When you ask about the cost of converting from Windows to Linux, there's a companion question: what's the cost of converting from Windows to the next version of Windows? Look at the licensing terms MS has now, and notice that they pretty much either force you to upgrade every 2 years or so or pay huge licensing fees when you do upgrade from an "obsolete" version. Also look at the history of cascading upgrades on Windows, where you need a new version of Word which forces an upgrade of Windows itself (the new Word won't run on older versions of the OS) which in turn forces upgrades of other software because your current versions won't run right (or at all!) on the new version of the OS. This is the dirty little secret cost the MS sales reps will never mention.
We don't want to keep reacting, though. We want you to ask your ISP before you sign up, and not do business with ISPs who may cause you problems because of their policies. Then the problem doesn't come up, and the spammers get isolated in places where there aren't any innocent bystanders around.
What you're asking for is for it to not affect the ISP at all to host a spammer. What incentive, then, is there for them to get rid of spammers?
How about, instead of contacting your ISP to get you off the list, you contact them about not allowing spammers on their networks in the first place and/or terminating their accounts before the spammer lands the ISP and their customers on a blacklist?
The First Amendment isn't the right basis for defending against trade-secret cases, anyway. The right basis is straight contract law: that you haven't made any agreement with them to keep that information secret, nor received any consideration for doing so which would imply an agreement. At that point they have to prove that they protected their trade secrets from disclosure or produce an NDA with your signature on it, which is a harder job for them.
Like we were in the mid-to-late 80s, when dongles and copy-protection schemes abounded? Oh, I forgot, legitimate customers refused to buy the protected software because the copy-protection measures were more hassle than the software was worth, and those measures died out.:)
Custom programming. Most programmers don't write Yet Another Word Processor. They work on code that's specific not just to one industry but to one company and the way it works. Open-source isn't an issue there, because the code doesn't go outside the company. This kind of work's never going to go away, either. At my last employer the general rule was that off-the-shelf software lagged the capabilities that we needed by 5 years or more, and required huge amounts of customization to work the way we wanted it to work (which was dictated by the way we wanted to run the business, and changing the way we did business to suit the software was simply Not An Option).
There's also customization of open-source software. Lots of companies have requirements that are almost met by an OSS package, and just need a bit of custom code added or a few bugs fixed. Again, this kind of work's likely to never end.
Why should there be indemnification? Take the prosaic example of cars. Large companies own fleets of cars. Those cars could be using stuff that's patented by someone else, who could then sue for patent infringement and win, then perhaps go after the companies still using those infringing cars. The cars could be defective, and the families of employees injured or killed by the defective cars could decide to sue the company instead of the car maker. In neither case do the car makers indemnify companies that buy their cars. Why should software makers indemnify?
Can the owner of the package file a suit against the ESA? Under the DMCA their complaint must include an assertion that they are the owners of the package, and making such a false assertion in order to get the package removed sounds to me like fraudulent interference with the real owner's IP rights.
Right, except for one thing. If a couple hundred people each dial that 800 number 100,000 times each, the courts would probably find that illegal. But, if each of the 100,000,000 recipients of an advertisement called that 800 number once, you'd get the same result but the courts would almost certainly rule that there was nothing illegal going on. Whether the people were interested in buying anything or not, no one of them did anything even unreasonable. Even if they simply want to complain about the advertisement, that's a reasonable use of the advertised number.
Even if you called repeatedly, you could probably get away with it. "Your Honor, the advertisement said to call that number for more information, so I did. All I could get was a busy signal, so I tried again twice a day for the next week just trying to get the information they said I could get at that number. If they didn't want me calling for more information, why did they say to call for more information? And it's not like I hit the redial button every 5 seconds, surely one attempt in the morning and one in the evening isn't that unreasonable?"
Why would it be illegal? The spammer put the links in the e-mail, obviously intending people to follow them (especially if they make reference to something being available at the linked site in the rest of the text). If far too many people follow the links and the site is brought down, how is that any more unlawful than Slashdot linking to a site in a story and the sudden burst of traffic bringing that site down?
