For an article describing something that is completely different from open source, they sure did use the term quite a lot. It sounds like they're just talking about a free-as-in-beer but very restrictive license for some hardware developers.
I agree with you, but I've had a few tonight, so I'll play Devil's Advocate:
The obvious reply is - so what? I can follow you home if I want to. If I see you on the street, I can watch where you go and note the address. As far as looking at the electric bills, well, that's a little harder to rationalize. But still, your electric bill is hardly highly personal - or is it?
If the assumption is made that growing pot is Very Bad, and Harmful To Society (think of the children!), then we need to be protected from those who would grow it. It's not like the feds are just bashing down random doors here, they're conducting surviellance in a public place, and "fishing" for suspects. Assuming they've found a quantity of "fresh stuff" somewhere, they almost seem to have cause. Obviously, somebody nearby grew the stuff.
Racial profiling (driving while black) is another side of this issue, however. I think the distinction can be made that just because you're black doesn't mean you're worth investigating for auto theft. But if you frequent (or even visit?) a place that sells equiptment useful for growing marijuana, and we *know* somebody's growing dope, it might be worth checking your electrical bill.
Don't forget that driving while black is also different because we'd assume whether or not you've stolen the car, you're going to get harrased (pulled over and forced to deal with an arrogant cop). If you're in fact innocent of growing pot, you may never know you were being watched.
As for the bolt cutters, I don't know. They're no more legitimate than hydroponics systems (or should I say hydro systems are no less legitimate than bolt cutters), but the procedure to find out if you're using them illegally is much more difficult - following you everywhere, all the time. With the hydro stuff, they just look at the bill and try to find out whether or not your sucking up juice for a huge array of High-Pressure Sodium bulbs or not.
Anybody care to sort this out, I'm gonna go smoke a joint and find me some bolt cutters.
I'll try to pose a question here. An... ethical (cue ominous music) question.
Is it ethical to investigate people apart from their connection in some crime? I "suspiciousness" enough cause to warrent a full-scale investigation, or does a government agency need more focus to perform such operations and remain in the ethical right?
The immediate reaction is often "no! just because somebody looks sort of suspicious is no reason to invade their privacy (and perhaps trample their rights)!"
OTOH, what is the harm in a little investigation, assuming no overt action is taken? Isn't it better to "know" that so-and-so is either a criminal or not? If the investigator believes that some (suspicious) person *might* pose a threat to Society At Large(tm), AND the investigation is to be carried out discreetly, such that if nothing is found to be wrong, nobody will ever know, should s/he investigate or not?
More importantly - why?
I'm really not sure. That's why I ask.
And yes, I know where rec.philosophy.ethics is.:-)
To those that argue that the purchase money isn't working locally, I would disagree - the amount of money spent is being offset by the large workforce that these companies have. So yeah, while a refrigerator split between ma' and pa' is a big chunk of change, there's an even bigger chunk to be had by 30-40 employees working at the bigger stores.
Your analysis is seriously flawed here. The Buck Stops with Mom-n-Pop. For one thing, the chunk is not any bigger because 30-40 people are getting a few cents. In fact, it's smaller. Because after these minimum-wage earners get their pittance, a bunch of that profit goes up the pipe to corp - and their shareholders. Oh yeah, those minimum-wage earners don't own any stock, trust me.
This is why the Wal-Marts of the world do take money out of the local economy. Not only that, but by taking that money to shareholders and "corporate citizens", they further widen the class divide.
As for "unfair practices", Wal-mart's sheer size allows it to undercut anybody they want to. They can lose money on a store in order to eradicate the competition. Maybe that's fair, and maybe it's not, but either way - it sucks.
The real problem is consumers. They don't realize that by pinching a penny here, and saving five minutes there, they're shooting themselves in the foot. Suddenly, everyone without a college education is making min-wage, at a shitty job, where the boss doesn't care about who they are.
