What have we had in the last 6 months here? About 10 stories about ancient/archaic computer systems. It was only interesting the first 3 or 4 times... now it's really wearing thin. Why don't they give "Computing History" or something like that it's own/box so those of us tired of these kinds of stories can filter them out?
What do you honestly see as the future market for Linux? Do you think it will remain strictly in the server closets and on the desktops of the UberGeeks? Or do you see it making it's way into business to be more than "just a cheap platform for a webserver" (which is unfortunately the attitude I see in many business settings)? Or will Linux thrive in the embedded / set top box / appliance market? Or (and this is the utopian ideal for me) do you see Linux and it's other free *nix-like cousins finally winning the battle and becoming the dominant platform for Joe Desktop User to Mr. and Ms. Uber PowerUser and all areas in between? Or do you see a mix of some/all of these possibilities?
That nothing will ever come of it, because there are too many companies with too many of their own agendas. Do we need a standardized API of the sort their discussing? Not need, as such, but it would be a great thing to have. Will it get done by all these companies? I seriously doubt it. That's what happens when you get this many companies together... corportate politics comes into play, and everyone's trying to get "their standard" adopted so that they can sell more of their video chipsets, sound or modem chipsets, or cheese graters. Sad but true.
Make sure you get the right firmware if you do get an 67x external! When I moved about 8 blocks and had my Qwest DSL service transferred, it took them over a month longer to get my service restored than they had initially promised. I was about ready to tell them to shove their service up their noses when a particularly clueful tech support guy was able to determine that I had, indeed been provisioned correctly, but at my old apartment the DSLAM had been CAP and at the house I moved to, the DSLAM I was provisioned on was DMT. Three days and a UPS delivery later I was back up and rolling, but it was a 5 week (7 weeks if you count the _TWO_ weeks they said it would take) nightmare of long hold times, head scratching, and frustration. So MAKE SURE you get the right firmware for the DSLAM you're provisioned on.
These defendants didn't go out and start MAKING Nd-Fe-B magnets, did they?? Fuck no! They PURCHASED them from some source to use in their electronics manufacturing. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't they already PAID someone (a components vendor) for these magnets, and it is the responsibility of the vendor(s) who supplied the component magnets to make sure the MANUFACTURER OF THE MAGNETS is in compliance with the appropriate patents? If someone were to patent a novel yet simple component (a small motor, for example), and then I use that component to construct something entirely different, but I purchased all my little components (i.e. little motors) from the original manufacturer then hasn't the original manufacturer/creator BEEN compensated adequately already?
Where does it say "When you purchase the MicroMiniSpinMaster 3000 motor, you agree not to use it in the manufacture of anything without providing royalties to Itsy Bitsy Motor Corp. under penalty of law."? What the fuck good is a magnet by itself? It MUST be used to make something more complex and more useful. This is utter bullshit, and I hope the courts see through this obvious attempt at ass-raping the electronics purchaser (you and me) by making us pay higher prices since if the defendants lose, they'll just raise prices to offset their loss.
Re:Half the ram and twice as fast?
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Yeah, no shit... What about my poor old P-150 laptop with only 32 Megs of ram? For Christ's sake, the minimum requirements are a P-233 and 64 Megs of ram. Believe me, I love my Open Source software as much as the next guy here. One of the things that we're supposed to be able to do with Linux and other OSS is extend the life of our legacy hardware. When I tried Win98 on that laptop for a while, IE5 loaded fast enough to be comfortably usable. But under linux, the only window mangers that come close to the speed/usability of Win98 are IceWM and Blackbox. I compiled KDE 2.1 and Gnome from source. With Sawmill(fish?) Gnome was only slightly faster than KDE, and with enlightment Gnome was measurably slower. Konqueror did a great job of rendering... if you had 30 - 40 seconds for it to initially open. After it opened, everything was peachy, but the delay... very frustrating. I don't even DARE to try Mozilla on it.
Just about 4 years ago a machine with the specs of my laptop would have been kick-ass. Why is it that everything just gets bigger and slower, when developers could theoretically sharpen and optimize to run on minimal hardware? Don't give me shit about "Why don't you just buy a faster laptop?" either. I'm a cheap bastard. Just ask my wife. And besides.. that goes against my earlier point about "extending the life of your existing systems with Linux." That used to be a big pitching point, but it's beginning to lose merit. Just something to consider.