I think the idea's dangerous for another reason, though. As noted, a spammer could easily include links to sites he doesn't like and let the traffic spike take them down.
Power supplies. Most of them have large capacitors in them to smooth out the power. Those capacitors store power, and they take a few seconds to discharge when you shut off the incoming power. If you turn power back on before that discharge cycle is complete, the sudden change in incoming power combines with the capacitor discharge and the transformers (inductors) in the power supply to create a nasty voltage spike that can burn out components in the power supply and even, in the worst case, in the computer.
You can actually hear the discharge in your monitor or television. After you shut it off, you can hear a slight crackling from the tube for a few seconds. The tube's the capacitor, the coils for the beams are the inductors and the crackling is the charge bleeding off.
I don't think PBIS will get anywhere with the privacy argument as they're putting it forward. They might get somewhere with the jurisdictional argument, but on privacy they're going to flop. People breaking the law have no right to have that illegal activity kept private.
PBIS would have better luck arguing that that provision of the DMCA violates the constitutional right to due process. The RIAA hasn't provided any proof beyond merely their word to any judicial authority that copyright infringement has in fact occurred, and PBIS could argue that the Constitution's due-process clause trumps the provision of the DMCA that allows this and that if the RIAA wants to force release of private information then they should be required to provide at least proof that the downloaded file in fact contained a song on which they hold copyright and a legal evidence chain showing that that file in fact came from the computer for which they are requesting the subscriber's private information. It would help also if PBIS could present a subpoena from the RIAA where the file they're claiming infringes provably doesn't infringe (eg. it contains an original work not owned by the RIAA which was shared either by the actual copyright owner or with his explicit authorization).
Except that Intertrust doesn't make anything currently, so they don't make anything that might infringe on a Microsoft patent. That makes the cross-licensing game useless against them. This is the one consequence of the expanded patent coverage that the big companies didn't foresee: that the same things that gave them so much freedom also give them opponents in the patent wars that they have no leverage on.
My immediate reaction would be to start avoiding that store and patronize other stores instead. If they see a drop in revenue after they put these in, they'll get the message that it's not a good idea.
Hint to stores: being too nosy is not a good way to inspire loyalty in me.
These are two aspects of the same thing. Hashed passwords and shadow password files are layers to make it harder to compromise everybody on a single machine once an intruder's got a foothold on that machine. Avoiding shared passwords make it harder to gain footholds on other machines in the network once an intruder's compromised that first machine in the network. Basic defense in depth, and it's what the most popular systems today seem bent on eliminating.
Seriously. The implementations are new, but the concept goes back to the dawn of interconnected computers, maybe further. Back in the Iron Age, you used different passwords on different systems specifically so that, if one of the systems were penetrated and your password compromised, all the other systems you had access to would not be immediately compromised as well. That was a limited form of intrusion tolerance, forcing the intruder to start over from scratch on every system in the network.
It's already happened. When you buy a blank CD-R or CD-RW, part of the price is a royalty paid to the RIAA to compensate them for lost revenues due to use of that blank for piracy. They negotiated this way back when CD-Rs first came out.
Not quite what I was saying. If you link then the combined work is a derivative work, but the original source code is not. If I create a work intended to link to GPL'd code but distribute it only as source code without any GPL'd source code included, then my code does not fall under the GPL (although the final compiled and linked executable would). So linking against SCO's SysV code could pull the result under SCO's license, but it wouldn't pull my original source code under their license and as copyright owner I could still relicense that source code under other terms.
Yes, but you haven't harmed the computers, hence can't be sued for harming them. You can be sued for other problems your mail causes, just as if you'd sent the same thing via snail-mail, but that's another claim and harder to prove in court.
