And just who do those stupid regents of the UC system think is footing the bill for all those classes anyway? It sure isn't them
I'm pretty sure I'm being suckered, but... It is them. Even with the tuition hikes of the last decade, the state still pays more than the students
I think the "them" refers to the regents - who aren't personally footing the bill.
As to the state footing the bill, the troll in me says "Wrong Again!". The state can't pay for anything, as it doesn't have any money. It just controls the tax dollars of California residents - including the students, the janitors of the RIAA, and Marc Andreeson. If merely providing the money makes one an owner, then the lectures and any derivitive works should be owned by every resident of California.
Not to mention donating to the EFF, and participating in public debate.
Internationally, you can also help by writing letters to businesses that support innane patents. I'm not talking about the ones that make money off them, but their suppliers and customers. For example, Tim O'Reilly didn't look twice at the 1-click patent until we told him what we thought about it - now he is actually somewhat of a patent activist.
The problem is, business model patents aren't new. The first documented example is from 1867, for a hotel restaurant's menu. They patented the idea of a menu with advertisements around the edge, which the PTO head pointed out bears a great resemblance to your average commercial website...
Anyway, that idea wasn't one that could have been a trade secret. It was defended under the other reason for patents - to promote innovation. By establishing a model that worked, the hotel challenged others to come up with something better, and ensured that the bigger hotel across the street didn't "steal" their idea and use it to run them out of business.
Disclaimer - I don't defend this use of patents, or any use of patents. The problem is, as Larry Lessig points out, that lawyers are used to thinking in lawyer terms, which means cites of how we've done things for a hundred years count more than common sense.
Color me cynical, but - Considering the exact opposite passed just last year, how could it pass?
According to the USPTO head bureaucrat, G. Todd "Its not my fault" Dickenson, a bill passed last year that made it against the law for patent office employees to seek help before letting patents pass.
The current system heavily prefers big companies, which have the money to defend lawsuits, and punishes little companies, who can't afford to challenge the big companies. Since big companies can also afford lobbying I don't see much incentive for the congress-critters to pass this one.
No, you can get a patent in the US, even after revealing your secrets, as long as you applied before the patent became public.
Often, for example, a company will apply for a patent, and then attend a standards board and push their technology as a new standard without mentioning the patent. By the time the patent becomes public, the standard may already be adopted. Some standards boards disallow this, but not all or even most.
Obvious to a union employee at the patent office isn't the same as obvious to you. Patents have been granted on hyperlinking, education over the internet, and international commerce over the internet.
According to G. Todd Dickenson, head of the USPTO, its only within the last year that they have started to have two people look at each patent to see if it is non-obvious. Further, according to current law, patent office employees can't talk to anyone outside to find out if the claims make sense. That's what this bill may make better.
If I remember, there's a federal law that stipulates you are allowed one [1] backup of any piece of software you own on the basis that it be used to restore/replace the original in the event of its destruction or loss, etceteras. I don't think it specified a change in media, or in the tools necessary to read that data- but it DOES mean that I'm legally allowed to back up any DVDs I might buy.
Not exactly a federal law, IIRC. US Fair Use law (with apologies for those outside the land of the DMCA) doesn't specifically address media-shifting (aka space-shifting). Space-shifting was recognized as a right in federal court, but that's not exactly the same as a law, AFAIK.
Recently, Time Warner and the MPAA has argued that space-shifting no longer applies. They argue that the fact that most computer programs are distributed on durable disks and that hardware is more reliable as taking away the reasons for those earlier federal rulings. They may not have a leg to stand on, but they have the lawyers.
The MPAA already knows about this. Their whole court case, in fact, depends on compression, as they insist that you can send a full DVD over a normal ethernet connection or copy it to a CD.
If you look at Judge Kaplan's decision (see the EFF's archive or Openlaw for the actual documents), you will see that he bought it.
Still, I don't really want to see it here - it just fosters the opinion of many that we're a bunch of evil pirates, who salivate at any opportunity to get something for nothing. That makes it much harder to explain DeCSS as being necessary for viewing on Linux.
Actually, its a good analogy...perpetual monopolies are also unconstitutional, and tying media to a player is a violation of the Sherman Act. Judge Kaplan said that because the DMCA was more recent, it was all that mattered.
