Just use an.mp3 file that is a recording of someone chanting, "when the log rolls over, we will die, we will die!" and make a copy of it corresponding to every mp3 song name on your 100GB "archive" partition.
Then, publish the results on/. in a couple of weeks.
The biggest question this leaves in my mind is: WHO EXECUTES THE LAWS IN THE USA???
Is it the local Police/FBI/CIA/President/etc.? And, even if they wanted to search my hard drive for illegal content, wouldn't they then have to follow due process, which includes getting a search warrant from a Judge? Remember the 6th amendment?
With this proposal, the RIAA would be "executing" the law themselves, taking upon themselves the power to search/analyze/copy/destroy information from my personal computer, without even "probable cause."
If the government starts sharing its monopoly on FORCE with companies, then God help this country! Too many companies have already given us examples of how far they will go with restraints. Just think how far they would go if unrestrained!
10 years down the road, think about the fact that all the new content in the world is locked up with some kind of DRM, and reverse engineering is illegal (thanks DMCA!).
Now, jump forward another 10 years. Some of the businesses have died, or "shifted focus," etc. Since the content they produced could not be kept, duplicated, converted to the latest mpg9 format--because of DRM--it can't be found. If found, it can't be "played". It's lost.
Think about the implications of this for historians 100 years down the road trying to play a DRM-controlled song from a company that has been out of business 90 years.
Without the ability to personally archive songs/movies/etc and convert to new mediums/compression formats/etc, content will be lost. Especially on something that isn't "commercially valuable."
A simple example: No video footage of one of the Super Bowls exist today. Even though 2 major networks filmed it, neither one kept the footage for whatever reason. The average person didn't have a VCR back then to make personal copies. Lost through negligence.
The only reason we haven't seen so much of it in the past is because we used dead trees. Pick up a 200-year old book. Yep, you can still read it. Now, pick up an 8" floppy disk that is 20 years old that had an etext copy of that book on it. Can you read it? Nope, even though the text of the book is on the disk, it can't be read. That's a physical problem (since there aren't any more 8" drives around). Now, throw the complexity of DRM onto that 8" disk. If you found a drive that could read it, you still couldn't because of the DRM. With a software/firmware solution, it just magnifies the potential problems an hundredfold.
Only so many "popular" movies will be converted to DVD. How many thousands will be left behind in VHS-land. Twenty years from now, will a VHS player be legal, and/or functional? Will the VHS tape itself have deteriorated? Will DVD even still be around?
Do you want access to our society's music/books/movies/culture to depend on a specific business or technology? If so, the longevity of that content is cut down to years, rather than centuries.
The destruction of the library and Alexandria was a major blow to the intellectual world for centuries to come. All it would take in the future is an economic downturn!
When this country was originally founded, one of the basic tenants of the free society it embodied was "innocent until proven guilty."
However, in our current society, the politicians are legislating controls on software/hardware/electronic media that contain implicit assumptions of guilt. These controls violate the basic principle of our constitution that one can be punished only after one has actually done something wrong.
Based on perceived potential improprieties or historical abuses by specific individuals, the current attack even targets technology that hasn't even been conceived of yet instead of punishing illegal actions. Inanimate property does not commit crimes; people do.
How can we try to stem this abandoning of the original intent of the Constitution?
What about the CD-ROM that the software came on? You're saying you don't own it?
It's identical to the Peanuts cartoon. If you bought a newspaper with that cartoon, you can sell that newspaper (or just the funnies page) to your coworker, without telling the Newspaper or the media syndicates. The newspaper licenses the Peanuts cartoon, but you still hold a copy in your hand which you can resale.
The deal is you shouldn't have made a photocopy of the Peanuts cartoon before you sold it, just like you shouldn't have made a copy of the CD of the software you are selling. And you should have removed it from your computer(s).
The doctrine of First Sale should be just as relevent for software as it is for printed material, once software attained "copyright" status.
Copyright protections prevent the making of additional copies of the newspaper itself, but if you buy a "newspaper", you can resale it. Copyright protections prevent the creation of new copies of the software, but if you buy a "program", you should be able to resale the CD.
