Perhaps it could still be considered a derived work.
Just like if I take an MP3 of Britney Spears and change every other byte to a zero. (*) There is no way to get back the original, but a court would very likely consider it an infringment to redistribute. We all know those are two different situations, but would, for example, Judge Kaplan agree? Remember how he ruled that DeCSS is illegal under the DMCA in spite of fair use, the Constitution, and even the defenses spelled out in the DMCA itself.
(*) One could definitely argue that the resulting file would be better than the original, and even better if the remaining bytes were turned to zeros as well.;)
Open messenging and chat makes Internet access more useful. That is GOOD for the telecom industry, and those people have tons of money. So we may have an ally there. (as an aside, it was mentioned the telecom industry makes more in a week than the movie industry makes in a year).
Criticism of bullying would attract attention to the preying upon those of less power, by those with more power. In addition, bullying serves to teach people, mostly the "different" (how convenient!), that one can get abuse for acting different or being different (both things you can control and those you cannot), and that you might just have to take it, and suffer, and that might (not justice) makes "right".
This serves their interests. We have bullies in adult society too. They are in government, where they have our tax dollars and have the ability, and sometimes the legal right) to kill. They include corporations which can fire us, unethically crush competitors, and send the gov't thugs after us to lock us up or rob us of our assets using the intermediary of the courts. They include lawyers who aid in the above. They include media conglomerates who censor viewpoints they do not like - "step out of line" and we will make it so no one can hear you (*). They include marketers who have tricked us into our changing what we want into what they want us to want. This list goes on and on...
Bullies in school serve (unknowingly) the interests of the bullies in society. They "soften up" the kids and get them ready to take it for the rest of their lives.
(*) Regarding media censorship: Look at how Tavis Smiley got fired from Black Entertainment Television right after Viacom bought them up. Makes one wonder...
So ban guns. Making murder illegal does not stop people from killing, but maybe if we ban guns, people will be afraid enough of being convicted of possesion of a firearm that they'll not find a way to get a gun, and hence not kill anyone.
Along that line, I suggest putting a no parking zone in front of every bank. That will ensure that bank robbers won't have a getaway car waiting there, and thus will stop bank robberies.
If you believe all that, I have this nice bridge up for sale on Ebay...
Criminals break laws. They will break gun laws too.
I am assuming that the number of actual physical CDs that get stolen via shoplifting is irrelevant here.
It is irrelevant to the RIAA. They still get their money, it is the store that loses. They'd RATHER you STEAL a CD than engage in unlawful duplication and distribution of its contents (so called "piracy"). I thought someone (Lars from Metallica, I am not sure) said something to the effect that you should steal a CD from Tower Records instead of "pirating" the music. Imagine that!
The operative parts (sec 1201) of the DMCA here prohibit circumventing access and "copy" control and devices that aid in such.
There are 2 different types of offenses, violating access control and "copy" control (measures "protecting" exclusive rights). Access control isn't really copyright, but it is part of the law. The definition there for circumvention is: "to
descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or
otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a
technological measure, without the authority of the copyright
owner; ".
Okay the CD copy restriction technology does not encrypt/scramble, so a "hack" won't decrypt/descramble. One can already get access to the work directly. The work just has defects designed to make accessing it difficult. No lock, just garbage that makes a CD-ROM puke. Locking content and making your content exploit a bug in CD-ROM firmware are 2 different things. Hmm, deliberately exploiting a bug, could be illegal under anti-"hacking" statues, especially if a CD-ROM damages itself trying to read it...
Next, effectively controls access: "effectively controls access to a
work'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation,
requires the application of information, or a process or a
treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain
access to the work."
Nope, the work is right there in front of you. Adding stuff to/messing with it to confuse CD-ROM's which are smart enough to see it and get hosed, whereas CD players are too dumb to care is indeed clever (albeit it detestable and unethical). That hardly qualifies as requiring special steps to get the access. MPAA did a MUCH better job with DVD by using CSS. Even a 1-byte XOR would be better, legally. The RIAA could not change the format retroactively and keep backward compatibility (which the citizens who purchase music demand - note: MPAA did not have this problem, they controlled the format BEFORE its adoption). So they do the ONLY thing they can do - which is clever tricks. You can't put a lock on something if legacy devices don't grok keys. So you look for the next best thing.