Think of the recent E-Books wars. You would think that publishing something that couldn't be read by accessibility software, and thus couldn't be read by blind people, would be against some law, somewhere. According to the publishers, though, you don't have a right to crack their codes in order to translate their books to braille.
First, write to your representatives, to make sure they don't make the same mistakes.
Second, participate in your government, to whatever extent possible.
Third, write the international organizations (e.g., WIPO) that have responsibilities for managing these rules. IIRC, one of the justifications for portions of the DMCA was to move it inline with international trade treaties.
Fourth, support the EFF, and any local organizations that have similar goals.
How about donating to the EFF? Or contributing to OpenLaw? Quite a few people who have contributed to this case (including the DeCSS Authors) aren't in the US.
The single most important thing that each of us can do is vote. Calling and writing your congressman may help, but ultimately it is what we do on election day that matters most.
There's something even more important that you can do. It isn't fun and it takes more time than beating Diablo II on Hell level. Here it is: Run for office.
How many times have you complained about the idiots we have running the country? What would it take for you to do better?
One nice thing about Slashdot readers is that we tend to move in herds. There are geographical regions that are packed with nerds (nerd-herds?), and could probably support city council or state legislature positions for people with brains. If we get enough of a critical mass at the lower levels, it shouldn't be too hard to move up.
Even if you won't run, or can't, try finding those candidates that can and helping them out. It could be financial help, or it could be coding them a new web page. It could be offering to speak at a party fundraiser, if you are well-known enough, putting a link on your home-page, submitting stories about their good works to Slashdot, whatever - just do something.
============================================
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. -- Aaron Burr
There are ways to influence politicians, but just arbitrarily increasing the voter count won't do it. It's not like anyone monitors the number of Voters Who Require Sensible Copyright Laws, nor would anyone care if such figures existed.
No, but they do monitor the number of people by demographics - age, income, type of job, gender. How many Americans reading Slashdot are male, making well above the poverty line, working in IT, and 18-30? I thought so.
I don't think we can make Gore or Bush make a big deal of it this election, but we can establish ourselves as the demographic to suck up to for the next one.
Or maybe not. Right now, this case isn't unwinnable, and it comes down to who is more credible - a bunch of "hackers", or the responsible corporations Time Warner and Disney. [cough, cough.]
Every action that makes us look like crackers or sociopaths makes them take us less seriously.
We need to take a lesson from other ideological battles. The one with the most money and popular support wins - the ones that go around blowing things up don't.
This was a request for comments on comments (sort of meta-moderation). It allowed people to respond to the earlier submissions, pointing out factual and legal errors.
Most senators and representatives do have people keeping track of the letters they receive on the DMCA. Writing them with short, concise emails or letters that essentially say "Repeal the DMCA" is something that they will notice.
Whether or not that will counter-balance the huge donations being made by the RIAA and MPAA is a matter of opinion.
They are mainly people who have participated in the OpenLawdvd-discuss mailing list, where we have put in a lot of time talking through both the law and technical side of things (I use the term "we" loosely - I'm mainly a lurker.)
Anyone was able to submit comments and reply comments - only a few did, but those few pointed out some important points.
Here's what I found (at http://execpc.com/~mhallign/crime.html):
On October 11, 1996, President Clinton signed "The Economic Espionage Act of 1996" into law. The theft of trade secrets is now a federal criminal offense.
This is a major development in the law of trade secrets in the United States and internationally. The Department of Justice now has sweeping authority to prosecute trade secret theft whether it is in the United States, via the Internet, or outside the United States.
Section 1832 of the Act makes it a federal criminal act for any person to convert a trade secret to his own benefit or the benefit of others intending or knowing that the offense will injure any owner of the trade secret. The conversion of a trade secret is defined broadly to cover every conceivable act of trade secret misappropriation including theft, appropriation without authorization, concealment, fraud artifice, deception, copying without authorization, duplication, sketches, drawings, photographs, downloads, uploads, alterations, destruction, photocopies, transmissions, deliveries, mail, communications, or other transfers or conveyances of such trade secrets without authorization.