BTW, I've also got an Athlon 800 w/ 256 MB and a dual Celery 400 w/ 384 MB, so it's not like I don't have a better system. I just can't use them on the couch while watching cartoons.;)
Asshole. How about The Corner Lounge, Main St., Jerome, ID any Tuesday or Friday night. I'll be the big (6'2", 285lbs.) guy with a shaved head drinking a pitcher of Fall Down Brown (a locally brewed beer). Anytime, you pussified loser.
Sung Hi Lee == Absolute Goddess
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Ever seen the photo of her in the "superhero" type costume that is so tight it looks painted on? Yummy!
Making and distributing copies of those books would indeed be copyright infringements, and I don't think the community should get behind that. However, when it comes to tabs that individuals have contributed based on their own interpretation, that's another matter entirely. There's a little trick called "wget -m " that's great for making mirrors. I'm already making my own mirrors just in case.
I think you need to read my posts more carefully. Not only do you read more into what I said, but you also bend my words into things are obviously misinterpreted. I never even implied that the ORIGINAL artist should only be paid for live performances. Reread what I have said about mp3s and artist compensation. What I _did_ say is that if another performer covers someone else's work, then the cover performer and the venue are both already obligated to pay the artist through established channels solely for having written the original. And I ALSO acknowledged the fact that sometimes performers make very little to no money by playing live. But if a local band plays at the local pub, they may spend MORE for transportation, drinks, soundman, etc. than they earned. So even if they LOST money playing, they are still under the same obligation to BMI or ASCAAP since they had revenue generated by performing other artists' works. I am neither uninformed nor inexperienced in these matters, and I would rather you not drag this down into a personal flamewar.
The only difference between the people providing these unofficial interpretations and the public library is the level of convenience. The library usually won't be open when that one riff keeps escaping you at 3AM. Plus, my tax dollars don't get funneled into the private citizens who are donating their tabs.
If a performer adheres to the letter of the law, and profits (or even loses money, but still takes in some revenue) by publicly performing a song, the artist IS compensated by way of union dues, ASCAAP, BMI, et. al.. That is definitely NOT getting something for nothing. If, on the other hand, someone gets the tab to figure out all or part of a song stricty for personal enjoyment, and not to make money with, how is that taking anything away from the artists?
I'd rather you debate the points of the discussion, rather than rehash the same tired arguments again and again or brag about what you've "contributed". I am programmer and musician myself, although I have not contributed more than bug reports and testing time to the Open Source community (mostly due to a lack of free time, not desire). The database company that I work for does promote Linux as our primary development and server paltform, though.
My work aside, how do you justify the belief that using tabs from people who themselves have NOT profitted from providing them strtictly for learning purposes is taking anything away from artists like the ones you mention? Again, I have already stated that this is completely different from distributing unauthorized mp3s, so the last line of your argument completely disregards an area where I've already made clear that I am totally in favor of the artist getting paid. These guys aren't distributing the songs themselves (like mp3s, which would be almost impossible to justify as learning materials), but educational materials...
Also, most of the musicians good enough to be booking paying gigs rarely have to rely on tabs, anyway... at least ones that I'd be willing to pay to see. There's just not that big of a legitimate market for tabs among those calibre musicians. I'd personally just as soon go out and by a book from the music store if I wanted to learn 8 or 9 Pink Floyd songs... but if I'm stuck on just a riff or two of one song, and I take a peak at a tab to get a better idea of how to play it, I've not taken food from the mouths of these artists, because I'd have never spent 19.95 to learn that one riff, and nor would the "starving artists" themselves.
Unfortunately, Coke doesn't see things the same as we do. For example, I used to have a customer back when I was in PC Retail who owned a kennel where she raised some obscure breed of ugly little dogs. Her login name for her ISP was kokakola, and so she set up a homepage for her kennel at her ISP-provided web space. The URL was http://people.herisp.net/~kokakola/ (I don't recall which ISP she used). Both she and her ISP got nasty letters from Coke's legal pricks, forcing her to shut down a site with absolutely NO POSSIBLE confusion with Coke, and no possible trademark dilution.
Herein lies a major personal quandry... Do I support a beverage company like Pepsico which is a major contributor to causes that want to take away my 2nd Amendment rights, or a bunch of nazis like Coke? I choose Mtn. Dew because it tastes best, and while Coke can get a site taken down, Pespico and their cronies will have to pry my hunting rifle and target pistol from my cold, dead hands.