Then crime goes up, and people start getting high on smack, and the police force starts cracking down, and Mr. Wal doesn't have to care, cause he's somewhere on his Yacht.
Maybe a little extreme there, but there's truth in my exaggeration.
First of all, I think it's great that your high school offers a Software Development course. I graduated from HS in 1995, and went on to study CS. All I could squeeze out of my school was a little pascal tutoring from the Computer Lab Nazi (tm).
As for raising awareness of the GPL, you can do it with words and with actions. Simply mentioning it in class is great. It's unfortunate that your teacher dismissed it as crack-pottery. A better educator would have been interested, and asked follow up questions, IMHO.
If you've got a big project to do for the class, and I'd hope you would, you could do one of several things. You could make something useful, and GPL it. This is nice if you don't have real options for choosing your project. Another option would be to find an OS project that interests you, and spec a specific module. Present the specification to your teacher as a project proposal. Include some good ol' fashioned OS propeganda in there for good measure.
If your teacher looked at you like you're crazy, it begs the question: does she know anything about Linux? Linux gets so much press these days I have a hard time believeing that somebody who's teaching a SD class hasn't even *heard* of it. Working from this, I'd assume she's heard some Linux hype, but doesn't know what makes it free software, exactly.
Aside from integrating your classwork and open-source development, you could go the talking route. Give her some URLs, and explain to her why you believe in Free Software. Discuss the educational oppurtunities - you can see the source! You want to know how to organize a large project? Look at the Mozilla CVS tree, or GIMP, or any other large project.
Maybe buy/burn her a Linux/*BSD disc or something.
First of all, this is not a problem that is only relevant to open source development. I pay the bills by doing commercial projects on a freelance basis. I now live in New York City, but used to live in the country. My current project involves collaboration with a group in holland, and business types who work down in the financial district.
Email and Listservs are very useful because you get a nice record of everything to reference later. Another nice thing about email is that it encourages (at least in theory) people to think carefully about what they want to say, and how to say it. Unfortunately, the latency is high, and for highly interactive exchanges, this can slow things seriously. IRC would be a decent way to work, or perhaps even just ICQ/AOLIM or the like. Haven't tried it yet.
We use the phone a lot. It's nice to be getting payed, because you can justify this. Of course, conference calls for OSS development is sort of out of the question.
This brings an interesting question - where are strong realtime collaboration tools? Preferably free ones. While not everyone has a fast connection yet, soon voice-over-ip should be plausable.
Also, I know of commercial collaborative-whiteboard type applications. I can imagine how this could be very useful. We recently flew the dutchies here just so we could draw shit on paper/walls.
So, who wants to start a conference-call/shared whiteboard OS project with me?
Does it bother anyone else that Reno has been touring with this "top AOL lawyer"? I dunno, I just get this mental image of a demonic figure standing in the shadows just to the rear-left, his eyes glowing a pale red...
I understand why AOL is interested in the prospect of new legislation, but to be making public appearances? Does the Administration think that this corporate poster-boy lends them some credibility or something? I'd feel better about seeing John Perry Barlow.
Thanks for making this point. It's still damned cool that they call pull out all this visual information, especially in such diverse lighting conditions. A university pal of mine tried to do some vision stuff a while back - I helped a little - it was very difficult to identify objects in a scene. Even when it's, eg, a red coke can in a white/light scene. To have such a cheap chip be capable of identifying and tracking 8 objects in a scene (presumeably the sensor is outputting a pixelmap) is incredible.
If this is half of what's it's cracked up to be, I'm pretty impressed. I played around with mobile robots at the university, and doing anything based on vision was very difficult. Most of the time it was easier to solve a problem with sonar. Sonar works great for finding walls and stuff, but as soon as you introduce moving objects into the environment, it gets less useful.
If this chip is really as capable as it's made out to be, it will mean a great deal to people who are primarily interested in autonomous mobile robots, as opposed to computer vision.
