A Pentium barely has the oomf to do fullscreen MPEG playback, let alone MPEG-2 like DVD or SVCD use.
My roommate over the summer used a Pentium 133 as his DVD player and it worked fine. The only time it ever interferred with the movie was when windows crashed. Ever hear of a DVD decoder card? They decode MPEG-2 data in hardware and therefore it doesn't need a fancy CPU. A good one should decode the audio, too.
While it would be an additional effort for [MPAA, RIAA, LMNOP] to file against multiple defendents in multiple states, it would be worth it to them because it proves that they are serious and even suggests that they are indefatigable.
And if the different courts fall on different sides of the issue, then what? If one of the losing defendants appeals federally, those other decisions will definitely be a factor. Played the right way, it could be one factor that gets the DMCA repealed.
Mildly offtopic, can a state court overturn a federal law?
what if your an ISP and your customers demand less spam?
That's like asking the postal service to deliver less junk mail. You should point that fact out to your customers. As an ISP isn't your responsibility to decide which mail your customers get and which they don't. If they don't want to get spam, then they need to take the time to set up their own blocking mechanisms.
I don't know if you've looked closely at any of your spam in the last couple of years,...
Yes, I have. And you know what? I control it using a method that is infinitely more accurate and infinitely less controversial than RBL. What is this godsend?
Censorship is something that can only be conducted by the government. Private organizations such as ISP's or MAPS can choose to carry or not carry whatever they like. The difference is of course that everyone 'owns' and funds the government which therefore has no right to moral or policical content it makes available. However private individuals have full discression over their own property and how they choose to utilize it.
This is the sort of mentality that easily degenerates into... well, I'll be completely frank... fascism.
AboveNet is a backbone provider that RBL. Why is that a problem? Because 1) a lot of people's traffic crosses AboveNet without them knowing and without them being able to do anything about it and 2) AboveNet won't carry certain content. According to you that's Ok, because, hey, it's their equipment.
Imagine, for a moment that it's not spam that's at issue. Suppose that some backbone provider subscribes to a service that blocks sites that provide information about the assination of JFK. According to you that's Ok, because, hey, it's their equipment.
Imagine for a moment that we're not even talking about the Internet. Instead we're talking about the phone network. Suppose some phone company decides to block calls to Russia, because in the opinion of the executive board of that phone company "they're all a bunch of commies". According to you that's Ok, because, hey, it's their equipment.
Do you get it now? Some services need to be universal, because if they have the authority to block based on content, then whatever means they use to do it is no longer voluntary by all parties involved. It's someone else deciding what other people can't have.
By the same token you should not be able to force a private entity such as an ISP to carry traffic they choose not to carry, i.e. traffic identified by the MAPS RBL. If you don't like MAPS then don't use their service or use the services of ISP's who do.
Services like RBL are supposed to end-user services. It's supposed to be a list that individuals like you and I use to block incoming mail. When backbone providers and ISPs use it, it becomes involuntary. You think it's easy to switch ISPs? You think everyone chose their ISP? How about students on the campus network? How about small towns with a local monopoly? How about big towns where every ISP has chosen to use RBL? It's none of the ISPs business what their customers are doing nor should it be. When an ISP subscribes to RBL, that's censorship, and no, it's not just the government that can censor.
Sendmail is a piece of software that can be used to spam. The folks at MarketingMasters offer software that is specifically designed for spamming, plus it comes with a bunch of addresses, probably including yours and mine. You see the difference?
Peacefire.org is a site about empowering people. They encourage people to exercise their rights under the law and dig up dirt on the people who would try to abuse their positions in the censorware market. Peacefire.org is currently blocked by RBL because MarketingMasters is selling spamware from a site hosted by the same service.
Put yourself in Peacefire's position. Suddenly your site is inaccessible from large portions of the Internet. You have no idea why and the people who are trying to connect to your site have no idea why. Some time later when the situation develops enough that you can start to figure it out, you realize that it's not related to your site at all. What would you do about it? Yes, I understand that they voluntarily chose their web hosting service over many many others, but in all honesty, are you going to tell Peacefire.org to switch providers now because they're using the same service as MarketingMasters?
