Bingo. That's why I wouldn't use MS word to compose anything that I wanted to be anonymous. If plain html was good enough for Tim Berners-Lee, it's good enough for me.
I think the difference is that Christianity (being a real religion, whether you agree with its tenets or not) has to take anybody, but Scientology (a religion concocted on a bet) would rather have rich loopy movie stars. Apparently it's pretty easy to fool them all of the time:)
By "impossible" I mean that within the framework of quantum electrodynamics it can *never* happen. Just like within the framework of arithematic you can never add one and one and get three. That's just how it works.
Just like the sums of the interior angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees? The Greeks would have assured you that the angles would *never* add up to more or less than that value, but we know now that in certain cases that is incorrect. The solution? See the framework as just a subset of a larger framework which doesn't make certain assumptions (in this case, the assumption that there are only two dimensions).
Saying "That's just how it works" is a cop-out. The entire mass of scientific knowledge is a set of theories with more or less supporting evidence behind each one. Things could change, or (more likely) someone will find a new approach to quantum theory that sidesteps the whole issue (which you sort-of mentioned). I'm just saying don't use assume that your current knowledge of the structure and limitations of reality are all exactly correct. Even assumptions with a fair amount of proof have been extended in strange directions in the light of new experimental approaches, better equipment, or better theories.
Fair enough - I can't argue with that. Like I said, you have to trust your hardware and OS not to add ID to your network transmissions and trust your apps not to embed ID in the content you create. Merely having unique ID on your machine isn't immediately a problem, it's really just an issue of who can find out this ID.
So ifconfig tells the driver to return the value you give it instead of the actual value. How do I know that this is the case? If you reboot, the address returns to it's former (permanent) value. You never touch the hardware.
It sounds like you are agreeing with the previous post that the MAC is fixed by the card (essentially burned in) rather than being software-configurable. But you started off by disagreeing with that idea. Which is it?
I don't care about the number that ifconfig prints out; I care about the MAC that other machines see on the wire from my ethernet card. The MAC on the wire can be changed, right?
(1) The unique MAC address on their ethernet card.
But this only identifies my card to other machines on the local network (on the same wire). Packets coming to me from the Internet just contain my IP address, which in my case is dynamic (although it doesn't seem to change day-to-day very often). Some cards allow you to change their MAC, if you're paranoid or running IPV6 (which is supposed to include the MAC in your IP address).
(2) The serial number in their modem ROM (See the ATIx series of commands)
Sorry, I don't have a modem so I can't comment. If you are dialed up, can the remote machine command your modem to return the serial number? I'm not familiar with the issue here.
(3) The unique serial number embedded in their BIOS ROM.
How, pray tell, are you going to get this from across the Internet? This is more-or-less equivalent to the PIII CPU ID - somehow software has to get this ID number off of your machine and send it out. As long as you run an OS that you trust not to do that, and there are no hidden hardware interfaces that can pass the ID directly from CPU or BIOS to the network card or modem, then you're safe even if you have a unique ID on your machine.
Well, except that some cards allow you to change your MAC address. You really only need MAC addresses to be unique on a particular network segment, rather than across the entire Internet. Of course, if you later rearrange your network and put two cards with the same MAC on the same segment, you'll have some interesting issues to track down...
Not to impugn your HCI credentials, but you're considering consistency between the interfaces used by many different users. The post to which you were replying was discussing one user having a variety of interfaces to choose from. That user could choose the interface which they found the most usable. These are really two orthogonal issues.
There's no reason that a computer couldn't be shipped with a default interface which is consistent with the expectations of most users, but allows for customization by a user who doesn't find the default interface particularly usable. Surely even a professional HCI designer would recognize that sometimes different interfaces are more usable for different people, depending on whether those people came from a Windows or *nix background, can touch type or not, and so on. Or do you happen to know the one exact interface which will raise everyone to unparalleled heights of efficiency? If so, please do tell.