The Act also makes it a federal criminal offense to receive, buy or possess the trade secret information of another person knowing the same to have been stolen, appropriated, obtained or converted without the trade secret owner's authorization.The definition of a "trade secret" in the Act generally tracks the definition of a trade secret in the Uniform Trade Secrets Act but expands the definition of a trade secret to include the new technological ways that trade secrets are created and stored. There's a ton of other useful information out there as well, including various state laws and supreme court decisions.
End of Quote
I had done research on trade secret law about five years ago, and even then there was a lot of case law supporting trade secret protection. Many states have laws that are applicable, in addition to the federal laws. To find other good sites, just search: I typed in "Trade Secret Law" in my browser, and its search returned dozens of good hits, including the above.
Um...no. Try searching on "Trade Secret Law":)
Here's what I found (at http://execpc.com/~mhallign/crime.html):
On October 11, 1996, President Clinton signed "The Economic Espionage Act of 1996" into law. The theft of trade secrets is now a federal criminal offense. This is a major development in the law of trade secrets in the United States and internationally. The Department of Justice now has sweeping authority to prosecute trade secret theft whether it is in the United States, via the Internet, or outside the United States.
Section 1832 of the Act makes it a federal criminal act for any person to convert a trade secret to his own benefit or the benefit of others intending or knowing that the offense will injure any owner of the trade secret. The conversion of a trade secret is defined broadly to cover every conceivable act of trade secret misappropriation including theft, appropriation without authorization, concealment, fraud artifice, deception, copying without authorization, duplication, sketches, drawings, photographs, downloads, uploads, alterations, destruction, photocopies, transmissions, deliveries, mail, communications, or other transfers or conveyances of such trade secrets without authorization.
The Act also makes it a federal criminal offense to receive, buy or possess the trade secret information of another person knowing the same to have been stolen, appropriated, obtained or converted without the trade secret owner's authorization.The definition of a "trade secret" in the Act generally tracks the definition of a trade secret in the Uniform Trade Secrets Act but expands the definition of a trade secret to include the new technological ways that trade secrets are created and stored.
There's a ton of other useful information out there as well, including various state laws and supreme court decisions.
I've interviewed for a fair number (40+) of companies, and other than Veritas, no one's ever asked me anything truly technical. It may be because I've mostly worked for large companies, but even the small consulting shop I work for now was basically just fishing to see if I knew what the acronyms "EJB" and "CORBA" meant.
Instead, most companies these days ask behavior based questions - describe a time when you've worked above and beyond, describe a time when you felt constrained by rules, those sorts of things. You may need to be a technical guru to advance, or to keep your job, but you rarely need to be one to get it.
There are plenty of people looking for programming jobs, who are unwilling to move or work on the things most companies need. There's a real shortage of people in the places where companies do development. There's also a real shortage of people willing to do anything other than Java and HTML. The DC Area, where I work, has a deficit of about 19000 developers (compared to the number of jobs) right now. This isn't conjecture; I've been a hiring manager/interviewer since '96, and I've seen the quality and quantity of interviewees steadily decrease.
Anyone else notice the fact that this was on ABC? ABC is owned by Disney, which is one of the big boys in the MPAA. The MPAA has a vested interest in making the mainstream think of Linux as bad -- I'm not sure if I'm paranoid, or just reaching.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure I'm being suckered, but... It is them. Even with the tuition hikes of the last decade, the state still pays more than the students
I think the "them" refers to the regents - who aren't personally footing the bill.
As to the state footing the bill, the troll in me says "Wrong Again!". The state can't pay for anything, as it doesn't have any money. It just controls the tax dollars of California residents - including the students, the janitors of the RIAA, and Marc Andreeson. If merely providing the money makes one an owner, then the lectures and any derivitive works should be owned by every resident of California.
Internationally, you can also help by writing letters to businesses that support innane patents. I'm not talking about the ones that make money off them, but their suppliers and customers. For example, Tim O'Reilly didn't look twice at the 1-click patent until we told him what we thought about it - now he is actually somewhat of a patent activist.
Anyway, that idea wasn't one that could have been a trade secret. It was defended under the other reason for patents - to promote innovation. By establishing a model that worked, the hotel challenged others to come up with something better, and ensured that the bigger hotel across the street didn't "steal" their idea and use it to run them out of business.
Disclaimer - I don't defend this use of patents, or any use of patents. The problem is, as Larry Lessig points out, that lawyers are used to thinking in lawyer terms, which means cites of how we've done things for a hundred years count more than common sense.