This is precisely how jamie has drawn this analogy. RBL is a service that blocks access to sites, that makes it censorware. The fact that MAPS has arbitrarily decided to block an entire web hosting service because of one of their customers is abuse.
RBL needs to be replaced. The original intention was to keep it as a list of sites that send spam. That why you could (theoretically) stop getting spam by not accepting mail from those sites. That system has grown the point that it can now be used to affect changes in IP routing. And now that a significant population of net users are either directly or indirectly beholden to RBL, MAPS has taken the power they have and abused it.
Let me repeat... RBL was a list of sites that send spam that you could use to block incoming spam. RBL has become a list of sites that have disappeared from the net, and a lot of innocent bystanders have just disappeared. You see the difference?
Whats's interesting about this case is that the plaintiff is claiming that the internet is an inherently dangerou[s]
Consider the parallels you can draw with meatspace. I think most people agree that the world is dangerous, too, and that it is the responsibility of parents to prepare kids to live in it. I think the same goes for bitspace. It is a dangerous place. For illustration, think about the online analogues of these meatspace offenses:
robbery
b and e
neglect
vandalism
Suppose your hypothetical child wandered into the red light district of some meatspace city. I think most people would agree that it was your responsibility to keep the kid away from that, and so should it be in bitspace as well.
If succesful, this suit could also provide ammnition to those who want to mandate censorware.
Following analogues again, is censorship mandatory for anything in meatspace? In some places, for some things, but in most Western democratic countries, a very narrow part of culture. In bitspace it should be the same. For the time being it is not, but I think that is largely due to widespread fear of the Internet among certain conservative groups. Once the Internet is as commonplace and familiar as the telephone and the automobile, these discrepancies will fade away.
Actually, no, it doesn't, because when no one is around, my speakers are turned off. Ordinarily, however, my loghost starts talking whenever a packet gets dropped. It tells me the source and destination of the packet and the port it was going to.
On startup, my loghost (the one with the soundcard and speakers) starts up speechd and firewall-reader.pl. speechd implements/dev/speech, which works like this:
$ echo "look who's talking now" >/dev/speech
The computer now says "look who's talking now"
speechd grabs the text from/dev/speech and passes it through to festival, a speech synthesizer.
firewall-reader.pl is the glue code (written in the ultimate glue language). It opens/var/log/messages read only and watches line by line for firewall packet logs. When it sees one, it formats it to be spoken, and appends it to/dev/speech (by the way,/dev/speech is a fifo).
It works very well. The only ongoing resource consumption is memory, because festival can get quite weighty. It's usually taking up about 10% on my loghost, which has 128MB RAM.
Oh, and by the way, firewall-reader.pl does need improving. Unfortunately my perl skills suck.
I clearly cited the section that supports my argument, where is section of the law that supports yours?
From Title 17 section 106 "Exclusive rights in copyrighted works":
"...the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or
phonorecords;
..."
Need I say more? The preceding bit that I didn't cite says subject to section 107, but that's the part you cited and is basically the legal definition of the criteria of fair use. The only way it will ever be resolved whether BugTraq's posting is fair use or infringement is if it's tested in court, and like I said, Elias Levy won't be taking on Microsoft anytime soon. So for reasons of practicallity, he's going to treat the posting of Microsoft advisories on Bugtraq as an infringement, and so will Microsoft.
The Law doesn't give a tinkers damn what Microsoft thinks...(or at least it shouldn't).
You're absolutely right, but the law doesn't care what you or I think either. What matters is what a judge, or perhaps a panel of judges thinks. And again, we'll never find that out.
Publishing is irrelevant, how can you reproduce something without "publishing" it? Pick any form you like. Newspaper, Oil painting or scratching in the dirt with a stick, if you put it where other people can see it you are "publishing" it.
Ok, so I picked the wrong word, but look at it this way: If Elias lets the advisories onto Bugtraq he faces the wrath of Microsoft, and for fear of losing a court case the likes of which have fallen in favor of the big corporate interests of late, he won't do it. And if he did Microsoft would threaten and threaten and could very well take him to court. Considering the track record of U.S. courts in intellectual property cases lately, Microsoft stands a much better chance than Elias. You and I may consider BugTraq news reporting, but judges just haven't seen it that way. They are still way behind the paradigm.