I haven't noticed the various Linux window managers impeding my use of the system; in fact they have enhanced it once I found one that worked better for me than even the Windows interface used to. I will admit that it is possible to get some different interfaces for Windows too, but I agree with the original poster that Windows certainly isn't architected to provide the level of modularity and ease of switching interfaces that a Unix-like system has.
That's not the way it works - if you don't have a login ID (like any first-time visitor to this site), you will see a ton of AC first posts, grits, and so on. That is generally accepted to be a bad thing. Thus those AC posts are correctly moderated down.
If the post is a troll, off-topic, or flamebait, it should be moderated as such whether or not it is from an AC. It's too bad we don't have meta-meta-moderation, so that if anyone is meta-moderated down for correctly moderating down a troll, that meta-moderator will be meta-meta-moderated down.
AC posters want just one thing -- attention. Give it to them, and they just get worse. Deny them
attention, and they'll go elsewhere.
Since I read at +1, I give no attention to trolls, because they are already moderated below my sight-line. Thus I'm happy to have them moderated down. If I read at zero I would feel the same about trolls from ACs.
I've seen the Salon article (a very good wrap-up, BTW) but I don't think that whether the two killers were geeks or not is the real issue. The real issue is that parents, educators, administrators, and peers of geeks nationwide used the assumption that the killers were geeks to act with prejudice towards the geeks that they knew.
The story isn't "geeks are tormented, snap, and gun down classmates", it's "people think geeks are potential killers because they are loners and like computers, video games, the color black, and/or goth music".
The Media forced the authorities to act like nazis, forced geeks to be equated with nazis, forced us to watch it as if we were nazis, and forced parents to react like nazis, when in fact all there was was a drug overdose.
I agree with your sentiment in general, but I disagree with this particular comment. The media didn't force anyone to do anything. They may have misinformed the nation and the world, they may have over-sensationalized the Columbine killings, and they may have hurtled to the wrong conclusions like a speeding locomotive, but they didn't make educators, parents, and non-geeks act the way that they did in the weeks following Columbine.
People are ultimately responsible for their own actions, and only their own actions. Any "nazism" that occurred was because people thought that the ends were justified by any means - everything from name-calling to ostracism and civil rights abuses. The media just gives the nation a convenient excuse once the excitement is over. Even if the media could cover tragedies like Columbine in a sober, objective manner, the capacity of humans to hate and fear other humans just for being different would remain, and people would find other excuses for acting on those feelings.
Food for thought: I see more violence on the evening news than I have ever seen on the Internet.
[OT] Slashdot coders: after previewing, my HTML tags are gone from the "comment" text field. This makes previewing a real pain. This was working correctly this morning.
Open source projects don't have "proprietary information" almost by definition - it would be very difficult to keep a trade secret while opening your code.
However, I think most people would agree that there are degrees of "proprietariety" with regards to software, ranging from closed source + closed interoperation standards + trade secrets to open source + open standards + unpatented algorithms. As I tried to explain below in my post, for the majority of users open source software is non-proprietary in effect, if not in fact. People use "proprietary" to mean "trade secret" or "we patented it first" or "don't even try to understand our networking standards". The level of proprietorship asserted by the GPL or other open source licenses pales in comparison.
No, sorry, I just think his Klein bottles are really neat, and I don't have a web page which is non-cheesy enough to point people to:) So I just point them to his.
cscope + xvi (vi in an xterm) is the only IDE I need. And since I've discovered this week that you can query cscope non-interactively from the command line, I use it when writing scripts to parse code rather than having to build that intelligence into my scripts. It isn't perfect (especially when you combine c code and assembly) but it's usually close enough that you can find the spot you're looking for.
Under his definition, any software with a license is "proprietary", so the only non-proprietary software is public-domain software. Thus, any restrictions == proprietary software.
Open source does not necessarily mean non-proprietary, Love contended. Users who make changes to software such as the Gimp image manipulation software must publish those changes under various open-source licenses, but the mere fact that there is a license obliging users to share code means that someone has set proprietary parameters on the use of the software.