According to the USPTO head bureaucrat, G. Todd "Its not my fault" Dickenson, a bill passed last year that made it against the law for patent office employees to seek help before letting patents pass.
The current system heavily prefers big companies, which have the money to defend lawsuits, and punishes little companies, who can't afford to challenge the big companies. Since big companies can also afford lobbying I don't see much incentive for the congress-critters to pass this one.
Often, for example, a company will apply for a patent, and then attend a standards board and push their technology as a new standard without mentioning the patent. By the time the patent becomes public, the standard may already be adopted. Some standards boards disallow this, but not all or even most.
According to G. Todd Dickenson, head of the USPTO, its only within the last year that they have started to have two people look at each patent to see if it is non-obvious. Further, according to current law, patent office employees can't talk to anyone outside to find out if the claims make sense. That's what this bill may make better.
That was actually suggested back in May, in the article about the first Dickenson/O'Reilly debate. The second debate is tonight, in the DC area, btw.
Just don't do it Western Union...
If I remember, there's a federal law that stipulates you are allowed one [1] backup of any piece of software you own on the basis that it be used to restore/replace the original in the event of its destruction or loss, etceteras. I don't think it specified a change in media, or in the tools necessary to read that data- but it DOES mean that I'm legally allowed to back up any DVDs I might buy.
Not exactly a federal law, IIRC. US Fair Use law (with apologies for those outside the land of the DMCA) doesn't specifically address media-shifting (aka space-shifting). Space-shifting was recognized as a right in federal court, but that's not exactly the same as a law, AFAIK.
Recently, Time Warner and the MPAA has argued that space-shifting no longer applies. They argue that the fact that most computer programs are distributed on durable disks and that hardware is more reliable as taking away the reasons for those earlier federal rulings. They may not have a leg to stand on, but they have the lawyers.
If you look at Judge Kaplan's decision (see the EFF's archive or Openlaw for the actual documents), you will see that he bought it.
Still, I don't really want to see it here - it just fosters the opinion of many that we're a bunch of evil pirates, who salivate at any opportunity to get something for nothing. That makes it much harder to explain DeCSS as being necessary for viewing on Linux.
Think of the recent E-Books wars. You would think that publishing something that couldn't be read by accessibility software, and thus couldn't be read by blind people, would be against some law, somewhere. According to the publishers, though, you don't have a right to crack their codes in order to translate their books to braille.
Second, participate in your government, to whatever extent possible.
Third, write the international organizations (e.g., WIPO) that have responsibilities for managing these rules. IIRC, one of the justifications for portions of the DMCA was to move it inline with international trade treaties.
Fourth, support the EFF, and any local organizations that have similar goals.
Already happened, supposedly. The MPAA used death threats and physical action against their members in their arguments for a closed courtroom.
There's something even more important that you can do. It isn't fun and it takes more time than beating Diablo II on Hell level. Here it is: Run for office.
How many times have you complained about the idiots we have running the country? What would it take for you to do better?
One nice thing about Slashdot readers is that we tend to move in herds. There are geographical regions that are packed with nerds (nerd-herds?), and could probably support city council or state legislature positions for people with brains. If we get enough of a critical mass at the lower levels, it shouldn't be too hard to move up.
Even if you won't run, or can't, try finding those candidates that can and helping them out. It could be financial help, or it could be coding them a new web page. It could be offering to speak at a party fundraiser, if you are well-known enough, putting a link on your home-page, submitting stories about their good works to Slashdot, whatever - just do something.
============================================
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. -- Aaron Burr
No, but they do monitor the number of people by demographics - age, income, type of job, gender. How many Americans reading Slashdot are male, making well above the poverty line, working in IT, and 18-30? I thought so.
I don't think we can make Gore or Bush make a big deal of it this election, but we can establish ourselves as the demographic to suck up to for the next one.
Every action that makes us look like crackers or sociopaths makes them take us less seriously.
We need to take a lesson from other ideological battles. The one with the most money and popular support wins - the ones that go around blowing things up don't.
This was a request for comments on comments (sort of meta-moderation). It allowed people to respond to the earlier submissions, pointing out factual and legal errors.
Whether or not that will counter-balance the huge donations being made by the RIAA and MPAA is a matter of opinion.