(net downloads, ie no media, is for another discussion.)
If I'm going to pay for it (which I would), I want guaranteed quality of both audio encoding (ie 128K encoding from CD source, not 64K FM radio junk) and bandwidth.
I am not going to pay for a service that still depends on the user's providing questionable files over 56k modems or even cable modems/ADSL.
So, what Napster would have to do is have a master.mp3 list that you could choose and download, from their server, from verified mp3 files.
Please notice your examples and how they break down into two major camps: Ones that violate someone else's rights and ones that don't.
Killing someone (even in Religion's name) is violating that person's right to life (whether it be voluntary or not is another question). Whereas an "underage" person taking the sacrament in the Catholic church is not violating anyone else's rights.
Classic quote by Frederic Bastiat in The Law (1850):
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them. The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are "just" because law makes them so.
(2)From 1923 to 1963, the copyright (if registered!) was for 28 years, with the possibility of extending it another 28 years on the last year of the first term. So, if someone wrote a book in 1940 (for example), and didn't fill out the paperwork for the extension in 1968, then it would have been in the public domain in 1969.
So, what are everyone's preferences as far as laptops go?
I am also currently looking at buying a laptop, and I'm going for one of the 3-3.5 lb. ultralights. Such as a Sony z505 or a Gateway Solo 3450. The only thing they don't have is a built in CD-ROM (the Gateway has it on an expansion slice), but they usually have built in 10/100 ethernet.
What kind of features are most important?
For me: XGA resolution, long battery life, as light as possible, built in ethernet. I want something that is very thin and light. I don't need a "road warrior" config.
How does price enter the equation?
Some half decent laptops are into the $1500 range, but anything with enough RAM and ethernet is around $2200-$3000.
Which one is best for the money?
An Etch-a-Sketch.;) It really depends on your choices for the above questions. How about something like this instead?
And especially, can you get a decent machine for under $1000?"
Ahhh, the Holy Grail(TM). eBay has some pretty good deals, but I've heard you need to be even more careful about who you buy from than normal. If you find this one, review it and post it here for us to check out.
So, I have to ask the question: Is it the words and phrases that the person has copyright to, or is the paper that it's published on? Or the bit's that it's represented with?
If it's the words, then the publisher can put those words into any medium they want to, as long as they fulfill the general contract and call it another copy of the work used/sold/viewed.
If, instead, it's the material/medium that the words are found on, can writers then claim ownership of the area on my hard disk that a copy of their work resides, in my browser cache? Am I going to have to worry about my RAM being taxed at purchase time to pay writers royalties?
Are some forward-thinking authors going to commission a worm-app that fills up your hard drive with copies of their works so they can claim it as their own property, or charge rent for your use of it? (They would have to fight Micro$oft though for a few gig on most machines, so maybe not all of it.)
"All your hard drives are belong to us!" might show up one day instead of the startup screen;)
From the start, the Zip was obviously an attempt to replace the ubiguitous and useless HD floppy. I always hoped that attempt would succeed.
The reason they never had a chance at doing this is because they wouldn't drop the price of their disks.
Think about it. A floppy disk today is between free and $.10 at most. You don't care if you give one to someone you don't know, and therefore don't care if you get it back or not. Drivers for new devices come on floppies still, because they don't add any cost to a product.
A zip disk, on the other hand, still costs up to $10. If I give one to someone, I only do it if I know that I'll get it back.
It's not disposable because of the cost, and this is the achilles heel that they never broke free of.
If they had dropped the price down to even $1-$2, licensed it to any manufacturer other than Sony, and made a few pennies off the billions of disks made and sold, they would have come out ahead, and we wouldn't still be giving away floppy disks.
I would today have the floppy drive replaced in every one of my machines, knowing that driver disks for my spiffy new hardware devices will be on a zip disk inside the package, instead of a floppy.
But, alas, zip disks are still up to $10, and therefore relegated to trading with my one or two close friends. This does not qualify as the "floppy replacement;" but merely one that could have been.