I love that quote because to me it personifies Microsoft perfectly.
Me, too. I find the correlation fascinating, even if frightening.
I see no hair to split, I have concrete statutes, what do you have? In reference to "bigger guns", that is irrelevant. The question is "Who is right?". The fact that "he who has the most money/lawyers wins" is simply pointing out the sad state that humanity has gotten itself into. I personally am sick of it.
The question of who is right is not for you or I to answer, but for a court. Yes, I am merely making a prediction, but do you honestly think a judge would see in favor of Elias Levy, a guy who runs a mailing list frequented by *gasp* "hackers"?
And by the way, that sad state you refer to is the state we are in, not some leftist scare scenario. "Bigger guns" are relevant, because unfortunately that's the state of affairs the U.S. "justice system" has fallen into. Look what they got for O.J. Look what they got for the MPAA. These are very recent concrete examples of the thinking of the courts. One member of the EFF's legal team said "We're going to need some bigger guns" pretty near the beginning of the DeCSS case, IIRC that was right before Garbus joined up with them. The big corporations are in control. I don't like it either, and to be completely frank, neither should most people. The fact that most people are cut from the same mold as the proverbial Joe Sixpack is what will keep it that way until evolution takes its course and the informed, motivated few outnumber the beer chugging, football watching masses.
That's all well and good, but the sections of Title 17 you've just cited cover fair use. We're not talking about fair use here. Fair use includes things like excerptation, citation, summarization, paraphrasing, and not complete verbatim copies for the purposes of publishing, which I'm sure is what Microsoft thinks BugTraq is doing with their advisories. Complete verbatim copies do fall under the doctrine of fair use under a number of circumstances, but not publishing, and that is what we're talking about here. You can argue all you want about whether BugTraq reporting news or publishing other people's work, but Elias Levy sure isn't going to take Microsoft to court to split hairs. And if he did, who do you think would have the bigger guns? No, IANAL, and I am especially not ones of Microsoft's, and I certainly hope YANAL either.
So justify to me the wisdom of copyrighting a bug advisory.
Don't ask me, I didn't copyright it. And it's not the copyright that's at issue here. Just because it's copyrighted doesn't mean it's automatically restricted. It's the way Microsoft has exercised the rights granted by copyright law that's at issue. I'm sure RedHat copyrights their advisories, too. The difference is that they want people to copy them. Have you ever actually read the Terms of Use applied to a RedHat advisory? They basically say copy to your heart's content and send it where ever you please, but do not modify the adivisory.
it is NOT "the same damn thing". No one is making a profit off of informing the public of a hole in an operating system
It is too the same thing. They produce some information and copyright it. You produce some information and copyright it. Motive is not an issue here and neither is profit. It's their information and they have a right to control its distribution. It's too bad they chose to handle it the way the did, but that's their prerogative. You can bitch and moan all you want, you have that right, but you can't copy and distribute Microsoft's advisories any way other than they allow, and that's their right.
That's not how the law works. They produced it, they have authority over it's copying and distribution. If they say we need permission, then yes, we need permission. It's the same authority the law grants you over your work. Ever written a line of GPL'd code? What would you think if that line ended up in some Windows code somewhere in Redmond? It's the same damn thing.
If you don't like the authority the law grants, then you have basicly two options. 1) Lobby your national legislature to drastically change copyright law. 2) Find a country that isn't a Berne Convention signatory and move there.
So let me turn your question back on you:
How can you be so friggin (sic) dense?
Ok, so basicly BugTraq can't have verbatim copies posted because permission was never granted by Microsoft.
Did anyone think to ask? How hard could it possibly be to tap Microsoft on the shoulder and say "Hey, a lot of people read this mailing list looking for security information. Specifically they want to know right away when vulnerabilities are discovered. It would be a shame if you disappointed those readers who run your software. May we have permission to post your advisories?"