I could imagine hooking something like this up to a pioneer and solving a bunch of problems.
Sort of makes me wish I were still a student, with the time and resources to play with robots...
I'd have thought they'd offer their content for syndication via RSS. Anyone have any idea why they seem to have gone with a proprietary XML format for syndication?
They *do* offer a Perl backend-syndication program to parse the XML, but I've already got some nice RSS tools. Integrating their stuff shouldn't be too hard, but putting another line in my RSS-reader's config file would be easier.
$foo = Linux is very innovative - how else could you account for its success?
$foo=~s/Linux/Windows/
Success is not a measure of innovation by any means. There are certainly some innovative things about linux, and the community behind it. But to call Linux on the whole "innovative" is going a bit far. "Cool", "useful", "Good", and "Robust" are better adjectives.
This "presumption of validity" seems to be one of the real issues here. I know the way the law is worded, but perhaps this needs to change.
I think the applicant ought to be required to meet some standard of due diligence and good faith. Some justification needs to be made as to why this invention is *deserving* of a patent.
On the other hand, with 8-12 hours to spend, I think a competent patent examiner with relevant expertise ought to have at least thought twice about 1-click shopping, or affiliate programs.
I agree wholeheartedly. Unworkable, well maybe, but it's worth I shot. The big problem is getting OSS-active folks to think like Lusers. I run into the problem constantly at work. The UI people and design folks tell show me something which i think is completely unintuitive. I suggest something, and they tell me my idea is going to confuse everyone. Usually, they're right.
So the real trick is to recruit some Lusers. With the hype OSS has recieved, you'd think it might be possible to get some "regular joes" to participate.
Look perhaps to the graphic designer community. Here is a non-technical community that is generally sitting in front of a computer all day. They understand 2-d design and layout, and also computer-human interaction. But they're not geeks.
I honsestly don't know how to organize such a venture, but maybe somebody else does. just my nickel.
I wonder why I see so many uses of the word "patent" with regards to the project. I agree with ucblockhead here regarding the right to copyright a map (as opposed to that which it is a map *of*).
Does anyone have any references to what exactly they're trying to "patent"? It seems the only patentable IP they have is the *process* used in mapping (re: Survey method) - assuming they developed it (no prior art).
Anyone?
Re:You may think you're joking, but you're not.
on
Master Of Your Domain
·
· Score: 1
I actually agree with your characterizations, but...
Let me guess: you don't believe in government, do you? Or at least not in taxes.
Can you give me an example of taxation that is not "theft"?
I mean, what do taxes pay for... military (worse than police), social programs, etc.
How about roads? Is using your (stolen) wealth to build roads also objectionable to you?
But I really don't get the case here, if the site offers music from less-known bands for free download, don't they have some contract with those bands that this is legal.
MP3.com is not distributing recordings owned by record companies. In fact, the mp3.com artists retain the rights to their recordings. I know this because my band is on the site. When you sign up at mp3.com, IIRC, you are entering a contract (which you can terminate at any time), whereby MP3.com distributes your music, and sells CDs for you. They keep 50% of the CD price, you get the other half. That's a damned good deal, considering that they manufacture the discs for you.
So I can use a stereo that is capable of recording CDs to copy a CD, but I can't use a computer with a CD-R in it to copy CDs, even though they contain the (basicaly) the same hardware. The only real difference is the interface you have with the hardware. Riiiiiight.
Actually, it seems like the difference is that
1) Audio-only equiptment manufacturers have to pay some sort or fee to the record companies to "compensate them" for the "lost revenue" due to distributing copies.
2) Audio-only devices have some system built in that determines whether the source disc is an original or a copy. This is to avoid serial copying. Using the system, it is possible to duplicate the original, but not the duplicate.
We could still be using it to develop [useless] open source software, host useless web pages, and pour nice hot bowls of grits down your pants.
