Find a service online that supports Firefox and give them your money instead of the other guy.
Don't just do that. Find another service, use it - and write an email to the tech support of the original website. Say clearly and politely that the original customer has lost a sale because it chose obnoxious web practice. If you can't find an alternative, then do without. Movie downloads you can get anywhere. Just not legally...
Seriously, if a business is making so much money that it can turn away 20% (at least!) of its potential customer base, then it clearly doesn't need you, and you don't need it. Rest assured, with that sort of untapped market space, another vendor will step up to the plate PDQ. That's a lot of dollars to go uncollected.
Doesn't the requirement state that multiple implementations must exist? As far as I know, only Office fully supports OOXML [though I did hear about someone else attempting an implementation, but I could be wrong].
If there is such a requirement, then MS's offering would not qualify. However, if they selected ODF, and Office supported ODF properly, then the government offices might very well upgrade to the next Office. That would be a matter for their local IT decision makers.
But the software used must satisfy the business requirements; that's not just for office documents, it should be a general law of software and hardware procurement.
1) DRM *THE WAY WE'VE DONE IT* is bad. 2) No way will we get rid of it, we'd rather have bad DRM than none. We need to be able to resell Elvis tracks every 5 years to the same consumer. 3) What we're hoping for is the government mandates a technical solution, since Apple has really screwed us up, and we don't seem to be able to work together to come up with a viable solution on our own.
The more I look at it, the more the music labels seem to resemble strung out junkies.
They know that DRM hurts more than it helps.
They know that infringing copying is rampant, and DRM schemes do nothing to stop it. I think they even know that the losses due to copying don't really make that much difference to their situation. Some difference, but not much. In fact, the most swapped music tends to enrich the bands at live gigs and sell more merchandise.
They want to stop, but they just can't. They can't make that first step. One of them (EMI, maybe?) will go cold turkey for a bit. Their tracks will then be all over P2P as they already are and always were, but this will be enough for the pushers (DRM manufacturers) to say "See? Do you want that sort of pain for your back catalogue?", and enough of them will start hurting. Enough to continue the sad cycle.
Eventually, they will phase out CD sales, and replace them with (DRM'ed) downloads only. Fine. I don't care. I won't buy them, and I won't even hack round them. And the bands I do buy from will be those who market themselves well enough, and play good gigs.
An old industry dies. A new one lives. It's a fair trade.
So the British government is trying to cover something up... quelle surprise.
Of course a government covers things up. It's got statutory authority to guard national secrets. What you mean, I guess, is that the government is covering up something which should be disclosed because of fear of embarrassment. In which case, I'll simply ask for your evidence (related to the honours for loans accusation) and await an answer. (Note: answers like "They're all at it", or "Everybody knows its true" don't count as evidence)
Is it just me, or is my country going to the dogs?
It's you. Just about every generation produces the Daily Wail/Torygraph whine about the country going to the dogs. You sound like my mother-in-law, but at least she has the decency to be half-insane. When she gets to the stage of actually believing the bile in the Torygraph, then I can ask for a Section 8 to get her into the Laughing Academy.
Or is it just that there is no such thing as an honest politician?
Or could it be that politicians are representative of the people, and thus can be both honest and dishonest? Seriously, your objections come across as pretty juvenile, here. The country isn't going to the dogs. Some things get better, some things get worse. In my opinion, things generally get better.
The only times that things get really bad in a democracy is when people stop caring.
You guys are lucky! Here in the UK they Government/Police can keep trying again and again until they get the result they want.
Not quite true. Firstly, this only applies to England and Wales. Scotland still has the "no double jeopardy" rule. Secondly, the state can try once for a second trial, but only if evidence which could not have been available at the initial trial is available. ISTR that permission from the House of Lords is needed to even launch another trial - and the HoL will refuse if the evidence is not the sort which would have radically altered the original outcome if not challenged. Also, I think that the offences covered for this sort of double jeopardy must be the most serious type (murder, rape, etc.)
I can't say I really approve of it (equality of arms, and all that), but then, we don't have the death penalty, so it's not like a defendant appeal couldn't be launched. The first conviction under these rules was for someone who had been acquitted and then confessed publicly to the murder [although even a freely given confession doesn't necessarily count as new evidence!]
The block who 'fessed up pleaded guilty at the second trial. See here for more details. --Ng
Besides, according to the wikiGods, H.264 at 1080p requires 50-200 mbps, depending on encoding quality. Even at 50mbps, that would be 22.5 gigabytes per hour.
Hold on a bit - that represents the maximum bitrate of a H.264 MP stream. On a disc, you'd be using VBR to ensure an optimum bit stream. (Unlike, say a TV broadcast where your transport stream needs to recover state more easily, hence CBR). If you take a look on Doom9, there was a recent transcoding competition using the (free) movie Elephant's Dream, to see what the acceptable bitrates for HD were. And H.264 pipped VC-1, but both gave perfectly acceptable quality at 6 Mbps (12 was nicer though, but 24 Mbps was just utter overkill).
The BBC currently broadcasts HD H.264 at around 20Mbps as a transport stream. I've transcoded that down to 8Mbps VBR, and it looks plenty fine - admittedly that's 1080i, but the 8 Mbps stream is deinterlaced.
So you definitely could get a HD movie on an existing DVD (definitely true if encoded to 720p). What you might not be able to do is get a movie with DTS Lossless audio tracks on it. Not sure if that's such a huge problem.
As for why the hardware makers haven't done it - you've answered the question yourself! Why would they want to make more of the $35 players which generate wafer thin margins, when they can enjoy a 2-4 year window of stupidly huge margins? The whole purpose of DVDCSS wasn't to stop people copying DVDs - it was to ensure that only certain authorised manufacturers were allowed to make DVD players. AACS is specifically designed to enhance and extend that exclusionary marketing method.
Blair has an absolute majority of MPs in Parliament, which effectively means he can force through almost anything.
Thankfully not anything, as the fiasco over the 90-day detention showed. What a stiff-necked dickhead he looked like after that. I guess it happens to all PM's eventually. They get quite convinced that anything is theirs for the demanding by virtue of their office. Maybe the Americans have got something in the two-term limit for PotUS.
Blair and co have gone about forcing laws through and creating legacies, but the simple fact is that they have no mandate to bring in the kinds of sweeping change they are championing, unless at the very least they also have support from the other main parties who brought in other people's votes. Clearly in many of these so-called anti-terrorism matters, they do not.
Sadly, none of this is confined to the current government. I'm old enough to remember when the Thatcher government introduced the Poll Tax for Scotland alone, using purely English Tory votes to force the stupid idea on an unwilling Scotland. It all went pear-shaped when it was introduced onto an equally unwilling England the next year, but it does go to show that introducing unpopular legislation without any shred of popular mandate is a time-hallowed tradition in the UK. In the end, liberty and such like find a way through, but a lot of damage can be done in the meantime.