I think this is a mind shackle that a lot of people can't get past. I think most people see that phrase about authorization and permission and they stop there. No you can't do much without permission, but yes, you can ask for permission.
This kind of behavior needs to be taken for what it is. Two hundred years ago, if someone else made an end run around your business and you couldn't earn back the capital you sunk into it, oh well, it was bad investment. Hope you got in touch with Lloyd's before getting into it.
If the market wants Internet coverage of the Olympic games, then free market logic dictates that the market should get Internet coverage of the Olympic games. It used to be said often enough that anyone who worked in open source was anti-capitalist. This incident, the DeCSS trial, the Napster trial, the DMCA, and other artifacts of the modern information economy all beg the question, is anyone a capitalist?
If anyone in this world is anti-capitalist it is (besides the usual suspects) the "free marketers" who want to control the market. They've got it in their heads that profit is an entitlement and if they aren't making one, then the system has failed. The system is fine. It's the executives that have failed. If they can't make a profit, it's either because they fucked up, or the market they've entered is simply not proifitable.
A lot of people I know (the ones who don't know computers anyway) don't even read the error messages that pop up. I can't count the times that someone as said "It's not working, there was an error." And every time, when I ask what it said, they responded very defensively that they didn't read it.
Why would this be any different? If one of these people tries to run some unsigned application and gets an error message, do you really think that this time it might get read? No. Error messages are considered by many an annoyance to be disposed of as quickly as possible. I think the mentality here is that the longer the message stays on the screen, the worse it gets (or something like that).
You could just print out a copy of the GPL and add the title "[insert distro here] End-User License Agreement".
In the best of all worlds each distribution would have an 'authors list' that lists the names and email addresses of all the people who ever wrote anything that ended up in the distribution, then you could give that list to your boss and say "These are the people that wrote this software. Send them each a donation if you choose." Only then may your boss understand.
Most people fail to see past the tip of their nose (OK, maybe as far as their pockets) when it comes to rights. When you try to explain to a good upstanding citizen how they can't play DVD's without either using an MPAA-approved DVD player or by violating the DMCA, the next logical question for that person to ask is "How can I tell if my DVD player is MPAA-approved?" Of course, you and I both know that probably all hardware DVD players are MPAA-approved, but when you say that, your good upstanding friend will be prompted to say "So what's the problem?" Their is absolutely no attention paid to violations of principle.
Perhaps this new Office "lease program" will be the first agreement that comes back and bites people in the ass hard enough to make them notice. Or maybe it'll happen when MS comes knocking on everyone's doors looking for licenses.
It's 11:00, do you know where license agreement is?
The network would probably route around it anyway. There are two types of routing going on in GNet. One is query routing... each query is sent down every link in the net. And there is response routing... each query response is sent over the same path the original query took.
Let's look at query routing. With each node connecting to ~4 or more others, it's a pretty well connected graph. If a query doesn't get through one way, it will probably get through another way. End users wouldn't really see much of a difference because of this connectedness.
For instance, if there's a 1 in 10 chance that a packet is dropped at a given node instead of relayed, and each node is connected to 4 others, that's a very small chance that it will never make it through.
Responses, on the other hand will have to be sent using the current protocol, or at least have a negligible chance of being dropped (i.e. drop all queries before dropping a response). Perhaps one day there will be a reroute protocol that can get a response back over a different path. Something to think about...
At any rate, I don't you'd see any more repeat queries if they occassionally get dropped than you do otherwise.
But the choices offered are fundamentally different. Microsoft is offering customers a new way to pay for their software. They are still not allowed to do anything that they couldn't do before with a different method of payment. With open source software, the choice is not how to pay for it, but what to do with it (although there are arguably more ways to pay for open source software than for Office).
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A Pentium barely has the oomf to do fullscreen MPEG playback, let alone MPEG-2 like DVD or SVCD use.
My roommate over the summer used a Pentium 133 as his DVD player and it worked fine. The only time it ever interferred with the movie was when windows crashed. Ever hear of a DVD decoder card? They decode MPEG-2 data in hardware and therefore it doesn't need a fancy CPU. A good one should decode the audio, too.
