No one cares about patent laws. Most people using mp3s are downloading them without paying for them, do you think they care about breaking some patent laws when they steal their mp3 encoder? No way.
Ogg Vorbis is most useful for streaming media servers. Get the decoder into a lot of the client software people are already using (winamp, wimp, and real), and the free streaming server will "sell" like hotcakes, if it's any good.
That doesn't make any sense. You were saying, or at least I understood you to be saying, that it isn't illegal to give a speech at a conference descibing how to circumvent access controls. Now you seem to be implying that if you read out source code (i.e. explicitly tell people how to circumvent access controls) that that would or might be illegal. Which is it?
It depends. If you give a speech at a conference which incites a riot, that would be illegal. If you give a speech at a conference which is slanderous, that's illegal. If you give a speech at a conference which divulges trade secrets, that's illegal. But the mere act of giving a speech at a conference describing how to circumvent access controls is not illegal. As in, it may or may not be legal depending on what else you do.
I see nothing in the DMCA that distinguishes between source code and any other description of a process.
"Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish any rights of free speech or the press for activities using consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing products."
The question is, is reading source code a form of speech? I think the meat of the question comes down to whether or not the people listening to the speech understand what the speaker is saying, or are just blindly typing things into their computer. That was what the Kaplan ruling said, anyway. It seems clear to me that there is no difference between transferring a program via ethernet and transferring it via sound waves.
To be clear on this : you do think that saying "in order to access the disk, you must type the following into your computer..." followed by explicit instructions could be illegal? Would "you muct click the icon that looks like..." be illegal too?
Re: "in order to access", depending on the specific instructions, it could probably be construed as trafficking in a service. It would have to be weighed against the free speech rights of the speaker, of course, and would depend on how understandable what must be typed in would be to the person involved. "you must click on the icon that looks like..." is doubtfully illegal. I'll be so bold as to say that it's not illegal (barring extremely strange circumstances such as "you must click on the icon that looks like Dmitry Sklyarov, in other words, has a huge wart on it's face", which would be slanderous).
If you do think these explanations are or might be illegal then what type of explanation could be given that would not be illegal? Basically any explanation that isn't complete enough to genuinely explain?
Well, I think any explanation which could be understood by the audience would probably be legal. Obviously anything with a commercially significant purpose other than to break the law would be legal. If the information is "disseminated in a manner reasonably calculated to advance the state of knowledge or development of encryption technology" it might be legal. Freedom of speech is the freedom of communication between humans. Really it's up to the courts to decide, ultimately the supreme court if it comes to that. The Kaplan ruling is not the final word on the matter, but you should read it. Ultimately it'll probably be up to the supreme court to set some more explicit guidelines, such as they did in the provisions of fair use.
Like someone said elsewhere, the best (and only I think) way to partially fix this problem is to write a variant of the worm (Code Green?:)) that fixes all the servers before it gets out of hand.
I bet if this was an apache/Linux bug that variant would be out already. Seriously.
It fights fire with water... A fire in someone else's house... Which would have set your house on fire too, except it's made of fireproof material (or you have a "firewall" between your houses).
May or may not be legal when you look at it that way. I'm pretty sure you can legally break into someone's house if you see flames coming out of the roof.
Again, could you please explain the relevence of the fact that he holds the copyright to the code.
The copyright holder has the exclusive right to distribute the work. So in order to distribute the work, ElcomSoft needed Sklyarov's permission (at least, you can presume they had it since he worked for the company and wasn't suing them for copyright infringement). Unless Sklyarov had already given a blanket permission for distribution before learning about it's distribution in the U.S., it seems that he's certainly guilty by not withdrawing that permission. Hopefully his lawyers have already fabricated a fake license agreement signed before any of the U.S. distributions took place, but I'd say there's certainly some evidence of a crime. Now that I've read up on probable cause as the standard of evidence necessary for an arrest warrant, I'd even say that was reached.
Now maybe there will be some defense evidence to counter this at some preliminary hearings, but as of now it seems like a trial will occur.
No, that probably had more to do with the fact that he was listed as the copyright owner of the program, not the CEO. Further, I can't even find the name of the CEO, are you pulling that out of your ass? Andrey Malyshev is listed as the Chief of software development, and he appears to be the only other criminal that the FBI knew was going to be there. For all you and I know, they tried to get a warrant for his arrest too, and failed.