Technically, there are no parameters on the use of the software, just on the distribution of modified software based on the original GPL'd software. For the majority of people who are software users but not software writers, the software is effectively non-proprietary - the file formats are open, code can be inspected for security, efficiency, and effectiveness, and unlimited copies of the software can be used for free.
"Some open-source licenses may go a little too far," he said. "It's one thing to facilitate open access, but another to demand it. That's what you are trying to get away from."
In the end, revolutionaries could do more to marginalize the operating system through zealous adherence to a misguided interpretation of the open-source movement.
What license is "demanding open access"? Is this a reference to the GPL, or is this just an attack on some GPL supporters who insist that all software should be GPL'd? Who has a "misguided interpretation" - is someone misinterpreting the GPL, or misinterpreting the ideals behind it? The article is practically a troll at this point - there are no justifications or examples for these accusations.
It seems to me that we settled for "good enough" proprietary software for a long time, but that didn't lead to the changes we are seeing Linux bring about today. Only the "zealous adherence" to open-source ideals has brought about the wave of changes that Mr. Love has found himself caught up in. After all, if he has all the answers on how open source is supposed to work, shouldn't he have helped start the movement a while back, rather than just jumping into it once it became profitable?
It's too bad the press quotes this guy all the time rather than one of the people who are really leading - of the well-known (whether deservedly or not) Linux figures, he suffers from foot-in-mouth disease the most often. Oh wait, I forgot, the real leaders of the open source community are too busy writing code and creating the software that keeps Mr. Love in business.
If everyone knows this, then everyone has the wrong idea, because there is no patent on the GIF format[*]. There is a patent on LZW compression, which is normally used when creating GIF files. However, it is possible to make GIF files without LZW, as described in some other post in this article.
I'm intrigued by the "no selective enforcement" comment made above. Why hasn't anybody used this defense before? Is it because Unisys is only hassling small-time users who can't afford to go to court, or is it that "no selective enforcement" isn't applicable somehow?
[*] Yes, I know the 'F' is for "Format", but "there is no patent on the GIF" doesn't sound right.
I'd rather that the citizens do the discussing themselves - governments haven't had a very good record of representing the interests of the online populace in the past. Unless you count lawyers who are online, that is.
That was the question which made the least sense to me. I have an "always on" cable modem, but that's not the same as "always has an IP address". He's going to have to convince AT&T/Time Warner/etc. that IPV6 is a better solution than DHCP, which is currently available on all PCs and they are trained to support.
Sure, it would be nice to have a static IP address, and I as a client would be happy to get that (and would have with telocity DSL if my landlord wasn't in cahoots w/MediaOne (now AT&T)), but the reason I want static IP is to run a server, and it's not in AT&T's interest to encourage that on a cable modem.[*] Most users will never require static IP and are perfectly happy with DHCP.
So until having a static IP becomes important to your average Web TV/WAP user and the user is willing to put up with getting mostly-new networking software, I don't see any ISPs being able to justify moving their networks to IPV6.
Of course, eventually they could reach the point where even the dynamic IP pool is in constant use and I can't get an address for my "always on" device. That's about the only other reason that I could see ISPs switching over, and even at that they might just hack on NAT at their connection to the net rather than moving their whole network to a new standard.
[*] Yes, I could get a dynamic IP redirector like dyndns.org, but right now I'm planning to move out and get DSL instead. Running a server at home isn't essential; it would just be nice (and it's not the only reason I'm moving:).
If you are a common carrier, you should be immune to lawsuits if you act properly when informed of a violation of the law. Lawsuits should be directed at those that broke the law - your users in this case. Of course, there's no reason that the courts can't subpoena your logs and so forth in an effort to find the user. And if you're hindering prosecution, then you'll probably end up in contempt of court.