While it would be an additional effort for [MPAA, RIAA, LMNOP] to file against multiple defendents in multiple states, it would be worth it to them because it proves that they are serious and even suggests that they are indefatigable.
And if the different courts fall on different sides of the issue, then what? If one of the losing defendants appeals federally, those other decisions will definitely be a factor. Played the right way, it could be one factor that gets the DMCA repealed.
Mildly offtopic, can a state court overturn a federal law?
what if your an ISP and your customers demand less spam?
That's like asking the postal service to deliver less junk mail. You should point that fact out to your customers. As an ISP isn't your responsibility to decide which mail your customers get and which they don't. If they don't want to get spam, then they need to take the time to set up their own blocking mechanisms.
I don't know if you've looked closely at any of your spam in the last couple of years,...
Yes, I have. And you know what? I control it using a method that is infinitely more accurate and infinitely less controversial than RBL. What is this godsend?
Delete.
Censorship is something that can only be conducted by the government. Private organizations such as ISP's or MAPS can choose to carry or not carry whatever they like. The difference is of course that everyone 'owns' and funds the government which therefore has no right to moral or policical content it makes available. However private individuals have full discression over their own property and how they choose to utilize it.
This is the sort of mentality that easily degenerates into... well, I'll be completely frank... fascism.
AboveNet is a backbone provider that RBL. Why is that a problem? Because 1) a lot of people's traffic crosses AboveNet without them knowing and without them being able to do anything about it and 2) AboveNet won't carry certain content. According to you that's Ok, because, hey, it's their equipment.
Imagine, for a moment that it's not spam that's at issue. Suppose that some backbone provider subscribes to a service that blocks sites that provide information about the assination of JFK. According to you that's Ok, because, hey, it's their equipment.
Imagine for a moment that we're not even talking about the Internet. Instead we're talking about the phone network. Suppose some phone company decides to block calls to Russia, because in the opinion of the executive board of that phone company "they're all a bunch of commies". According to you that's Ok, because, hey, it's their equipment.
Do you get it now? Some services need to be universal, because if they have the authority to block based on content, then whatever means they use to do it is no longer voluntary by all parties involved. It's someone else deciding what other people can't have.
By the same token you should not be able to force a private entity such as an ISP to carry traffic they choose not to carry, i.e. traffic identified by the MAPS RBL. If you don't like MAPS then don't use their service or use the services of ISP's who do.
Services like RBL are supposed to end-user services. It's supposed to be a list that individuals like you and I use to block incoming mail. When backbone providers and ISPs use it, it becomes involuntary. You think it's easy to switch ISPs? You think everyone chose their ISP? How about students on the campus network? How about small towns with a local monopoly? How about big towns where every ISP has chosen to use RBL? It's none of the ISPs business what their customers are doing nor should it be. When an ISP subscribes to RBL, that's censorship, and no, it's not just the government that can censor.
Sendmail is a piece of software that can be used to spam. The folks at MarketingMasters offer software that is specifically designed for spamming, plus it comes with a bunch of addresses, probably including yours and mine. You see the difference?
Peacefire.org is a site about empowering people. They encourage people to exercise their rights under the law and dig up dirt on the people who would try to abuse their positions in the censorware market. Peacefire.org is currently blocked by RBL because MarketingMasters is selling spamware from a site hosted by the same service.
Put yourself in Peacefire's position. Suddenly your site is inaccessible from large portions of the Internet. You have no idea why and the people who are trying to connect to your site have no idea why. Some time later when the situation develops enough that you can start to figure it out, you realize that it's not related to your site at all. What would you do about it? Yes, I understand that they voluntarily chose their web hosting service over many many others, but in all honesty, are you going to tell Peacefire.org to switch providers now because they're using the same service as MarketingMasters?
This is precisely how jamie has drawn this analogy. RBL is a service that blocks access to sites, that makes it censorware. The fact that MAPS has arbitrarily decided to block an entire web hosting service because of one of their customers is abuse.