Do you think PR would make a sufficiently significant change to stop ill-conceived legislation from being forced through? One thing I would love to see is for the (reformed) House of Lords to have the power to block a bill for one Parliamentary session. If the government feels that strongly about the legislation, it can call an election and have the bill passed on the back of popular mandate. Alternatively, it can wait and introduce it after the lifetime of the current Parliament. But if the HoL vetoes a bill which has been explicitly mentioned in the government's manifesto, then they must pass it. A sort of updated Salisbury Convention.
After Britain institutionalized slavery in the South by sustaining it and encouraging it during the colonial period, they had helped to create an economic system in the lower half of the United States that had grown entirely dependent on slavery. When the original rough-draft of the declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson, et al., it originally included the following passage
Yes, yes - but what has this to do with the matter at hand? My point was simply that the Constitution allowed slavery to continue (before thankfully abolishing it some 80 years later). And thus it follows that merely having a piece of paper is not enough. I'm well aware of the history of this matter (actually, my reading matter right now is Simon Schama's "Rough Crossings"), and my point wasn't to attack the USA or its Constitution. Just to say that it's just a piece of paper. The strength of the Constitution depends on the will of the American people to cherish it.
Now, with respect to your point about the "frailties" of British liberty (ie, depending on the sovreignty of the Crown-in-Parliament) is the fact that generally the best arbiter of liberty is political stability. Lots of countries have Constitutions which promise just as much as the US one (the Soviet one springs to mind) but political instability have caused their stricture to be abandoned, and atrocity after atrocity to be committed. The reason that the rights enshrined in the US Bill of Rights or Constitution does not depend on American exceptionalism (NB: I'm not saying that you said so either), but on economic prosperity, respect for democratic institutions, etc.
Again, my point is that you're reading the British constitution like it's a designed state. It isn't - but the bonds of tradition, convention and law can't just be pretended away like they are just so much ephemera. The British are really lousy at doing what they're told. Any government which seeks to impose the sorts of tyranny which is theoretically possible would end up out of office within days. It's not tidy and architected - it's organic, it's asymmetric, it's historical - but by and large, it's worked in both England and Scotland for a thousand years - with more than a few bumps on the way. The key is that it works for us. Not that it would work for anyone else (the entire dismal Imperial episode proved that all too well). Of course, we could write a constitution, with guaranteed rights for all, etc, etc. But that in itself wouldn't actually help anyone - not unless the British felt there was a crushing need to rein in the powers of a runaway government - which, for all their whining and bellyaching, they do not currently.
As for the destruction of liberty being done as per a legislative process - let them try. We've killed one King in the UK - the odd Prime Minister really isn't that much of an imaginative leap.
Furthermore, this was an "Act of Parliament". Under parliamentary sovereignty no previous act of parliament can trump a future act of parliament. This can be overturned by another Act of Parliament until the British establish a Bill of Rights of the people which limits Parliament's sovereignty and binds all future parliament's to its provisions.
Actually, that's not quite correct. The courts (which are independent of the executive. Well, as independent as any judiciary can be) have long held that there are "ordinary statutes" and "constitutional statutes". And only a new constitutional statute can overturn an existing one. In other words, things like the Human Rights Act, the Representation fo the Peoples Act and the Bill of Rights (along with the Acts of Union, Settlement, etc, etc) must be purposefully overturned. You cannot just stick a rider onto a Fisheries Bill abolishing the right of appeal, or fling in a statutory instrument asserting the right of the executive to have detention without trial. It must be specifically brought forth and voted in by Parliament (all of Parliament, not just the House of Commons).
Afterall, the right to remain silent was sustained for 300 years based on tradition and self-restraint, yet Blair's government tossed both out the window and now that long-held right that was taken for granted is now gone.
Actually, that was the last Conservative government, with Home Secretary Michael Howard introducing the legislation.
In the end, the strength of the US Constitution is only as great as those charged with its defence, and the desire of the US population to see its strictures adhered to. It didn't stop the abomination of slavery - although its power was shown when that institution was finally abolished via constitutional amendment. Similarly, the desire of the US population to refrain from state torture seems to be somewhat ambivalent right now (And we can probably thank "24" for that...:-)). This is not to decry the magnificence of the US Bill of Rights or the US Constitution. Merely to say that a written constitution has certain advantages, and certain disadvantages, and that a constitution in itself is no guarantor of liberty.
At the moment, liberty is taking a bit of a pounding either side of the Atlantic. But it will reassert itself, and when it does, the centuries of British conventions, traditions and personal desire for liberty will prove just as powerful a force as the US's instruments of state. The British method of government and preservation of liberty isn't as capricious or fragile as one might think from your posting.
I beat my last penny there will be a tax introduced on media that is copied - and it will be sourced at purchase.
Not if the major record labels have anything to do with it there won't be. The big labels are pathologically opposed to media levies of any sort. And why not? They've pushed for, and got, total TPM (Technological Protection Measures) blessed by government. It's a crime to bypass, or tell others how to bypass any DRM which copy protects stuff. With that little gem bought and paid for, the last thing the media cartels would want would be a public license to copy materials (and therefore to bypass anything which stood in the way of that legitimate copying).
Incidentally, the indie media labels in the UK would love to see media levies introduced, or even levies on Internet use. That way copying and sharing would be legitimate, But the majors will die in a ditch before they let that happen.
If Gordon Brown wanted to raise a stealth tax, he'd be a zillion times more effective in passing some sort of Internet levy - so that people in rural areas can have their right to the Internet, just like the townies have got. And if the government needed to cream off a little for administration purposes, well, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, y'know...
In Belgium it's 70 after the auther has died, now you try and explain that to me
Is that the mechanical copyright or the authors copyright? The mechanical copyright is just the right to copy any particular recording. The author's copyright is the royalties that must be paid to the songwriter to record a new version of the song, or put out a public performance of the song. Generally, the life+70 is for authors, but I'm not sure what Belgian law says re: mechanical copyrights.
Also, most continental European states have a private right of copy which extends considerably further than copying your own CDs for your iPod, etc. Consumers there have the right to perform small scale distribution (ie, copy stuff for family and friends). Wish we in the UK had that level of common sense...
'it is not the music industry's job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of government.'
I wholeheartedly support the things they're trying to achieve, but...I would be hard-pressed to find a statement that could be more fundamentally wrong than the above. It's that sort of thinking that's got us in the mess we're in.
Note: the speaker did not say which rights the people (ie, the citizens of the state) have, it was which rights consumers have. We're not talking about fundamental rights of the citizen, we're talking about the rights of the consumer within a marketplace scenario. Generally, consumer protection is delegated to government as a power to ensure that vendors are not allowed to market falsely, exercise unconscionable contracts, etc. It's usually accepted in most European states that those possessing capital (the vendors) are in a stronger position than those parting with it (the consumers). The people have a right to expect that government will act as a shield for the weaker party, in order to ensure a fair marketplace. In other words, whether we're talking about a European model of liberty, or an American one, the point remains: consumer protection is generally a power which government has been given popular authority to exercise.