It is illegal to house illegal content once you are informed that you are doing so, which is really the issue here. Common carriers are permitted to not know exactly what they are housing until someone informs them, whereas non-common-carriers (like a newspaper publisher) can't deny knowledge of what they publish and don't get that protection.
As far as I'm concerned, some things probably are going to be illegal content (at least for the forseeable future). The real problem with this case is that common carriers are no longer safe from prosecution even when they followed the letter of the law. This is going to have a major negative effect on the Internet if the ruling stands, because there will effectively infinite legal responsibility for ISPs that allow users to set up web pages, chat rooms, etc. Result: a lot less of the interactivity that's made the Internet great (OK, a lot less "pictures of my dog" AOL web pages too, but you have to take the bad with the good:)
I can't help how I'm moderated - post early & post often:)
-1 doesn't understand the comment he is "translating". The DMCA protects content creators and their authorized agents, not distributors.
The whole point of the article was that the DMCA protects online service providers as "common carriers" from prosecution for copyright violation, as long as they take proper action once they are informed of the violation. Yes, usually the DMCA is used by content creators and publishers to protect their creations. In this case, however, we are talking about a different provision of the DMCA which may act against content creators and publishers in this case. The comment from the article which I was complaining about was from a lawyer who was unhappy that the law applied both ways, and wanted to rewrite it to the exclusive gain of the recording industry.
Of course, there is the question as to whether Napster really qualifies as a common carrier - depending on the outcome of the court case, this could probably go either way. So Napster may or may not be be protected. But that will be determined as a result of the court battle and is not currently a cut-and-dried issue as you seem to think.
-1 clueless
Hmmm. Which of us actually read the article all the way through and can thoughtfully explain the issues involved (although IANAL), and which of us is just name-calling?
Actually, in the referenced article at the top of the page, a Napster employee states that they were made aware of copyright infringement and booted those users off of their network.
"The defense is a novel one, but if Napster wins this, I predict the law will be rewritten in eight minutes," said Neil Rosini, a lawyer at New York law firm Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo, who represents online music firm MyPlay. "The DMCA was never intended for companies like Napster."
Translation: if someone else uses our law, we'll change it so they can't. Laws are only for the use of our large, moneyed conglomerate and should never end up helping the little guy.
I wish there was a legal fund one could contribute to that would be guaranteed to finance a challenge to the constitutionality of the DMCA. Rather than supporting a bunch of different legal battles at once or supporting different advocacy groups (although groups like the EFF fill an essential purpose, don't get me wrong), it would be more efficient to have one case go "all the way".
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo. That's why I wouldn't use MS word to compose anything that I wanted to be anonymous. If plain html was good enough for Tim Berners-Lee, it's good enough for me.
I think the difference is that Christianity (being a real religion, whether you agree with its tenets or not) has to take anybody, but Scientology (a religion concocted on a bet) would rather have rich loopy movie stars. Apparently it's pretty easy to fool them all of the time :)
Just like the sums of the interior angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees? The Greeks would have assured you that the angles would *never* add up to more or less than that value, but we know now that in certain cases that is incorrect. The solution? See the framework as just a subset of a larger framework which doesn't make certain assumptions (in this case, the assumption that there are only two dimensions).
Saying "That's just how it works" is a cop-out. The entire mass of scientific knowledge is a set of theories with more or less supporting evidence behind each one. Things could change, or (more likely) someone will find a new approach to quantum theory that sidesteps the whole issue (which you sort-of mentioned). I'm just saying don't use assume that your current knowledge of the structure and limitations of reality are all exactly correct. Even assumptions with a fair amount of proof have been extended in strange directions in the light of new experimental approaches, better equipment, or better theories.
Fair enough - I can't argue with that. Like I said, you have to trust your hardware and OS not to add ID to your network transmissions and trust your apps not to embed ID in the content you create. Merely having unique ID on your machine isn't immediately a problem, it's really just an issue of who can find out this ID.
