Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist seemed unsympathetic to those who want the law overturned.
"You want the right to copy people's works verbatim," he told Eldred's lawyer.
Why yes, sir, that's the whole point. That's what "public domain" means. Maybe if we can get past the knee-jerk incomprehension of "public domain", we can actually inject some sense into these proceedings. But probably not.
Doesn't the Ex Post Facto prohibition apply only to criminal and not civil proceedings? Although I guess since copyright penalties are criminal in nature, perhaps this would still apply.
Convictions or not, he's employed in the Executive branch at the behest of the President. Meaning that he pretty much has to do what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice say; if he has political differences with them, they'd better not show up on TV or in print.
Frankly, it's interesting that Colin Powell has been able to voice as much dissent with the administration as he has done in the past. Although he doesn't seem to be doing that so much recently.
That must be what Lessig could have really used in the courtroom today: cute female assistant DAs:)
Nope, if this was really L&O they'd be going to commercial, and I'd look at my watch and think "15 minutes to go? There's got to be at least one more plot twist in there...".
It's time for "three strikes" laws for legislators - vote in favor of three laws that are ruled unconstitutional within 5 or 10 years of their passage, and you're removed from office. (The 5 or 10 is to avoid a case where, after 30 years in Congress, the courts have so radically changed their view of the issue that your previously good law has now become unconstitutional.)
If you think Congress is bad with trying to pass unconstitutional laws, you should take a look at some state legislatures from time to time. Some states continue to pass abortion laws, for instance, that they know based on past cases will be ruled unconstitutional. They're just wasting the taxpayer's money, but they don't care because there's no feedback loop to force them to at least try to make good, constitutional law, or (better yet) none at all.
But if the next generation decides that 50 years (or anything less) is "more reasonable" to them, they still have to wait 100 years for the "just granted" copyrights to expire.
Not that I disagree with your point, but I don't see why, if retroactive copyright extensions are constitutional, a retroactive copyright contraction wouldn't also be constitutional. By the current reasoning that Congress seems to be going by, in 100 years they can decide to only protect copyrights on items created within the last ten years, or something like that. Retroactive copyright contraction would have the effect of removing the rights of some authors, true, but in just the same way that retroactive copyright extension removes some rights of the public.
I dunno, it all seems pretty clear to me. Guess that's why IANAL:)
I think it's more likely to be the case that the Turing machine 'tape' in our heads is not infinite, and thus keeps getting erased, reread, and reused over time. Thus explaining why it's possible to lose one's keys. A brain isn't a universal Turing machine since it doesn't have infinite storage, but then again neither is any computer we could build either. So if "being able to forget things" is your standard for thought, then eventually computers with enough on their minds will be able to forget things too, and in fact they'll have to if they want to get useful work done.
How can you be sure that you're not in fact executing instructions, really really fast, with some chance of error at each instruction? Aren't synapse firings basically bioelectrical intereactions based on simple threshold calculations? It's not surprising to me that you can't know about every synapse firing; once we have computer systems that are complex enough to be above caring about every individual instruction, we may find that it thinks as well. Or we may not be able to even tell, just like thinking bacteria in our crania might not be able to tell that we're thinking with those synapses. The base mechanisms of thought are not the thoughts themselves.
Frankly, I don't see how Joe User could install and operate either a 747 or the Shuttle. That's way too hard - we need transportation that Grandma can handle:)
But when you're talking about TCO, you have to consider the average admin. The average Windows admin won't know the command-line management stuff (such as it is, I admit I'm not too familiar with it either) while the average Linux/Solaris admin will know the command-line management tools. Does an MCSE cert include these tools? You can bet that a RHCE does. If every Windows admin had that extra training, they'd probably cost as much as a Linux admin does, wouldn't you think?
Besides, the whole point of Windows is that it's easy to use and even a monkey could manage it, right? That's been the prevailing point that Microsoft has been pushing for years now; it's a little disingenuous to turn around and say "but you can run it as easily as Linux if you invest in equivalent command-line training".
I'm surprised that so many people are settling if he's representing himself. Usually that's a pretty good sign that, with just a little legal help yourself, you could take him on and, if the case is as open-and-shut as/. says, successfully defend yourself. It's one thing when the plaintiff has high-powered legal help; it's a lot less intimidating if the plaintiff is some guy with a grudge in his basement.
