An emergency shuttle mission is already being scheduled to deal with the problem. It will be a failure, however, when the astronaut discovers that he cannot find the Any key.
No, not a whiner, a power negotiator of the "Someone is going to get fucked in this deal and it ain't gonna be me" variety. He knows exactly what he's doing and why.
. ..the MacWorld keynote had a specific time and date
In a power negotiation it isn't necessarily the case that whoever holds the rights wins. It's whoever has a deadline loses. Rights don't really mean much of anything, power does, and rights are just one factor in who has power. A deadline is a weakness; and the closer to the deadline, the greater the weakness.
I'm no Jobs fanboy either. I think he's an asshole and has earned the right to be treated as such. But there is no "good guy" in this thing. We're witnessing Asshole v. Asshole here and Jobs simply made the mistake of being the asshole that has to bend over and get fucked.
Thought they had a deal. A legitimate understanding through negotiations in good faith (and the courts will often uphold good faith agreements if you can prove they actually existed). But they were dorks overanxious to use to name at the Grand Ball (which Cisco knew and manipulated) and put themselves at the mercy of Cisco who can now be a dick about the whole thing.
If Apple had said "We haven't named it yet," everyone would have just called it the iPhone anyway and deluted Cisco's mark without any liability to Apple.
Surely by your own logic though, if you download from a torrent the RIAA or MPAA has uploaded. ..
You're late to the party. I've already been whacked over the head with that one. More than once. Read through the thread.
. ..it is not a crime. ..
I said that. It is not a crime even without a "the MPAA uploaded it" loophole. Downloading a song is not theft and it is not a crime. It is a simple civil violation of the monopoly right to copy. You might owe someone a buck for doing it. You have incured a liability; a debt to the rights holder. Debt is not a crime. Not even a bad debt.
Nor are the poisoners of the well taking action through legal channels. They're sending letters saying "We see you."
Often "I'd buy the CD if I could get it directly from the artist" is used as justification form illegally downloading music because the RIAA tax is a dealbreaker.
Perhaps they ought to chose their artists more carefully.
The other thing I advocate if buyint used CDs and ripping them.
The thing everyone advocating this idea should realize is that the artists have expressed their desire to be free of distributing their own material by virtue of their having contracted with someone else to do it.
We do not want or need you people to wade into this fracas and rescue us. Put away your hero complex and buy the CDs where we obviously want you to buy them.
Put away your persecution complex. What I advocate has no power over you.
It should have been called "copy distribution right" or "publication right".
I'm afraid that if that is what they had meant it to be, that is what they would have called it. Fair use was supposed to cover the cases you bring up. There is, unfortunately, a good deal of legal philosophy behind the law which is being degraded, or outright ignored. The history of copyright as civil code goes back to the early 1600s and at that point there was already a centuries long history of application by royal decree to base the code on. Handel is largely "credited" with the founding of the modern music industry and he died in his mid 70s in 1759. Copyright isn't modern and the commercial music industry founded on it predates the Declaration of Independence by some decades.
To understand the strictly American legal philosophy you have to go back at least to the letters of debate exchanged between Jefferson and Madison and they, of course, were debating on the basis of knowledge of what had come before under British law. The important point to note, however, is that they both recognized it as principly being an infringement on the rights of The People and to be treated as such in law.
But the right to a monopoly on making copies, not trade, is the foundation of everything else; as it absolutely must be in a free society. Rights to distribute derive from a monopoly on copying. Give some thought to it and you should see why. But that monopoly must also be severly limited in a free society and only applied to where it gives a primary benefit to The People. There is a social contract that The People give up something of their innate rights to get a return. Quid Pro Quo. Something for something.
. ..no silliness about how running a program involves making a copy and thus invokes copyright law.
Ah, that's a very peculiar case. The idea is the very foundation that licensing of software is built on, but it is actually denied by current code. Sometimes the law is an ass.
But I'm not going to go into it, because it always seems to raise a shit storm and I'm just not up to it right now.