I've got a Fujitsu M3093DG scanner, and it fits the bill for exactly what you intend to do. On Fujitsu models, the D is for Duplex and the G is for SCSI. They also make an M3097DG which does 11x17, or two full pages side-by-side. Panasonic makes duplex non-flatbed scanners, but they don't support grayscale.
Quick specs:
27 ppm (duplex, so 54 images/minute)
50 sheet document feeder
4 seconds for a flatbed pass (@ 400dpi b/w). This is great for stuff you don't want to
chop. (works best with one person changing the page while another hits the scan button.
up to 400dpi b/w or grayscale (which is hard to find), 600dpi b/w with an 8MB SIMM.
It's SCSI, so you don't need the optical interface cards, like some high-end duplex scanners. But, I think they only have TWAIN drivers for windows.
You can find them on eBay for $1000-$2500. Retail, they go for about $3500-$4000.
I've had mine for a year and a half ($2200 on eBay, brand new), and have scanned about 30,000 pages without any problems. Some paper does give it feed problems, but then I just throw the next page in as the current one is fed in. It means I have to stand there, but it doesn't slow the process down.
I use TypeReader for OCR (by ExperVision), but it works fine with Omnipage or any other TWAIN compatible program. I've found the 400dpi (over the standard 300dpi) does help reduce OCR errors, enough to offset the extra file size increase.
The bigger problem that you will find is what to do with all the info once it's scanned. You can just keep the.tiff images, or OCR and export to.pdf, or OCR and export to text or some formatted text format. All this needs to be weighed on the time input versus information output quality/quantity. But, over time, it starts to pile up, so figure out what you want to do before you start.
I personally use Folio Views (flat file-based, free-form database) to organize my data, with several perl scripts to add the heirarchy structure, and fix common OCR errors, etc. AskSam is another aption. Of course, a real database is also possible, but requires more know-how and time than I have.
As for your question about legal concern for doing this, technically it _is_ violating the copyright. By taking it to electronic format, you are--for all intents and purposes--making a new "copy" of the material, which you didn't pay for. Also, the magazine publisher just might not want that stuff to be in electronic format. They have that right. By scanning it in without asking and receiving permission, you are violating that.
Originally, copyright length was 12 years, with the option to extend it on the last year for another 12 years.
Currently, it's up to 95 years (if memory serves).
According to the Constitution, it was supposed to be for "limited times," but 95 years is longer than most people's average lifespan. To me, it seems that the copyright protection is effectively "forever" since odds are an average American would never (legally) get the chance to apply creative talent to make a derivative work from the Star Wars universe, for example.
What do you consider to be an appropriate copyright length, balancing the need to pay content creators, versus the Public Domain and society's claim on it? And, if you think it should be considerably less than it is now, how does the US's Berne Convention agreement effect/influence what can be done?
Nicholas,
What you fail to realize, is the government (and from the previous chunks of Federal Law, applied to the State as well) cannot claim any copyright whatsoever on anything it produces.
From the Copyright office's website: "Works by the U. S. Government are not eligible for U. S. copyright protection."
This has gone around the right many times about rulings made by Federal judges, and the companies that compile these, and then sell them. The Courts can't claim copyright (and hence can't restrict their use AT ALL by any third party) on their rulings.
If the teacher is claiming copyright, then that would be the same as every artist claiming copyright to each frame of The Little Mermaid that that artist drew, and not Disney. The Teacher was paid by the Unervisity (with taxpayer's money and student's tuition) to give that lecture. That would be constituted as 'work made for hire' which the University (if it could, but it can't) would then have the rights to it.
This is truly a blatant misapplication of copyright law.
Simply put, by wanting to limit the use of the material, you are trying to apply copyright restrictions to the distribution of the material. But since it was a 'work for hire' for a government entity, it is inherently excluded from copyright protections.
Coldmist
Slashdot Mirror
So, who will volunteer a boxen to be a honeypot?