Except it won't have that short-term effect. Why should an employer hire a new person, with the expenses that hiring entails (unemployment taxes, paperwork costs and such), when they can just make the people they've already got on payroll work longer hours? Traditionally overtime costs were high enough that it was cheaper to bring in part-time or temp workers or hire more people, but when the hourly cost is the same either way why would an employer take on the up-front cost of more bodies when they don't have to?
The problem is the way SCO is trying to define "derivative work". Under the GPL it's a derivative work if it includes GPL'd code. That's sensible. SCO, OTOH, is trying to claim that code IBM created independently and before they got involved with SCO is a derivative work of SCO's code merely because it was added to SCO's code after creation. That's where the outrage comes from.
It's a matter of distribution. If you had someone come in and create a binary-only patch for a piece of GPL'd software for your use only, and never distributed it to anyone else, not even RMS would argue against it. He might not like it but he'd be the first to admit that the GPL doesn't restrict use, only distribution, and you aren't distributing anything. The same with the CleanFlicks patch: they do the patch only for those who have already purchased the original movie, and they don't sell the patched version independent of a normally-purchased unaltered version. It's a fine distinction, but one that's held up in court before and one that stems directly from the first-sale doctrine.
Critical difference between DVDs and GPL'd software that bears on this: the license terms prohibit you from making and distributing additional copies of a DVD, altered or otherwise, whereas the terms of the GPL explicitly guarantee the right to redistribute and prohibit you from limiting it. That makes a critical difference in cases where alterations for use by the owner of a copy are concerned.
The artists need to look at demand and sales and realize one thing. It's not a question of divvying up the sales of a $18 album vs. a $1 single. It's a question of divvying up the sales of lots and lots of $1 singles vs. trying to divvy up zero sales of albums. Fans are tired of having to pay that much money to get only a couple of songs they really like, and they're not willing to do it anymore. Artists who refuse to give fans what they want... won't have too many fans.
Slashdot Mirror
When you ask about the cost of converting from Windows to Linux, there's a companion question: what's the cost of converting from Windows to the next version of Windows? Look at the licensing terms MS has now, and notice that they pretty much either force you to upgrade every 2 years or so or pay huge licensing fees when you do upgrade from an "obsolete" version. Also look at the history of cascading upgrades on Windows, where you need a new version of Word which forces an upgrade of Windows itself (the new Word won't run on older versions of the OS) which in turn forces upgrades of other software because your current versions won't run right (or at all!) on the new version of the OS. This is the dirty little secret cost the MS sales reps will never mention.
We don't want to keep reacting, though. We want you to ask your ISP before you sign up, and not do business with ISPs who may cause you problems because of their policies. Then the problem doesn't come up, and the spammers get isolated in places where there aren't any innocent bystanders around.
What you're asking for is for it to not affect the ISP at all to host a spammer. What incentive, then, is there for them to get rid of spammers?
It isn't a matter of inspecting data, it's a matter of a) putting in place an AUP that says "no spamming" and b) enforcing that AUP.
How about, instead of contacting your ISP to get you off the list, you contact them about not allowing spammers on their networks in the first place and/or terminating their accounts before the spammer lands the ISP and their customers on a blacklist?
The First Amendment isn't the right basis for defending against trade-secret cases, anyway. The right basis is straight contract law: that you haven't made any agreement with them to keep that information secret, nor received any consideration for doing so which would imply an agreement. At that point they have to prove that they protected their trade secrets from disclosure or produce an NDA with your signature on it, which is a harder job for them.
Like we were in the mid-to-late 80s, when dongles and copy-protection schemes abounded? Oh, I forgot, legitimate customers refused to buy the protected software because the copy-protection measures were more hassle than the software was worth, and those measures died out. :)
Custom programming. Most programmers don't write Yet Another Word Processor. They work on code that's specific not just to one industry but to one company and the way it works. Open-source isn't an issue there, because the code doesn't go outside the company. This kind of work's never going to go away, either. At my last employer the general rule was that off-the-shelf software lagged the capabilities that we needed by 5 years or more, and required huge amounts of customization to work the way we wanted it to work (which was dictated by the way we wanted to run the business, and changing the way we did business to suit the software was simply Not An Option).