Don't worry, I get confused a lot. This very thread offers some fine examples.
I always understood entrapment was- a law enforcement officer- setting someone in a situation where normally they would not commit a crime.
This thing is more like the Gifford scandal. Maybe he was set up, maybe there wasn't a crime, but he still boffed the floozy. All he had to do to avoid the public embaressment was say "I'm married. No."
Current code assumes the legal philosophy and history of copyright without explicitly stating it. The letter of the code is all that can be enforced, but that is not at all the same thing as saying that is all there is to it.
There's no way that the grown-up fans are ever going to be satisfied the way they were when they were 11 years old.
I was a grown up when Star Wars was released. I'd voted, I could buy whiskey and smokes. When Return of the Jedi was released I was old enough to have a child I could converse with.
Despite all the Ewok jokes I've told over the years I liked them a lot; still do, and even though I gasped at the Imperial star cruiser going overhead it wasn't because of the effects. They were good movies. Well filmed, well written and well acted. Funny. Just because something follows a formula doesn't mean it's bad. There's nothing in Shakespeare that isn't utterly formulaic.
I felt betrayed within the opening sequence of Episode "One," because it was, well . ..stupid,retroactively stupid at that, which takes some doing, but at least it got worse from there.
I'm not an effects junky, nor an action fan. I liked Sense and Sensibility. I don't understand people who think Chinatown is too long. Never Cry Wolf and Walkabout are two of my all time favorite movies despite the fact that "nothing" happens in either of them and there is a distinct paucity of special effects.
The original Star Wars trilogy was good stuff. Still is. Episode "One" sucked so hard I've basically never watched anything Star Wars that's come since.
If I own the copyright to something, and I offer to give it to you . ..
I presume you mean a copy of the protected something and not the copyright.
. ..and you accept, and then I give you something worthless instead, aren't I guilty of fraud? So can't downloaders who end up with worthless files sue the MPAA for fraud?
I await with bated breath your argument for financial loss in getting nothing for nothing. Nevermind the fact that they promised you nothing, you assumed.
"Would you like this peanut butter jar?"
"Shit yeah! I'm hungry. Hey! There's no peanut butter in here. What's the deal?"
"Dude, is it a jar? Does it say "peanut butter" on the label? It's a peanut butter jar. Now fuck off."
The bank will care when one uses their incorrect balance in writing a check and writes a check for money they don't have.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! What the bank cares about is overdrafts. I don't do that. Because I have a sense of number without having to perform a calculation. This also allows me to know that anyone who claims the average ocean level rose 2mm last year is a numeric moron, no matter how many or what particular letters he writes after his name; again without performing any calculations.
I don't pay for overdraft protection.
Niether do I. I don't need it. I don't write out checks for more than I have. Even though I haven't balanced my checkbook in at least five years and often go a few months between looking at statements.
There are only two reasons to balance your checkbook; because you have to know to the penny how much you have to avoid an overdraft; and to check the bank's calculations for errors to the penny.
But making good approximations is one of the most valuable numeric skills you could possess. To have a good sense of how much you've got to spend. I'm sorry if this cuts a bit close to home, but anyone who can't look at a derived number and have an innate sense of how correct/incorrect it is isn't very good at math. They simply know arithmetic, which is a valuable, but limited, numeric skill. Especially for an engineer, who is working with the messy and imprecise real world and not merely a man defined abstraction.
The arithmetic performed by the failed Mars lander was as perfect as a computer could perform it. There was a failure of method. Missuse of units, not numbers. A human being looking at the mathematical model in toto would have picked it up without being given a single number to calculate.
And relying on perfect arithmatical skills to determine how many feet tall the tree is may well result in your shell sailing over the top of it, instead of knocking off the top few feet as you inteneded, because your perfect arithmetic gave the wrong answer.
And you didn't have a sense that it was wrong, because your arithmetic all checked out.
