. Even if he did harm someone's prestige, or good will, like you say, he did that only by stating true facts about them. Stating true facts about someone and harming their prestige is not illegal, nor should it be.
Its still theft - the minute he copied the data it was theft.
So I just copied your writeup, was that theft? Was it theft when I copied, or when I pasted?
Nahh our opinions on theft are different beacuse i have to spend money and time keeping pieces of work like this out of my systems
As do I. I'm just not selfish about it. Do lawyers copyright their court arguments? They spend money and time creating those arguments, and they are "stolen" (your words) all the time in other cases referencing them. I don't see lawyers going out of business. Why? Because they are paid for their ability to make new arguments, to adapt to new situations, not to copy and paste things which they've already created. The software industry should be no different. I have no need to be paid over and over again for a program I write. Once is enough, thank you. The time I'd save being able to "steal" (your words) other people's code would more than make up for the money I'd lose because some idiot knows how to copy and paste.
Besides all of that, whether or not this is theft is not an opinion. It is a fact. And my belief as to whether or not what this guy did should be illegal has nothing to do with the fact that is not theft. Those who try to imply that it should be illegal, such as yourself, sometimes claim that it is theft to make it sound a lot worse than it is. Copying is not theft. It's not murder, it's not rape, it's not treason, it's not terrorism. It might be copyright infringement. It might be industrial espionage (in this case it wasn't though).
But hey, if it really is theft, I guess we can get rid of copyright law, since it's redundant. Theft is already illegal, so why bother making it illegal again. (I'll give you a hint, because no jury would convict someone of theft just because they made a copy of something).
You, are very wrong.
No, you are.
"Waa, waa, I can't be wrong, I'm 1337! Information wants to be free! He didn't take anything! It isn't theft! Waa!"
Well, that was enlightening. If you would like a response as to why you are wrong, feel free to post again without being a dickhead.
It's theft. Any arguement to the contrary is bullshit.
No, the code was never resold to anyone. It would be like finding someone's wallet, copying down the credit card numbers with the intent to defraud, and then returning the wallet. Which isn't illegal unless there were more than 15 numbers. See US Code Section 1029:
FWIW, Brian West broke that one too, since the passwords are access devices (although if they were encrypted, he only broke it if 15 of them were cracked, I suppose).
Nor should it ever be illegal to possess a number. It's only a number. I give my credit card number to strangers all the time. I haven't yet had something stolen from me, and even if I did I would simply refuse to pay for it. Sure, the reason for that is mainly the law, but I don't have any problem with a law against fraudulently misrepresenting another person to buy on that person's credit. If I go into a bar and say that I'm you and ask them to put it on your tab, you have no responsibility to pay for my bill. If I get caught, I've committed fraud, and if I don't, then the bartender loses that money.
What if someone finds someone's wallet and memorizes the credit card numbers? Should we make that illegal too? I'm sorry, I don't buy this intellectual property bullshit. If you don't want your information being public, don't put it on a public network.
The argument over intellectual property is so much crap - they were on a secured password protected section of a server he had no legal access to and also i will point out one belonging to a competitor of his - and he stole them thus commiting theft.
This was not theft. Copyright infringement perhaps, unlawful computer access definately, but not theft.
Nothing is missing. It's more like if you saw a pinball machine which had unlimited free games, played for an hour, and then reported it to the owner.
May I ask what company that would be? I thought all the networks were owned by larger companies which subsidized them. I also thought that they got royalties from the cable companies under the statutory licensing of the secondary transmissions.
Judging from your post, I'll assume that you believe memories, knowledge, and "soul" don't result merely from complex physical processes.
Define physical. A soul has the ability to act on physical objects. This is evidenced by my typing this. A soul is acted upon by physical objects. This is evidenced by my replying to your writeup. If something can be acted upon by physical objects, and acts upon physical object, what about it is different from a physical object itself?
Is an electron physical? Why? No one has ever seen one. Sure, it can be observed indirectly, but so can a soul. Sure, it follows a predictable probability pattern, but so does a soul. You could define a soul as that which cannot be descibed by any mathematical formula, but then you're including just about every elementary particle, since they all exhibit random behavior at some planck's scale.
Still you need to know when to determine the spin and this information you do not have...
I fully agree they wouldn't serve for teleportation, but hundreds of years from now there may be ways to selectively interact with the interior without any destructive consequences.
Umm, wouldn't that violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
The reason that they are dirt cheap was the reason for my original post. People ignore them. Thus, advertisers are not willing to pay much to have them posted. Thus, dot-coms that rely on being paid to post them are failing.
Most mainstream dot-coms that rely on advertising as their only revenue source are failing, just like most mainstream newspapers and magazines which rely on advertisments as their only revenue source fail (or a road which relied on billboard ads as its only revenue source). Even broadcast television gets revenues from places other than advertising nowadays.
The biggest problem with advertising on the internet is that it tries to be interactive. Sure that works if you have a really unique idea or have the lowest prices, but most companies' advertising relies on repetition. They blast you with the same thing over and over and over again and eventually a larger percentage will buy their product. College screen savers are good for this, and the college will make a little extra money off it. They won't be able to fund the college, or even the computer lab, with it, of course.