And what is this evidence precisely? Evidently you know something the rest of us don't.
The specific evidence is in the complaint, that he is an employee of Elcomsoft, and that he is listed on the products as the copyright holder.
Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime. A person who aids or advises another in committing a crime may be guilty of aiding and abetting, and may be criminally liable for the acts of the other person, as well.
Actually, now that I see that he is listed as the copyright holder, he might actually lose this case after all. On this point though I would defer to any legal experts, as I'm not very familiar with what constitutes conspiracy or aiding and abetting. I'm also not very familiar with exactly how much evidence it takes to get an arrest warrant. But I think as a non-lawyer I am knowledgable enough to say that there is some evidence that he was involved in a conspiracy (blah blah blah).
Do you honestly think that breaking copyright law is equivalent to selling cocaine?
No, I think that breaking copyright law is worse than selling cocaine, but that neither should be illegal.
And can you honestly say that people who break copyright laws are more hurtful than crack whores who abuse their kids, or Columbian drug cartels that regularly assasinate people?
No, but I can honestly say that people who break copyright laws and abuse their kids are more hurtful than people who use cocaine and abuse their kids, and that copyright infringement cartels that regularly assassinate people are worse than Columbian drug cartels that regularly assassinate people.
When it comes down to it, Sklyarov isn't even guilty of circumventing copyright protection measures.
He may or may not be, just as a cocaine manufacturer may or may not be guilty of using cocaine.
He's guilty of writing a useful consumer tool. This product was not designed to copy e-books for mass distribution, it was designed to take back fair use rights which were unfairly removed from the product.
The drug manufacturer is likewise guilty of manufacturing a useful consumer tool. The product is not designed to kill you or to make you beat your kids, it is designed to make you feel good. Further, the primary purpose of his product is for a judge and a jury to decide. There is sufficient evidence for his arrest. He has not yet been convicted of anything.
Just because it can also be used for mass redistribution shouldn't make it illegal.
RTFDCMA some time. Just because it can also be used for mass redistribution doesn't make it illegal.
What's the difference between a hammer and this tool?
The difference is that the primary purpose of this tool is to circumvent copyright protection.
I've read the DMCA several times, and I can't find it.
And it's confirmed in the DeCSS case, where "judge" Kaplan even outlawed links to a circumvention device.
From the DeCSS ruling:
To the extent that defendants have linked to sites that automatically commence the process of downloading DeCSS upon a user being transferred by defendants? hyperlinks, there can be no serious question. Defendants are engaged in the functional equivalent of transferring the DeCSS code to the user themselves. Substantially the same is true of defendants? hyperlinks to web pages that display nothing more than the DeCSS code or present the user only with the choice of commencing a download of DeCSS and no other content. The only distinction is that the entity extending to the user the option of downloading the program is the transferee site rather than defendants, a distinction without a difference.
Hyperlinks were outlawed because they were considered equivalent to trafficking. While I don't agree with that particular part of the ruling, that is quite different from giving a talk at a conference (as long as that talk does not involve reading out the source code, anyway).
And SDMI sure thought giving such a speech was illegal under the DMCA, as they sent legal threats to Professor Felten who had broken SDMI, though they, like Adobe, backpedaled publically after getting what they wanted.
I can send you a legal threat for sneezing, that doesn't make it illegal, nor does it even imply that I think it's illegal.
Well, he knew about it, and still helped them, which probably makes him an accomplice. There's certainly enough evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to traffic the software to get an arrest warrant, and without a really good lawyer, probably enough to go to trial. IANAL, so I don't know exactly how much involvement is actually necessary in this situation, and I haven't read any arguments or responses to the question from those involved. It's possible he just has a shitty lawyer who never even brought the issue up. There will probably be a preliminary motion as soon as the trial begins, and possibly even earlier than that.
They have not charged him with the only thing that he DID do on US soil that was a violation of the DMCA: giving his talk at the conference where he explained how to circumvent E-book encryption.
That would be because giving a talk at a conference explaining how to circumvent E-book encryption is not a criminal offense, and I challenge you to show me where in the U.S. Code it says it is.
