This 'piracy' as presented by the music industry is an old problem. Mix tapes and concert boot legs are old buisness. They just never got the attention of mp3's since they weren't easy to mass distribute. Mix tapes and other bootlegs often accomplished two things.
1) Help people collect rare, hard to find, and out of print material. Obviously to say that this hurts artists is bs.
2) Introduce people to new bands and new types of music. Liking the new music they go out and buy things by albums. Obviously this is actually a boon to artists and record companies.
mp3's do two similiar things. Most of what I and the people I deal with have small mp3 collections. These are primarily songs we own the album for, plan to buy the album for or can't find on albums. How this hurts anybody is lost on me.
I suggest looking at the ever popular jargon file. While it is a hacker language in it's own right, it also gives insight into how an artificially developed internet language might develop, especially the logical nature of computers.
Patents protect in the case of software the process, in the case of software it protects the algorythm. Copyrights (the other protection) actually protects the work itself, in software that means the source and binaries.
To me this seems to be especially dangerouse to fantasy roleplayers. Many of the things one does for roleplaying games, especially those set in modern or near future times, may be seen as planning violence. Needless to say since these are not threats to anybody, and are entirely fictitous they are protected by the first amendment, etc.
Most of the people who know what they are doing do not try to illegally access computers. As for the others, 90%+ are script kiddies so we already know how they operate... SATAN.
1. Government Encryption v. Citizens' rights: Do the people have the right to know? Is it outweighed by the governments need to protect national security, copyrights, etc? What rights do people have to decrypt data?
2. Citizens' Encryption v. Government: Is encryption a valid way to protect our privacy? Does the need to protect the public from criminals and nation threats override the right to privacy? What rights do people have to encrypt data?
I am not familiar with the legalities of the matter, however I have used geek sense to think about this, and how an ISP can be a publisher.
What is a publisher? Essentially the publisher is the person who owns the printing press, wether this be physical or electronic. Publishers are the ones that take the material, put it in a form to be distributed and then distribute it to the book stores and libraries.
What are the ISP's? The ISP's serve as libraries. They are essentially shelf-space to store the material being distributed over the web. They do not play a part in the content of the material when it is created, they just put it out where people can see it like a giant library.
Source code is only the step by step instructions for how to do something, in a special format granted, but still just instructions. Instructions on how to do something are legally protected speech. This includes instructions on how to break the law (such as DeCSS Source).
The binaries are compiled into object code they become a device capable of doing something. It is at this point that DeCSS is a device which violates the copyright laws.
Scripts would be protected instructions. Since they are not object code until they are interpretted they are protected speech, though running them is not.
My concern is that WAVE will unfairly target players of fantasy role playing games. This is do to the fact that their verbal and written speech with in the fantasy scenario in the game will be interpretted as repeated acts of violence (which is a `warning sign` listed by WAVE). The fact that fantasy role players have small groups of tight friends (at least in my experience) does not help much, since it often gives the impression of a criminal group.
How do you plan on protecting fantasy roleplayers and other similiar groups from being targeted by people who are ignorant about them?
They were not raided because of GURPS Cyber-Punk. The reason the FBI raided them was that they had found a copy of information lifted from a phone company computer posted on their BBS. It set a lot of prescedents, and has a lot of signifigance in the field of cyber law
Trade Secret? The idea makes me laugh. They trying to cover the fact that it doesn't take an expert to write a perl script that can generate one of these black lists.
The real threat to rights online is not the Millenium Copyright in and of itself but the presedences it sets. These establish a double standard for the internet and everything else.
<i>Criminal Tools</i>: In the physical (not the internet) world the US government does not pass laws against possessing tools that can be used to commit crimes. Crowbars, lockpicks, guns, etc are tools that COULD be used to commit a crime, but they are not outlawed and they where all designed for legitimate legal purposes. DeCSS COULD be used for piracy, but it too was designed for legitimate legal purposes, however it is illegal. Now if the government and other groups and individuals have nothing against this type of double standard, which strips away our rights, then it will be easier for them to set more in the future.
Yes, but at least when the hippies and civil rights activists linked arms around police chains the media wasn't treating it like they where crippling major cities. If a revolution this is, the media has decided for us already it is one via nuclear assault, so ii will be hard to get support behind.
The thing that worries me is the fact that so many are happpening. I doubt they where all planned by the same group, but that the 5 later DoS attack where instead copy cat crimes. Readers at Slashdot themselves said that crimes against the sites like the latter ones attacked would be easier than the "yahoo job"
Perhaps I high-bred model of "white list", "black list" and parent supervision would work best. Here is the idea:
The program keeps a black list of sides selected by some filter-esk software, a white list of safe sites. It gives parents and educaters some ideas about a site's content. The parent can then review the site and decide wether to add it to the black list, or the white list or not to either list.