Remember the context: copyright legislation. At the moment, we have copyright legislation that's almost exclusively to the advantage of rightsholders, ignoring the basic truth that the fruits of knowledge can be shared almost trivially today. The IPPR are saying that it is the government's right and duty to reassert that ideas and their expressions are not primarily commercial quantities. That the right for consumers to copy their own possessions is not one which should have been ceded in the 300 years of copyright legislation.
Your point was addressing the nature and rights of the citizen in the modern state: a far more general and differently rooted argument than the point at hand. Some here will consider that those rights are natural rights (ie, they stem from our being human), others will consider that rights are essentially civil (ie, they are reserved/ceded as part of a social contract); in either case, the power of government to act as a fair market arbiter tends to be accepted by either construction. (Yes, I'm aware that some libertarians do not accept that such a role of government is legitimate; however, the libertarian constructs of Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia would accept such a power as proper).
In essence this means: If you pass a law which allows it and doesn't violate basic legal rules, then it's ok.
That's an overly legalistic reading - there's also EU case law which fleshes out the sorts of derogations which can be tolerated. By example, detaining terrorst suspects without trial in Belmarsh, for instance, violated the ECHR and the UK Human Rights Act. It didn't matter that the government had passed legislation saying it was OK - the law said that you can't just "pass a law" to OK violations of the ECHR. And privacy is a basic legal right within the EU - much to annoyance of governments.
I don't know what provisions are in the German proposed law. I'm simply saying that if they're claiming that the Data Retention Directive orders them to pass such (copyright) laws, that's a lie. And as a lie, German citizens will be able to sue their government for allowing non-criminal investigation of retained ISP records. Unless they can demonstrate pressing need to allow private companies to go on ISP trawls, then they will be violating the ECHR - and the German Basic Law, I think.
As I said before, if Germany wishes to shift copyright infringement from a civil tort into criminal law, there really is nothing anyone outside Germany can do about it (the German people are more than capable of making their democratic feelings heard). But it's not a result of the Data Retention Directive - it's a product of the existing German political system. Perhaps there is popular support for criminalising copyright infrgingement in Germany. I really don't know. But if such support is there, then removing the capability of Internet anonymity and retaining ISP data would be essential to such a move. So it would have had to happen with or without the Directive.
Sure, new laws can be written. But if those laws breach basic civil rights as granted by treaty, conventions, constitutions, etc, they can be challenged. In the US, such widespread access would probably be challenged under 4th amendment rights. In the EU, we would invoke Article 8 of the ECHR to say that such access was disproportionately interfering with basic privacy rights. Individual member states might have even stronger protections.
I know what you're saying - and I agree - that legal protections aren't worth the paper they're written on if the democratic institutions can't rein in special interests. But that's not a problem with data retention directives/laws. That's a problem with the constitution of democracy and liberty within our respective states.
I know I can't blame that on the EU directive alone, but IMHO the omission of clear and strict access limitations from the directive, even though such limitations were considered, is a dead giveaway that the directive wasn't really designed to "fight terrorism".
I never thought it was. And as a tool to fight terrorism, it seems a very limited one.
The directive itself doesn't limit access to the retained data and has only very soft constraints on the implementation. (If you think it does compel the EU members to limit access in any significant way, please point me to the respective article of the actual directive. Hearsay is irrelevant.) Basically it is up to the member states to decide on the circumstances which justify access to the data.
it does compel members to adhere to the principles of the various data protection and privacy directives already in force (ie, exemptions or derogations from those directives can only be for serious matters; national security, organised crime, etc, etc.). Article 4 expressly states that the ECHR will be used as one of the yardsticks to gauge whether member state implementations are proportionate. Section 25 explicitly reminds member states that Article 8 of the ECHR demands that free-for-all access cannot be granted. Article 9 calls out that data retention is useful (yeah, right) in investigation of "serious matters such as organised crime and terrorism". Therefore, extending copyright reform such that it would fall under the banner of this directive would not be effective.
As an EU citizen (you must be to be writing so), you're well aware that member states can implement directives according to their national laws. They are also free to go further. IMHO, the directive should (a) never have been passed - you can thank my government (UK) for that, and (b) if passed should have mentioned that access can only be granted for prosecution of EAW covered offences. However, the law as it stands in the UK is very clear. Access can only be sought for criminal matters. All I was saying in my original post is that the EU Directive can not be the tool by which private agencies (like copyright holders) gain access to government gathered communications intelligence. If EU member states allow this to happen on their turf, then they are free to do so, but they will have to answer to their populations for it.
Germany would be completely within its rights to pass laws saying that civil torts may also be covered, but the German government could almost certainly be sued in the European courts for breach of the privacy requirements of the ECHR. They could not claim that the Data Retention Directive gave them the authority to pass such laws, since the directive specifically mentions criminal actions only as its reasons for existence.
Now, Germany is also free to move copyright infringement into the criminal sphere if that is what its legislatures wish - neither the EU nor any other member state can prevent that. But if Herr Krings states that the Directive is the reason why copyright holders must be granted access to all German citizens communications records, then he is lying. The directive time and again refers to criminal matters as the scope of its text, and not once does it refer to civil torts.
FYI: Guenther Krings, a member of the party which is currently in power in Germany and spokesman for the second stage of the copyright reform, has recently remarked that, if the data has been collected, it can be used to prosecute copyright violations.
Not if it's been collected under the aegis of the EU Data Retention Directive, it can't. Now, Germany is free to pass whatever laws it sees fit. If it wants to retain data for 20 years, it is free to pass such legislation. But the EU DRD is ultra-clear, which is that data so retained may only be accessed for criminal invesiigation and prosecution only. There was a section which said that it could be used for prevention of crime (which was such a wide open door that it was removed).
It is possible that criminal copyright violation (which is a much bigger leap than traditional copyright infringement) could be investigated, but only if the investigation was linked, say, to organised crime, or that the proceeds of such violations were funding, for example, terrorism.
In the UK, retained data can only be accessed with a court order. and the courts have been told that they should not issue such orders unless criminal charges have already been filed against a suspect. Since copyright infringement is generally not a criminal offence (except in rare circumstances), but a civil tort, a court order can not be granted to examine retained ISP records.
Of course, in the course of discovery, a civil case might request ISP IP records for a particular subscriber. That's fine - but the generalised trawl of data by private parties would be illegal (under current UK and EU law).
The summary does right in pointing out that retaining this stuff attracts copyright holders like flies round shit, but, thankfully for the moment, they're not allowed access to this data [in fact, it would be a criminal offence if they were granted such access]. Part of the fighting between the EU commission and the EU parliament was that the parliament wanted access locked down to ultra-specific cases (things that could be prosecuted under the European Arrest Warrant only). They didn't get it, but the compromise was that access could only be granted for serious criminal activities, defined by each member state's law.
Civil torts (ie, copyright infringement) are way outside the ballpark by anybody's measure, so it'll be a long while before they wheedle their way into this. They will try, but Big Content doesn't hold quite the same disproportionate influence in the EU that it does in the USA. So, from a US point of view, I think that you have much more to fear from data retention that EU citizens have, given that AG Gonzales explicitly mentioned copyright infringement in his reasons for pushing this turd of an idea.