There's also customization of open-source software. Lots of companies have requirements that are almost met by an OSS package, and just need a bit of custom code added or a few bugs fixed. Again, this kind of work's likely to never end.
Why should there be indemnification? Take the prosaic example of cars. Large companies own fleets of cars. Those cars could be using stuff that's patented by someone else, who could then sue for patent infringement and win, then perhaps go after the companies still using those infringing cars. The cars could be defective, and the families of employees injured or killed by the defective cars could decide to sue the company instead of the car maker. In neither case do the car makers indemnify companies that buy their cars. Why should software makers indemnify?
Can the owner of the package file a suit against the ESA? Under the DMCA their complaint must include an assertion that they are the owners of the package, and making such a false assertion in order to get the package removed sounds to me like fraudulent interference with the real owner's IP rights.
Right, except for one thing. If a couple hundred people each dial that 800 number 100,000 times each, the courts would probably find that illegal. But, if each of the 100,000,000 recipients of an advertisement called that 800 number once, you'd get the same result but the courts would almost certainly rule that there was nothing illegal going on. Whether the people were interested in buying anything or not, no one of them did anything even unreasonable. Even if they simply want to complain about the advertisement, that's a reasonable use of the advertised number.
Even if you called repeatedly, you could probably get away with it. "Your Honor, the advertisement said to call that number for more information, so I did. All I could get was a busy signal, so I tried again twice a day for the next week just trying to get the information they said I could get at that number. If they didn't want me calling for more information, why did they say to call for more information? And it's not like I hit the redial button every 5 seconds, surely one attempt in the morning and one in the evening isn't that unreasonable?"
Why would it be illegal? The spammer put the links in the e-mail, obviously intending people to follow them (especially if they make reference to something being available at the linked site in the rest of the text). If far too many people follow the links and the site is brought down, how is that any more unlawful than Slashdot linking to a site in a story and the sudden burst of traffic bringing that site down?
I think the idea's dangerous for another reason, though. As noted, a spammer could easily include links to sites he doesn't like and let the traffic spike take them down.
Power supplies. Most of them have large capacitors in them to smooth out the power. Those capacitors store power, and they take a few seconds to discharge when you shut off the incoming power. If you turn power back on before that discharge cycle is complete, the sudden change in incoming power combines with the capacitor discharge and the transformers (inductors) in the power supply to create a nasty voltage spike that can burn out components in the power supply and even, in the worst case, in the computer.
You can actually hear the discharge in your monitor or television. After you shut it off, you can hear a slight crackling from the tube for a few seconds. The tube's the capacitor, the coils for the beams are the inductors and the crackling is the charge bleeding off.
I don't think PBIS will get anywhere with the privacy argument as they're putting it forward. They might get somewhere with the jurisdictional argument, but on privacy they're going to flop. People breaking the law have no right to have that illegal activity kept private.
PBIS would have better luck arguing that that provision of the DMCA violates the constitutional right to due process. The RIAA hasn't provided any proof beyond merely their word to any judicial authority that copyright infringement has in fact occurred, and PBIS could argue that the Constitution's due-process clause trumps the provision of the DMCA that allows this and that if the RIAA wants to force release of private information then they should be required to provide at least proof that the downloaded file in fact contained a song on which they hold copyright and a legal evidence chain showing that that file in fact came from the computer for which they are requesting the subscriber's private information. It would help also if PBIS could present a subpoena from the RIAA where the file they're claiming infringes provably doesn't infringe (eg. it contains an original work not owned by the RIAA which was shared either by the actual copyright owner or with his explicit authorization).
I want the telemarketers to answer one question before their suit is allowed to proceed:
When exactly was it that your right to speak mutated into your right to use my property to speak?