Then the the internet browser is password protected, so little, little kids can only get into white list sites, older children can get into everything but black listed sites and adults can get into any site, and change the lists. There are some obviouse problems and details to work out for this scheme but I believe it to be more effective than one or the other, used in a school or private home setting.
The sad par is that at many sites these are being used as eye-candy and take away from the content. It is a sad day when a group is discrimenated against because people have started turning their backs on important content. I make my pages clear, simple, and with alt-tags for the few graphics there are
Okay, we have seen (hopefully) the standards censor-ware makers use to censor works by now. So lets see what happens if we apply these standards to a public library:
a)Most news magazines and newspapers would be censored, since they have all talked about the pornagraphy issue at one time one time or another.
b)The classics would be banned. A lot of them contain some sex and profanity and other censored key words.
c)Most medical refrence books would also be banned because of mentions of the word "Penis", "testicule" and "breast" to name a few.
d)Biology books that talk about the sexual reproduction of plants and animals would be banned. for containing the word "sex".
And I could keep going on until all you have left is the children's book section. Not a very interesting or useful library, now is it. That is what they are doing to the internet.
Most people don't realize the potential of the internet. Most users communicate between friends using e-mail and AIM, they shop and they do school research. But the internet is a forum to communicate ideas, and it has a much greater potential than that. It can be a medium to discuss ideas, change the way people view the world and even hold seriouse dialogs (such as this one (mostly)). Imagine what the great scholars of the scientific revolution (Galelio and his kin) could of accomplished if instead of having to think up ideas indpendently, and writing obtuse papers, if they could of pooled all of their collective knowledge and experience together. That is what the interenet is and what people should realize, a pool of information and experiences of the collective group of people who use it.
I am in the second generation of internet users, the one to whom Arpa-net is legend and to whom life with out a keyboard in our hands is unbarable. This is how I view the internet:
The printing press allowed people to send information all over the world, and save that information for all time. A great leap in the ability to share ideas and information. The internet is the modern printing press. It allows us to instintanously communicate ideas and information all around the world. When the printing press came around those with power feared it, because if they can not control information they can not use it to manipulate it the people. The same is true for the internet, those who oppose it do so because they fear it. Religously minded political orginizations fear the internet because it is a forum of reason, and much of it goes against their morals based on blind faith. Corporations fear the internet. As it was only people with the money to pay for it could gather great minds to work together to produce products. Now with the internet it is easier than ever for people to gather and share ideas, work, thus breaking the big buisness' monopoly. Since these minds can, and do, produce competing products, often times equal or superior to commercial products, the corporations are afraid. However a few people stood up for printed works, fought hard to protect the right to own books and printed material no matter their content. Today any country is frowned upon for regulating books. Now is the time we must speak up, and secure the rights on the internet, that we have for printed materials. Wether the enemy to free speach be an outdated government or companies who fear losing their market share, they must be stopped from controling the internet just as they where stopped from controlling the printing press.
This isn't neccesarily so. Many Usenet groups are a very close community of regular posters, and demonstrate the characteristics of anyother group of good friends.
The reason for the "The posts are the property of their poster" comments is due to one of the major diffrences between Usenet and internet sites. On Usenet it is an open forum, no one owns it, so there for it can never come back to hurt the person or group running a forum. However when a private individual or group runs a website (VA Linux for example) they own that site and what is said there can come back on them. They are trying to cover their flanks in case someone says something offensive in a post. This is similiar to the standard "The views expressed here do not neccesarily reflect the views of the managment" disclaimer.
These people are not the only people in this world who we need to worry about. For instance I attend a state funded university, which, unknown to us, was selling the personal data they had on us, which is quite a lot. Until recently, and maybe still, telemarkerters would buy lists of data off of the DMV. What these two examples point out is that no matter how closely we guard our data people will still get it.
This means that if we want to protect our privacy then we need to take action. Contact our legistlatures and demand that they pass laws protecting our privacy, let others know how their privacy is being sold off. Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries started a war to protect our freedoms, and it we must keep fighting to keep them.
Slashdot Mirror
This 'piracy' as presented by the music industry is an old problem. Mix tapes and concert boot legs are old buisness. They just never got the attention of mp3's since they weren't easy to mass distribute. Mix tapes and other bootlegs often accomplished two things.
1) Help people collect rare, hard to find, and out of print material. Obviously to say that this hurts artists is bs.