Color me confused. You said:
It sounds like you are agreeing with the previous post that the MAC is fixed by the card (essentially burned in) rather than being software-configurable. But you started off by disagreeing with that idea. Which is it?
I don't care about the number that ifconfig prints out; I care about the MAC that other machines see on the wire from my ethernet card. The MAC on the wire can be changed, right?
How will these get traced back to me?
But this only identifies my card to other machines on the local network (on the same wire). Packets coming to me from the Internet just contain my IP address, which in my case is dynamic (although it doesn't seem to change day-to-day very often). Some cards allow you to change their MAC, if you're paranoid or running IPV6 (which is supposed to include the MAC in your IP address).
Sorry, I don't have a modem so I can't comment. If you are dialed up, can the remote machine command your modem to return the serial number? I'm not familiar with the issue here.
How, pray tell, are you going to get this from across the Internet? This is more-or-less equivalent to the PIII CPU ID - somehow software has to get this ID number off of your machine and send it out. As long as you run an OS that you trust not to do that, and there are no hidden hardware interfaces that can pass the ID directly from CPU or BIOS to the network card or modem, then you're safe even if you have a unique ID on your machine.
Well, except that some cards allow you to change your MAC address. You really only need MAC addresses to be unique on a particular network segment, rather than across the entire Internet. Of course, if you later rearrange your network and put two cards with the same MAC on the same segment, you'll have some interesting issues to track down...
Not to impugn your HCI credentials, but you're considering consistency between the interfaces used by many different users. The post to which you were replying was discussing one user having a variety of interfaces to choose from. That user could choose the interface which they found the most usable. These are really two orthogonal issues.
There's no reason that a computer couldn't be shipped with a default interface which is consistent with the expectations of most users, but allows for customization by a user who doesn't find the default interface particularly usable. Surely even a professional HCI designer would recognize that sometimes different interfaces are more usable for different people, depending on whether those people came from a Windows or *nix background, can touch type or not, and so on. Or do you happen to know the one exact interface which will raise everyone to unparalleled heights of efficiency? If so, please do tell.
I haven't noticed the various Linux window managers impeding my use of the system; in fact they have enhanced it once I found one that worked better for me than even the Windows interface used to. I will admit that it is possible to get some different interfaces for Windows too, but I agree with the original poster that Windows certainly isn't architected to provide the level of modularity and ease of switching interfaces that a Unix-like system has.
That's not the way it works - if you don't have a login ID (like any first-time visitor to this site), you will see a ton of AC first posts, grits, and so on. That is generally accepted to be a bad thing. Thus those AC posts are correctly moderated down.
If the post is a troll, off-topic, or flamebait, it should be moderated as such whether or not it is from an AC. It's too bad we don't have meta-meta-moderation, so that if anyone is meta-moderated down for correctly moderating down a troll, that meta-moderator will be meta-meta-moderated down.
Since I read at +1, I give no attention to trolls, because they are already moderated below my sight-line. Thus I'm happy to have them moderated down. If I read at zero I would feel the same about trolls from ACs.
I've seen the Salon article (a very good wrap-up, BTW) but I don't think that whether the two killers were geeks or not is the real issue. The real issue is that parents, educators, administrators, and peers of geeks nationwide used the assumption that the killers were geeks to act with prejudice towards the geeks that they knew.
The story isn't "geeks are tormented, snap, and gun down classmates", it's "people think geeks are potential killers because they are loners and like computers, video games, the color black, and/or goth music".
I agree with your sentiment in general, but I disagree with this particular comment. The media didn't force anyone to do anything. They may have misinformed the nation and the world, they may have over-sensationalized the Columbine killings, and they may have hurtled to the wrong conclusions like a speeding locomotive, but they didn't make educators, parents, and non-geeks act the way that they did in the weeks following Columbine.