I couldn't agree with your suggested sollution more. Of course, most of the truly technical people at all the ISPs would probably fall on the right side of this issue, so doing this subversively at first is probably doable if only we could organize everyone necessary. The rub lies in the companies who provide the actual physical circuits -- the MCIs and Sprints of the world. When the suits and their lawyers get wind of this quiet revolution, they'd have the plug pulled on the bandwidth to the subversives' machines. I'm all for an open revolt against corporate stupidity and the rebirth of Common Sense. See http://www.inhuman.net for something I found sadly appropriate.
This is a blatant abuse of their power and position, and is completely wrong... but to whom are they accountable? As far as I can tell, they're the top of the food chain in this situation. If you can't trust the police, who do you get to police them, right?
Throughout this article, you've proven to be nothing but an apologist for lawyers of greedy corporations. The people who take the time to write these tabs don't profit from it. They do it as a community service, and not to steal from artists. Patents should protect INVENTIONS, not intangibles like software and business models. Similarly, copyright should protect artists from others (like greedy corporate types) from profiting from their work without the artist getting his or her fair share. Fans who take the time to make the words or guitar / bass parts available at absolutely NO financial profit are, as far as I and most others are concerned, engaging in Fair Use for the purpose of educating other fans in how to understand the musical workings of a song. That is absolutely NOT stealing from the artist. That is helping the fans of the artist understand and appreciate even more the artists' work.
It is you, sir, who fails to grasp subtle concepts like Fair Use and For Educational Purposes. Perhaps until you learn to recognize lawyers (are you one yourself?) abusing existing laws by distorting the spirit and intent of laws to meet the agenda of corporate greed with the help of bought politicians and judges are what's criminal, and NOT fans of artists trading information to further their appreciation of the art involved.
Despite the degree to which I disagree with you, I respect your right to voice a dissenting opinion, but you've totally driven it into the ground on this forum. You can only say the same thing so many times before it gets tiresome.
As another view, once a song is publically broadcast, it become a matter of public knowledge. Commentary on something that is public knowledge should also be protected by the 1st Amendment, since anyone who hears it and writes a tab is actally only writing down a technical analysis of how THEY THINK that it sounds. And again, this would be for educational purposes, not for profit.
From the argument you seem to support, it should be illegal for a musician with a good ear to learn a song by listening to it, but that they should HAVE to have a copy of the sheet music from the publisher, even if they don't read music. After all, if they do publicly perform what they learned either by ear, tab, or sheet music, they are ALREADY required to compensate the artist by way of BMI or ASCAAP as is the bar or venue where they perform it. Also, if they're union musicians, then I'm sure a significant portion of their dues go towards BMI and ASCAAP. As I see it, they're already getting more than their fair share by double or even triple dipping into the pockets of the ones who already BUY the music. Now that's greed!
This is entirely different from the mp3 situation, where I agree that in order to qualify as fair use, one must own a legitimate copy of either the cassette, CD, vinyl, or other media so that the artist is properly compensated (unless, of course, you paid for the mp3 itself or the artist explicitly permits free trade of their music as an mp3).
Why must you illustrate absurdity by being absurd? The protection for Ford in your example is that they have PATENTED technologies, not copyright. Copyright laws began as a protection for creative people (a good thing, IMHO), but such is no longer the case. Why you fail to acknowledge this I cannot see. Copyright and the concept of IP have been perverted into tools of rampant greed and tools to crush individual liberties like fair use, clean room implementations as a product of reverse engineering, etc.. If there had been a DCMA 25 years ago, then there would never have been a PC maker other than IBM and we wouldn't have had the explosion in cheap commodity computers. It is CRITICAL to encourage these practices to promote innovation, contrary to the arguments of all the lawyers and politicians in the pockets of big business. I know that there was an entirely different environment back in the bad old days of Big Blue being the big corporate bully, and the DMCA is a reaction to the new world of -- and please excuse the use of a buzz word -- "Digital Media," but it should never be the intent of laws to decrease the freedoms of the individual citizen while promoting the agenda of industry. Of course, "should" and "does" rarely meet in the real world.