RBL needs to be replaced. The original intention was to keep it as a list of sites that send spam. That why you could (theoretically) stop getting spam by not accepting mail from those sites. That system has grown the point that it can now be used to affect changes in IP routing. And now that a significant population of net users are either directly or indirectly beholden to RBL, MAPS has taken the power they have and abused it.
Let me repeat... RBL was a list of sites that send spam that you could use to block incoming spam. RBL has become a list of sites that have disappeared from the net, and a lot of innocent bystanders have just disappeared. You see the difference?
Whats's interesting about this case is that the plaintiff is claiming that the internet is an inherently dangerou[s]
Consider the parallels you can draw with meatspace. I think most people agree that the world is dangerous, too, and that it is the responsibility of parents to prepare kids to live in it. I think the same goes for bitspace. It is a dangerous place. For illustration, think about the online analogues of these meatspace offenses:
robbery
b and e
neglect
vandalism
Suppose your hypothetical child wandered into the red light district of some meatspace city. I think most people would agree that it was your responsibility to keep the kid away from that, and so should it be in bitspace as well.
If succesful, this suit could also provide ammnition to those who want to mandate censorware.
Following analogues again, is censorship mandatory for anything in meatspace? In some places, for some things, but in most Western democratic countries, a very narrow part of culture. In bitspace it should be the same. For the time being it is not, but I think that is largely due to widespread fear of the Internet among certain conservative groups. Once the Internet is as commonplace and familiar as the telephone and the automobile, these discrepancies will fade away.
Actually, no, it doesn't, because when no one is around, my speakers are turned off. Ordinarily, however, my loghost starts talking whenever a packet gets dropped. It tells me the source and destination of the packet and the port it was going to.
Except I have it read my firewall logs in real time. My roommate is also posting a comment about it right now. Anyway, here's the info:
/dev/speech, which works like this:
/dev/speech
/dev/speech and passes it through to festival, a speech synthesizer.
/var/log/messages read only and watches line by line for firewall packet logs. When it sees one, it formats it to be spoken, and appends it to /dev/speech (by the way, /dev/speech is a fifo).
Required software:
festival (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/)
speechd (http://www.speechio.org)
firewall-reader.pl (http://movealong.dhs.org/firewall-reader.pl
On startup, my loghost (the one with the soundcard and speakers) starts up speechd and firewall-reader.pl. speechd implements
$ echo "look who's talking now" >
The computer now says "look who's talking now"
speechd grabs the text from
firewall-reader.pl is the glue code (written in the ultimate glue language). It opens
It works very well. The only ongoing resource consumption is memory, because festival can get quite weighty. It's usually taking up about 10% on my loghost, which has 128MB RAM.
Oh, and by the way, firewall-reader.pl does need improving. Unfortunately my perl skills suck.
I clearly cited the section that supports my argument, where is section of the law that supports yours?
From Title 17 section 106 "Exclusive rights in copyrighted works":
"...the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or
phonorecords;
..."
Need I say more? The preceding bit that I didn't cite says subject to section 107, but that's the part you cited and is basically the legal definition of the criteria of fair use. The only way it will ever be resolved whether BugTraq's posting is fair use or infringement is if it's tested in court, and like I said, Elias Levy won't be taking on Microsoft anytime soon. So for reasons of practicallity, he's going to treat the posting of Microsoft advisories on Bugtraq as an infringement, and so will Microsoft.
The Law doesn't give a tinkers damn what Microsoft thinks...(or at least it shouldn't).
You're absolutely right, but the law doesn't care what you or I think either. What matters is what a judge, or perhaps a panel of judges thinks. And again, we'll never find that out.
Publishing is irrelevant, how can you reproduce something without "publishing" it? Pick any form you like. Newspaper, Oil painting or scratching in the dirt with a stick, if you put it where other people can see it you are "publishing" it.
Ok, so I picked the wrong word, but look at it this way: If Elias lets the advisories onto Bugtraq he faces the wrath of Microsoft, and for fear of losing a court case the likes of which have fallen in favor of the big corporate interests of late, he won't do it. And if he did Microsoft would threaten and threaten and could very well take him to court. Considering the track record of U.S. courts in intellectual property cases lately, Microsoft stands a much better chance than Elias. You and I may consider BugTraq news reporting, but judges just haven't seen it that way. They are still way behind the paradigm.
