But for a movie, the bad guy has to look intimidating and powerful.
Oh, I diagree, strongly. Movies most often go wrong when they attempt to show Ultimate Evil. (Except Time Bandits, of course, since Ultimate Evil was indeed a named character). Ultimate Evil is best kept in the shadows, so that you sense it viscerally. No amount of Hollywood SFX -- not even these -- can live up to the conception we carry inside.
My usual case in point is Star Wars. Yes, Vader is evil and they show him. But he isn't Ultimate Evil, since it is always intimated that the Emperor is way more evil than him. In the first, the Emperor is hardly there at all. In The Empire Strikes Back, he shows up only as a vague, intimidating hologram.
Then in Return of the Jedi, he becomes an on-screen character and shrinks to merely human proportions. The showing of the Emperor is what undermines Jedi, for my money. Well, that and Ewoks -- just another manifestation of Ultimate Evil.:)
According to the article, Qwest favored the opt-in version of the law. They're not the ones screwing you out of your privacy, so if you want to rant against someone, let it be the federal government.
I have to assume, if you read the article, that you are referring to David Sobel, whose "organization favored the commission's original "opt in" approach, which would have prohibited companies from using consumers' data without their express permission". Unfortunately, if you actually read the article carefully, you see that David Sobel works not for Qwest but for EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center).
If Qwest truly supported an opt-in policy, then they could create an opt-in policy. They could explicitly waive the rights they claim they are merely explicitly reserving via this notice. The federal government is not holding a gun to their heads saying "You must use opt-out." In this case, it most certainly is the corporation choosing to do the wrong thing.
Closed source software sells because it's a valuable, solid product.
Actually, strictly speaking, it sells because it is perceived to be a valuable, solid product. People stick with it in part because they see few viable alternatives. The Brit initiative is exploring those alternatives. Don't you see, just a smidge, the irony that they publish their survey in closed formats only?
The phrase is "eat your cake and have it too" NOT "have your cake and eat it too". You can't eat your cake if you didn't have it in the first place.;)
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing, though. The sense of the phrase is to desire more than is reasonable; indeed, more than is possible. If it's ordered the way you suggest, that sense is no sense: of course, first you must have the cake and then you can eat it.
But actually, the order is reserved -- and it makes a lot more sense that way. Once you eat your cake, you no longer have it... you can't have it both ways.
"You can't have your cake and eat it too -- One can't use something up and still have it to enjoy. This proverb was recorded in the book of proverbs by John Heywood in 1546, and is first attested in the United States in the 1742 'Colonial Records of Georgia' in 'Original Papers, 1735- 1752.' The adage is found in varying forms: You can't eat your cake and have it too. You can't have everything and eat it too; Eat your cake and have the crumbs in bed with you, etc...." From "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" (1996) by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996).
Having said all this, record industry does have the right to implement copy protection.
I've thought about the following for a while. There ought to be a two-track system of copyright. Whenever anything is released for public consumption, the publisher would make a choice:
Forego any technical copy protection -- the data is presented in the clear. However, stringent and heavy penalties accrue for copyright infringement, and the publisher can utilize the court system to recover these penalties.
Encrypt the data or otherwise protect it by technical means. In this case, however, no penalties would follow from circumvention of the encyption... the works would, in essence, be public domain, with only the encryption providing protection (= revenue stream) to the publisher.
In other words, the content publisher doesn't get to eat his/her cake and have it, too. By restricting Fair Use access, by cordonning off the material from the public domain (essentially forever), the publisher loses the protection of the courts. If you don't want to play ball with the justice system, you don't get to use it, either.
This approach is entirely justifiable, as copyright is a privilege granted by the state, not a right inherent in the content. As Litman and others point out, historically, copyright has been viewed as a bargain between the publishers and the public. If publishers try to unilaterally change the terms of the game -- by, for instance, encrypting data streams -- then the public has every right and justification to revoke the copyright.
Um, the Constitution? Congress has a law-making authority constrained by the Constitution. That bit of law cannot be overridden by a vote of Congress. (It can be amended by such, but that's not the same thing: the amendment process is spelled out in the document and, when followed, leads to new law under the Constitution.)