Sklyarov (I knew I got that spelling wrong last time) was not arrested for giving a talk. He was arrested for trafficking in a product designed to circumvent copyright protection measures.
I am comparing that to being arrested for trafficking in cocaine. I believe the two are equal. In fact, I'd probably have more sympathy for the cocaine trafficker, since cocaine is less often used to hurt someone else. But for the record, I don't think either of them should be illegal.
Doesn't matter, the only reason why there ever was a warrant in the first place was the talk.
Technically true, because without the talk they wouldn't have been able to arrest him. There's no way Russia would have cooperated to extradite.
Sklyarov was only A programmer who worked on the software, in Russia, under Russian law. He never broke a single American law in American jurisdiction.
And for this reason he will probably be found not guilty. But there is some evidence that he was involved in a conspiracy to sell the product, to US citizens living in the US, using a US company. Probably not enough evidence to convict, and probably not even enough to surivive a preliminary motion to drop the charges, if he has a good lawyer. But the fact of the matter is he probably was involved in a conspiracy to import the product into the US. Again, the charges have nothing to do with the talk, and if the government is smart they won't even bring up the talk in the trial, if there is one, and they can completely eliminate one source of possible appeal.
The fact that the charges are about anything BUT the talk he gave is proof of what they really are about, and proof of just how vulnerable the DMCA really is to challenge.
The fact of the matter is that the FBI was involved for a long time before the talk was even planned. They tried to shut the company down, and they failed. Then idiot boy decided he was going to come to the US and shove it in their faces. That's why idiot boy is now in jail. I'm not sure how this constitutes a challenge to the DMCA. Reality and legality are two seperate issues.
Skylarov has become an unwilling pawn in a political game.
As much as a cocaine manufacturer whose company smuggles drugs in from Mexico, who decides to come to the U.S. to give a talk on how cocaine is made.
Pawn in a political game? Sure. Unwilling? There are a whole lot of occupations in Russia which don't involve smuggling illegal products into the US. And most people who have those occupations that do involve importation of illegal products aren't stupid enough to come into the US and give a talk about it.
Unfortunately, the warrant for his arrest came out before he even gave the talk. The warrant was for importation and distribution of (blah blah blah). It seems the company he worked for sold and distributed the product to Americans through an American company.
A) I don't see why he should be held accountable for the actions of his company, we didn't exactly go and arrest the CEO and programmers of Napster for copyright infringement. It is likely that he will be found not guilty for this reason, but that they can even hold him in the first place is something we should be protesting.
but B) You shouldn't be knowingly selling software which is illegal in the US to US citizens living in the US, using a US company to handle the payment. Skylarov (I think I misspelled it) isn't a martyr. He was trying to make a buck, and he was using the copyright system itself to do that (his product was not released for free, it was copyrighted). While I feel sorry for him, because I disagree with the law, there are millions of people in jail for less harmful (such as drug) offenses. If you do the crime, you need to be willing to do the time, regardless of whether or not you agree with the law.
Wait a second... Mechanical licensing refers to the (already enacted) compulsory license for the act of making a copy of the song, not the specific instance of the song. In other words, if I make a cover of "Baby One More Time", I can sell CDs of my cover by paying (probably Britney, through the Harry Fox Agency) under a compulsory mechanical license. I also believe this is what record companies pay to the artist. Generally the artist owns the rights to the song, and the record company owns the rights to the recording.
Mechanical licensing does not give you a compulsory license to copy an actual recording. This is most likely why the RIAA wants this, and the artists do not. It allows the owner of the recording to distribute over the internet without negotiating a license with the owner of the song.
Re:Random bits that are in Pi somewhere
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 1
So, if your reasoning and my reasoning are correct, then pi is a rational number, but someone smarter than me proved that it isn't a rational number.
Well, there is one other possibility. This assumes that both pi and e are normal, which hasn't yet been proven. But if e is in pi, and pi is normal, then I would think e too must be normal. So this would then imply that there are no normal numbers at all. Hmm, that doesn't seem likely, I'd say 0.1234567891011121314... is pretty much by definition both normal and irrational.