I love that quote because to me it personifies Microsoft perfectly.
Me, too. I find the correlation fascinating, even if frightening.
I see no hair to split, I have concrete statutes, what do you have? In reference to "bigger guns", that is irrelevant. The question is "Who is right?". The fact that "he who has the most money/lawyers wins" is simply pointing out the sad state that humanity has gotten itself into. I personally am sick of it.
The question of who is right is not for you or I to answer, but for a court. Yes, I am merely making a prediction, but do you honestly think a judge would see in favor of Elias Levy, a guy who runs a mailing list frequented by *gasp* "hackers"?
And by the way, that sad state you refer to is the state we are in, not some leftist scare scenario. "Bigger guns" are relevant, because unfortunately that's the state of affairs the U.S. "justice system" has fallen into. Look what they got for O.J. Look what they got for the MPAA. These are very recent concrete examples of the thinking of the courts. One member of the EFF's legal team said "We're going to need some bigger guns" pretty near the beginning of the DeCSS case, IIRC that was right before Garbus joined up with them. The big corporations are in control. I don't like it either, and to be completely frank, neither should most people. The fact that most people are cut from the same mold as the proverbial Joe Sixpack is what will keep it that way until evolution takes its course and the informed, motivated few outnumber the beer chugging, football watching masses.
That's all well and good, but the sections of Title 17 you've just cited cover fair use. We're not talking about fair use here. Fair use includes things like excerptation, citation, summarization, paraphrasing, and not complete verbatim copies for the purposes of publishing, which I'm sure is what Microsoft thinks BugTraq is doing with their advisories. Complete verbatim copies do fall under the doctrine of fair use under a number of circumstances, but not publishing, and that is what we're talking about here. You can argue all you want about whether BugTraq reporting news or publishing other people's work, but Elias Levy sure isn't going to take Microsoft to court to split hairs. And if he did, who do you think would have the bigger guns? No, IANAL, and I am especially not ones of Microsoft's, and I certainly hope YANAL either.
Copyrighting the advisories is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. What's sad is that they won't let anyone distribute them.
So justify to me the wisdom of copyrighting a bug advisory.
Don't ask me, I didn't copyright it. And it's not the copyright that's at issue here. Just because it's copyrighted doesn't mean it's automatically restricted. It's the way Microsoft has exercised the rights granted by copyright law that's at issue. I'm sure RedHat copyrights their advisories, too. The difference is that they want people to copy them. Have you ever actually read the Terms of Use applied to a RedHat advisory? They basically say copy to your heart's content and send it where ever you please, but do not modify the adivisory.
it is NOT "the same damn thing". No one is making a profit off of informing the public of a hole in an operating system
It is too the same thing. They produce some information and copyright it. You produce some information and copyright it. Motive is not an issue here and neither is profit. It's their information and they have a right to control its distribution. It's too bad they chose to handle it the way the did, but that's their prerogative. You can bitch and moan all you want, you have that right, but you can't copy and distribute Microsoft's advisories any way other than they allow, and that's their right.
That's not how the law works. They produced it, they have authority over it's copying and distribution. If they say we need permission, then yes, we need permission. It's the same authority the law grants you over your work. Ever written a line of GPL'd code? What would you think if that line ended up in some Windows code somewhere in Redmond? It's the same damn thing.
If you don't like the authority the law grants, then you have basicly two options. 1) Lobby your national legislature to drastically change copyright law. 2) Find a country that isn't a Berne Convention signatory and move there.
So let me turn your question back on you:
How can you be so friggin (sic) dense?
Ok, so basicly BugTraq can't have verbatim copies posted because permission was never granted by Microsoft.
Did anyone think to ask? How hard could it possibly be to tap Microsoft on the shoulder and say "Hey, a lot of people read this mailing list looking for security information. Specifically they want to know right away when vulnerabilities are discovered. It would be a shame if you disappointed those readers who run your software. May we have permission to post your advisories?"