Eventually somebody will put up a real legal fight against this guy, he'll make some dumb legal mistake, and he'll lose big. It's too bad that the little guys had to get thwacked before that could happen. They really should have banded together in defense - they could have hired a real lawyer and put him in his place pretty swiftly if they'd worked together. It sounds like he picked them off of the herd one-by-one, gradually building up steam, and now thinks that he's ready to take on the big boys.
Switching costs (training, downtime, etc.) are a one-time thing, though. The only recurring cost is possible increased tech support, which may be offset by the generally decreased tech support needs (X admins per Y users) that *nix desktops generally provide. When you compare recurring costs to recurring benefits (not paying software license fees), the picture may be different. It also depends on how long you're willing to amortize your switching costs over, although Telstra could just write it all down in one quarter as a special charge.
I agree that shareholders won't get anything back and neither will consumers, but that probably has a lot more to do with Telstra's near-monopoly situation than anything:)
And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench.
I would have to agree - for anyone who can read faster than the people around them can talk, email (or, in general, the written word) is vastly preferable to voicemail or the spoken word. I don't have time to listen to other people say "um" a bunch of times. If I wanted more of that I'd go to more meetings:)
I'd just be happy if I didn't have to listen to the moron in the other aisle whistling to himself at odd moments. That is so much more distracting than mere Abba when you're trying to work out something in your head and get it into the code.
How do you know that's not what you were really calculating? Without source to the client, there's no real way to prove that you were looking for evidence of alien transmissions as opposed to, say, cracking Iraqi short-wave signals in near real-time.
So far, distributed computing has succeeded on the basis of the cover story, not really on the basis of what's actually being computed.
I'm not sure that I agree about the relative track record; I'll admit that neither are perfect. Even with type-safe languages, bugs will occur. The solution is not better bug-proofing technology (although that would be nice as well); the solution is better oversight by IT customers of what their vendors are shoveling them. Customers should have more leverage against vendors who have customarily let them down in the past, whether it's sendmail or Outlook. And I think the leverage should include source code access in some cases, so that customers could hire an independent third party to audit the code if there are any concerns. Availability of source code to customers doesn't necessarily mean that the product itself has to be open source, although I do think that as a practical matter if consumers cultivate an appreciation for source access, they will tend to favor open-source alternatives in fields where there are such alternatives available.
Patching after the fact is a different argument; I'm more interested in giving IT consumers power before and after they purchase anything to verify that the software is going to work or is working properly.
As far as property goes, the situation is more like you left out your bike, unlocked, with a "Use Me" sign on it. Remember, no one is forcing their way into these networks; the network access is entirely permitted to any and all. It's not stealing if someone asked your bike if they could have it, and your bike said "Well, my owner says it's OK, so sure!"
It's true that phreaking consumed resources on the phone network, just the same way that wardriving would consume resources on a wireless network. I'm not arguing that there is no effect at all from these actions; I'm just arguing that the effect was authorized by the owner of the property. If you called a Ma Bell operator, and asked her to patch you through to the other side of the country for free, and she went and did it, did you steal anything? No, because you asked permission and were granted permission. I don't see why you shouldn't get the same benefit of the doubt if you asked a machine instead of a real live woman living in New Jersey.
I'm not an expert on the phreaking scene, so I'm not going to defend it entirely. Sometimes access information was obtained by social engineering which may have been fraudulent, and that is wrong. But if you just ask the phone network in its language to let you use it, and it lets you, then I say that you were authorized, in the sense that the human owners of the network delegated authorization responsibility to a machine, and the machine made the decision to let you in. The problem is not theft, it's just dumb gatekeepers and network owners who are unwilling to admit that they bought a stupid machine, or configured it to be stupid.
Really, the whole legality of it is immaterial anyway - if a network owner depends only upon the law to protect them, then they're wide open against a serious criminal enterprise that can cover its tracks properly. So maybe Nokia feels good about going after casual warchalkers; but Nokia's network equipment customers may still be left wide open. Likewise with unencrypted cell phones, poorly encrypted satellite TV, etc.
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More importantly, if you think you can get puppies from doing a girl, WTF was your biology teacher on?
Why yes, sir, that's the whole point. That's what "public domain" means. Maybe if we can get past the knee-jerk incomprehension of "public domain", we can actually inject some sense into these proceedings. But probably not.