Now the copy control bypassing prohibitions:
to ''circumvent protection afforded by a technological
measure'' means avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or
otherwise impairing a technological measure; and
(B) a technological measure ''effectively protects a right of a
copyright owner under this title'' if the measure, in the
ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or
otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner
under this title.
We could get nailed on circumvention theoretically. However the effective protection clause helps us (encryption being weak ala CSS may not, but this is different).
Does the measure protect a "right"? NO. It stops ACCESS, not COPYING. COPYING is an exclusive "right" (monopoly), not ACCESS. Copyright does not grant an ACCESS monopoly. The only access prohibition were dealt with above.
The device prohibitions depend on facilitating those violations, so if you aren't illegally circumventing, a device you use won't be considered an illegal cirumvention device.
Disclaimer: I am neither a lawyer, nor Judge Kaplan.
Microsoft has a legal monopoly on distribution of certain software programs. They use the law, they should be subjected to it. I am willing to give Microsoft an out: They can continue to act monopolistic with free rain as long as they forever give up the right to "intellectual property" "protection". Someone leaks their source code for NT - no trade secret protection. Somone copies/redistributes/modifies/clones/emulates their products - no right for M$ to sue them.
In your agrument there is no gov't fascism. Here is what is wrong.
1. Nothing stops RIAA from hindering access to music that we paid for
2. Admittedly, nothing stops us from boycotting
3. Also, nothing stops us from working around the hinderance applied to our access and the blocking of our fair use rights. Oh, wait. the DMCA makes it ILLEGAL for us to work around the BUG that prevents OUR FAIR USE. If the access control (NOT "copy-protection") system really only stopped illegal uses that would be one thing. But it is flawed, and working around it to make a legal use is now illegal.
THAT is gov't coercion. RIAA can hinder YOUR access, and your trying to get it back means the gov't will USE FORCE to punish you for doing so.
USE OF FORCE by the gov't to allow the playing field to be tilted is NOT part of a free market economy.
They'd be separate laws. First, free speech is devaluted. Then some congressperson makes a law against "commercially detrimental" speech. Acutally the DMCA qualifies as such a law (see how it outlaws DeCSS). Later, with free speech devalued, the next interest group that wants to ban violent or explicit lyrics comes along. They have a lot of clout now and are geeting ratings and labels put on everything. Just push a little harder, and by then free speech will have been totally devalued, and all the "bad" stuff gets outlawed.
Once we snowball into fascism, it is not going to stop on its own.
But, like stone walls, which never ultimately keep out the invaders, this tactic will eventually fail. It must, unless the USA ceases to be free and capitalistic, but
instead becomes Authoritarian and Corporate, although right now that is looking to be a possibility.
Perfect karmic justice: free speech goes away to protect the RIAA, and then a huge amount of RIAA products become illegal. The RIAA has tons of music which would be outlawed were it not for the First Amendmant.
What it comes down to is that, as a parent, I still have to make all the same parenting decisions whether I use the V-Chip or not. If that's the case, then there's clearly no benefit. And if there's no benefit, what is it for?!
Well it could be a forerunner to the real technology they want to deploy.
1. Forcing the chip to block any content worse than an MPAA "R" Rating. They can make it illegal for Canadians to broadcast such material, but that won't stop US broadcasters, some of whose signals can be picked up in Canada.
2. Log how many shows watched are "bad", and a history of what the rating threshold has been set to. If there is ever a custody fight or allegations of bad parenting, the courts can come and take your children away if they see a lot of "bad" stuff being watched or the rating threshold being too high.
Somebody sounds confused. The legislation already exists: the DMCA. If the content producers make content that will only work on so-called "secure" (i.e. restricted) PCs, and modifying a "secure" PC to be able to exercise your fair use rights is illegal - they have won. Non-"secure" PCs could still exist and be legal, but unable to access protected content. Down the road, such a PC might be unable to read over 90% of content, even including the Internet.