If your checking account bears interest, do you balance your checkbook to the fraction of a penny?
When I write physics examples on the blackboard I use the number "10" for gravitational acceleration. It makes performing quick calculations in front of students easy. But is this number correct or incorrect?
Their copyright of the fake data has been violated?
Well yes, it can well be. The file is only "fake" in the sense that isn't the data you were expecting. It is still their data, even if it isn't the data you think you're getting. Your shopping list is your data. I don't happen to agree with this and think the dropping of the requirement to register for protection was a huge mistake; but there it is.
"They" do not even appear to be the MPAA, but independents working under contract, distributing their fake data, not any of the MPAAs.
Of course a lot of people aren't actually even getting fake data, because the download selfterminates after the ip is logged.:)
If they're freely distributing their own material then what is being infringed exactly?
And then there's this issue. You got me. You may have simply tried to violate a copyright and failed I guess. Innocence by accident. Ya aren't seeding anything you shouldn't be, are you?
That analogy doesn't work for downloading, though. Their servers aren't just sitting there with files on them. They are actively sending out data to people who have requested it.
Yeah, there is that. Plus the fact that many people aren't actually recieving any files at all, or the file is a just solid screen color.
Nothing is perfect, least of all an analogy.
if you are sitting on your porch with a bag of money, and I walk up and ask for some, I'm not stealing if you reach into the bag and hand me some of it.
Of course it's just cut up newspaper really, which might well annoy you, because you were actually expecting money, money you had every reason to believe was not mine to give, but you asked for it anyway.
No, there's no reason to sue/arrest you, but you might still be deserving of having your parents sit you down and scold the living bejeesus out of you.
Please bear in mind that in the past I've made it explicitly clear that I am, at the least, supportive of Jefferson's view that copyright has no place in a free society.
I'm not saying this is the way I think it should be, just trying my best, however weak and feeble that best is, to explain how things are.
If they make it available along with a message encouraging to you take it, it isn't unauthorized.
If I put a brown paper bag on my front porch labeled "Full of Money," I do need to encourage anyone to take it. Their own greed is perfectly sufficient to do the job.
And AFAIK, copyright infringement requires unauthorized *distribution*. ..
No, unauhtorized distribution is a requirement for copyright infringement to be deemed a criminal matter, but the law is called copyright, not distribution right. The right to distribute is a corallary right of the right to copy, since the former depends on the latter.
If you are the legitimate owner of the physical media you may distribute at will. You do not need any special authorization, the person who created it did. CD stores are not licensed, they just buy "stuff," property, and resell it.
So what exactly are they claiming when they "notify" the ISPs?
That their copyright has been violated, because it has. The downloader is making a copy, without authorization. Yes, it's a trivial civil offense. That isn't at all the same thing as saying it isn't an offense.
Slashdot Mirror
An emergency shuttle mission is already being scheduled to deal with the problem. It will be a failure, however, when the astronaut discovers that he cannot find the Any key.
KFG
But just think of the mass hysteria that would prevail by causing a spy satellite's radio to break down.
I know I feel safer already. Oh, wait. . .
KFG
does anybody else feel that the mention of terrorists in this article is just absofuckinglutely retarded?
Yes.
KFG
No, not a whiner, a power negotiator of the "Someone is going to get fucked in this deal and it ain't gonna be me" variety. He knows exactly what he's doing and why.
.the MacWorld keynote had a specific time and date
. .
In a power negotiation it isn't necessarily the case that whoever holds the rights wins. It's whoever has a deadline loses. Rights don't really mean much of anything, power does, and rights are just one factor in who has power. A deadline is a weakness; and the closer to the deadline, the greater the weakness.
I'm no Jobs fanboy either. I think he's an asshole and has earned the right to be treated as such. But there is no "good guy" in this thing. We're witnessing Asshole v. Asshole here and Jobs simply made the mistake of being the asshole that has to bend over and get fucked.
KFG
One can only speculate that they. . .