Anyone was able to submit comments and reply comments - only a few did, but those few pointed out some important points.
On October 11, 1996, President Clinton signed "The Economic Espionage Act of 1996" into law. The theft of trade secrets is now a federal criminal offense.
This is a major development in the law of trade secrets in the United States and internationally. The Department of Justice now has sweeping authority to prosecute trade secret theft whether it is in the United States, via the Internet, or outside the United States.
Section 1832 of the Act makes it a federal criminal act for any person to convert a trade secret to his own benefit or the benefit of others intending or knowing that the offense will injure any owner of the trade secret. The conversion of a trade secret is defined broadly to cover every conceivable act of trade secret misappropriation including theft, appropriation without authorization, concealment, fraud artifice, deception, copying without authorization, duplication, sketches, drawings, photographs, downloads, uploads, alterations, destruction, photocopies, transmissions, deliveries, mail, communications, or other transfers or conveyances of such trade secrets without authorization.
The Act also makes it a federal criminal offense to receive, buy or possess the trade secret information of another person knowing the same to have been stolen, appropriated, obtained or converted without the trade secret owner's authorization.The definition of a "trade secret" in the Act generally tracks the definition of a trade secret in the Uniform Trade Secrets Act but expands the definition of a trade secret to include the new technological ways that trade secrets are created and stored. There's a ton of other useful information out there as well, including various state laws and supreme court decisions.
End of Quote
I had done research on trade secret law about five years ago, and even then there was a lot of case law supporting trade secret protection. Many states have laws that are applicable, in addition to the federal laws. To find other good sites, just search: I typed in "Trade Secret Law" in my browser, and its search returned dozens of good hits, including the above.
Um...no. Try searching on "Trade Secret Law" :)
Here's what I found (at http://execpc.com/~mhallign/crime.html): On October 11, 1996, President Clinton signed "The Economic Espionage Act of 1996" into law. The theft of trade secrets is now a federal criminal offense. This is a major development in the law of trade secrets in the United States and internationally. The Department of Justice now has sweeping authority to prosecute trade secret theft whether it is in the United States, via the Internet, or outside the United States. Section 1832 of the Act makes it a federal criminal act for any person to convert a trade secret to his own benefit or the benefit of others intending or knowing that the offense will injure any owner of the trade secret. The conversion of a trade secret is defined broadly to cover every conceivable act of trade secret misappropriation including theft, appropriation without authorization, concealment, fraud artifice, deception, copying without authorization, duplication, sketches, drawings, photographs, downloads, uploads, alterations, destruction, photocopies, transmissions, deliveries, mail, communications, or other transfers or conveyances of such trade secrets without authorization. The Act also makes it a federal criminal offense to receive, buy or possess the trade secret information of another person knowing the same to have been stolen, appropriated, obtained or converted without the trade secret owner's authorization.The definition of a "trade secret" in the Act generally tracks the definition of a trade secret in the Uniform Trade Secrets Act but expands the definition of a trade secret to include the new technological ways that trade secrets are created and stored. There's a ton of other useful information out there as well, including various state laws and supreme court decisions.
I've interviewed for a fair number (40+) of companies, and other than Veritas, no one's ever asked me anything truly technical. It may be because I've mostly worked for large companies, but even the small consulting shop I work for now was basically just fishing to see if I knew what the acronyms "EJB" and "CORBA" meant.
Instead, most companies these days ask behavior based questions - describe a time when you've worked above and beyond, describe a time when you felt constrained by rules, those sorts of things. You may need to be a technical guru to advance, or to keep your job, but you rarely need to be one to get it.
There are plenty of people looking for programming jobs, who are unwilling to move or work on the things most companies need. There's a real shortage of people in the places where companies do development. There's also a real shortage of people willing to do anything other than Java and HTML. The DC Area, where I work, has a deficit of about 19000 developers (compared to the number of jobs) right now. This isn't conjecture; I've been a hiring manager/interviewer since '96, and I've seen the quality and quantity of interviewees steadily decrease.
Anyone else notice the fact that this was on ABC? ABC is owned by Disney, which is one of the big boys in the MPAA. The MPAA has a vested interest in making the mainstream think of Linux as bad -- I'm not sure if I'm paranoid, or just reaching.