My other quip would have been, the laws of mathematics. Remember the state legislature that considered mandating a value of 3 for pi?:)
Even a newtonian particle at constant velocity (to use your example) needs to somehow obtain that velocity.
Um, no. Constant velocity does not to be explained in Newtonian physics. It is just every bit as "natural" as being at rest. You might have an intuition or a bias that everything "should" have begun at rest and therefore the current state of non-rest must be explained. But that isn't implicit in Newtonian physics. The advance made by Newton was exactly the realization that changes in velocity required agents but that constant velocity does not.
I mentioned recent supernova observations and the idea that there *is* a force causing *acceleration* of expansion.
What is implied by the recent supernova observations -- and we will leave aside the argument over whether Type I supernovae are really standard candles that can be used for this sort of thing -- is that the rate of expansion of the Universe is accelerating. So much we agree upon, although we should both be cautious that these results are still preliminary (and in fact seem recently to have been scaled back some).
One possible explanation for this acceleration -- and the only one that I've seen attract serious attention from cosmologists, though they are far from unaminous on this -- is the presence of a cosmological constant in Einstein's equations. A cosmological constant acts like a pressure density defined everywhere in space and keeps the metric expanding ever faster. But it doesn't exert a "force" in any standard usage of the word. We don't need a repulsive force to accelerate the expansion, because space itself is exapnding and carrying the matter along with it.
I will admit to misusing the name "deSitter Universe", which is apparently not the construct of which I was thinking. I guess it's time to dust off ole MTW and try again.
Re:Huh what? Re:Time to stop the madness
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
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· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
He means quit downloading shit off Kazaa if you don't own it already. You personally might not do it, but others do
I was fully aware that was the thrust. But I wanted to flag the incredibly dangerous idea that these freedoms are granted and can be revoked. It doesn't matter how many people "abuse" their right to free speech -- free speech remains a fundamental right of humankind and attempts to restrain it remain unjust.
Of course, people flagrantly flouting the law doesn't make it any easier to convince people that something serious is going on here, and in that light, the original post was good advice. But don't imply that, just because it makes its harder to exercise our rights, it's equivalent to abdicating them.
Where in the DMCA does it give the RIAA the right to have control over your DVD collection? I must have missed that part.
"This disc is intended for sale or viewing within Region 1 (US and Canada) only."
The DMCA does not do that. Read it some time.
People keep saying that. I don't know if I intend to be insulted. I have read it. It does make illegal things that allow the exercise of long-established rights.
Re:Computer Science Major and Political Science Mi
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
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· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
You can rant and rave but let's face it: one of the jobs of the DoJ is to defend the government
However they appear to be currently rather selective about doing their job. Otherwise we would have expected them to have squashed (revokation of of corporate charter and arrest of those who lied in court) Microsoft a few months back.
One might have wished they had continued their aggressive pursuit of Microsoft -- I know I wish they had. However, there is a world of difference between prosecuting a case and defending one. In the Microsoft thing, the DoJ was one of the initiators; they brought the suit. It's an active thing. In the Felten case, the researcher sued the government, and they defended. It's a reactive thing. Ethically, I believe, the DoJ cannot simply allow the progress of suits against the US government to proceed without challenge.
It's sort of along the lines of, your defense attorney isn't interested whether you're guilty. He's there to do his best to spring you.
I realize that space itself is also expanding, but that is a *result* of matter expanding, not the *cause* of matter expanding.
I'm sorry to repeat myself, but you are in error here. Even in an empty Universe, the Einstein equations lead to a spacetime metric that is either expanding or contracting. (I believe this solution is called a deSitter Universe.) It doesn't take matter at all, so it can't depend on the kinetic energy of matter.
To imply that it is "inherent in the space-time metric" means that there is some force causing expansion.
No, actually, it doesn't mean that at all. It means exactly what it says: the metric of spacetime -- the set of notional "metersticks" by which distance is defined -- is simply expanding as a function of time. It's in many ways the exact opposite of a force: there's no agent acting, no particle mediating the expansion, no interaction causing it. It just happens, because the structure of spacetime is such that it expands.