.mp3 file that is a recording of someone chanting, "when the log rolls over, we will die, we will die!" and make a copy of it corresponding to every mp3 song name on your 100GB "archive" partition.
/. in a couple of weeks.
Just use an
Then, publish the results on
The biggest question this leaves in my mind is: WHO EXECUTES THE LAWS IN THE USA???
Is it the local Police/FBI/CIA/President/etc.? And, even if they wanted to search my hard drive for illegal content, wouldn't they then have to follow due process, which includes getting a search warrant from a Judge? Remember the 6th amendment?
With this proposal, the RIAA would be "executing" the law themselves, taking upon themselves the power to search/analyze/copy/destroy information from my personal computer, without even "probable cause."
If the government starts sharing its monopoly on FORCE with companies, then God help this country! Too many companies have already given us examples of how far they will go with restraints. Just think how far they would go if unrestrained!
10 years down the road, think about the fact that all the new content in the world is locked up with some kind of DRM, and reverse engineering is illegal (thanks DMCA!).
Now, jump forward another 10 years. Some of the businesses have died, or "shifted focus," etc. Since the content they produced could not be kept, duplicated, converted to the latest mpg9 format--because of DRM--it can't be found. If found, it can't be "played". It's lost.
Think about the implications of this for historians 100 years down the road trying to play a DRM-controlled song from a company that has been out of business 90 years.
Without the ability to personally archive songs/movies/etc and convert to new mediums/compression formats/etc, content will be lost. Especially on something that isn't "commercially valuable."
A simple example: No video footage of one of the Super Bowls exist today. Even though 2 major networks filmed it, neither one kept the footage for whatever reason. The average person didn't have a VCR back then to make personal copies. Lost through negligence.
The only reason we haven't seen so much of it in the past is because we used dead trees. Pick up a 200-year old book. Yep, you can still read it. Now, pick up an 8" floppy disk that is 20 years old that had an etext copy of that book on it. Can you read it? Nope, even though the text of the book is on the disk, it can't be read. That's a physical problem (since there aren't any more 8" drives around). Now, throw the complexity of DRM onto that 8" disk. If you found a drive that could read it, you still couldn't because of the DRM. With a software/firmware solution, it just magnifies the potential problems an hundredfold.
Only so many "popular" movies will be converted to DVD. How many thousands will be left behind in VHS-land. Twenty years from now, will a VHS player be legal, and/or functional? Will the VHS tape itself have deteriorated? Will DVD even still be around?
Do you want access to our society's music/books/movies/culture to depend on a specific business or technology? If so, the longevity of that content is cut down to years, rather than centuries.
The destruction of the library and Alexandria was a major blow to the intellectual world for centuries to come. All it would take in the future is an economic downturn!
When this country was originally founded, one of the basic tenants of the free society it embodied was "innocent until proven guilty."
However, in our current society, the politicians are legislating controls on software/hardware/electronic media that contain implicit assumptions of guilt. These controls violate the basic principle of our constitution that one can be punished only after one has actually done something wrong.
Based on perceived potential improprieties or historical abuses by specific individuals, the current attack even targets technology that hasn't even been conceived of yet instead of punishing illegal actions. Inanimate property does not commit crimes; people do.
How can we try to stem this abandoning of the original intent of the Constitution?
What about the CD-ROM that the software came on? You're saying you don't own it?
It's identical to the Peanuts cartoon. If you bought a newspaper with that cartoon, you can sell that newspaper (or just the funnies page) to your coworker, without telling the Newspaper or the media syndicates. The newspaper licenses the Peanuts cartoon, but you still hold a copy in your hand which you can resale.
The deal is you shouldn't have made a photocopy of the Peanuts cartoon before you sold it, just like you shouldn't have made a copy of the CD of the software you are selling. And you should have removed it from your computer(s).
The doctrine of First Sale should be just as relevent for software as it is for printed material, once software attained "copyright" status.
Copyright protections prevent the making of additional copies of the newspaper itself, but if you buy a "newspaper", you can resale it. Copyright protections prevent the creation of new copies of the software, but if you buy a "program", you should be able to resale the CD.