They have already bought their law and bought at least a judge or 2.
Wuthout the DMCA we might be able to let the market decide. They make a system which stops fair use, and we write software which overcomes that limitation. A cat and mouse game, where we, as citizens, are trying to make fair use of content we paid for, and the corps are trying to infringe that right. We could stay one step ahead perhaps. But now the DMCA makes that illegal - it is a cat and mouse game, where if the mouse tried to run, a big bear comes by and stomps on the mouse.
People that compare the current situation to a capitalist free market are wrong - it is a merchantilist market where gov't protects the corps. A lot like the economic side of fascism.
Mandatory Access Control vs fine-grained security
on
NSA Inside?
·
· Score: 4
The article seems to muddle those 2 concepts together. They are different things.
Mandatory Access Control means one user is PREVENTED even from consensual sharing of info with an untrusted user (Discretionary Access Control only stops nonconsensual information sharing).
Fine-grained security means you can be more explicit about what rights a given process can have - i.e. something better than the current UNIX system.
Allowing certain processes selected by the admin to, for example, bind a reserved port while not having full root privs is fine-grained security, but NOT Mandatory Access Control. They can both be good, and they can work together, but they are different.
Mandatory Access Control is NOT a panacea - there are always covert channels to worry about. Safest thing is to allow only one security level on a given machine (e.g. no machine can have both Secret and Top Secret data on it).
Re:This is a Good Thing
on
NSA Inside?
·
· Score: 2
This wouldn't stop the NSA, they'd come through the front door with
guns (and FBI agents) and simply take the computer, access controls be damned.
Umm, no.
The FBI and ATF are like that, NSA will use TEMPEST to read the EMF of your computers and tap your phone lines and decode all those SSH and SSL encrypted connections. They might also do a stealth break-and-enter job, but with the above abilities, that very likely isn't necessary.
NSA can bget your data and YOU WON'T EVEN KNOW IT. Funny thing, intellegence gathering works better when the subject doesn't know about it.
Its just too bad its going to help drag the US economy into the shitter.
Maybe that is the one thing that will save us in the end. That might FORCE a change. When the chickens come home to roost and their evil ways affect their bottom line - they'll WANT to change, since they'll NEED to change just to survive. Corps are amoral, not immoral. They'll be nice WHEN IT IS IN THEIR BEST INTEREST TO DO SO (as long as they realize it is in their best interest).
Fear the gov't. The corporations won't be the one's rounding you up and putting you in prison if you disobey their rules. The gov't will. Corporations do not fine, imprison, or kill you. Gov't does.
Gov't is the only entity that can legally attack you directly. Corps can only do so indirectly, using the government as their agent. The corps might initiate the process, but hte guns pointing at you are from the gov't. Corporations don't usually engage in direct action. It is illegal, would make them look REALLY BAD, make you look like a victim, and is unnecessary. They ge the courts to do it. Now you get hurt be the full force of the government (way stronger than any corp), they look like a victim, and you look like a criminal. People won't stop trusting the corp, they stop trusting you. So not only do you have fines, imprisonment or death (*) , but you get a reputation for being a criminal and untrustworthy.
Vote out the people in our government. Vote for the incumbents' main opposition, or just vote Green Party straight down the line. If enough people (there is the catch) did that, we could win these battles overnight.
If one people would wake 5 others out of their complacancy and get them to do likewise, we could win this.
(*) The DeCSS case could have been worse - leaking that scret could have been said to have caused such economic damage to US business to constitute "economic treason", for which there is a federal DEATH PENALTY - just wait 10 or 20 years and you may see such a situation actually arise. A possible future headline for a similar situation: "Hacker sentenced to die for deliberately damaging the US economy by destroying intellectual property".