Precisely. A useless boondoggle, as I said. You are free to fund your own hobbies. You are not free (morally, anyhow; the law is debased these days) to put a gun to my head and coerce me into paying for your hobbies. And that is exactly what a business-free, publically-funded Internet would be: Your gun to my head, my money in your pocket. As simple as that.
You are free to buy your own books. You are not free to put a gun to my head and coerce me into paying for your library. And that's exactly what publicly-funded libraries would be...
You are free to fund your own childrens' education. You are not free to put a gun to my head and coerce me into paying for your childrens' education. And that is exactly what publically-funded education would be....
You are free to fund your own security team. You are not free to make me pay for public police. I live in a low-crime area. The police department is of no value to me. How dare you put a gun to my head and make me pay for your Police Department?!
Also try: Healthcare The EPA Anything else that recieves public funds that somebody might think is useless.
RIAA has a strong case, but law is failing here
on
RIAA Sues MP3.com
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· Score: 1
I agree with most of the comments pointing out that mp3.com probably doesn't have the right to transmit *their own* copy of a track to you just because you also own a copy.
Consider this, though:
case 1: "hard drive in the sky" If mp3.com were essentially providing private storage space to all comers - that is to say if beam-it actually transmitted the bits off your own CD (each and every one of them) to the site, and later allowed you to retrieve them. This case would be hard for the RIAA to win. Obviously, this case is not the case.
Case 2: "Case 1 + sneaky compression" As per case one, maintaining that they're storing stuff in a private directory (just for the user). Except there's a bunch of redundency here. So they guys at MP3.com compare the bits they got from your CD (again, every single bit from the CD you're "beaming"), and replace your copy of the file with a pointer to an identical file somewhere on their system. I don't know if we've crossed over into illegal land yet or not.
In case we haven't:
Case 3: "Fake 'transmission compression'" something like this: read bits from user CD until we have only one possible match on the site. Then compare sums of bytes. Here we have the outside chance (however remote) that by some cosmic coincidence they get it wrong, and give you permission to download something you don't own. This would never actually happen, but theoretically... This theoretical possibility would give the RIAA a good case, from both legal and ethical perspectives.
Slashdot Mirror
For an article describing something that is completely different from open source, they sure did use the term quite a lot. It sounds like they're just talking about a free-as-in-beer but very restrictive license for some hardware developers.
Damned straight you'll incur my wrath.
I agree with you, but I've had a few tonight, so I'll play Devil's Advocate:
The obvious reply is - so what? I can follow you home if I want to. If I see you on the street, I can watch where you go and note the address. As far as looking at the electric bills, well, that's a little harder to rationalize. But still, your electric bill is hardly highly personal - or is it?
If the assumption is made that growing pot is Very Bad, and Harmful To Society (think of the children!), then we need to be protected from those who would grow it. It's not like the feds are just bashing down random doors here, they're conducting surviellance in a public place, and "fishing" for suspects. Assuming they've found a quantity of "fresh stuff" somewhere, they almost seem to have cause. Obviously, somebody nearby grew the stuff.
Racial profiling (driving while black) is another side of this issue, however. I think the distinction can be made that just because you're black doesn't mean you're worth investigating for auto theft. But if you frequent (or even visit?) a place that sells equiptment useful for growing marijuana, and we *know* somebody's growing dope, it might be worth checking your electrical bill.
Don't forget that driving while black is also different because we'd assume whether or not you've stolen the car, you're going to get harrased (pulled over and forced to deal with an arrogant cop). If you're in fact innocent of growing pot, you may never know you were being watched.
As for the bolt cutters, I don't know. They're no more legitimate than hydroponics systems (or should I say hydro systems are no less legitimate than bolt cutters), but the procedure to find out if you're using them illegally is much more difficult - following you everywhere, all the time. With the hydro stuff, they just look at the bill and try to find out whether or not your sucking up juice for a huge array of High-Pressure Sodium bulbs or not.