Thought they had a deal. A legitimate understanding through negotiations in good faith (and the courts will often uphold good faith agreements if you can prove they actually existed). But they were dorks overanxious to use to name at the Grand Ball (which Cisco knew and manipulated) and put themselves at the mercy of Cisco who can now be a dick about the whole thing.
If Apple had said "We haven't named it yet," everyone would have just called it the iPhone anyway and deluted Cisco's mark without any liability to Apple.
KFG
Which is a fairly common thing to name a badass chicken.
Of course if he were really "The Devil" he wouldn't end up in the stew pot quite so quickly, but I'm sure to another chicken he's a mean mother.
I think I'm going to start calling my fighting hydra "Cthulhu." He be bad and shit. Scourge of the daphnia. Tremble before his evil might.
KFG
Surely by your own logic though, if you download from a torrent the RIAA or MPAA has uploaded. . .
.it is not a crime. . .
You're late to the party. I've already been whacked over the head with that one. More than once. Read through the thread.
. .
I said that. It is not a crime even without a "the MPAA uploaded it" loophole. Downloading a song is not theft and it is not a crime. It is a simple civil violation of the monopoly right to copy. You might owe someone a buck for doing it. You have incured a liability; a debt to the rights holder. Debt is not a crime. Not even a bad debt.
Nor are the poisoners of the well taking action through legal channels. They're sending letters saying "We see you."
And what is the first lesson of not being seen?
KFG
That's the rationalization, not the reason.
The reason is because code names are cool and they want to call it a really cool code name.
KFG
Often "I'd buy the CD if I could get it directly from the artist" is used as justification form illegally downloading music because the RIAA tax is a dealbreaker.
Perhaps they ought to chose their artists more carefully.
The other thing I advocate if buyint used CDs and ripping them.
The thing everyone advocating this idea should realize is that the artists have expressed their desire to be free of distributing their own material by virtue of their having contracted with someone else to do it.
We do not want or need you people to wade into this fracas and rescue us. Put away your hero complex and buy the CDs where we obviously want you to buy them.
Put away your persecution complex. What I advocate has no power over you.
KFG
It should have been called "copy distribution right" or "publication right".
.no silliness about how running a program involves making a copy and thus invokes copyright law.
I'm afraid that if that is what they had meant it to be, that is what they would have called it. Fair use was supposed to cover the cases you bring up. There is, unfortunately, a good deal of legal philosophy behind the law which is being degraded, or outright ignored. The history of copyright as civil code goes back to the early 1600s and at that point there was already a centuries long history of application by royal decree to base the code on. Handel is largely "credited" with the founding of the modern music industry and he died in his mid 70s in 1759. Copyright isn't modern and the commercial music industry founded on it predates the Declaration of Independence by some decades.
To understand the strictly American legal philosophy you have to go back at least to the letters of debate exchanged between Jefferson and Madison and they, of course, were debating on the basis of knowledge of what had come before under British law. The important point to note, however, is that they both recognized it as principly being an infringement on the rights of The People and to be treated as such in law.
But the right to a monopoly on making copies, not trade, is the foundation of everything else; as it absolutely must be in a free society. Rights to distribute derive from a monopoly on copying. Give some thought to it and you should see why. But that monopoly must also be severly limited in a free society and only applied to where it gives a primary benefit to The People. There is a social contract that The People give up something of their innate rights to get a return. Quid Pro Quo. Something for something.
. .
Ah, that's a very peculiar case. The idea is the very foundation that licensing of software is built on, but it is actually denied by current code. Sometimes the law is an ass.
But I'm not going to go into it, because it always seems to raise a shit storm and I'm just not up to it right now.
KFG
Am I right?
Yes.
I get confused sometimes.
Don't worry, I get confused a lot. This very thread offers some fine examples.
I always understood entrapment was- a law enforcement officer- setting someone in a situation where normally they would not commit a crime.