It certainly IS possible to block all indecent material. Simple, just block EVERYTHING. Would comply with the letter of the law. A filter that has 2 settings. Internet On and Internet Off. On the Internet Off setting it would DEFINITELY block all porn. Just put a real user friendly icon on the desktop (a big switch with a wireframe rendition of the world connected to it would be cool) and a commandline program (internet --on and internet --off for example) and you're legal.;)
There is a DMCA exception for protecting privacy. You can go around it to find out if anything private is being sent and disable it. In addition, the DMCA only protects restrictions placed by the copyright owner, and allows a copyright owner to allow circumvention. You are the copyright owner of your own personal info. Third, the DMCA is unconstitutional.
I am not a lawyer, get real legal advice if you need it. Or just hide your tracks real well.;)
Just what are we supposed to do when we see something like that? Ignore it entirely unless they've shot someone already? The police looked into it, and found no crime. What more can you ask?
That the police look into the future with their magic crystal ball, and realize there was no threat?;)
Apparently some people expect that. I am a strong civil libertarian, but I also want possible threats to be looked into. Most cops don't know what the "fortune" program does. They do know what a bullet through the head of a child does. That is their perspective.
Now if the kids were arrested and charged with a crime that would be different...
Slashdotters live in a rewritable world. If you make a mistake, you don't just correct it, you erase its existance. You are responsible only for the end product and justifying your billable hours. Thay don't understand the world of police, doctors, even teachers, who live in a "note in the margins" world, where false starts, investigations that go nowhere and even mistakes MUST be kept on file, every detail from the begining to end.It's a world where the proccess is every bit as important as the end product.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like if I take an MP3 of Britney Spears and change every other byte to a zero. (*) There is no way to get back the original, but a court would very likely consider it an infringment to redistribute. We all know those are two different situations, but would, for example, Judge Kaplan agree? Remember how he ruled that DeCSS is illegal under the DMCA in spite of fair use, the Constitution, and even the defenses spelled out in the DMCA itself.
(*) One could definitely argue that the resulting file would be better than the original, and even better if the remaining bytes were turned to zeros as well. ;)
It is a 128bit hash. So it would mean (128/8)*file size, which is 16*file size of hash codes.
16*24k=384k which is certainly extremely feasible. Many apps are bigger than that by quite a lot. It is less than 2 minutes @ 33.6Kbps.
Open messenging and chat makes Internet access more useful. That is GOOD for the telecom industry, and those people have tons of money. So we may have an ally there. (as an aside, it was mentioned the telecom industry makes more in a week than the movie industry makes in a year).
This serves their interests. We have bullies in adult society too. They are in government, where they have our tax dollars and have the ability, and sometimes the legal right) to kill. They include corporations which can fire us, unethically crush competitors, and send the gov't thugs after us to lock us up or rob us of our assets using the intermediary of the courts. They include lawyers who aid in the above. They include media conglomerates who censor viewpoints they do not like - "step out of line" and we will make it so no one can hear you (*). They include marketers who have tricked us into our changing what we want into what they want us to want. This list goes on and on...
Bullies in school serve (unknowingly) the interests of the bullies in society. They "soften up" the kids and get them ready to take it for the rest of their lives.
(*) Regarding media censorship: Look at how Tavis Smiley got fired from Black Entertainment Television right after Viacom bought them up. Makes one wonder...
Along that line, I suggest putting a no parking zone in front of every bank. That will ensure that bank robbers won't have a getaway car waiting there, and thus will stop bank robberies.
If you believe all that, I have this nice bridge up for sale on Ebay...
Criminals break laws. They will break gun laws too.
It is irrelevant to the RIAA. They still get their money, it is the store that loses. They'd RATHER you STEAL a CD than engage in unlawful duplication and distribution of its contents (so called "piracy"). I thought someone (Lars from Metallica, I am not sure) said something to the effect that you should steal a CD from Tower Records instead of "pirating" the music. Imagine that!
There are 2 different types of offenses, violating access control and "copy" control (measures "protecting" exclusive rights). Access control isn't really copyright, but it is part of the law. The definition there for circumvention is: "to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; ".