Except that Intertrust doesn't make anything currently, so they don't make anything that might infringe on a Microsoft patent. That makes the cross-licensing game useless against them. This is the one consequence of the expanded patent coverage that the big companies didn't foresee: that the same things that gave them so much freedom also give them opponents in the patent wars that they have no leverage on.
My immediate reaction would be to start avoiding that store and patronize other stores instead. If they see a drop in revenue after they put these in, they'll get the message that it's not a good idea.
Hint to stores: being too nosy is not a good way to inspire loyalty in me.
These are two aspects of the same thing. Hashed passwords and shadow password files are layers to make it harder to compromise everybody on a single machine once an intruder's got a foothold on that machine. Avoiding shared passwords make it harder to gain footholds on other machines in the network once an intruder's compromised that first machine in the network. Basic defense in depth, and it's what the most popular systems today seem bent on eliminating.
Seriously. The implementations are new, but the concept goes back to the dawn of interconnected computers, maybe further. Back in the Iron Age, you used different passwords on different systems specifically so that, if one of the systems were penetrated and your password compromised, all the other systems you had access to would not be immediately compromised as well. That was a limited form of intrusion tolerance, forcing the intruder to start over from scratch on every system in the network.
It's already happened. When you buy a blank CD-R or CD-RW, part of the price is a royalty paid to the RIAA to compensate them for lost revenues due to use of that blank for piracy. They negotiated this way back when CD-Rs first came out.
Not quite what I was saying. If you link then the combined work is a derivative work, but the original source code is not. If I create a work intended to link to GPL'd code but distribute it only as source code without any GPL'd source code included, then my code does not fall under the GPL (although the final compiled and linked executable would). So linking against SCO's SysV code could pull the result under SCO's license, but it wouldn't pull my original source code under their license and as copyright owner I could still relicense that source code under other terms.
Yes, but you haven't harmed the computers, hence can't be sued for harming them. You can be sued for other problems your mail causes, just as if you'd sent the same thing via snail-mail, but that's another claim and harder to prove in court.
Except it won't have that short-term effect. Why should an employer hire a new person, with the expenses that hiring entails (unemployment taxes, paperwork costs and such), when they can just make the people they've already got on payroll work longer hours? Traditionally overtime costs were high enough that it was cheaper to bring in part-time or temp workers or hire more people, but when the hourly cost is the same either way why would an employer take on the up-front cost of more bodies when they don't have to?
The problem is the way SCO is trying to define "derivative work". Under the GPL it's a derivative work if it includes GPL'd code. That's sensible. SCO, OTOH, is trying to claim that code IBM created independently and before they got involved with SCO is a derivative work of SCO's code merely because it was added to SCO's code after creation. That's where the outrage comes from.
It's a matter of distribution. If you had someone come in and create a binary-only patch for a piece of GPL'd software for your use only, and never distributed it to anyone else, not even RMS would argue against it. He might not like it but he'd be the first to admit that the GPL doesn't restrict use, only distribution, and you aren't distributing anything. The same with the CleanFlicks patch: they do the patch only for those who have already purchased the original movie, and they don't sell the patched version independent of a normally-purchased unaltered version. It's a fine distinction, but one that's held up in court before and one that stems directly from the first-sale doctrine.
Critical difference between DVDs and GPL'd software that bears on this: the license terms prohibit you from making and distributing additional copies of a DVD, altered or otherwise, whereas the terms of the GPL explicitly guarantee the right to redistribute and prohibit you from limiting it. That makes a critical difference in cases where alterations for use by the owner of a copy are concerned.
The artists need to look at demand and sales and realize one thing. It's not a question of divvying up the sales of a $18 album vs. a $1 single. It's a question of divvying up the sales of lots and lots of $1 singles vs. trying to divvy up zero sales of albums. Fans are tired of having to pay that much money to get only a couple of songs they really like, and they're not willing to do it anymore. Artists who refuse to give fans what they want... won't have too many fans.