So what's more likely is that inductive proofs are simply not able to show what I have attempted to show. I kind of suspected this, and the post was more of a troll of sorts (similar to the proofs that 1=0 and such).
the difference of course is when you buy Windows part of the money goes to the people who make it, and part to the brainchild Bill Gates who conceived it. Whereas when you buy Linux, 0% goes to Linus and probably 0% to most of the hard working programmers, too.
Re:Random bits that are in Pi somewhere
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 2
Hmmm... Assume temporarily that all strings of the same length appear with the same frequency in pi.
Hypothesis: e is in Pi
Base case: the first digit of e is in pi. 3.141592... 2 is in pi.
Inductive case: If the first n digits of e are in pi, then the first n+1 digits of e are in pi. We know that all strings of the same length appear with the same frequency in pi. We also know that at least one string of length n+1 digits appears in pi. Therefore at least n+1 digits of e are in pi.
Thus, having shown the inductive case, we have proven the hypothesis, that all digits of e are in pi (consecutively). Therefore e is in pi! QED.
Listening to a CD does not require the authority the copyright holder. Using a CD player does not require the authority of the copyright holder. Correcting errors does not require the authority of the copyright holder. Unless there is a patent on the process of playing a CD, which someone else claims there is, but I did not see any evidence of this. Actually, even if there is a patent, this probably wouldn't apply unless the patent holder is also the copyright holder.
By your interpretation of the DMCA, browser makers need the permission of the copyright holder in order to display a webpage. HMTL is a technological measure which requires the treatment of data to gain access to the work. And you are clearly removing the measure when you parse the HTML and display it on the screen.
I wonder how far the MPAA is from going all the way - deeming "a brain" as a circumvention device, and criminalize posession thereof.
Well, the DMCA does not say anything about mere "possession", and only covers devices "primarily" for circumvention, anyway. Read the DMCA some time. It's really hard to be for copyright but against the DMCA.
I know you're joking, but I really think that attacking the DMCA is going to get us nowhere. Even if it is deemed unconstitutional, there is no doubt that it'll just be changed slightly to close the loopholes and reinstated. The DMCA merely tries to enforce a law which most of the country already breaks, by closing some loopholes that some unscrupulous individuals have used to get around it.
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No one cares about patent laws. Most people using mp3s are downloading them without paying for them, do you think they care about breaking some patent laws when they steal their mp3 encoder? No way.
Ogg Vorbis is most useful for streaming media servers. Get the decoder into a lot of the client software people are already using (winamp, wimp, and real), and the free streaming server will "sell" like hotcakes, if it's any good.
At $2000, wearables might finally hit a lot of toilets
No, that's those $450 cameras.
That still leaves the point that either giving a speech that tells someone how to circumvent an access control is itself illegal or else it is not.
I believe that it would not be illegal unless it amounts to distribution of software or actual circumvention itself.
That doesn't make any sense. You were saying, or at least I understood you to be saying, that it isn't illegal to give a speech at a conference descibing how to circumvent access controls. Now you seem to be implying that if you read out source code (i.e. explicitly tell people how to circumvent access controls) that that would or might be illegal. Which is it?
It depends. If you give a speech at a conference which incites a riot, that would be illegal. If you give a speech at a conference which is slanderous, that's illegal. If you give a speech at a conference which divulges trade secrets, that's illegal. But the mere act of giving a speech at a conference describing how to circumvent access controls is not illegal. As in, it may or may not be legal depending on what else you do.
I see nothing in the DMCA that distinguishes between source code and any other description of a process.
"Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish any rights of free speech or the press for activities using consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing products."
The question is, is reading source code a form of speech? I think the meat of the question comes down to whether or not the people listening to the speech understand what the speaker is saying, or are just blindly typing things into their computer. That was what the Kaplan ruling said, anyway. It seems clear to me that there is no difference between transferring a program via ethernet and transferring it via sound waves.
To be clear on this : you do think that saying "in order to access the disk, you must type the following into your computer..." followed by explicit instructions could be illegal? Would "you muct click the icon that looks like..." be illegal too?
Re: "in order to access", depending on the specific instructions, it could probably be construed as trafficking in a service. It would have to be weighed against the free speech rights of the speaker, of course, and would depend on how understandable what must be typed in would be to the person involved. "you must click on the icon that looks like..." is doubtfully illegal. I'll be so bold as to say that it's not illegal (barring extremely strange circumstances such as "you must click on the icon that looks like Dmitry Sklyarov, in other words, has a huge wart on it's face", which would be slanderous).