I think this is a mind shackle that a lot of people can't get past. I think most people see that phrase about authorization and permission and they stop there. No you can't do much without permission, but yes, you can ask for permission.
After yesterday's article about RPM and apt sort of playing nice, I have a question. What effect will apt in RedHat Linux have an RedHat, Inc?
This kind of behavior needs to be taken for what it is. Two hundred years ago, if someone else made an end run around your business and you couldn't earn back the capital you sunk into it, oh well, it was bad investment. Hope you got in touch with Lloyd's before getting into it.
If the market wants Internet coverage of the Olympic games, then free market logic dictates that the market should get Internet coverage of the Olympic games. It used to be said often enough that anyone who worked in open source was anti-capitalist. This incident, the DeCSS trial, the Napster trial, the DMCA, and other artifacts of the modern information economy all beg the question, is anyone a capitalist?
If anyone in this world is anti-capitalist it is (besides the usual suspects) the "free marketers" who want to control the market. They've got it in their heads that profit is an entitlement and if they aren't making one, then the system has failed. The system is fine. It's the executives that have failed. If they can't make a profit, it's either because they fucked up, or the market they've entered is simply not proifitable.
Aren't most babies [unstable]? Most of the ones I've been around almost constantly dump core.
The ability to dump core without segfaulting...
I wonder if this technology will ever get into Linux.
A lot of people I know (the ones who don't know computers anyway) don't even read the error messages that pop up. I can't count the times that someone as said "It's not working, there was an error." And every time, when I ask what it said, they responded very defensively that they didn't read it.
Why would this be any different? If one of these people tries to run some unsigned application and gets an error message, do you really think that this time it might get read? No. Error messages are considered by many an annoyance to be disposed of as quickly as possible. I think the mentality here is that the longer the message stays on the screen, the worse it gets (or something like that).
You could just print out a copy of the GPL and add the title "[insert distro here] End-User License Agreement".
In the best of all worlds each distribution would have an 'authors list' that lists the names and email addresses of all the people who ever wrote anything that ended up in the distribution, then you could give that list to your boss and say "These are the people that wrote this software. Send them each a donation if you choose." Only then may your boss understand.
But paying for stuff with corporate money... that's charity.
Most people fail to see past the tip of their nose (OK, maybe as far as their pockets) when it comes to rights. When you try to explain to a good upstanding citizen how they can't play DVD's without either using an MPAA-approved DVD player or by violating the DMCA, the next logical question for that person to ask is "How can I tell if my DVD player is MPAA-approved?" Of course, you and I both know that probably all hardware DVD players are MPAA-approved, but when you say that, your good upstanding friend will be prompted to say "So what's the problem?" Their is absolutely no attention paid to violations of principle.
Perhaps this new Office "lease program" will be the first agreement that comes back and bites people in the ass hard enough to make them notice. Or maybe it'll happen when MS comes knocking on everyone's doors looking for licenses.
It's 11:00, do you know where license agreement is?
The network would probably route around it anyway. There are two types of routing going on in GNet. One is query routing... each query is sent down every link in the net. And there is response routing... each query response is sent over the same path the original query took.
Let's look at query routing. With each node connecting to ~4 or more others, it's a pretty well connected graph. If a query doesn't get through one way, it will probably get through another way. End users wouldn't really see much of a difference because of this connectedness.
For instance, if there's a 1 in 10 chance that a packet is dropped at a given node instead of relayed, and each node is connected to 4 others, that's a very small chance that it will never make it through.
Responses, on the other hand will have to be sent using the current protocol, or at least have a negligible chance of being dropped (i.e. drop all queries before dropping a response). Perhaps one day there will be a reroute protocol that can get a response back over a different path. Something to think about...
At any rate, I don't you'd see any more repeat queries if they occassionally get dropped than you do otherwise.
But the choices offered are fundamentally different. Microsoft is offering customers a new way to pay for their software. They are still not allowed to do anything that they couldn't do before with a different method of payment. With open source software, the choice is not how to pay for it, but what to do with it (although there are arguably more ways to pay for open source software than for Office).
And with the lower ping times it'll be so much easier to get frags in a game full of Aussies!