People are ultimately responsible for their own actions, and only their own actions. Any "nazism" that occurred was because people thought that the ends were justified by any means - everything from name-calling to ostracism and civil rights abuses. The media just gives the nation a convenient excuse once the excitement is over. Even if the media could cover tragedies like Columbine in a sober, objective manner, the capacity of humans to hate and fear other humans just for being different would remain, and people would find other excuses for acting on those feelings.
Food for thought: I see more violence on the evening news than I have ever seen on the Internet.
[OT] Slashdot coders: after previewing, my HTML tags are gone from the "comment" text field. This makes previewing a real pain. This was working correctly this morning.
I'll consider myself corrected, then. I've had this sig for a few weeks - I guess nobody else noticed. Thanks.
So you wouldn't correct Cliff, even if you had evidence? He seems like an OK guy, you probably would survive the experience ;)
See above.
Open source projects don't have "proprietary information" almost by definition - it would be very difficult to keep a trade secret while opening your code.
I looked it up, and you are correct. Mea culpa.
However, I think most people would agree that there are degrees of "proprietariety" with regards to software, ranging from closed source + closed interoperation standards + trade secrets to open source + open standards + unpatented algorithms. As I tried to explain below in my post, for the majority of users open source software is non-proprietary in effect, if not in fact. People use "proprietary" to mean "trade secret" or "we patented it first" or "don't even try to understand our networking standards". The level of proprietorship asserted by the GPL or other open source licenses pales in comparison.
No, sorry, I just think his Klein bottles are really neat, and I don't have a web page which is non-cheesy enough to point people to :) So I just point them to his.
cscope + xvi (vi in an xterm) is the only IDE I need. And since I've discovered this week that you can query cscope non-interactively from the command line, I use it when writing scripts to parse code rather than having to build that intelligence into my scripts. It isn't perfect (especially when you combine c code and assembly) but it's usually close enough that you can find the spot you're looking for.
You might have to build the database first, before searching. I'm using cscope 13.3 on HP-UX, and I have to do something like:
find -type f -print > cscope.files
cscope -b -i cscope.files -f cscope.out
cscope -d -f cscope.out
YMMV, of course, since you have a later cscope than I do.
Under his definition, any software with a license is "proprietary", so the only non-proprietary software is public-domain software. Thus, any restrictions == proprietary software.
Technically, there are no parameters on the use of the software, just on the distribution of modified software based on the original GPL'd software. For the majority of people who are software users but not software writers, the software is effectively non-proprietary - the file formats are open, code can be inspected for security, efficiency, and effectiveness, and unlimited copies of the software can be used for free.
What license is "demanding open access"? Is this a reference to the GPL, or is this just an attack on some GPL supporters who insist that all software should be GPL'd? Who has a "misguided interpretation" - is someone misinterpreting the GPL, or misinterpreting the ideals behind it? The article is practically a troll at this point - there are no justifications or examples for these accusations.
It seems to me that we settled for "good enough" proprietary software for a long time, but that didn't lead to the changes we are seeing Linux bring about today. Only the "zealous adherence" to open-source ideals has brought about the wave of changes that Mr. Love has found himself caught up in. After all, if he has all the answers on how open source is supposed to work, shouldn't he have helped start the movement a while back, rather than just jumping into it once it became profitable?
It's too bad the press quotes this guy all the time rather than one of the people who are really leading - of the well-known (whether deservedly or not) Linux figures, he suffers from foot-in-mouth disease the most often. Oh wait, I forgot, the real leaders of the open source community are too busy writing code and creating the software that keeps Mr. Love in business.
If everyone knows this, then everyone has the wrong idea, because there is no patent on the GIF format[*]. There is a patent on LZW compression, which is normally used when creating GIF files. However, it is possible to make GIF files without LZW, as described in some other post in this article.
I'm intrigued by the "no selective enforcement" comment made above. Why hasn't anybody used this defense before? Is it because Unisys is only hassling small-time users who can't afford to go to court, or is it that "no selective enforcement" isn't applicable somehow?
[*] Yes, I know the 'F' is for "Format", but "there is no patent on the GIF" doesn't sound right.