This thing is more like the Gifford scandal. Maybe he was set up, maybe there wasn't a crime, but he still boffed the floozy. All he had to do to avoid the public embaressment was say "I'm married. No."
KFG
KFG
Don't assume so much.
Current code assumes the legal philosophy and history of copyright without explicitly stating it. The letter of the code is all that can be enforced, but that is not at all the same thing as saying that is all there is to it.
The legal history even predates code itself.
KFG
There's no way that the grown-up fans are ever going to be satisfied the way they were when they were 11 years old.
.stupid,retroactively stupid at that, which takes some doing, but at least it got worse from there.
I was a grown up when Star Wars was released. I'd voted, I could buy whiskey and smokes. When Return of the Jedi was released I was old enough to have a child I could converse with.
Despite all the Ewok jokes I've told over the years I liked them a lot; still do, and even though I gasped at the Imperial star cruiser going overhead it wasn't because of the effects. They were good movies. Well filmed, well written and well acted. Funny. Just because something follows a formula doesn't mean it's bad. There's nothing in Shakespeare that isn't utterly formulaic.
I felt betrayed within the opening sequence of Episode "One," because it was, well . .
I'm not an effects junky, nor an action fan. I liked Sense and Sensibility. I don't understand people who think Chinatown is too long. Never Cry Wolf and Walkabout are two of my all time favorite movies despite the fact that "nothing" happens in either of them and there is a distinct paucity of special effects.
The original Star Wars trilogy was good stuff. Still is. Episode "One" sucked so hard I've basically never watched anything Star Wars that's come since.
KFG
Maybe a remake of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers ... something he loved as a child . . .
And destroy it.
KFG
"Howard the Duck."
There were actually several seconds of that that were quite good, but it wasn't the duck's ass I was looking at.
KFG
Buy the frinkin CD already!!!
From the artist.
KFG
If I own the copyright to something, and I offer to give it to you . . .
.and you accept, and then I give you something worthless instead, aren't I guilty of fraud? So can't downloaders who end up with worthless files sue the MPAA for fraud?
I presume you mean a copy of the protected something and not the copyright.
. .
I await with bated breath your argument for financial loss in getting nothing for nothing. Nevermind the fact that they promised you nothing, you assumed.
"Would you like this peanut butter jar?"
"Shit yeah! I'm hungry. Hey! There's no peanut butter in here. What's the deal?"
"Dude, is it a jar? Does it say "peanut butter" on the label? It's a peanut butter jar. Now fuck off."
KFG
The bank will care when one uses their incorrect balance in writing a check and writes a check for money they don't have.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! What the bank cares about is overdrafts. I don't do that. Because I have a sense of number without having to perform a calculation. This also allows me to know that anyone who claims the average ocean level rose 2mm last year is a numeric moron, no matter how many or what particular letters he writes after his name; again without performing any calculations.
I don't pay for overdraft protection.
Niether do I. I don't need it. I don't write out checks for more than I have. Even though I haven't balanced my checkbook in at least five years and often go a few months between looking at statements.
There are only two reasons to balance your checkbook; because you have to know to the penny how much you have to avoid an overdraft; and to check the bank's calculations for errors to the penny.
But making good approximations is one of the most valuable numeric skills you could possess. To have a good sense of how much you've got to spend. I'm sorry if this cuts a bit close to home, but anyone who can't look at a derived number and have an innate sense of how correct/incorrect it is isn't very good at math. They simply know arithmetic, which is a valuable, but limited, numeric skill. Especially for an engineer, who is working with the messy and imprecise real world and not merely a man defined abstraction.
The arithmetic performed by the failed Mars lander was as perfect as a computer could perform it. There was a failure of method. Missuse of units, not numbers. A human being looking at the mathematical model in toto would have picked it up without being given a single number to calculate.
And relying on perfect arithmatical skills to determine how many feet tall the tree is may well result in your shell sailing over the top of it, instead of knocking off the top few feet as you inteneded, because your perfect arithmetic gave the wrong answer.