In this particular case, the ability simply to IDENTIFY what you hear in a piece of music, store that information in a manner that is human readable, and share that interpretation with others who share an interest in that music is criminal??? At what point does it become a crime? Many musicians recognize music in numeric intervals, so if I simply say that a song is a 12 bar blues in E, then a musician knows the song is usually constructed with E as the 1 chord, A as the 4 chord, and B as the 5 chord with a chord structure like 1-1-1-1-4-4-1-1-5-4-1-5. Have I just violated someone's copyright? If I tell someone to take the same numeric structure that occurs in another piece of music and simply change 1 to Bb, 4 to Eb and 5 to F, have I suddenly violated someone else's copyrights? Or if I show only the hook from a song, am I still in violation? When does it become criminal? When I tell what key it is in? When I show how to play the first full measure? Two measures? Four? Can I simply copyright a piece of music that contains the note C and nothing else, and then claim that anything written afterwards containing it is a "derivative?" (I use your technique of illustrating absurdity by being absurd here.)
It saddens me that a government that used to be "of, by, and for the people" has become Government over the people (who cannot afford a huge legal team and lobbyists), for (the benefit of the coroporate) people (whose lawyers are willing to sue the non-submissive types into oblivion), and by the people (whom the aforementioned corporate people have purchased by way of political "contributions," legalized bribery, and other underhanded methods).
Perhaps Willy Shakespeare was right about lawyers, eh?
Hm. Kurt must not have forgotten me... look what I just got (notice the X-Mailer header, too...):
<snip>
From Kurt Seifried Sun Apr 15 03 36 11 2001
X Apparently To concealed at yahoo.com via web11506
Reply to seifried at securityportal.com
From Kurt Seifried seifried at securityportal.com
To concealed at yahoo.com
Subject tag
Date Sun, 15 Apr 2001 04 36 11 -0600
Organization SecurityPortal
MIME Version 1.0
Content Type text plain charset iso-8859-1
Content Transfer Encoding 7bit
X Priority 3
X MSMail Priority Normal
X Mailer Microsoft Outlook Express 5 50 4522 1200
X MimeOLE Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5 50 4522 1200
Content Length 11
=)
Kurt
</snip>
Ya know, this lameness filter bullshit sucks... it apparently won't let you paste an email with headers -- says this when you try...
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.
Reason: Junk character post.
And this even after I edited out all the colons and at symbols and most of the dashes and such. How fucked up is that?
Anyway, since Kurt is obviously following this article with interest, "Hi, Kurt! It's really good to hear from you, even if it is more of you usual self-inflated BS. If you look on eBay, you might find a personality that you can afford... I doubt many people would disagree with me on the fact that you definitely need one."
Sorry for airing our dirty laundry in public, but the world needs to know that Security Portal has a real jerk doing all these columns for them. I'm not alone in thinking that Kurt has a bad habit of jumping onto one thing and then beating it into the ground... regardless of how much merit that thing _really_ has in the minds of those who already exercise a bit of common horse sense in the administration of their systems. OF COURSE you can get fucked installing binaries of ANY sort. Kurt is quite a master of the obvious, no? That's why common sense comes into play. Be careful who you download from. Check MD5 sums and/or GPG/PGP signatures. Compile source if you're competent enough. All this fits under the "Duh?" category for those with half a clue.
My experience with Kurt Seifried is that he's a pompous asshole windbag. First he wails on Caldera for not including OpenSSH _binary RPM_ files for their eDesktop 2.4 distro, even though there are OpenSSH RPM files for their eServer distro that work on eDesktop just as well. He went so far as to call the fine folks at Caldera "lame" for not including them by default. When I wrote him personally, and suggested that calling them lame was out of line (I'm not a Caldera user, but I think that showing your ass and giving the unwashed masses in the corporate-0wned media examples of bickering and infighting are poor advocacy), he was a complete asshole about the whole situtation. I'd paste in the original emails, but I was so pissed after I had tried to be civil with him, and all he could do was be a smartass, I shit-canned the emails. And now, after bitching that they didn't provide binary RPMs (which they did, but with eServer, not eDesktop... a point he never acknowldeged), he now goes on a tirade _AGAINST_ binary RPMs? If you ask me, Kurt Seifried is a bunch of hot fucking air, and not press-worthy.
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Software error:
No such file or directory at
For help, please send mail to this site's webmaster, giving this error message and the time and date of the error. ;
Somebody mod this up as Funny!
Whoa! That was like.... deep and stuff, dude... Yah!