I'd rather that the citizens do the discussing themselves - governments haven't had a very good record of representing the interests of the online populace in the past. Unless you count lawyers who are online, that is.
That was the question which made the least sense to me. I have an "always on" cable modem, but that's not the same as "always has an IP address". He's going to have to convince AT&T/Time Warner/etc. that IPV6 is a better solution than DHCP, which is currently available on all PCs and they are trained to support.
Sure, it would be nice to have a static IP address, and I as a client would be happy to get that (and would have with telocity DSL if my landlord wasn't in cahoots w/MediaOne (now AT&T)), but the reason I want static IP is to run a server, and it's not in AT&T's interest to encourage that on a cable modem.[*] Most users will never require static IP and are perfectly happy with DHCP.
So until having a static IP becomes important to your average Web TV/WAP user and the user is willing to put up with getting mostly-new networking software, I don't see any ISPs being able to justify moving their networks to IPV6.
Of course, eventually they could reach the point where even the dynamic IP pool is in constant use and I can't get an address for my "always on" device. That's about the only other reason that I could see ISPs switching over, and even at that they might just hack on NAT at their connection to the net rather than moving their whole network to a new standard.
[*] Yes, I could get a dynamic IP redirector like dyndns.org, but right now I'm planning to move out and get DSL instead. Running a server at home isn't essential; it would just be nice (and it's not the only reason I'm moving :).
If you are a common carrier, you should be immune to lawsuits if you act properly when informed of a violation of the law. Lawsuits should be directed at those that broke the law - your users in this case. Of course, there's no reason that the courts can't subpoena your logs and so forth in an effort to find the user. And if you're hindering prosecution, then you'll probably end up in contempt of court.
It is illegal to house illegal content once you are informed that you are doing so, which is really the issue here. Common carriers are permitted to not know exactly what they are housing until someone informs them, whereas non-common-carriers (like a newspaper publisher) can't deny knowledge of what they publish and don't get that protection.
As far as I'm concerned, some things probably are going to be illegal content (at least for the forseeable future). The real problem with this case is that common carriers are no longer safe from prosecution even when they followed the letter of the law. This is going to have a major negative effect on the Internet if the ruling stands, because there will effectively infinite legal responsibility for ISPs that allow users to set up web pages, chat rooms, etc. Result: a lot less of the interactivity that's made the Internet great (OK, a lot less "pictures of my dog" AOL web pages too, but you have to take the bad with the good :)
I can't help how I'm moderated - post early & post often :)
The whole point of the article was that the DMCA protects online service providers as "common carriers" from prosecution for copyright violation, as long as they take proper action once they are informed of the violation. Yes, usually the DMCA is used by content creators and publishers to protect their creations. In this case, however, we are talking about a different provision of the DMCA which may act against content creators and publishers in this case. The comment from the article which I was complaining about was from a lawyer who was unhappy that the law applied both ways, and wanted to rewrite it to the exclusive gain of the recording industry.
Of course, there is the question as to whether Napster really qualifies as a common carrier - depending on the outcome of the court case, this could probably go either way. So Napster may or may not be be protected. But that will be determined as a result of the court battle and is not currently a cut-and-dried issue as you seem to think.
Hmmm. Which of us actually read the article all the way through and can thoughtfully explain the issues involved (although IANAL), and which of us is just name-calling?
Actually, in the referenced article at the top of the page, a Napster employee states that they were made aware of copyright infringement and booted those users off of their network.
Translation: if someone else uses our law, we'll change it so they can't. Laws are only for the use of our large, moneyed conglomerate and should never end up helping the little guy.
I wish there was a legal fund one could contribute to that would be guaranteed to finance a challenge to the constitutionality of the DMCA. Rather than supporting a bunch of different legal battles at once or supporting different advocacy groups (although groups like the EFF fill an essential purpose, don't get me wrong), it would be more efficient to have one case go "all the way".