(net downloads, ie no media, is for another discussion.)
If I'm going to pay for it (which I would), I want guaranteed quality of both audio encoding (ie 128K encoding from CD source, not 64K FM radio junk) and bandwidth.
.mp3 list that you could choose and download, from their server, from verified mp3 files.
I am not going to pay for a service that still depends on the user's providing questionable files over 56k modems or even cable modems/ADSL.
So, what Napster would have to do is have a master
Now that's a service that I would pay for.
How about Herbivore2000?
Or, maybe this could be an upgrade to The Beast itself (Carnivore), and it could be called Omnivore?
Please notice your examples and how they break down into two major camps: Ones that violate someone else's rights and ones that don't.
Killing someone (even in Religion's name) is violating that person's right to life (whether it be voluntary or not is another question). Whereas an "underage" person taking the sacrament in the Catholic church is not violating anyone else's rights.
Classic quote by Frederic Bastiat in The Law (1850):
Not quite.
Two issues. (1) Prior to 1978, you had to include the standard © notice or else no copyright.
(2)From 1923 to 1963, the copyright (if registered!) was for 28 years, with the possibility of extending it another 28 years on the last year of the first term. So, if someone wrote a book in 1940 (for example), and didn't fill out the paperwork for the extension in 1968, then it would have been in the public domain in 1969.
I am also currently looking at buying a laptop, and I'm going for one of the 3-3.5 lb. ultralights. Such as a Sony z505 or a Gateway Solo 3450. The only thing they don't have is a built in CD-ROM (the Gateway has it on an expansion slice), but they usually have built in 10/100 ethernet.
For me: XGA resolution, long battery life, as light as possible, built in ethernet. I want something that is very thin and light. I don't need a "road warrior" config.
Some half decent laptops are into the $1500 range, but anything with enough RAM and ethernet is around $2200-$3000.
An Etch-a-Sketch. ;) It really depends on your choices for the above questions. How about something like this instead?
Ahhh, the Holy Grail(TM). eBay has some pretty good deals, but I've heard you need to be even more careful about who you buy from than normal. If you find this one, review it and post it here for us to check out.
Cheers!
I might believe what the popular media tells me, but I do not trust anything that comes from Poland! ;)
So, I have to ask the question: Is it the words and phrases that the person has copyright to, or is the paper that it's published on? Or the bit's that it's represented with?
;)
If it's the words, then the publisher can put those words into any medium they want to, as long as they fulfill the general contract and call it another copy of the work used/sold/viewed.
If, instead, it's the material/medium that the words are found on, can writers then claim ownership of the area on my hard disk that a copy of their work resides, in my browser cache? Am I going to have to worry about my RAM being taxed at purchase time to pay writers royalties?
Are some forward-thinking authors going to commission a worm-app that fills up your hard drive with copies of their works so they can claim it as their own property, or charge rent for your use of it? (They would have to fight Micro$oft though for a few gig on most machines, so maybe not all of it.)
"All your hard drives are belong to us!" might show up one day instead of the startup screen
http://www.pcpowercooling.com/.
The only thing their fans don't have is the third wire for rpm watching, which also means you can't plug it into a mboard fan header.
coldmist
The reason they never had a chance at doing this is because they wouldn't drop the price of their disks.
Think about it. A floppy disk today is between free and $.10 at most. You don't care if you give one to someone you don't know, and therefore don't care if you get it back or not. Drivers for new devices come on floppies still, because they don't add any cost to a product.
A zip disk, on the other hand, still costs up to $10. If I give one to someone, I only do it if I know that I'll get it back.
It's not disposable because of the cost, and this is the achilles heel that they never broke free of.
If they had dropped the price down to even $1-$2, licensed it to any manufacturer other than Sony, and made a few pennies off the billions of disks made and sold, they would have come out ahead, and we wouldn't still be giving away floppy disks.
I would today have the floppy drive replaced in every one of my machines, knowing that driver disks for my spiffy new hardware devices will be on a zip disk inside the package, instead of a floppy.