Well, at least we agree on the movie reviews. ;b
What have we had in the last 6 months here? About 10 stories about ancient/archaic computer systems. It was only interesting the first 3 or 4 times... now it's really wearing thin. Why don't they give "Computing History" or something like that it's own /box so those of us tired of these kinds of stories can filter them out?
What do you honestly see as the future market for Linux? Do you think it will remain strictly in the server closets and on the desktops of the UberGeeks? Or do you see it making it's way into business to be more than "just a cheap platform for a webserver" (which is unfortunately the attitude I see in many business settings)? Or will Linux thrive in the embedded / set top box / appliance market? Or (and this is the utopian ideal for me) do you see Linux and it's other free *nix-like cousins finally winning the battle and becoming the dominant platform for Joe Desktop User to Mr. and Ms. Uber PowerUser and all areas in between? Or do you see a mix of some/all of these possibilities?
That nothing will ever come of it, because there are too many companies with too many of their own agendas. Do we need a standardized API of the sort their discussing? Not need, as such, but it would be a great thing to have. Will it get done by all these companies? I seriously doubt it. That's what happens when you get this many companies together... corportate politics comes into play, and everyone's trying to get "their standard" adopted so that they can sell more of their video chipsets, sound or modem chipsets, or cheese graters. Sad but true.
Make sure you get the right firmware if you do get an 67x external! When I moved about 8 blocks and had my Qwest DSL service transferred, it took them over a month longer to get my service restored than they had initially promised. I was about ready to tell them to shove their service up their noses when a particularly clueful tech support guy was able to determine that I had, indeed been provisioned correctly, but at my old apartment the DSLAM had been CAP and at the house I moved to, the DSLAM I was provisioned on was DMT. Three days and a UPS delivery later I was back up and rolling, but it was a 5 week (7 weeks if you count the _TWO_ weeks they said it would take) nightmare of long hold times, head scratching, and frustration. So MAKE SURE you get the right firmware for the DSLAM you're provisioned on.
n/t
Vincent Vega's back! And he's on a mission from Xenu! John "Brainwashed" Travolta stars in "Pulp Fiction 2: Battlefield Canada!"
Somebody give Dr. Dubious a +1 for Funny. heh.
These defendants didn't go out and start MAKING Nd-Fe-B magnets, did they?? Fuck no! They PURCHASED them from some source to use in their electronics manufacturing. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't they already PAID someone (a components vendor) for these magnets, and it is the responsibility of the vendor(s) who supplied the component magnets to make sure the MANUFACTURER OF THE MAGNETS is in compliance with the appropriate patents? If someone were to patent a novel yet simple component (a small motor, for example), and then I use that component to construct something entirely different, but I purchased all my little components (i.e. little motors) from the original manufacturer then hasn't the original manufacturer/creator BEEN compensated adequately already?
Where does it say "When you purchase the MicroMiniSpinMaster 3000 motor, you agree not to use it in the manufacture of anything without providing royalties to Itsy Bitsy Motor Corp. under penalty of law."? What the fuck good is a magnet by itself? It MUST be used to make something more complex and more useful. This is utter bullshit, and I hope the courts see through this obvious attempt at ass-raping the electronics purchaser (you and me) by making us pay higher prices since if the defendants lose, they'll just raise prices to offset their loss.
Yeah, no shit... What about my poor old P-150 laptop with only 32 Megs of ram? For Christ's sake, the minimum requirements are a P-233 and 64 Megs of ram. Believe me, I love my Open Source software as much as the next guy here. One of the things that we're supposed to be able to do with Linux and other OSS is extend the life of our legacy hardware. When I tried Win98 on that laptop for a while, IE5 loaded fast enough to be comfortably usable. But under linux, the only window mangers that come close to the speed/usability of Win98 are IceWM and Blackbox. I compiled KDE 2.1 and Gnome from source. With Sawmill(fish?) Gnome was only slightly faster than KDE, and with enlightment Gnome was measurably slower. Konqueror did a great job of rendering... if you had 30 - 40 seconds for it to initially open. After it opened, everything was peachy, but the delay... very frustrating. I don't even DARE to try Mozilla on it.