Anybody care to sort this out, I'm gonna go smoke a joint and find me some bolt cutters.
I'll try to pose a question here. An... ethical (cue ominous music) question.
:-)
Is it ethical to investigate people apart from their connection in some crime? I "suspiciousness" enough cause to warrent a full-scale investigation, or does a government agency need more focus to perform such operations and remain in the ethical right?
The immediate reaction is often "no! just because somebody looks sort of suspicious is no reason to invade their privacy (and perhaps trample their rights)!"
OTOH, what is the harm in a little investigation, assuming no overt action is taken? Isn't it better to "know" that so-and-so is either a criminal or not? If the investigator believes that some (suspicious) person *might* pose a threat to Society At Large(tm), AND the investigation is to be carried out discreetly, such that if nothing is found to be wrong, nobody will ever know, should s/he investigate or not?
More importantly - why?
I'm really not sure. That's why I ask.
And yes, I know where rec.philosophy.ethics is.
Well, maybe... but why would we ever want to?
Oh, perhaps to taunt them...
Your analysis is seriously flawed here. The Buck Stops with Mom-n-Pop. For one thing, the chunk is not any bigger because 30-40 people are getting a few cents. In fact, it's smaller. Because after these minimum-wage earners get their pittance, a bunch of that profit goes up the pipe to corp - and their shareholders. Oh yeah, those minimum-wage earners don't own any stock, trust me.
This is why the Wal-Marts of the world do take money out of the local economy. Not only that, but by taking that money to shareholders and "corporate citizens", they further widen the class divide.
As for "unfair practices", Wal-mart's sheer size allows it to undercut anybody they want to. They can lose money on a store in order to eradicate the competition. Maybe that's fair, and maybe it's not, but either way - it sucks.
The real problem is consumers. They don't realize that by pinching a penny here, and saving five minutes there, they're shooting themselves in the foot. Suddenly, everyone without a college education is making min-wage, at a shitty job, where the boss doesn't care about who they are.
Then crime goes up, and people start getting high on smack, and the police force starts cracking down, and Mr. Wal doesn't have to care, cause he's somewhere on his Yacht.
Maybe a little extreme there, but there's truth in my exaggeration.
First of all, I think it's great that your high school offers a Software Development course. I graduated from HS in 1995, and went on to study CS. All I could squeeze out of my school was a little pascal tutoring from the Computer Lab Nazi (tm).
As for raising awareness of the GPL, you can do it with words and with actions. Simply mentioning it in class is great. It's unfortunate that your teacher dismissed it as crack-pottery. A better educator would have been interested, and asked follow up questions, IMHO.
If you've got a big project to do for the class, and I'd hope you would, you could do one of several things. You could make something useful, and GPL it. This is nice if you don't have real options for choosing your project. Another option would be to find an OS project that interests you, and spec a specific module. Present the specification to your teacher as a project proposal. Include some good ol' fashioned OS propeganda in there for good measure.
If your teacher looked at you like you're crazy, it begs the question: does she know anything about Linux? Linux gets so much press these days I have a hard time believeing that somebody who's teaching a SD class hasn't even *heard* of it. Working from this, I'd assume she's heard some Linux hype, but doesn't know what makes it free software, exactly.
Aside from integrating your classwork and open-source development, you could go the talking route. Give her some URLs, and explain to her why you believe in Free Software. Discuss the educational oppurtunities - you can see the source! You want to know how to organize a large project? Look at the Mozilla CVS tree, or GIMP, or any other large project.
Maybe buy/burn her a Linux/*BSD disc or something.
Has she heard of Perl? Python?
First of all, this is not a problem that is only relevant to open source development. I pay the bills by doing commercial projects on a freelance basis. I now live in New York City, but used to live in the country. My current project involves collaboration with a group in holland, and business types who work down in the financial district.