If you do think these explanations are or might be illegal then what type of explanation could be given that would not be illegal? Basically any explanation that isn't complete enough to genuinely explain?
Well, I think any explanation which could be understood by the audience would probably be legal. Obviously anything with a commercially significant purpose other than to break the law would be legal. If the information is "disseminated in a manner reasonably calculated to advance the state of knowledge or development of encryption technology" it might be legal. Freedom of speech is the freedom of communication between humans. Really it's up to the courts to decide, ultimately the supreme court if it comes to that. The Kaplan ruling is not the final word on the matter, but you should read it. Ultimately it'll probably be up to the supreme court to set some more explicit guidelines, such as they did in the provisions of fair use.
Hopefully they'll throw in some human opponents, just for comparison sake.
Like someone said elsewhere, the best (and only I think) way to partially fix this problem is to write a variant of the worm (Code Green? :)) that fixes all the servers before it gets out of hand.
I bet if this was an apache/Linux bug that variant would be out already. Seriously.
it fights fire with fire but its still illegal.
It fights fire with water... A fire in someone else's house... Which would have set your house on fire too, except it's made of fireproof material (or you have a "firewall" between your houses).
May or may not be legal when you look at it that way. I'm pretty sure you can legally break into someone's house if you see flames coming out of the roof.
Again, could you please explain the relevence of the fact that he holds the copyright to the code.
The copyright holder has the exclusive right to distribute the work. So in order to distribute the work, ElcomSoft needed Sklyarov's permission (at least, you can presume they had it since he worked for the company and wasn't suing them for copyright infringement). Unless Sklyarov had already given a blanket permission for distribution before learning about it's distribution in the U.S., it seems that he's certainly guilty by not withdrawing that permission. Hopefully his lawyers have already fabricated a fake license agreement signed before any of the U.S. distributions took place, but I'd say there's certainly some evidence of a crime. Now that I've read up on probable cause as the standard of evidence necessary for an arrest warrant, I'd even say that was reached.
Now maybe there will be some defense evidence to counter this at some preliminary hearings, but as of now it seems like a trial will occur.
Several @home customers have written about slowed service today, but they're definitely not alone.
I've had slowed service today, but I think that's because I've been using Mozilla (which is now up to 69,428K in memory usage).
No, that probably had more to do with the fact that he was listed as the copyright owner of the program, not the CEO. Further, I can't even find the name of the CEO, are you pulling that out of your ass? Andrey Malyshev is listed as the Chief of software development, and he appears to be the only other criminal that the FBI knew was going to be there. For all you and I know, they tried to get a warrant for his arrest too, and failed.
And what is this evidence precisely? Evidently you know something the rest of us don't.
The specific evidence is in the complaint, that he is an employee of Elcomsoft, and that he is listed on the products as the copyright holder.
Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime. A person who aids or advises another in committing a crime may be guilty of aiding and abetting, and may be criminally liable for the acts of the other person, as well.
Actually, now that I see that he is listed as the copyright holder, he might actually lose this case after all. On this point though I would defer to any legal experts, as I'm not very familiar with what constitutes conspiracy or aiding and abetting. I'm also not very familiar with exactly how much evidence it takes to get an arrest warrant. But I think as a non-lawyer I am knowledgable enough to say that there is some evidence that he was involved in a conspiracy (blah blah blah).
What planet are you from?
Earth
Do you honestly think that breaking copyright law is equivalent to selling cocaine?
No, I think that breaking copyright law is worse than selling cocaine, but that neither should be illegal.
And can you honestly say that people who break copyright laws are more hurtful than crack whores who abuse their kids, or Columbian drug cartels that regularly assasinate people?
No, but I can honestly say that people who break copyright laws and abuse their kids are more hurtful than people who use cocaine and abuse their kids, and that copyright infringement cartels that regularly assassinate people are worse than Columbian drug cartels that regularly assassinate people.
When it comes down to it, Sklyarov isn't even guilty of circumventing copyright protection measures.
He may or may not be, just as a cocaine manufacturer may or may not be guilty of using cocaine.