2) Introduce people to new bands and new types of music. Liking the new music they go out and buy things by albums. Obviously this is actually a boon to artists and record companies.
mp3's do two similiar things. Most of what I and the people I deal with have small mp3 collections. These are primarily songs we own the album for, plan to buy the album for or can't find on albums. How this hurts anybody is lost on me.
http://www.jargon.org
I suggest looking at the ever popular jargon file. While it is a hacker language in it's own right, it also gives insight into how an artificially developed internet language might develop, especially the logical nature of computers.
Patents protect in the case of software the process, in the case of software it protects the algorythm. Copyrights (the other protection) actually protects the work itself, in software that means the source and binaries.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
To me this seems to be especially dangerouse to fantasy roleplayers. Many of the things one does for roleplaying games, especially those set in modern or near future times, may be seen as planning violence. Needless to say since these are not threats to anybody, and are entirely fictitous they are protected by the first amendment, etc.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
Most of the people who know what they are doing do not try to illegally access computers. As for the others, 90%+ are script kiddies so we already know how they operate ... SATAN.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
1. Government Encryption v. Citizens' rights: Do the people have the right to know? Is it outweighed by the governments need to protect national security, copyrights, etc? What rights do people have to decrypt data?
2. Citizens' Encryption v. Government: Is encryption a valid way to protect our privacy? Does the need to protect the public from criminals and nation threats override the right to privacy? What rights do people have to encrypt data?
--
Hephaestus_Lee
I am not familiar with the legalities of the matter, however I have used geek sense to think about this, and how an ISP can be a publisher.
What is a publisher?
Essentially the publisher is the person who owns the printing press, wether this be physical or electronic. Publishers are the ones that take the material, put it in a form to be distributed and then distribute it to the book stores and libraries.
What are the ISP's?
The ISP's serve as libraries. They are essentially shelf-space to store the material being distributed over the web. They do not play a part in the content of the material when it is created, they just put it out where people can see it like a giant library.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
Source code is only the step by step instructions for how to do something, in a special format granted, but still just instructions. Instructions on how to do something are legally protected speech. This includes instructions on how to break the law (such as DeCSS Source).
The binaries are compiled into object code they become a device capable of doing something. It is at this point that DeCSS is a device which violates the copyright laws.
Scripts would be protected instructions. Since they are not object code until they are interpretted they are protected speech, though running them is not.
My concern is that WAVE will unfairly target players of fantasy role playing games. This is do to the fact that their verbal and written speech with in the fantasy scenario in the game will be interpretted as repeated acts of violence (which is a `warning sign` listed by WAVE). The fact that fantasy role players have small groups of tight friends (at least in my experience) does not help much, since it often gives the impression of a criminal group.
How do you plan on protecting fantasy roleplayers and other similiar groups from being targeted by people who are ignorant about them?
They were not raided because of GURPS Cyber-Punk. The reason the FBI raided them was that they had found a copy of information lifted from a phone company computer posted on their BBS. It set a lot of prescedents, and has a lot of signifigance in the field of cyber law
--Hephaestus Lee
Trade Secret? The idea makes me laugh. They trying to cover the fact that it doesn't take an expert to write a perl script that can generate one of these black lists.
--Hephaestus_Lee
The real threat to rights online is not the Millenium Copyright in and of itself but the presedences it sets. These establish a double standard for the internet and everything else.
<i>Criminal Tools</i>: In the physical (not the internet) world the US government does not pass laws against possessing tools that can be used to commit crimes. Crowbars, lockpicks, guns, etc are tools that COULD be used to commit a crime, but they are not outlawed and they where all designed for legitimate legal purposes. DeCSS COULD be used for piracy, but it too was designed for legitimate legal purposes, however it is illegal. Now if the government and other groups and individuals have nothing against this type of double standard, which strips away our rights, then it will be easier for them to set more in the future.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
Yes, but at least when the hippies and civil rights activists linked arms around police chains the media wasn't treating it like they where crippling major cities. If a revolution this is, the media has decided for us already it is one via nuclear assault, so ii will be hard to get support behind.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
Check out CNN's report about the second wave of major DoS attacks at >http://cnnfn.com/2000/02/08/technology/ yahoo/</a>
--
Hephaestus_Lee
What precautions has Slashdot taken to protect itself from attacks, and keep us informed on the bleding edge geek news?