Frankly, I wonder if maybe he shouldn't have stuck with his other job as an impeachment court robes designer.
Doesn't the Ex Post Facto prohibition apply only to criminal and not civil proceedings? Although I guess since copyright penalties are criminal in nature, perhaps this would still apply.
Convictions or not, he's employed in the Executive branch at the behest of the President. Meaning that he pretty much has to do what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice say; if he has political differences with them, they'd better not show up on TV or in print.
Frankly, it's interesting that Colin Powell has been able to voice as much dissent with the administration as he has done in the past. Although he doesn't seem to be doing that so much recently.
That must be what Lessig could have really used in the courtroom today: cute female assistant DAs :)
Nope, if this was really L&O they'd be going to commercial, and I'd look at my watch and think "15 minutes to go? There's got to be at least one more plot twist in there...".
It's time for "three strikes" laws for legislators - vote in favor of three laws that are ruled unconstitutional within 5 or 10 years of their passage, and you're removed from office. (The 5 or 10 is to avoid a case where, after 30 years in Congress, the courts have so radically changed their view of the issue that your previously good law has now become unconstitutional.)
If you think Congress is bad with trying to pass unconstitutional laws, you should take a look at some state legislatures from time to time. Some states continue to pass abortion laws, for instance, that they know based on past cases will be ruled unconstitutional. They're just wasting the taxpayer's money, but they don't care because there's no feedback loop to force them to at least try to make good, constitutional law, or (better yet) none at all.
Not that I disagree with your point, but I don't see why, if retroactive copyright extensions are constitutional, a retroactive copyright contraction wouldn't also be constitutional. By the current reasoning that Congress seems to be going by, in 100 years they can decide to only protect copyrights on items created within the last ten years, or something like that. Retroactive copyright contraction would have the effect of removing the rights of some authors, true, but in just the same way that retroactive copyright extension removes some rights of the public.
I dunno, it all seems pretty clear to me. Guess that's why IANAL :)
That wasn't flamebait, although practically any response to that comment would likely be flamebait. There is a difference :)
I think it's more likely to be the case that the Turing machine 'tape' in our heads is not infinite, and thus keeps getting erased, reread, and reused over time. Thus explaining why it's possible to lose one's keys. A brain isn't a universal Turing machine since it doesn't have infinite storage, but then again neither is any computer we could build either. So if "being able to forget things" is your standard for thought, then eventually computers with enough on their minds will be able to forget things too, and in fact they'll have to if they want to get useful work done.
How can you be sure that you're not in fact executing instructions, really really fast, with some chance of error at each instruction? Aren't synapse firings basically bioelectrical intereactions based on simple threshold calculations? It's not surprising to me that you can't know about every synapse firing; once we have computer systems that are complex enough to be above caring about every individual instruction, we may find that it thinks as well. Or we may not be able to even tell, just like thinking bacteria in our crania might not be able to tell that we're thinking with those synapses. The base mechanisms of thought are not the thoughts themselves.
Wait, I thought NASA was supposed to spy on hot chicks with that camera? Don't they read label directions?
Frankly, I don't see how Joe User could install and operate either a 747 or the Shuttle. That's way too hard - we need transportation that Grandma can handle :)
But when you're talking about TCO, you have to consider the average admin. The average Windows admin won't know the command-line management stuff (such as it is, I admit I'm not too familiar with it either) while the average Linux/Solaris admin will know the command-line management tools. Does an MCSE cert include these tools? You can bet that a RHCE does. If every Windows admin had that extra training, they'd probably cost as much as a Linux admin does, wouldn't you think?
Besides, the whole point of Windows is that it's easy to use and even a monkey could manage it, right? That's been the prevailing point that Microsoft has been pushing for years now; it's a little disingenuous to turn around and say "but you can run it as easily as Linux if you invest in equivalent command-line training".
More chilling words were never spoken. Thank you.
I'm surprised that so many people are settling if he's representing himself. Usually that's a pretty good sign that, with just a little legal help yourself, you could take him on and, if the case is as open-and-shut as /. says, successfully defend yourself. It's one thing when the plaintiff has high-powered legal help; it's a lot less intimidating if the plaintiff is some guy with a grudge in his basement.