;)
Just about 4 years ago a machine with the specs of my laptop would have been kick-ass. Why is it that everything just gets bigger and slower, when developers could theoretically sharpen and optimize to run on minimal hardware? Don't give me shit about "Why don't you just buy a faster laptop?" either. I'm a cheap bastard. Just ask my wife. And besides.. that goes against my earlier point about "extending the life of your existing systems with Linux." That used to be a big pitching point, but it's beginning to lose merit. Just something to consider.
BTW, I've also got an Athlon 800 w/ 256 MB and a dual Celery 400 w/ 384 MB, so it's not like I don't have a better system. I just can't use them on the couch while watching cartoons.
Asshole. How about The Corner Lounge, Main St., Jerome, ID any Tuesday or Friday night. I'll be the big (6'2", 285lbs.) guy with a shaved head drinking a pitcher of Fall Down Brown (a locally brewed beer). Anytime, you pussified loser.
Ever seen the photo of her in the "superhero" type costume that is so tight it looks painted on? Yummy!
Making and distributing copies of those books would indeed be copyright infringements, and I don't think the community should get behind that. However, when it comes to tabs that individuals have contributed based on their own interpretation, that's another matter entirely. There's a little trick called "wget -m " that's great for making mirrors. I'm already making my own mirrors just in case.
I think you need to read my posts more carefully. Not only do you read more into what I said, but you also bend my words into things are obviously misinterpreted. I never even implied that the ORIGINAL artist should only be paid for live performances. Reread what I have said about mp3s and artist compensation. What I _did_ say is that if another performer covers someone else's work, then the cover performer and the venue are both already obligated to pay the artist through established channels solely for having written the original. And I ALSO acknowledged the fact that sometimes performers make very little to no money by playing live. But if a local band plays at the local pub, they may spend MORE for transportation, drinks, soundman, etc. than they earned. So even if they LOST money playing, they are still under the same obligation to BMI or ASCAAP since they had revenue generated by performing other artists' works. I am neither uninformed nor inexperienced in these matters, and I would rather you not drag this down into a personal flamewar.
The only difference between the people providing these unofficial interpretations and the public library is the level of convenience. The library usually won't be open when that one riff keeps escaping you at 3AM. Plus, my tax dollars don't get funneled into the private citizens who are donating their tabs.
If a performer adheres to the letter of the law, and profits (or even loses money, but still takes in some revenue) by publicly performing a song, the artist IS compensated by way of union dues, ASCAAP, BMI, et. al.. That is definitely NOT getting something for nothing. If, on the other hand, someone gets the tab to figure out all or part of a song stricty for personal enjoyment, and not to make money with, how is that taking anything away from the artists?
I'd rather you debate the points of the discussion, rather than rehash the same tired arguments again and again or brag about what you've "contributed". I am programmer and musician myself, although I have not contributed more than bug reports and testing time to the Open Source community (mostly due to a lack of free time, not desire). The database company that I work for does promote Linux as our primary development and server paltform, though.
My work aside, how do you justify the belief that using tabs from people who themselves have NOT profitted from providing them strtictly for learning purposes is taking anything away from artists like the ones you mention? Again, I have already stated that this is completely different from distributing unauthorized mp3s, so the last line of your argument completely disregards an area where I've already made clear that I am totally in favor of the artist getting paid. These guys aren't distributing the songs themselves (like mp3s, which would be almost impossible to justify as learning materials), but educational materials...
Also, most of the musicians good enough to be booking paying gigs rarely have to rely on tabs, anyway... at least ones that I'd be willing to pay to see. There's just not that big of a legitimate market for tabs among those calibre musicians. I'd personally just as soon go out and by a book from the music store if I wanted to learn 8 or 9 Pink Floyd songs... but if I'm stuck on just a riff or two of one song, and I take a peak at a tab to get a better idea of how to play it, I've not taken food from the mouths of these artists, because I'd have never spent 19.95 to learn that one riff, and nor would the "starving artists" themselves.
Unfortunately, Coke doesn't see things the same as we do. For example, I used to have a customer back when I was in PC Retail who owned a kennel where she raised some obscure breed of ugly little dogs. Her login name for her ISP was kokakola, and so she set up a homepage for her kennel at her ISP-provided web space. The URL was http://people.herisp.net/~kokakola/ (I don't recall which ISP she used). Both she and her ISP got nasty letters from Coke's legal pricks, forcing her to shut down a site with absolutely NO POSSIBLE confusion with Coke, and no possible trademark dilution. Herein lies a major personal quandry... Do I support a beverage company like Pepsico which is a major contributor to causes that want to take away my 2nd Amendment rights, or a bunch of nazis like Coke? I choose Mtn. Dew because it tastes best, and while Coke can get a site taken down, Pespico and their cronies will have to pry my hunting rifle and target pistol from my cold, dead hands.