He's guilty of writing a useful consumer tool. This product was not designed to copy e-books for mass distribution, it was designed to take back fair use rights which were unfairly removed from the product.
The drug manufacturer is likewise guilty of manufacturing a useful consumer tool. The product is not designed to kill you or to make you beat your kids, it is designed to make you feel good. Further, the primary purpose of his product is for a judge and a jury to decide. There is sufficient evidence for his arrest. He has not yet been convicted of anything.
Just because it can also be used for mass redistribution shouldn't make it illegal.
RTFDCMA some time. Just because it can also be used for mass redistribution doesn't make it illegal.
What's the difference between a hammer and this tool?
The difference is that the primary purpose of this tool is to circumvent copyright protection.
The DMCA says it's so.
I've read the DMCA several times, and I can't find it.
And it's confirmed in the DeCSS case, where "judge" Kaplan even outlawed links to a circumvention device.
From the DeCSS ruling:
Hyperlinks were outlawed because they were considered equivalent to trafficking. While I don't agree with that particular part of the ruling, that is quite different from giving a talk at a conference (as long as that talk does not involve reading out the source code, anyway).
And SDMI sure thought giving such a speech was illegal under the DMCA, as they sent legal threats to Professor Felten who had broken SDMI, though they, like Adobe, backpedaled publically after getting what they wanted.
I can send you a legal threat for sneezing, that doesn't make it illegal, nor does it even imply that I think it's illegal.
Well, he knew about it, and still helped them, which probably makes him an accomplice. There's certainly enough evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to traffic the software to get an arrest warrant, and without a really good lawyer, probably enough to go to trial. IANAL, so I don't know exactly how much involvement is actually necessary in this situation, and I haven't read any arguments or responses to the question from those involved. It's possible he just has a shitty lawyer who never even brought the issue up. There will probably be a preliminary motion as soon as the trial begins, and possibly even earlier than that.
They have not charged him with the only thing that he DID do on US soil that was a violation of the DMCA: giving his talk at the conference where he explained how to circumvent E-book encryption.
That would be because giving a talk at a conference explaining how to circumvent E-book encryption is not a criminal offense, and I challenge you to show me where in the U.S. Code it says it is.
Sklyarov (I knew I got that spelling wrong last time) was not arrested for giving a talk. He was arrested for trafficking in a product designed to circumvent copyright protection measures.
I am comparing that to being arrested for trafficking in cocaine. I believe the two are equal. In fact, I'd probably have more sympathy for the cocaine trafficker, since cocaine is less often used to hurt someone else. But for the record, I don't think either of them should be illegal.
Doesn't matter, the only reason why there ever was a warrant in the first place was the talk.
Technically true, because without the talk they wouldn't have been able to arrest him. There's no way Russia would have cooperated to extradite.
Sklyarov was only A programmer who worked on the software, in Russia, under Russian law. He never broke a single American law in American jurisdiction.
And for this reason he will probably be found not guilty. But there is some evidence that he was involved in a conspiracy to sell the product, to US citizens living in the US, using a US company. Probably not enough evidence to convict, and probably not even enough to surivive a preliminary motion to drop the charges, if he has a good lawyer. But the fact of the matter is he probably was involved in a conspiracy to import the product into the US. Again, the charges have nothing to do with the talk, and if the government is smart they won't even bring up the talk in the trial, if there is one, and they can completely eliminate one source of possible appeal.
The fact that the charges are about anything BUT the talk he gave is proof of what they really are about, and proof of just how vulnerable the DMCA really is to challenge.
The fact of the matter is that the FBI was involved for a long time before the talk was even planned. They tried to shut the company down, and they failed. Then idiot boy decided he was going to come to the US and shove it in their faces. That's why idiot boy is now in jail. I'm not sure how this constitutes a challenge to the DMCA. Reality and legality are two seperate issues.
Skylarov has become an unwilling pawn in a political game.
As much as a cocaine manufacturer whose company smuggles drugs in from Mexico, who decides to come to the U.S. to give a talk on how cocaine is made.
Pawn in a political game? Sure. Unwilling? There are a whole lot of occupations in Russia which don't involve smuggling illegal products into the US. And most people who have those occupations that do involve importation of illegal products aren't stupid enough to come into the US and give a talk about it.