I know this may sound like a foreign concept to some...but you're in class to learn.
Maybe that's supposed to be the point, but I went to class to get a degree, not to learn. Maybe 25% of my classes I benefitted from actually attending. Maybe another 25% I went to merely because attendence was required. Then the other 50% I never went to at all.
Depending on what school you're going to, using the internet during class time might be the best way to learn.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just have the professor ask any student bothering other students to leave? I don't see why any sort of technical solution has to come into play.
What are the legitimate uses of encrypted email for those without something to hide?
What are the legitimate uses of banning encrypted email for a country which has the support of its citizens?
What are the legitimate uses of encrypted email for those without something to hide?
To overthrow the new government if the Taliban captures Washington and gains access to all U.S. communications. If Afghanistan had country-wide, free, unrestricted information, it would have been much harder for the Taliban to take over in the first place.
Why use EBay when you can get CNN to distribute your stegonagraphically encoded messages for you?
Why even make the site 'public'? Restrict access, and don't have a link on your main page pointing to a hyper-secret-photo.
Because that would defeat the whole point of using steganography. The idea is that terrorists can talk to each other without the government knowing that they're even talking to each other. If only one person visits the site, you might as well just email the encrypted data.
If 10,000 people all view the picture, how do you know which one is actually receiving the information? It's just one more layer of "security".
Very difficult to do, especially if it's a startup company.
If it's a startup company you're taking a big risk by working there. If you want stability, work for Microsoft, and even then, put a few months pay into a low risk savings account. On the other hand, if you can afford to take the risk, many of these startup companies are the most fun and highest paying jobs to work for.
If the risk is really a problem for you, find out about the main investors and executives. When I started working for my first internet company, a simple search on Yahoo showed lots of information about the previous investments that our lead investor made, and I even found out some information about the former companies of our CEO. If I had particularly cared (I didn't mind risk, so I didn't), I could have contacted those previous companies and asked for even more information.
Above all, remember that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Maybe you really have won the lottery by getting that company to choose you over all the other candidates, or maybe that company has just found the biggest sucker. Ultimately you always have to take some risk, but there are ways you can minimize it.
All it takes to show "intent to distribute" is whatever the agents/judge think is more than one person can consume...
What is your argument here, that someone who doesn't have intent to distribute will be considered by a judge to have it? Show me one single case of an individual who spent a single day in jail over federal drug charges without distributing those drugs. Let alone life.
I don't agree with this nation's drugs laws, but they're simply not used to infringe upon your right to cultivate and consume cannibus in the privacy of your home without interference from the federal government. The constitution is cut and dry on this issue, the federal government does not have jurisdiction.
Further, I doubt there was ever a case where an individual spent life in prison based on state law for the private home cultivation and consumption of cannibus. Sure, it's technically illegal in some states, but so is doing 56 miles per hour in a 55 mile per hour zone. Hell, you could go to jail for failure to pay use tax on your internet purchases. Doesn't mean anyone ever has, or ever will.
I fully support repealing all drug laws on all levels of government. In fact, if I happened to live in one of those states which had jail time for personal home cultivation and consumption I'd be working on its repeal. But anyone who tries to tell you that you could spend life in federal prison over the private cultivation is simply pushing an agenda which I support through lies which I don't support.
I think I'm missing it. How is the GPL being subverted?
It is being subverted in the sense that it is essentially equivalent to the BSD license.
a GPL version of the library could be created if someone had an objection to paying for it.
Likewise a GPL version of Mac OS X could be created if someone had an objection to paying for it. The point is that enhancements can be made to a product without releasing those enhancements under the GPL. The only realistic legal difference I can see with the GPL and the BSD license would be for minor bug fixes which can't be realistically made into a library. And that's only one of the many legal holes in the GPL.
If I rip the copyright notice out of a book I buy and then resell it, that doesn't mean that the person I sold it to can then make as many copies as he likes.
First of all, I never said that the copyright notice was removed. The software is modified, copied, and distributed by person A under the permission of the copyright holder. Secondly, I never said that Person B was the one making the copies, Person A makes the copies, Person B only redistributes those copies.
Person B above *only* has first sale rights, and so does person C. They still don't have the right to distribute a single copy that has added to the original.
What is "the original" in this case? Person B can redistribute the single copy (or multiple copies, if s/he bought multiple copies) of whatever s/he received.
IOW, they can't pull out single pages and write a story around that page because it would be a derivitive work.
But if Person A pulls out those single pages and writes a story around that page under the permission of the copyright holder, then Person A sells a 100 copies of that story to Person B under the permission of the copyright holder, Person B has the first sale right to resell those copies under any conditions s/he chooses.
Each person down the chain of first sales would have less than or equal to the information that the previous person had.
On this point I agree. Personally I think that Person A would also have the right to distribute modified copies without distributing the original, but that point is much harder to argue because it comes down to the question of whether or not the GPL is a binding contract. So I have been forced to enter into the scenario multiple entities in order to get around that fact. It would be similar to a situation where a license prohibits reverse engineering, but because the reverse engineering is done by one entity and then his/her work is given to another entity in a clean room, that second entity cannot be held liable for breach of contract (since the second entity has never agreed to the contract).