I couldn't agree with your suggested sollution more. Of course, most of the truly technical people at all the ISPs would probably fall on the right side of this issue, so doing this subversively at first is probably doable if only we could organize everyone necessary. The rub lies in the companies who provide the actual physical circuits -- the MCIs and Sprints of the world. When the suits and their lawyers get wind of this quiet revolution, they'd have the plug pulled on the bandwidth to the subversives' machines. I'm all for an open revolt against corporate stupidity and the rebirth of Common Sense. See http://www.inhuman.net for something I found sadly appropriate.
This is a blatant abuse of their power and position, and is completely wrong... but to whom are they accountable? As far as I can tell, they're the top of the food chain in this situation. If you can't trust the police, who do you get to police them, right?
Throughout this article, you've proven to be nothing but an apologist for lawyers of greedy corporations. The people who take the time to write these tabs don't profit from it. They do it as a community service, and not to steal from artists. Patents should protect INVENTIONS, not intangibles like software and business models. Similarly, copyright should protect artists from others (like greedy corporate types) from profiting from their work without the artist getting his or her fair share. Fans who take the time to make the words or guitar / bass parts available at absolutely NO financial profit are, as far as I and most others are concerned, engaging in Fair Use for the purpose of educating other fans in how to understand the musical workings of a song. That is absolutely NOT stealing from the artist. That is helping the fans of the artist understand and appreciate even more the artists' work.
It is you, sir, who fails to grasp subtle concepts like Fair Use and For Educational Purposes. Perhaps until you learn to recognize lawyers (are you one yourself?) abusing existing laws by distorting the spirit and intent of laws to meet the agenda of corporate greed with the help of bought politicians and judges are what's criminal, and NOT fans of artists trading information to further their appreciation of the art involved.
Despite the degree to which I disagree with you, I respect your right to voice a dissenting opinion, but you've totally driven it into the ground on this forum. You can only say the same thing so many times before it gets tiresome.
As another view, once a song is publically broadcast, it become a matter of public knowledge. Commentary on something that is public knowledge should also be protected by the 1st Amendment, since anyone who hears it and writes a tab is actally only writing down a technical analysis of how THEY THINK that it sounds. And again, this would be for educational purposes, not for profit.
From the argument you seem to support, it should be illegal for a musician with a good ear to learn a song by listening to it, but that they should HAVE to have a copy of the sheet music from the publisher, even if they don't read music. After all, if they do publicly perform what they learned either by ear, tab, or sheet music, they are ALREADY required to compensate the artist by way of BMI or ASCAAP as is the bar or venue where they perform it. Also, if they're union musicians, then I'm sure a significant portion of their dues go towards BMI and ASCAAP. As I see it, they're already getting more than their fair share by double or even triple dipping into the pockets of the ones who already BUY the music. Now that's greed!
This is entirely different from the mp3 situation, where I agree that in order to qualify as fair use, one must own a legitimate copy of either the cassette, CD, vinyl, or other media so that the artist is properly compensated (unless, of course, you paid for the mp3 itself or the artist explicitly permits free trade of their music as an mp3).
Why must you illustrate absurdity by being absurd? The protection for Ford in your example is that they have PATENTED technologies, not copyright. Copyright laws began as a protection for creative people (a good thing, IMHO), but such is no longer the case. Why you fail to acknowledge this I cannot see. Copyright and the concept of IP have been perverted into tools of rampant greed and tools to crush individual liberties like fair use, clean room implementations as a product of reverse engineering, etc.. If there had been a DCMA 25 years ago, then there would never have been a PC maker other than IBM and we wouldn't have had the explosion in cheap commodity computers. It is CRITICAL to encourage these practices to promote innovation, contrary to the arguments of all the lawyers and politicians in the pockets of big business. I know that there was an entirely different environment back in the bad old days of Big Blue being the big corporate bully, and the DMCA is a reaction to the new world of -- and please excuse the use of a buzz word -- "Digital Media," but it should never be the intent of laws to decrease the freedoms of the individual citizen while promoting the agenda of industry. Of course, "should" and "does" rarely meet in the real world.