Unfortunately, the warrant for his arrest came out before he even gave the talk. The warrant was for importation and distribution of (blah blah blah). It seems the company he worked for sold and distributed the product to Americans through an American company.
A) I don't see why he should be held accountable for the actions of his company, we didn't exactly go and arrest the CEO and programmers of Napster for copyright infringement. It is likely that he will be found not guilty for this reason, but that they can even hold him in the first place is something we should be protesting.
but B) You shouldn't be knowingly selling software which is illegal in the US to US citizens living in the US, using a US company to handle the payment. Skylarov (I think I misspelled it) isn't a martyr. He was trying to make a buck, and he was using the copyright system itself to do that (his product was not released for free, it was copyrighted). While I feel sorry for him, because I disagree with the law, there are millions of people in jail for less harmful (such as drug) offenses. If you do the crime, you need to be willing to do the time, regardless of whether or not you agree with the law.
Wait a second... Mechanical licensing refers to the (already enacted) compulsory license for the act of making a copy of the song, not the specific instance of the song. In other words, if I make a cover of "Baby One More Time", I can sell CDs of my cover by paying (probably Britney, through the Harry Fox Agency) under a compulsory mechanical license. I also believe this is what record companies pay to the artist. Generally the artist owns the rights to the song, and the record company owns the rights to the recording.
Mechanical licensing does not give you a compulsory license to copy an actual recording. This is most likely why the RIAA wants this, and the artists do not. It allows the owner of the recording to distribute over the internet without negotiating a license with the owner of the song.
So, if your reasoning and my reasoning are correct, then pi is a rational number, but someone smarter than me proved that it isn't a rational number.
Well, there is one other possibility. This assumes that both pi and e are normal, which hasn't yet been proven. But if e is in pi, and pi is normal, then I would think e too must be normal. So this would then imply that there are no normal numbers at all. Hmm, that doesn't seem likely, I'd say 0.1234567891011121314... is pretty much by definition both normal and irrational.
So what's more likely is that inductive proofs are simply not able to show what I have attempted to show. I kind of suspected this, and the post was more of a troll of sorts (similar to the proofs that 1=0 and such).
the difference of course is when you buy Windows part of the money goes to the people who make it, and part to the brainchild Bill Gates who conceived it. Whereas when you buy Linux, 0% goes to Linus and probably 0% to most of the hard working programmers, too.
Hmmm... Assume temporarily that all strings of the same length appear with the same frequency in pi.
Hypothesis: e is in Pi
Base case: the first digit of e is in pi. 3.141592... 2 is in pi.
Inductive case: If the first n digits of e are in pi, then the first n+1 digits of e are in pi. We know that all strings of the same length appear with the same frequency in pi. We also know that at least one string of length n+1 digits appears in pi. Therefore at least n+1 digits of e are in pi.
Thus, having shown the inductive case, we have proven the hypothesis, that all digits of e are in pi (consecutively). Therefore e is in pi! QED.
Listening to a CD does not require the authority the copyright holder. Using a CD player does not require the authority of the copyright holder. Correcting errors does not require the authority of the copyright holder. Unless there is a patent on the process of playing a CD, which someone else claims there is, but I did not see any evidence of this. Actually, even if there is a patent, this probably wouldn't apply unless the patent holder is also the copyright holder.
By your interpretation of the DMCA, browser makers need the permission of the copyright holder in order to display a webpage. HMTL is a technological measure which requires the treatment of data to gain access to the work. And you are clearly removing the measure when you parse the HTML and display it on the screen.
I wonder how far the MPAA is from going all the way - deeming "a brain" as a circumvention device, and criminalize posession thereof.
Well, the DMCA does not say anything about mere "possession", and only covers devices "primarily" for circumvention, anyway. Read the DMCA some time. It's really hard to be for copyright but against the DMCA.
I know you're joking, but I really think that attacking the DMCA is going to get us nowhere. Even if it is deemed unconstitutional, there is no doubt that it'll just be changed slightly to close the loopholes and reinstated. The DMCA merely tries to enforce a law which most of the country already breaks, by closing some loopholes that some unscrupulous individuals have used to get around it.