Okay the CD copy restriction technology does not encrypt/scramble, so a "hack" won't decrypt/descramble. One can already get access to the work directly. The work just has defects designed to make accessing it difficult. No lock, just garbage that makes a CD-ROM puke. Locking content and making your content exploit a bug in CD-ROM firmware are 2 different things. Hmm, deliberately exploiting a bug, could be illegal under anti-"hacking" statues, especially if a CD-ROM damages itself trying to read it...
Next, effectively controls access: "effectively controls access to a work'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work."
Nope, the work is right there in front of you. Adding stuff to/messing with it to confuse CD-ROM's which are smart enough to see it and get hosed, whereas CD players are too dumb to care is indeed clever (albeit it detestable and unethical). That hardly qualifies as requiring special steps to get the access. MPAA did a MUCH better job with DVD by using CSS. Even a 1-byte XOR would be better, legally. The RIAA could not change the format retroactively and keep backward compatibility (which the citizens who purchase music demand - note: MPAA did not have this problem, they controlled the format BEFORE its adoption). So they do the ONLY thing they can do - which is clever tricks. You can't put a lock on something if legacy devices don't grok keys. So you look for the next best thing.
Now the copy control bypassing prohibitions: to ''circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure'' means avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or otherwise impairing a technological measure; and (B) a technological measure ''effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title. We could get nailed on circumvention theoretically. However the effective protection clause helps us (encryption being weak ala CSS may not, but this is different).
Does the measure protect a "right"? NO. It stops ACCESS, not COPYING. COPYING is an exclusive "right" (monopoly), not ACCESS. Copyright does not grant an ACCESS monopoly. The only access prohibition were dealt with above.
The device prohibitions depend on facilitating those violations, so if you aren't illegally circumventing, a device you use won't be considered an illegal cirumvention device.
Disclaimer: I am neither a lawyer, nor Judge Kaplan.
Microsoft has a legal monopoly on distribution of certain software programs. They use the law, they should be subjected to it. I am willing to give Microsoft an out: They can continue to act monopolistic with free rain as long as they forever give up the right to "intellectual property" "protection". Someone leaks their source code for NT - no trade secret protection. Somone copies/redistributes/modifies/clones/emulates their products - no right for M$ to sue them.
That is a consistent argument.
In your agrument there is no gov't fascism. Here is what is wrong.
1. Nothing stops RIAA from hindering access to music that we paid for
2. Admittedly, nothing stops us from boycotting
3. Also, nothing stops us from working around the hinderance applied to our access and the blocking of our fair use rights. Oh, wait. the DMCA makes it ILLEGAL for us to work around the BUG that prevents OUR FAIR USE. If the access control (NOT "copy-protection") system really only stopped illegal uses that would be one thing. But it is flawed, and working around it to make a legal use is now illegal.
THAT is gov't coercion. RIAA can hinder YOUR access, and your trying to get it back means the gov't will USE FORCE to punish you for doing so.
USE OF FORCE by the gov't to allow the playing field to be tilted is NOT part of a free market economy.
They'd be separate laws. First, free speech is devaluted. Then some congressperson makes a law against "commercially detrimental" speech. Acutally the DMCA qualifies as such a law (see how it outlaws DeCSS). Later, with free speech devalued, the next interest group that wants to ban violent or explicit lyrics comes along. They have a lot of clout now and are geeting ratings and labels put on everything. Just push a little harder, and by then free speech will have been totally devalued, and all the "bad" stuff gets outlawed.
Once we snowball into fascism, it is not going to stop on its own.
Perfect karmic justice: free speech goes away to protect the RIAA, and then a huge amount of RIAA products become illegal. The RIAA has tons of music which would be outlawed were it not for the First Amendmant.
Brazil? That description sounds a lot like the US!
(except only parts of the US get really hot in the summer)
Well it could be a forerunner to the real technology they want to deploy.
1. Forcing the chip to block any content worse than an MPAA "R" Rating. They can make it illegal for Canadians to broadcast such material, but that won't stop US broadcasters, some of whose signals can be picked up in Canada.