And you didn't have a sense that it was wrong, because your arithmetic all checked out.
If your checking account bears interest, do you balance your checkbook to the fraction of a penny?
When I write physics examples on the blackboard I use the number "10" for gravitational acceleration. It makes performing quick calculations in front of students easy. But is this number correct or incorrect?
KFG
Then you will be attempting to charge me for the theft of money. . .
I'm not charging you with anything, let alone theft. Copyright violation is not theft.
And you wont be charging me with the theft of a paper bag, because AFAIK the torrent index file isn't physically the copywrited material in dispute.
The label does not determine what is in dispute. That only determines your expectations.
and now my brain hurts!
My brain hurts, my scalp hurts and my frickin' hair hurts, but that has nothing to do with the matter at hand, only my ability to deal with it.
KFG
Their copyright of the fake data has been violated?
:)
Well yes, it can well be. The file is only "fake" in the sense that isn't the data you were expecting. It is still their data, even if it isn't the data you think you're getting. Your shopping list is your data. I don't happen to agree with this and think the dropping of the requirement to register for protection was a huge mistake; but there it is.
"They" do not even appear to be the MPAA, but independents working under contract, distributing their fake data, not any of the MPAAs.
Of course a lot of people aren't actually even getting fake data, because the download selfterminates after the ip is logged.
If they're freely distributing their own material then what is being infringed exactly?
And then there's this issue. You got me. You may have simply tried to violate a copyright and failed I guess. Innocence by accident. Ya aren't seeding anything you shouldn't be, are you?
KFG
That analogy doesn't work for downloading, though. Their servers aren't just sitting there with files on them. They are actively sending out data to people who have requested it.
Yeah, there is that. Plus the fact that many people aren't actually recieving any files at all, or the file is a just solid screen color.
Nothing is perfect, least of all an analogy.
if you are sitting on your porch with a bag of money, and I walk up and ask for some, I'm not stealing if you reach into the bag and hand me some of it.
Of course it's just cut up newspaper really, which might well annoy you, because you were actually expecting money, money you had every reason to believe was not mine to give, but you asked for it anyway.
No, there's no reason to sue/arrest you, but you might still be deserving of having your parents sit you down and scold the living bejeesus out of you.
Please bear in mind that in the past I've made it explicitly clear that I am, at the least, supportive of Jefferson's view that copyright has no place in a free society.
I'm not saying this is the way I think it should be, just trying my best, however weak and feeble that best is, to explain how things are.
KFG
Your quoted source is obsolete. I'll get around to fixing that as soon as I finish shoveling all the elephant shit off my lawn.
KFG
If I buy a bootleg DVD, am I making a copy?
No. You are purchasing a physical object. The bootlegger made the copy.
In "computer terms", you're copying the data, but you're not making a copy in the traditional sense.
Is there a pattern of ones and zeros on your drive that wasn't there before that matches the pattern of ones and zeros of the source?
If so, I'm afraid you have made a copy. A copy that even has a physical instantiation, even you fail to understand the latter point.
KFG
If they make it available along with a message encouraging to you take it, it isn't unauthorized.
If I put a brown paper bag on my front porch labeled "Full of Money," I do need to encourage anyone to take it. Their own greed is perfectly sufficient to do the job.
KFG
And AFAIK, copyright infringement requires unauthorized *distribution*. . .
No, unauhtorized distribution is a requirement for copyright infringement to be deemed a criminal matter, but the law is called copyright, not distribution right. The right to distribute is a corallary right of the right to copy, since the former depends on the latter.
If you are the legitimate owner of the physical media you may distribute at will. You do not need any special authorization, the person who created it did. CD stores are not licensed, they just buy "stuff," property, and resell it.
So what exactly are they claiming when they "notify" the ISPs?
That their copyright has been violated, because it has. The downloader is making a copy, without authorization. Yes, it's a trivial civil offense. That isn't at all the same thing as saying it isn't an offense.
KFG