Not saying that the data retention doesn't suck - just that the existing fears of abuse are more than enough the scare the bejesus out of me without imagining what *AA snooping would be like. I've yet to be convinced that it's not the usual government trick of "let's spend lots of money (better still, other people's money) on a problem, and rely on the traditional public belief that the government is tackling something because it wouldn't spend billions to accomplish nothing".
The objective is not to assess whether or not, say, $500 million is an appropriate cost to make Mission Impossible 15, the objective is to make sure that if the studio says it cost that much, then the rest of their legally required accounting for the stated time period says that number is a reasonable amount - ie: that their reported expenses for goods, services, wages, etc in the (reported) timeframe the movies was being made, adds up to about the right number. In other words, that they're not just making up numbers and alleged expenses are disappearing off into the creative accounting ether.
OK. Got you now. So what you're saying is that while copyright expires only after death of the author (I imagine it would be some arbitrary number - 50 years or so - for corporations since they cannot die), the exclusive right of distribution expires after cost recovery. So a work would have three phases in its life
1. Cost Recovery Mode: No one can copy it (except the author or his publishers).
2. Cost Recovered Mode: It can be freely distributed, but not sold for cost. So P2P would be OK, but AllofMP3 wouldn't. Any monies extracted at this point are profit for the author/publisher.
3. Public Domain: The author has died, so the work can be sold, copied, bent, folded, spindled or mutilated. Presumably a "moral right" still exists - ie, you cannot reassign authorship of the work.
Allowable transitions are 1->2->3 [Recover Costs; Profit; Die Rich] or 1->3 [Recover Costs; Die Poor]. Have I got this right?
It's also aimed squarely at the boot system: a Trusted Computing enabled chipset on the motherboard can prevent the booting of any kernel, or bootable device, without an appropriate vendor signature. You'd better believe Microsoft wants this to prevent "Trusted Computing" hardware from booting non-authorized operating systems.
I'm sure they would like such a system. But they can't have it. A BIOS which issues a TPM_Startup command is still under the control of the platform owner (which is why the TPM primitives have the operation of "Take Ownership"). I take your point about adding to complexity if the user wishes to install another OS - but the disk is still under user control. It may be that an OS which the owner does not register cannot have the chain of trust built - and therefore cannot attest that the device should be trusted. It should still boot up, however (at least under the HP and IBM BIOSes that I've looked at it will)
Another thing though - the BIOS checks the signatures generated by the TPM - not the OS vendor. In other words, it's up to me as the platform owner to certify a particular device as my approved configuration. Now, it may that various h/w and OS vendors may give out a default configuration, but that absolutely can be reset by the platform owner (it's a requirement of the TCG). In a corporate environment, the platform owner will probably be the IT department; in a home environment, it will be the purchaser of the system, in all likelihood.
Don't get me wrong. I can see all sorts of stupid abuses of the TPM system which will (in effect) stop the use of a personal computer per se. Trusted Connect is one of these things which could be abused by ISPs to ensure only Windows boxes connect to their networks, which would be disastrous. My only point is that TPM has some really solid uses for F/OSS - it's not just the tool of the Great Satan to take away our digital freedom.
These desires for DRM are supported heavily by Microsoft, which wants to protect its software licenses and prevent other software from writing or even reading the private formats they use, especially for "personally encrypted" files. The whole field of DRM is about to get much worse with the "Trusted Computing" software program, led by Microsoft, which locks software and media to a specific motherboard's encryption and authentication chip,
Well, hold on a sec. Microsoft has a vision for its Windows system as a home media platform - not a home computing platform. Each new version of Windows angles straight for this goal - to remove the open nature of computing, in favour of a trustworthy media consumption platform. Now, if the studios were happy to trust MS in this regard, DRM would never have happened. MS have no incentive to develop and maintain a mathematical impossibility. But the content producers will simply not produce for computer platforms unless a sufficiently robust anti copying technology is present in the system. Hence MS have no option but to invest in DRM. And since the obnoxiousness of the DMCA and EUCD came to pass, the odious nature of DRM has multiplied.
Now, as for TC related activity - there's a lot of nonsense talked about this, and I don't have time to go into it right now. TPMs are neither good nor bad. They are simply a way for the owner of the platform to measure the integrity of his/her platform, and to attest that integrity to a remote verifier. That's all it can do. The key here is the word "owner". Vista and friends are very much interested in separating the role of computer and platform owner into that of computer owner and platform licensee. As a licensee, you end up surrendering some ownership rights to MS. But fundamentally, if you control the hardware, you also control the mechanism for verifying any result. A Linux machine running with a TPM has several advantages over one which doesn't - and the TPM won't enforce one damn bit of DRM unless the platform owner wants it to.
BTW, I can't believe I inadvertently backed Microsoft in a/. post. I'll go and flay some skin from my back by way of mea culpa
On the death of the copyright holder, all their copyrighted works enter the public domain.
Great incentive to shoot your favorite artist!
Also a great incentive to ensure that all the mind numbing crap is locked up in copyright forever. So that means we'd have to keep Paris Hilton alive by cryogenics if necessary. Can you imagine a world where her warbled excreta could be freely traded? Will no-one think of the children?
Length of copyright is linked to a works "ECD". When a work is registered as copyrighted, it must include an "Estimated Cost of Development". Once the owner of the copyright has recorded income from selling the copyrighted work that meets or exceeds the "ECD", the work is no longer subject to protection from non-profit copyright infringement (ie: filesharing and the like). Note that for-profit reproduction (ie: someone else *selling* a copyrighted work) is still a crime (and would be harshly punished).
I sympathise with the goals, but think that the practice you're trying to implement would be extremely difficult. The unintended consequence of such a regime would (I think) be the artificial inflation of ECDs (notwithstanding your next point). Noone would have the appropriate incentive to report true costs - you'd need an extremely rigorous copyright equivalent of the SEC and Sarbanes-Oxley. Hell, Hollywood inflates its costs right now so that it can avoid paying percentage of profits to authors/screenplay writers/etc. I think having an ECD as the sole determinant of copyright duration would make this obscene situation much worse.
Fraudulent reporting of "ECD" or copyright-related income would be *severely* punished. Upon confirmation of such fraud, the work would immediately enter the public domain...
The problem here is determining what is a fraudulent assessment of a works costs. If everyone has an incentive to maximise their costs, then how does the appropriate copyright authority determine that they are all out of line - and by how much? You'd need some sort of state appointed copyright regulator (something like the Office of Communications [OfCom] in the UK). Regulators are generally employed, however, where there is, in effect, no free market in goods or services. Think of it as a sort of "surrogate market". You'd have a hard time saying that copyrighted works weren't in abundant supply.
I like the tone of your idea - that copyright is there to ensure you've got a chance of getting your costs back (NOT a guarantee) plus some reasonable profit for the venture (NOT some obscenely bloated ROI which guarantees you never have to work again). I think I'd simply advocate that one has an exploitation window of 10 years for free, and then an exponentially increasing copyright cost for keeping a work out of the public domain. After 25 years, a work enters the public domain, come what may. The incidence of works which only recover their costs after 25 years of distribution is vanishingly small. I have never understood the logic which says that works will not be attempted unless monopoly distribution rights extend 70 years past the death of the author. How many new works is Elvis producing these days?