2. Log how many shows watched are "bad", and a history of what the rating threshold has been set to. If there is ever a custody fight or allegations of bad parenting, the courts can come and take your children away if they see a lot of "bad" stuff being watched or the rating threshold being too high.
They have already bought their law and bought at least a judge or 2.
People that compare the current situation to a capitalist free market are wrong - it is a merchantilist market where gov't protects the corps. A lot like the economic side of fascism.
Mandatory Access Control means one user is PREVENTED even from consensual sharing of info with an untrusted user (Discretionary Access Control only stops nonconsensual information sharing).
Fine-grained security means you can be more explicit about what rights a given process can have - i.e. something better than the current UNIX system.
Allowing certain processes selected by the admin to, for example, bind a reserved port while not having full root privs is fine-grained security, but NOT Mandatory Access Control. They can both be good, and they can work together, but they are different.
Mandatory Access Control is NOT a panacea - there are always covert channels to worry about. Safest thing is to allow only one security level on a given machine (e.g. no machine can have both Secret and Top Secret data on it).
Umm, no.
The FBI and ATF are like that, NSA will use TEMPEST to read the EMF of your computers and tap your phone lines and decode all those SSH and SSL encrypted connections. They might also do a stealth break-and-enter job, but with the above abilities, that very likely isn't necessary.
NSA can bget your data and YOU WON'T EVEN KNOW IT. Funny thing, intellegence gathering works better when the subject doesn't know about it.
As of this posting this article was listed under "Hardware" which is wrong. "Internet" would fit better.
Maybe that is the one thing that will save us in the end. That might FORCE a change. When the chickens come home to roost and their evil ways affect their bottom line - they'll WANT to change, since they'll NEED to change just to survive. Corps are amoral, not immoral. They'll be nice WHEN IT IS IN THEIR BEST INTEREST TO DO SO (as long as they realize it is in their best interest).
Gov't is the only entity that can legally attack you directly. Corps can only do so indirectly, using the government as their agent. The corps might initiate the process, but hte guns pointing at you are from the gov't. Corporations don't usually engage in direct action. It is illegal, would make them look REALLY BAD, make you look like a victim, and is unnecessary. They ge the courts to do it. Now you get hurt be the full force of the government (way stronger than any corp), they look like a victim, and you look like a criminal. People won't stop trusting the corp, they stop trusting you. So not only do you have fines, imprisonment or death (*) , but you get a reputation for being a criminal and untrustworthy.
Vote out the people in our government. Vote for the incumbents' main opposition, or just vote Green Party straight down the line. If enough people (there is the catch) did that, we could win these battles overnight.
If one people would wake 5 others out of their complacancy and get them to do likewise, we could win this.
(*) The DeCSS case could have been worse - leaking that scret could have been said to have caused such economic damage to US business to constitute "economic treason", for which there is a federal DEATH PENALTY - just wait 10 or 20 years and you may see such a situation actually arise. A possible future headline for a similar situation: "Hacker sentenced to die for deliberately damaging the US economy by destroying intellectual property".
It certainly IS possible to block all indecent material. Simple, just block EVERYTHING. Would comply with the letter of the law. A filter that has 2 settings. Internet On and Internet Off. On the Internet Off setting it would DEFINITELY block all porn. Just put a real user friendly icon on the desktop (a big switch with a wireframe rendition of the world connected to it would be cool) and a commandline program (internet --on and internet --off for example) and you're legal. ;)
(maybe not, ask a lawyer for legal advice...)
Judge Kaplan of the Southern District of New York does not believe fair use is ANY defense to a DMCA violation.
I am not a lawyer, get real legal advice if you need it. Or just hide your tracks real well. ;)
That the police look into the future with their magic crystal ball, and realize there was no threat? ;)
Apparently some people expect that. I am a strong civil libertarian, but I also want possible threats to be looked into. Most cops don't know what the "fortune" program does. They do know what a bullet through the head of a child does. That is their perspective.
Now if the kids were arrested and charged with a crime that would be different...
Umm, good GOOD software engineers do the same...