Email and Listservs are very useful because you get a nice record of everything to reference later. Another nice thing about email is that it encourages (at least in theory) people to think carefully about what they want to say, and how to say it. Unfortunately, the latency is high, and for highly interactive exchanges, this can slow things seriously. IRC would be a decent way to work, or perhaps even just ICQ/AOLIM or the like. Haven't tried it yet.
We use the phone a lot. It's nice to be getting payed, because you can justify this. Of course, conference calls for OSS development is sort of out of the question.
This brings an interesting question - where are strong realtime collaboration tools? Preferably free ones. While not everyone has a fast connection yet, soon voice-over-ip should be plausable.
Also, I know of commercial collaborative-whiteboard type applications. I can imagine how this could be very useful. We recently flew the dutchies here just so we could draw shit on paper/walls.
So, who wants to start a conference-call/shared whiteboard OS project with me?
Does it bother anyone else that Reno has been touring with this "top AOL lawyer"? I dunno, I just get this mental image of a demonic figure standing in the shadows just to the rear-left, his eyes glowing a pale red...
I understand why AOL is interested in the prospect of new legislation, but to be making public appearances? Does the Administration think that this corporate poster-boy lends them some credibility or something? I'd feel better about seeing John Perry Barlow.
Thanks for making this point. It's still damned cool that they call pull out all this visual information, especially in such diverse lighting conditions. A university pal of mine tried to do some vision stuff a while back - I helped a little - it was very difficult to identify objects in a scene. Even when it's, eg, a red coke can in a white/light scene. To have such a cheap chip be capable of identifying and tracking 8 objects in a scene (presumeably the sensor is outputting a pixelmap) is incredible.
Most likely some people will. But they'll probably suck. Robotics SOTA historically advances *very* slowly (it's HARD!).
If this chip is really as capable as it's made out to be, it will mean a great deal to people who are primarily interested in autonomous mobile robots, as opposed to computer vision.
I could imagine hooking something like this up to a pioneer and solving a bunch of problems.
Sort of makes me wish I were still a student, with the time and resources to play with robots...
I'd have thought they'd offer their content for syndication via RSS. Anyone have any idea why they seem to have gone with a proprietary XML format for syndication?
They *do* offer a Perl backend-syndication program to parse the XML, but I've already got some nice RSS tools. Integrating their stuff shouldn't be too hard, but putting another line in my RSS-reader's config file would be easier.
$foo=~s/Linux/Windows/
Success is not a measure of innovation by any means. There are certainly some innovative things about linux, and the community behind it. But to call Linux on the whole "innovative" is going a bit far. "Cool", "useful", "Good", and "Robust" are better adjectives.
This "presumption of validity" seems to be one of the real issues here. I know the way the law is worded, but perhaps this needs to change.
I think the applicant ought to be required to meet some standard of due diligence and good faith. Some justification needs to be made as to why this invention is *deserving* of a patent.
On the other hand, with 8-12 hours to spend, I think a competent patent examiner with relevant expertise ought to have at least thought twice about 1-click shopping, or affiliate programs.
Um... read the MOTD when you log in...
<ROUGH APPROXIMATION>
Telnet: in only
FTP: in only
x|x is a protocol: none
...
Some message about how its for developers, not a ISP shell account.
</ROUGH APPROXIMATION>
I don't know whether or not your programs can get out or not...
I agree wholeheartedly. Unworkable, well maybe, but it's worth I shot. The big problem is getting OSS-active folks to think like Lusers. I run into the problem constantly at work. The UI people and design folks tell show me something which i think is completely unintuitive. I suggest something, and they tell me my idea is going to confuse everyone. Usually, they're right.
So the real trick is to recruit some Lusers. With the hype OSS has recieved, you'd think it might be possible to get some "regular joes" to participate.
Look perhaps to the graphic designer community. Here is a non-technical community that is generally sitting in front of a computer all day. They understand 2-d design and layout, and also computer-human interaction. But they're not geeks.