Can you provide a link for this? I've never known the Natural History Unit to bend itself to political inteference, so this seems strange to me. But I have to say the last election bored me so much that I watched next to no TV, so I could well have missed it.
UK law is really strict about election broadcasts, and the BBC isn't usually a government lapdog - though there have been times where their standards haven't been as high as they should have been.
It's illegal to copy music in the UK without a license to do so, even for personal use.
That is not true. In the UK, the copyright design and patents act explicitly allows individuals to do just that under what it terms use for "research and private study".
Obviously it does not give carte blanche permission to give copies to all your friends though ("oh noes!" students across the land cry), but even sharing copies of media with family / household members is seen as "probably" legal, according to review by a government task force set up to investigate it (which is as definitive as they could come up with).
I don't know to which government task force you referring - perhaps a reference would be useful? What I do know is that the All-Party Internet Group believes the same as the BPI and the Patent Office - namely that it is an infringement. (Note: not illegal which means a breach of criminal law. I know I'm very sloppy with that word, so I can't blame others if they use it in the everyday sense of the word, ie "something that you're not supposed to do")
From the APIG report (report on DRM), p9, para.41
It was quite clear to us that the 'letter of the law' would be quite a surprise to many of the individuals who submitted responses. People told us that they expected to be able to copy CDs as a backup (in case of scratches), or to make compilation albums to play in their cars (or when out and about in their wheelchairs). However, these are almost invariably illegal activities in the UK!
Note that the MPs are also using the word "illegal" sloppily.
To re-iterate a previous point, if it were not so, that would mean unequivocally anyone who sell's iPods or Mini Disc's (now there is an irony) or who makes available copies of MP3 ripping software (including Apple's iTunes) would therefore be guilty of secondary infringement by order of supplying tools for the intended purpose of assisting in copyright violation - which is an interesting taking on things!
No - the tools you mention could enable the ripping of stuff which you do have permission (ie, if there's a significant non-infringing use, then it's not secondary infringement).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't just do that. Find another service, use it - and write an email to the tech support of the original website. Say clearly and politely that the original customer has lost a sale because it chose obnoxious web practice. If you can't find an alternative, then do without. Movie downloads you can get anywhere. Just not legally...
Seriously, if a business is making so much money that it can turn away 20% (at least!) of its potential customer base, then it clearly doesn't need you, and you don't need it. Rest assured, with that sort of untapped market space, another vendor will step up to the plate PDQ. That's a lot of dollars to go uncollected.
--Ng
Doesn't the requirement state that multiple implementations must exist? As far as I know, only Office fully supports OOXML [though I did hear about someone else attempting an implementation, but I could be wrong].
If there is such a requirement, then MS's offering would not qualify. However, if they selected ODF, and Office supported ODF properly, then the government offices might very well upgrade to the next Office. That would be a matter for their local IT decision makers.
But the software used must satisfy the business requirements; that's not just for office documents, it should be a general law of software and hardware procurement.
--Ng
1Passwd does keychain password storage for Firefox on OS X. But it's not free (I think it was about $20). Seems to work OK.
--Ng
The more I look at it, the more the music labels seem to resemble strung out junkies.
They know that DRM hurts more than it helps.
They know that infringing copying is rampant, and DRM schemes do nothing to stop it. I think they even know that the losses due to copying don't really make that much difference to their situation. Some difference, but not much. In fact, the most swapped music tends to enrich the bands at live gigs and sell more merchandise.
They want to stop, but they just can't. They can't make that first step. One of them (EMI, maybe?) will go cold turkey for a bit. Their tracks will then be all over P2P as they already are and always were, but this will be enough for the pushers (DRM manufacturers) to say "See? Do you want that sort of pain for your back catalogue?", and enough of them will start hurting. Enough to continue the sad cycle.
Eventually, they will phase out CD sales, and replace them with (DRM'ed) downloads only. Fine. I don't care. I won't buy them, and I won't even hack round them. And the bands I do buy from will be those who market themselves well enough, and play good gigs.
An old industry dies. A new one lives. It's a fair trade.
--Ng
Of course a government covers things up. It's got statutory authority to guard national secrets. What you mean, I guess, is that the government is covering up something which should be disclosed because of fear of embarrassment. In which case, I'll simply ask for your evidence (related to the honours for loans accusation) and await an answer. (Note: answers like "They're all at it", or "Everybody knows its true" don't count as evidence)
It's you. Just about every generation produces the Daily Wail/Torygraph whine about the country going to the dogs. You sound like my mother-in-law, but at least she has the decency to be half-insane. When she gets to the stage of actually believing the bile in the Torygraph, then I can ask for a Section 8 to get her into the Laughing Academy.
Or could it be that politicians are representative of the people, and thus can be both honest and dishonest? Seriously, your objections come across as pretty juvenile, here. The country isn't going to the dogs. Some things get better, some things get worse. In my opinion, things generally get better.
The only times that things get really bad in a democracy is when people stop caring.
--Ng
Not quite true. Firstly, this only applies to England and Wales. Scotland still has the "no double jeopardy" rule. Secondly, the state can try once for a second trial, but only if evidence which could not have been available at the initial trial is available. ISTR that permission from the House of Lords is needed to even launch another trial - and the HoL will refuse if the evidence is not the sort which would have radically altered the original outcome if not challenged. Also, I think that the offences covered for this sort of double jeopardy must be the most serious type (murder, rape, etc.)
I can't say I really approve of it (equality of arms, and all that), but then, we don't have the death penalty, so it's not like a defendant appeal couldn't be launched. The first conviction under these rules was for someone who had been acquitted and then confessed publicly to the murder [although even a freely given confession doesn't necessarily count as new evidence!]
The block who 'fessed up pleaded guilty at the second trial. See here for more details.
--Ng
Hold on a bit - that represents the maximum bitrate of a H.264 MP stream. On a disc, you'd be using VBR to ensure an optimum bit stream. (Unlike, say a TV broadcast where your transport stream needs to recover state more easily, hence CBR). If you take a look on Doom9, there was a recent transcoding competition using the (free) movie Elephant's Dream, to see what the acceptable bitrates for HD were. And H.264 pipped VC-1, but both gave perfectly acceptable quality at 6 Mbps (12 was nicer though, but 24 Mbps was just utter overkill).
The BBC currently broadcasts HD H.264 at around 20Mbps as a transport stream. I've transcoded that down to 8Mbps VBR, and it looks plenty fine - admittedly that's 1080i, but the 8 Mbps stream is deinterlaced.
So you definitely could get a HD movie on an existing DVD (definitely true if encoded to 720p). What you might not be able to do is get a movie with DTS Lossless audio tracks on it. Not sure if that's such a huge problem.