--
Hephaestus_Lee
The thing that worries me is the fact that so many are happpening. I doubt they where all planned by the same group, but that the 5 later DoS attack where instead copy cat crimes. Readers at Slashdot themselves said that crimes against the sites like the latter ones attacked would be easier than the "yahoo job"
--
Hephaestus_Lee
Perhaps I high-bred model of "white list", "black list" and parent supervision would work best. Here is the idea:
The program keeps a black list of sides selected by some filter-esk software, a white list of safe sites. It gives parents and educaters some ideas about a site's content. The parent can then review the site and decide wether to add it to the black list, or the white list or not to either list.
Then the the internet browser is password protected, so little, little kids can only get into white list sites, older children can get into everything but black listed sites and adults can get into any site, and change the lists. There are some obviouse problems and details to work out for this scheme but I believe it to be more effective than one or the other, used in a school or private home setting.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
The sad par is that at many sites these are being used as eye-candy and take away from the content. It is a sad day when a group is discrimenated against because people have started turning their backs on important content. I make my pages clear, simple, and with alt-tags for the few graphics there are
--
Hepaestus_Lee
Okay, we have seen (hopefully) the standards censor-ware makers use to censor works by now. So lets see what happens if we apply these standards to a public library:
a)Most news magazines and newspapers would be censored, since they have all talked about the pornagraphy issue at one time one time or another.
b)The classics would be banned. A lot of them contain some sex and profanity and other censored key words.
c)Most medical refrence books would also be banned because of mentions of the word "Penis", "testicule" and "breast" to name a few.
d)Biology books that talk about the sexual reproduction of plants and animals would be banned. for containing the word "sex".
And I could keep going on until all you have left is the children's book section. Not a very interesting or useful library, now is it. That is what they are doing to the internet.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
Most people don't realize the potential of the internet. Most users communicate between friends using e-mail and AIM, they shop and they do school research. But the internet is a forum to communicate ideas, and it has a much greater potential than that. It can be a medium to discuss ideas, change the way people view the world and even hold seriouse dialogs (such as this one (mostly)). Imagine what the great scholars of the scientific revolution (Galelio and his kin) could of accomplished if instead of having to think up ideas indpendently, and writing obtuse papers, if they could of pooled all of their collective knowledge and experience together. That is what the interenet is and what people should realize, a pool of information and experiences of the collective group of people who use it.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
I am in the second generation of internet users, the one to whom Arpa-net is legend and to whom life with out a keyboard in our hands is unbarable. This is how I view the internet:
The printing press allowed people to send information all over the world, and save that information for all time. A great leap in the ability to share ideas and information. The internet is the modern printing press. It allows us to instintanously communicate ideas and information all around the world. When the printing press came around those with power feared it, because if they can not control information they can not use it to manipulate it the people. The same is true for the internet, those who oppose it do so because they fear it. Religously minded political orginizations fear the internet because it is a forum of reason, and much of it goes against their morals based on blind faith. Corporations fear the internet. As it was only people with the money to pay for it could gather great minds to work together to produce products. Now with the internet it is easier than ever for people to gather and share ideas, work, thus breaking the big buisness' monopoly. Since these minds can, and do, produce competing products, often times equal or superior to commercial products, the corporations are afraid. However a few people stood up for printed works, fought hard to protect the right to own books and printed material no matter their content. Today any country is frowned upon for regulating books. Now is the time we must speak up, and secure the rights on the internet, that we have for printed materials. Wether the enemy to free speach be an outdated government or companies who fear losing their market share, they must be stopped from controling the internet just as they where stopped from controlling the printing press.
--Hephaestus_Lee
--
This isn't neccesarily so. Many Usenet groups are a very close community of regular posters, and demonstrate the characteristics of anyother group of good friends.
-Hephaestus_Lee
The reason for the "The posts are the property of their poster" comments is due to one of the major diffrences between Usenet and internet sites. On Usenet it is an open forum, no one owns it, so there for it can never come back to hurt the person or group running a forum. However when a private individual or group runs a website (VA Linux for example) they own that site and what is said there can come back on them. They are trying to cover their flanks in case someone says something offensive in a post. This is similiar to the standard "The views expressed here do not neccesarily reflect the views of the managment" disclaimer.
--Hephaestus Lee
These people are not the only people in this world who we need to worry about. For instance I attend a state funded university, which, unknown to us, was selling the personal data they had on us, which is quite a lot. Until recently, and maybe still, telemarkerters would buy lists of data off of the DMV. What these two examples point out is that no matter how closely we guard our data people will still get it.
This means that if we want to protect our privacy then we need to take action. Contact our legistlatures and demand that they pass laws protecting our privacy, let others know how their privacy is being sold off. Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries started a war to protect our freedoms, and it we must keep fighting to keep them.
-Hephaestus_Lee