But, alas, zip disks are still up to $10, and therefore relegated to trading with my one or two close friends. This does not qualify as the "floppy replacement;" but merely one that could have been.
coldmist
I've got a Fujitsu M3093DG scanner, and it fits the bill for exactly what you intend to do. On Fujitsu models, the D is for Duplex and the G is for SCSI. They also make an M3097DG which does 11x17, or two full pages side-by-side. Panasonic makes duplex non-flatbed scanners, but they don't support grayscale.
.tiff images, or OCR and export to .pdf, or OCR and export to text or some formatted text format. All this needs to be weighed on the time input versus information output quality/quantity. But, over time, it starts to pile up, so figure out what you want to do before you start.
Quick specs:
27 ppm (duplex, so 54 images/minute)
50 sheet document feeder
4 seconds for a flatbed pass (@ 400dpi b/w). This is great for stuff you don't want to
chop. (works best with one person changing the page while another hits the scan button.
up to 400dpi b/w or grayscale (which is hard to find), 600dpi b/w with an 8MB SIMM.
It's SCSI, so you don't need the optical interface cards, like some high-end duplex scanners. But, I think they only have TWAIN drivers for windows.
You can find them on eBay for $1000-$2500. Retail, they go for about $3500-$4000.
I've had mine for a year and a half ($2200 on eBay, brand new), and have scanned about 30,000 pages without any problems. Some paper does give it feed problems, but then I just throw the next page in as the current one is fed in. It means I have to stand there, but it doesn't slow the process down.
I use TypeReader for OCR (by ExperVision), but it works fine with Omnipage or any other TWAIN compatible program. I've found the 400dpi (over the standard 300dpi) does help reduce OCR errors, enough to offset the extra file size increase.
The bigger problem that you will find is what to do with all the info once it's scanned. You can just keep the
I personally use Folio Views (flat file-based, free-form database) to organize my data, with several perl scripts to add the heirarchy structure, and fix common OCR errors, etc. AskSam is another aption. Of course, a real database is also possible, but requires more know-how and time than I have.
As for your question about legal concern for doing this, technically it _is_ violating the copyright. By taking it to electronic format, you are--for all intents and purposes--making a new "copy" of the material, which you didn't pay for. Also, the magazine publisher just might not want that stuff to be in electronic format. They have that right. By scanning it in without asking and receiving permission, you are violating that.
Ryan
Originally, copyright length was 12 years, with the option to extend it on the last year for another 12 years.
Currently, it's up to 95 years (if memory serves).
According to the Constitution, it was supposed to be for "limited times," but 95 years is longer than most people's average lifespan. To me, it seems that the copyright protection is effectively "forever" since odds are an average American would never (legally) get the chance to apply creative talent to make a derivative work from the Star Wars universe, for example.
What do you consider to be an appropriate copyright length, balancing the need to pay content creators, versus the Public Domain and society's claim on it? And, if you think it should be considerably less than it is now, how does the US's Berne Convention agreement effect/influence what can be done?
Nicholas, What you fail to realize, is the government (and from the previous chunks of Federal Law, applied to the State as well) cannot claim any copyright whatsoever on anything it produces. From the Copyright office's website: "Works by the U. S. Government are not eligible for U. S. copyright protection." This has gone around the right many times about rulings made by Federal judges, and the companies that compile these, and then sell them. The Courts can't claim copyright (and hence can't restrict their use AT ALL by any third party) on their rulings. If the teacher is claiming copyright, then that would be the same as every artist claiming copyright to each frame of The Little Mermaid that that artist drew, and not Disney. The Teacher was paid by the Unervisity (with taxpayer's money and student's tuition) to give that lecture. That would be constituted as 'work made for hire' which the University (if it could, but it can't) would then have the rights to it. This is truly a blatant misapplication of copyright law. Simply put, by wanting to limit the use of the material, you are trying to apply copyright restrictions to the distribution of the material. But since it was a 'work for hire' for a government entity, it is inherently excluded from copyright protections. Coldmist