As for why the hardware makers haven't done it - you've answered the question yourself! Why would they want to make more of the $35 players which generate wafer thin margins, when they can enjoy a 2-4 year window of stupidly huge margins? The whole purpose of DVDCSS wasn't to stop people copying DVDs - it was to ensure that only certain authorised manufacturers were allowed to make DVD players. AACS is specifically designed to enhance and extend that exclusionary marketing method.
Time will tell whether the ploy is successful.
--Ng
Thankfully not anything, as the fiasco over the 90-day detention showed. What a stiff-necked dickhead he looked like after that. I guess it happens to all PM's eventually. They get quite convinced that anything is theirs for the demanding by virtue of their office. Maybe the Americans have got something in the two-term limit for PotUS.
Sadly, none of this is confined to the current government. I'm old enough to remember when the Thatcher government introduced the Poll Tax for Scotland alone, using purely English Tory votes to force the stupid idea on an unwilling Scotland. It all went pear-shaped when it was introduced onto an equally unwilling England the next year, but it does go to show that introducing unpopular legislation without any shred of popular mandate is a time-hallowed tradition in the UK. In the end, liberty and such like find a way through, but a lot of damage can be done in the meantime.
Do you think PR would make a sufficiently significant change to stop ill-conceived legislation from being forced through? One thing I would love to see is for the (reformed) House of Lords to have the power to block a bill for one Parliamentary session. If the government feels that strongly about the legislation, it can call an election and have the bill passed on the back of popular mandate. Alternatively, it can wait and introduce it after the lifetime of the current Parliament. But if the HoL vetoes a bill which has been explicitly mentioned in the government's manifesto, then they must pass it. A sort of updated Salisbury Convention.
--Ng
After Britain institutionalized slavery in the South by sustaining it and encouraging it during the colonial period, they had helped to create an economic system in the lower half of the United States that had grown entirely dependent on slavery. When the original rough-draft of the declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson, et al., it originally included the following passage
Yes, yes - but what has this to do with the matter at hand? My point was simply that the Constitution allowed slavery to continue (before thankfully abolishing it some 80 years later). And thus it follows that merely having a piece of paper is not enough. I'm well aware of the history of this matter (actually, my reading matter right now is Simon Schama's "Rough Crossings"), and my point wasn't to attack the USA or its Constitution. Just to say that it's just a piece of paper. The strength of the Constitution depends on the will of the American people to cherish it.
Now, with respect to your point about the "frailties" of British liberty (ie, depending on the sovreignty of the Crown-in-Parliament) is the fact that generally the best arbiter of liberty is political stability. Lots of countries have Constitutions which promise just as much as the US one (the Soviet one springs to mind) but political instability have caused their stricture to be abandoned, and atrocity after atrocity to be committed. The reason that the rights enshrined in the US Bill of Rights or Constitution does not depend on American exceptionalism (NB: I'm not saying that you said so either), but on economic prosperity, respect for democratic institutions, etc.
Again, my point is that you're reading the British constitution like it's a designed state. It isn't - but the bonds of tradition, convention and law can't just be pretended away like they are just so much ephemera. The British are really lousy at doing what they're told. Any government which seeks to impose the sorts of tyranny which is theoretically possible would end up out of office within days. It's not tidy and architected - it's organic, it's asymmetric, it's historical - but by and large, it's worked in both England and Scotland for a thousand years - with more than a few bumps on the way. The key is that it works for us. Not that it would work for anyone else (the entire dismal Imperial episode proved that all too well). Of course, we could write a constitution, with guaranteed rights for all, etc, etc. But that in itself wouldn't actually help anyone - not unless the British felt there was a crushing need to rein in the powers of a runaway government - which, for all their whining and bellyaching, they do not currently.
As for the destruction of liberty being done as per a legislative process - let them try. We've killed one King in the UK - the odd Prime Minister really isn't that much of an imaginative leap.
--Ng
Furthermore, this was an "Act of Parliament". Under parliamentary sovereignty no previous act of parliament can trump a future act of parliament. This can be overturned by another Act of Parliament until the British establish a Bill of Rights of the people which limits Parliament's sovereignty and binds all future parliament's to its provisions.
:-)). This is not to decry the magnificence of the US Bill of Rights or the US Constitution. Merely to say that a written constitution has certain advantages, and certain disadvantages, and that a constitution in itself is no guarantor of liberty.
Actually, that's not quite correct. The courts (which are independent of the executive. Well, as independent as any judiciary can be) have long held that there are "ordinary statutes" and "constitutional statutes". And only a new constitutional statute can overturn an existing one. In other words, things like the Human Rights Act, the Representation fo the Peoples Act and the Bill of Rights (along with the Acts of Union, Settlement, etc, etc) must be purposefully overturned. You cannot just stick a rider onto a Fisheries Bill abolishing the right of appeal, or fling in a statutory instrument asserting the right of the executive to have detention without trial. It must be specifically brought forth and voted in by Parliament (all of Parliament, not just the House of Commons).
Afterall, the right to remain silent was sustained for 300 years based on tradition and self-restraint, yet Blair's government tossed both out the window and now that long-held right that was taken for granted is now gone.
Actually, that was the last Conservative government, with Home Secretary Michael Howard introducing the legislation.
In the end, the strength of the US Constitution is only as great as those charged with its defence, and the desire of the US population to see its strictures adhered to. It didn't stop the abomination of slavery - although its power was shown when that institution was finally abolished via constitutional amendment. Similarly, the desire of the US population to refrain from state torture seems to be somewhat ambivalent right now (And we can probably thank "24" for that...
At the moment, liberty is taking a bit of a pounding either side of the Atlantic. But it will reassert itself, and when it does, the centuries of British conventions, traditions and personal desire for liberty will prove just as powerful a force as the US's instruments of state. The British method of government and preservation of liberty isn't as capricious or fragile as one might think from your posting.
--Ng
I beat my last penny there will be a tax introduced on media that is copied - and it will be sourced at purchase.
Not if the major record labels have anything to do with it there won't be. The big labels are pathologically opposed to media levies of any sort. And why not? They've pushed for, and got, total TPM (Technological Protection Measures) blessed by government. It's a crime to bypass, or tell others how to bypass any DRM which copy protects stuff. With that little gem bought and paid for, the last thing the media cartels would want would be a public license to copy materials (and therefore to bypass anything which stood in the way of that legitimate copying).
Incidentally, the indie media labels in the UK would love to see media levies introduced, or even levies on Internet use. That way copying and sharing would be legitimate, But the majors will die in a ditch before they let that happen.
If Gordon Brown wanted to raise a stealth tax, he'd be a zillion times more effective in passing some sort of Internet levy - so that people in rural areas can have their right to the Internet, just like the townies have got. And if the government needed to cream off a little for administration purposes, well, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, y'know...
--Ng
In Belgium it's 70 after the auther has died, now you try and explain that to me
Is that the mechanical copyright or the authors copyright? The mechanical copyright is just the right to copy any particular recording. The author's copyright is the royalties that must be paid to the songwriter to record a new version of the song, or put out a public performance of the song. Generally, the life+70 is for authors, but I'm not sure what Belgian law says re: mechanical copyrights.