Eventually somebody will put up a real legal fight against this guy, he'll make some dumb legal mistake, and he'll lose big. It's too bad that the little guys had to get thwacked before that could happen. They really should have banded together in defense - they could have hired a real lawyer and put him in his place pretty swiftly if they'd worked together. It sounds like he picked them off of the herd one-by-one, gradually building up steam, and now thinks that he's ready to take on the big boys.
Switching costs (training, downtime, etc.) are a one-time thing, though. The only recurring cost is possible increased tech support, which may be offset by the generally decreased tech support needs (X admins per Y users) that *nix desktops generally provide. When you compare recurring costs to recurring benefits (not paying software license fees), the picture may be different. It also depends on how long you're willing to amortize your switching costs over, although Telstra could just write it all down in one quarter as a special charge.
I agree that shareholders won't get anything back and neither will consumers, but that probably has a lot more to do with Telstra's near-monopoly situation than anything :)
I hear that you can't overclock 'em unless they're water-cooled :)
"...And creating a nuisance."
And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench.
http://www.arlo.net/lyrics/alices.shtml
I would have to agree - for anyone who can read faster than the people around them can talk, email (or, in general, the written word) is vastly preferable to voicemail or the spoken word. I don't have time to listen to other people say "um" a bunch of times. If I wanted more of that I'd go to more meetings :)
I'd just be happy if I didn't have to listen to the moron in the other aisle whistling to himself at odd moments. That is so much more distracting than mere Abba when you're trying to work out something in your head and get it into the code.
OK, I'm done venting now.
How do you know that's not what you were really calculating? Without source to the client, there's no real way to prove that you were looking for evidence of alien transmissions as opposed to, say, cracking Iraqi short-wave signals in near real-time.
So far, distributed computing has succeeded on the basis of the cover story, not really on the basis of what's actually being computed.
That was funny, well, never.
Wouldn't bleach be antibiotic, rather than just antibacterial? It kills mold, etc. as well.
Frankly, I can't believe you got so many to bite. Has the level of trolling fallen so far that people are no longer able to recognize them on sight?
I'm not sure that I agree about the relative track record; I'll admit that neither are perfect. Even with type-safe languages, bugs will occur. The solution is not better bug-proofing technology (although that would be nice as well); the solution is better oversight by IT customers of what their vendors are shoveling them. Customers should have more leverage against vendors who have customarily let them down in the past, whether it's sendmail or Outlook. And I think the leverage should include source code access in some cases, so that customers could hire an independent third party to audit the code if there are any concerns. Availability of source code to customers doesn't necessarily mean that the product itself has to be open source, although I do think that as a practical matter if consumers cultivate an appreciation for source access, they will tend to favor open-source alternatives in fields where there are such alternatives available.
Patching after the fact is a different argument; I'm more interested in giving IT consumers power before and after they purchase anything to verify that the software is going to work or is working properly.
As far as property goes, the situation is more like you left out your bike, unlocked, with a "Use Me" sign on it. Remember, no one is forcing their way into these networks; the network access is entirely permitted to any and all. It's not stealing if someone asked your bike if they could have it, and your bike said "Well, my owner says it's OK, so sure!"
It's true that phreaking consumed resources on the phone network, just the same way that wardriving would consume resources on a wireless network. I'm not arguing that there is no effect at all from these actions; I'm just arguing that the effect was authorized by the owner of the property. If you called a Ma Bell operator, and asked her to patch you through to the other side of the country for free, and she went and did it, did you steal anything? No, because you asked permission and were granted permission. I don't see why you shouldn't get the same benefit of the doubt if you asked a machine instead of a real live woman living in New Jersey.
I'm not an expert on the phreaking scene, so I'm not going to defend it entirely. Sometimes access information was obtained by social engineering which may have been fraudulent, and that is wrong. But if you just ask the phone network in its language to let you use it, and it lets you, then I say that you were authorized, in the sense that the human owners of the network delegated authorization responsibility to a machine, and the machine made the decision to let you in. The problem is not theft, it's just dumb gatekeepers and network owners who are unwilling to admit that they bought a stupid machine, or configured it to be stupid.
Really, the whole legality of it is immaterial anyway - if a network owner depends only upon the law to protect them, then they're wide open against a serious criminal enterprise that can cover its tracks properly. So maybe Nokia feels good about going after casual warchalkers; but Nokia's network equipment customers may still be left wide open. Likewise with unencrypted cell phones, poorly encrypted satellite TV, etc.