In this particular case, the ability simply to IDENTIFY what you hear in a piece of music, store that information in a manner that is human readable, and share that interpretation with others who share an interest in that music is criminal??? At what point does it become a crime? Many musicians recognize music in numeric intervals, so if I simply say that a song is a 12 bar blues in E, then a musician knows the song is usually constructed with E as the 1 chord, A as the 4 chord, and B as the 5 chord with a chord structure like 1-1-1-1-4-4-1-1-5-4-1-5. Have I just violated someone's copyright? If I tell someone to take the same numeric structure that occurs in another piece of music and simply change 1 to Bb, 4 to Eb and 5 to F, have I suddenly violated someone else's copyrights? Or if I show only the hook from a song, am I still in violation? When does it become criminal? When I tell what key it is in? When I show how to play the first full measure? Two measures? Four? Can I simply copyright a piece of music that contains the note C and nothing else, and then claim that anything written afterwards containing it is a "derivative?" (I use your technique of illustrating absurdity by being absurd here.)
It saddens me that a government that used to be "of, by, and for the people" has become Government over the people (who cannot afford a huge legal team and lobbyists), for (the benefit of the coroporate) people (whose lawyers are willing to sue the non-submissive types into oblivion), and by the people (whom the aforementioned corporate people have purchased by way of political "contributions," legalized bribery, and other underhanded methods).
Perhaps Willy Shakespeare was right about lawyers, eh?
Hm. Kurt must not have forgotten me... look what I just got (notice the X-Mailer header, too...):
<snip>
From Kurt Seifried Sun Apr 15 03 36 11 2001
X Apparently To concealed at yahoo.com via web11506
Reply to seifried at securityportal.com
From Kurt Seifried seifried at securityportal.com
To concealed at yahoo.com
Subject tag
Date Sun, 15 Apr 2001 04 36 11 -0600
Organization SecurityPortal
MIME Version 1.0
Content Type text plain charset iso-8859-1
Content Transfer Encoding 7bit
X Priority 3
X MSMail Priority Normal
X Mailer Microsoft Outlook Express 5 50 4522 1200
X MimeOLE Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5 50 4522 1200
Content Length 11
=)
Kurt
</snip>
Ya know, this lameness filter bullshit sucks... it apparently won't let you paste an email with headers -- says this when you try...
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.
Reason: Junk character post.
And this even after I edited out all the colons and at symbols and most of the dashes and such. How fucked up is that?
Anyway, since Kurt is obviously following this article with interest, "Hi, Kurt! It's really good to hear from you, even if it is more of you usual self-inflated BS. If you look on eBay, you might find a personality that you can afford... I doubt many people would disagree with me on the fact that you definitely need one."
Sorry for airing our dirty laundry in public, but the world needs to know that Security Portal has a real jerk doing all these columns for them. I'm not alone in thinking that Kurt has a bad habit of jumping onto one thing and then beating it into the ground... regardless of how much merit that thing _really_ has in the minds of those who already exercise a bit of common horse sense in the administration of their systems. OF COURSE you can get fucked installing binaries of ANY sort. Kurt is quite a master of the obvious, no? That's why common sense comes into play. Be careful who you download from. Check MD5 sums and/or GPG/PGP signatures. Compile source if you're competent enough. All this fits under the "Duh?" category for those with half a clue.
My experience with Kurt Seifried is that he's a pompous asshole windbag. First he wails on Caldera for not including OpenSSH _binary RPM_ files for their eDesktop 2.4 distro, even though there are OpenSSH RPM files for their eServer distro that work on eDesktop just as well. He went so far as to call the fine folks at Caldera "lame" for not including them by default. When I wrote him personally, and suggested that calling them lame was out of line (I'm not a Caldera user, but I think that showing your ass and giving the unwashed masses in the corporate-0wned media examples of bickering and infighting are poor advocacy), he was a complete asshole about the whole situtation. I'd paste in the original emails, but I was so pissed after I had tried to be civil with him, and all he could do was be a smartass, I shit-canned the emails. And now, after bitching that they didn't provide binary RPMs (which they did, but with eServer, not eDesktop... a point he never acknowldeged), he now goes on a tirade _AGAINST_ binary RPMs? If you ask me, Kurt Seifried is a bunch of hot fucking air, and not press-worthy.