I honsestly don't know how to organize such a venture, but maybe somebody else does. just my nickel.
The knees will jerk...
I wonder why I see so many uses of the word "patent" with regards to the project. I agree with ucblockhead here regarding the right to copyright a map (as opposed to that which it is a map *of*).
Does anyone have any references to what exactly they're trying to "patent"? It seems the only patentable IP they have is the *process* used in mapping (re: Survey method) - assuming they developed it (no prior art).
Anyone?
I actually agree with your characterizations, but...
Let me guess: you don't believe in government, do you? Or at least not in taxes.
Can you give me an example of taxation that is not "theft"?
I mean, what do taxes pay for... military (worse than police), social programs, etc.
How about roads? Is using your (stolen) wealth to build roads also objectionable to you?
MP3.com is not distributing recordings owned by record companies. In fact, the mp3.com artists retain the rights to their recordings. I know this because my band is on the site. When you sign up at mp3.com, IIRC, you are entering a contract (which you can terminate at any time), whereby MP3.com distributes your music, and sells CDs for you. They keep 50% of the CD price, you get the other half. That's a damned good deal, considering that they manufacture the discs for you.
Actually, it seems like the difference is that
1) Audio-only equiptment manufacturers have to pay some sort or fee to the record companies to "compensate them" for the "lost revenue" due to distributing copies.
2) Audio-only devices have some system built in that determines whether the source disc is an original or a copy. This is to avoid serial copying. Using the system, it is possible to duplicate the original, but not the duplicate.
Precisely. A useless boondoggle, as I said. You are free to fund your own hobbies. You are not free (morally, anyhow; the law is debased these days) to put a gun to my head and coerce me into paying for your hobbies. And that is exactly what a business-free, publically-funded Internet would be: Your gun to my head, my money in your pocket. As simple as that.
You are free to buy your own books. You are not free to put a gun to my head and coerce me into paying for your library. And that's exactly what publicly-funded libraries would be...
You are free to fund your own childrens' education. You are not free to put a gun to my head and coerce me into paying for your childrens' education. And that is exactly what publically-funded education would be....
You are free to fund your own security team. You are not free to make me pay for public police. I live in a low-crime area. The police department is of no value to me. How dare you put a gun to my head and make me pay for your Police Department?!
Also try:
Healthcare
The EPA
Anything else that recieves public funds that somebody might think is useless.
what?
I guess I could use some new coasters. I don't really see how this is going to be effective for anyone invovled.
Not the most brilliant move I've seen this week.
This question is beyond my abilities, but I wonder how difficult it would be to do an open-source version of VGS.
Er... this is dumb
I agree with most of the comments pointing out that mp3.com probably doesn't have the right to transmit *their own* copy of a track to you just because you also own a copy.
Consider this, though:
case 1: "hard drive in the sky"
If mp3.com were essentially providing private storage space to all comers - that is to say if beam-it actually transmitted the bits off your own CD (each and every one of them) to the site, and later allowed you to retrieve them. This case would be hard for the RIAA to win. Obviously, this case is not the case.
Case 2: "Case 1 + sneaky compression"
As per case one, maintaining that they're storing stuff in a private directory (just for the user). Except there's a bunch of redundency here. So they guys at MP3.com compare the bits they got from your CD (again, every single bit from the CD you're "beaming"), and replace your copy of the file with a pointer to an identical file somewhere on their system. I don't know if we've crossed over into illegal land yet or not.
In case we haven't:
Case 3: "Fake 'transmission compression'"
something like this: read bits from user CD until we have only one possible match on the site. Then compare sums of bytes. Here we have the outside chance (however remote) that by some cosmic coincidence they get it wrong, and give you permission to download something you don't own. This would never actually happen, but theoretically... This theoretical possibility would give the RIAA a good case, from both legal and ethical perspectives.
Interesting cases to think about, anyway.
check out my own music in case you care.