Also, most continental European states have a private right of copy which extends considerably further than copying your own CDs for your iPod, etc. Consumers there have the right to perform small scale distribution (ie, copy stuff for family and friends). Wish we in the UK had that level of common sense...
--Ng
Note: the speaker did not say which rights the people (ie, the citizens of the state) have, it was which rights consumers have. We're not talking about fundamental rights of the citizen, we're talking about the rights of the consumer within a marketplace scenario. Generally, consumer protection is delegated to government as a power to ensure that vendors are not allowed to market falsely, exercise unconscionable contracts, etc. It's usually accepted in most European states that those possessing capital (the vendors) are in a stronger position than those parting with it (the consumers). The people have a right to expect that government will act as a shield for the weaker party, in order to ensure a fair marketplace. In other words, whether we're talking about a European model of liberty, or an American one, the point remains: consumer protection is generally a power which government has been given popular authority to exercise.
Remember the context: copyright legislation. At the moment, we have copyright legislation that's almost exclusively to the advantage of rightsholders, ignoring the basic truth that the fruits of knowledge can be shared almost trivially today. The IPPR are saying that it is the government's right and duty to reassert that ideas and their expressions are not primarily commercial quantities. That the right for consumers to copy their own possessions is not one which should have been ceded in the 300 years of copyright legislation.
Your point was addressing the nature and rights of the citizen in the modern state: a far more general and differently rooted argument than the point at hand. Some here will consider that those rights are natural rights (ie, they stem from our being human), others will consider that rights are essentially civil (ie, they are reserved/ceded as part of a social contract); in either case, the power of government to act as a fair market arbiter tends to be accepted by either construction. (Yes, I'm aware that some libertarians do not accept that such a role of government is legitimate; however, the libertarian constructs of Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia would accept such a power as proper).
--Ng
That's an overly legalistic reading - there's also EU case law which fleshes out the sorts of derogations which can be tolerated. By example, detaining terrorst suspects without trial in Belmarsh, for instance, violated the ECHR and the UK Human Rights Act. It didn't matter that the government had passed legislation saying it was OK - the law said that you can't just "pass a law" to OK violations of the ECHR. And privacy is a basic legal right within the EU - much to annoyance of governments.
I don't know what provisions are in the German proposed law. I'm simply saying that if they're claiming that the Data Retention Directive orders them to pass such (copyright) laws, that's a lie. And as a lie, German citizens will be able to sue their government for allowing non-criminal investigation of retained ISP records. Unless they can demonstrate pressing need to allow private companies to go on ISP trawls, then they will be violating the ECHR - and the German Basic Law, I think.
As I said before, if Germany wishes to shift copyright infringement from a civil tort into criminal law, there really is nothing anyone outside Germany can do about it (the German people are more than capable of making their democratic feelings heard). But it's not a result of the Data Retention Directive - it's a product of the existing German political system. Perhaps there is popular support for criminalising copyright infrgingement in Germany. I really don't know. But if such support is there, then removing the capability of Internet anonymity and retaining ISP data would be essential to such a move. So it would have had to happen with or without the Directive.
Sure, new laws can be written. But if those laws breach basic civil rights as granted by treaty, conventions, constitutions, etc, they can be challenged. In the US, such widespread access would probably be challenged under 4th amendment rights. In the EU, we would invoke Article 8 of the ECHR to say that such access was disproportionately interfering with basic privacy rights. Individual member states might have even stronger protections.
I know what you're saying - and I agree - that legal protections aren't worth the paper they're written on if the democratic institutions can't rein in special interests. But that's not a problem with data retention directives/laws. That's a problem with the constitution of democracy and liberty within our respective states.
--Ng
I never thought it was. And as a tool to fight terrorism, it seems a very limited one.
it does compel members to adhere to the principles of the various data protection and privacy directives already in force (ie, exemptions or derogations from those directives can only be for serious matters; national security, organised crime, etc, etc.). Article 4 expressly states that the ECHR will be used as one of the yardsticks to gauge whether member state implementations are proportionate. Section 25 explicitly reminds member states that Article 8 of the ECHR demands that free-for-all access cannot be granted. Article 9 calls out that data retention is useful (yeah, right) in investigation of "serious matters such as organised crime and terrorism". Therefore, extending copyright reform such that it would fall under the banner of this directive would not be effective.
As an EU citizen (you must be to be writing so), you're well aware that member states can implement directives according to their national laws. They are also free to go further. IMHO, the directive should (a) never have been passed - you can thank my government (UK) for that, and (b) if passed should have mentioned that access can only be granted for prosecution of EAW covered offences. However, the law as it stands in the UK is very clear. Access can only be sought for criminal matters. All I was saying in my original post is that the EU Directive can not be the tool by which private agencies (like copyright holders) gain access to government gathered communications intelligence. If EU member states allow this to happen on their turf, then they are free to do so, but they will have to answer to their populations for it.
Germany would be completely within its rights to pass laws saying that civil torts may also be covered, but the German government could almost certainly be sued in the European courts for breach of the privacy requirements of the ECHR. They could not claim that the Data Retention Directive gave them the authority to pass such laws, since the directive specifically mentions criminal actions only as its reasons for existence.
Now, Germany is also free to move copyright infringement into the criminal sphere if that is what its legislatures wish - neither the EU nor any other member state can prevent that. But if Herr Krings states that the Directive is the reason why copyright holders must be granted access to all German citizens communications records, then he is lying. The directive time and again refers to criminal matters as the scope of its text, and not once does it refer to civil torts.
--Ng
Not if it's been collected under the aegis of the EU Data Retention Directive, it can't. Now, Germany is free to pass whatever laws it sees fit. If it wants to retain data for 20 years, it is free to pass such legislation. But the EU DRD is ultra-clear, which is that data so retained may only be accessed for criminal invesiigation and prosecution only. There was a section which said that it could be used for prevention of crime (which was such a wide open door that it was removed).
It is possible that criminal copyright violation (which is a much bigger leap than traditional copyright infringement) could be investigated, but only if the investigation was linked, say, to organised crime, or that the proceeds of such violations were funding, for example, terrorism.
In the UK, retained data can only be accessed with a court order. and the courts have been told that they should not issue such orders unless criminal charges have already been filed against a suspect. Since copyright infringement is generally not a criminal offence (except in rare circumstances), but a civil tort, a court order can not be granted to examine retained ISP records.
Of course, in the course of discovery, a civil case might request ISP IP records for a particular subscriber. That's fine - but the generalised trawl of data by private parties would be illegal (under current UK and EU law).
--Ng
The summary does right in pointing out that retaining this stuff attracts copyright holders like flies round shit, but, thankfully for the moment, they're not allowed access to this data [in fact, it would be a criminal offence if they were granted such access]. Part of the fighting between the EU commission and the EU parliament was that the parliament wanted access locked down to ultra-specific cases (things that could be prosecuted under the European Arrest Warrant only). They didn't get it, but the compromise was that access could only be granted for serious criminal activities, defined by each member state's law.
Civil torts (ie, copyright infringement) are way outside the ballpark by anybody's measure, so it'll be a long while before they wheedle their way into this. They will try, but Big Content doesn't hold quite the same disproportionate influence in the EU that it does in the USA. So, from a US point of view, I think that you have much more to fear from data retention that EU citizens have, given that AG Gonzales explicitly mentioned copyright infringement in his reasons for pushing this turd of an idea.
Not saying that the data retention doesn't suck - just that the existing fears of abuse are more than enough the scare the bejesus out of me without imagining what *AA snooping would be like. I've yet to be convinced that it's not the usual government trick of "let's spend lots of money (better still, other people's money) on a problem, and rely on the traditional public belief that the government is tackling something because it wouldn't spend billions to accomplish nothing".
--Ng
OK. Got you now. So what you're saying is that while copyright expires only after death of the author (I imagine it would be some arbitrary number - 50 years or so - for corporations since they cannot die), the exclusive right of distribution expires after cost recovery. So a work would have three phases in its life
1. Cost Recovery Mode: No one can copy it (except the author or his publishers).
2. Cost Recovered Mode: It can be freely distributed, but not sold for cost. So P2P would be OK, but AllofMP3 wouldn't. Any monies extracted at this point are profit for the author/publisher.
3. Public Domain: The author has died, so the work can be sold, copied, bent, folded, spindled or mutilated. Presumably a "moral right" still exists - ie, you cannot reassign authorship of the work.
Allowable transitions are 1->2->3 [Recover Costs; Profit; Die Rich] or 1->3 [Recover Costs; Die Poor]. Have I got this right?
--Ng
I'm sure they would like such a system. But they can't have it. A BIOS which issues a TPM_Startup command is still under the control of the platform owner (which is why the TPM primitives have the operation of "Take Ownership"). I take your point about adding to complexity if the user wishes to install another OS - but the disk is still under user control. It may be that an OS which the owner does not register cannot have the chain of trust built - and therefore cannot attest that the device should be trusted. It should still boot up, however (at least under the HP and IBM BIOSes that I've looked at it will)
Another thing though - the BIOS checks the signatures generated by the TPM - not the OS vendor. In other words, it's up to me as the platform owner to certify a particular device as my approved configuration. Now, it may that various h/w and OS vendors may give out a default configuration, but that absolutely can be reset by the platform owner (it's a requirement of the TCG). In a corporate environment, the platform owner will probably be the IT department; in a home environment, it will be the purchaser of the system, in all likelihood.
Don't get me wrong. I can see all sorts of stupid abuses of the TPM system which will (in effect) stop the use of a personal computer per se. Trusted Connect is one of these things which could be abused by ISPs to ensure only Windows boxes connect to their networks, which would be disastrous. My only point is that TPM has some really solid uses for F/OSS - it's not just the tool of the Great Satan to take away our digital freedom.
--Ng
Well, hold on a sec. Microsoft has a vision for its Windows system as a home media platform - not a home computing platform. Each new version of Windows angles straight for this goal - to remove the open nature of computing, in favour of a trustworthy media consumption platform. Now, if the studios were happy to trust MS in this regard, DRM would never have happened. MS have no incentive to develop and maintain a mathematical impossibility. But the content producers will simply not produce for computer platforms unless a sufficiently robust anti copying technology is present in the system. Hence MS have no option but to invest in DRM. And since the obnoxiousness of the DMCA and EUCD came to pass, the odious nature of DRM has multiplied.
Now, as for TC related activity - there's a lot of nonsense talked about this, and I don't have time to go into it right now. TPMs are neither good nor bad. They are simply a way for the owner of the platform to measure the integrity of his/her platform, and to attest that integrity to a remote verifier. That's all it can do. The key here is the word "owner". Vista and friends are very much interested in separating the role of computer and platform owner into that of computer owner and platform licensee. As a licensee, you end up surrendering some ownership rights to MS. But fundamentally, if you control the hardware, you also control the mechanism for verifying any result. A Linux machine running with a TPM has several advantages over one which doesn't - and the TPM won't enforce one damn bit of DRM unless the platform owner wants it to.
BTW, I can't believe I inadvertently backed Microsoft in a /. post. I'll go and flay some skin from my back by way of mea culpa
--Ng
Also a great incentive to ensure that all the mind numbing crap is locked up in copyright forever. So that means we'd have to keep Paris Hilton alive by cryogenics if necessary. Can you imagine a world where her warbled excreta could be freely traded? Will no-one think of the children?
--Ng
I sympathise with the goals, but think that the practice you're trying to implement would be extremely difficult. The unintended consequence of such a regime would (I think) be the artificial inflation of ECDs (notwithstanding your next point). Noone would have the appropriate incentive to report true costs - you'd need an extremely rigorous copyright equivalent of the SEC and Sarbanes-Oxley. Hell, Hollywood inflates its costs right now so that it can avoid paying percentage of profits to authors/screenplay writers/etc. I think having an ECD as the sole determinant of copyright duration would make this obscene situation much worse.
The problem here is determining what is a fraudulent assessment of a works costs. If everyone has an incentive to maximise their costs, then how does the appropriate copyright authority determine that they are all out of line - and by how much? You'd need some sort of state appointed copyright regulator (something like the Office of Communications [OfCom] in the UK). Regulators are generally employed, however, where there is, in effect, no free market in goods or services. Think of it as a sort of "surrogate market". You'd have a hard time saying that copyrighted works weren't in abundant supply.
I like the tone of your idea - that copyright is there to ensure you've got a chance of getting your costs back (NOT a guarantee) plus some reasonable profit for the venture (NOT some obscenely bloated ROI which guarantees you never have to work again). I think I'd simply advocate that one has an exploitation window of 10 years for free, and then an exponentially increasing copyright cost for keeping a work out of the public domain. After 25 years, a work enters the public domain, come what may. The incidence of works which only recover their costs after 25 years of distribution is vanishingly small. I have never understood the logic which says that works will not be attempted unless monopoly distribution rights extend 70 years past the death of the author. How many new works is Elvis producing these days?
--Ng
Can you provide a link for this? I've never known the Natural History Unit to bend itself to political inteference, so this seems strange to me. But I have to say the last election bored me so much that I watched next to no TV, so I could well have missed it.
UK law is really strict about election broadcasts, and the BBC isn't usually a government lapdog - though there have been times where their standards haven't been as high as they should have been.
--Ng
I don't know to which government task force you referring - perhaps a reference would be useful? What I do know is that the All-Party Internet Group believes the same as the BPI and the Patent Office - namely that it is an infringement. (Note: not illegal which means a breach of criminal law. I know I'm very sloppy with that word, so I can't blame others if they use it in the everyday sense of the word, ie "something that you're not supposed to do")
From the APIG report (report on DRM), p9, para
Note that the MPs are also using the word "illegal" sloppily.
No - the tools you mention could enable the ripping of stuff which you do have permission (ie, if there's a significant non-infringing use, then it's not secondary infringement).
--Ng