People intiuitively want a stable Universe, so they try to imagine things that "cause" the expansion. I believe it's very analogous to the Newtonian breakthrough in dynamics: For a long while everyone thought that the "natural" state of motion was to be at rest; therefore physical theories "had" to explain constant-velocity motion. But Newton saw that constant-velocity motion -- of which rest is just a particular case -- is the natural thing, and it is accelerations that must be explained. Likewise, people think the Universe "should" be stable and therefore think one must explain the expansion. But the Einstein equations show that the expansion is natural and therefore need not be explained further.
DVD's encrypted with CSS will eventually become part of the public domain. Not all DVD's will become part of the public domain at the same time. So when will it be legal to distribute DeCSS?
Complete and utter FUD.
You keep using that word. I do not think it meanms what you think it means.:)
It doesn't need to be legal to distribute DeCSS, you can distribute the unencrypted work, or distribute a crack specifically for a certain DVD.
How are you supposed to distribute an unencrypted version of the work, if you are prohibited from using tools that decrypt the work? Or will it become the responsibility of each person to write his/her own version of deCSS -- without ever discussing any aspect of it with any other person -- so that he/she can decrypt works and allow the perfectly legitimate public domain usage of them?
If the device is not primarily made or marketed to access copyrighted works, it is not illegal.
I'm glad you feel that way. I wish the judge, whose opinion actually matters, felt that way, too. As it is, it is the "potentially infringing" use that sways him. When pressed, the DVDCCA was unable to offer even a single instance wherein DeCSS was implicated in violating copyright.
On the other hand, it was used by quite a number of people to view DVDs on Linux boxes, a completely legitimate use.
So apparently it's not a weight of usage argument after all. DMCA bans things like DeCSS on the mere potential of their misuse. It's like banning hammers because they could be used to kill someone.
Before the DMCA we had strong copyright laws -- some would say too strong -- that provided more than adequate tools to prosecute people actually engaging in copyright violation. The Content Cartel didn't like those laws because they required actual effort to uncover "piracy", assemble a case, etc. It's much easier to make the mere possibility of infringing illegal; the case is much easier to make, then.
It just didn't matter that this completely upends American standards of justice.
Well, first of all, they do. They are still protected by the Bill of Rights, for example; and it's still illegal to, say, randomly beat them.
Second, one would expect that even someone adhering to this principle recognizes a scaling in it. If you litter, is it really OK for the police to break down your door, drag you to a cell, beat you, and torture you? I would hope not.
Third, even if you go so far as to say that no criminal has any rights, it would still apply only to criminals... to people convicted of a crime after a fair trial under due process of law. Things that perforce restrict me before I have been convicted of a crime -- before I have even committed a crime -- things that perforce restrict innocent citizens, are unjust and must be resisted.
Re:cry me a river you CRIMINAL
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
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· Score: 4, Troll
Blockquoth the poster:
Face it: The whole world is against you. No one cares. The DMCA outlaws things that most people think should be outlawed.
Funny, I've talked to a lot of people who are far from geeks, much less "pirates". I've told them about the attempt to place unexpirable "access controls" on material slated to be public domain. I've told them about the arrest of a foreign national for writing a program legal in his country. I've told them about the intimidation and outright threatening of scientists who dare to expose flaws in a sham security system. I've told them about being blocked from watching a movie they've bought wherever they want on whatever machine they choose. I've told them about losing their time-honored rights to Fair Use, to First Sale, to archival copies...
You know what? They don't think any of those things should be occuring. They don't think that reverse engineering for system interoperability should be illegal. They don't think allowing backups should be illegal. They don't think allowing you to read an eBook on whatever machine you choose, should be illegal. They don't think control over your own movie collection should be illegal. They don't think that quotation from a digital source, for the purposes of scholarship, should be illegal. They don't think that scientific research should be illegal.
So don't get on your high horse and tell me what people think should be illegal and what not. You don't know a thing about what people want. When the mists are lifted, when the DMCA and its implications are laid bare in ordinary language, and not swirled up and hidden behind copyright-lawyerese, then even the "ordinary" people do care.
In this fight, the problem is not that the majority understand the issues and are against. The problem is that they do not understand the issues. They stand neither against us nor for us, for they have not yet thought it through. In my experience, when they do stop to think about it, when the shape of things is made clear, then the rational citizens I encounter invariable end up quite upset with the DMCA.
People are only as stupid as you seem to think they are, when they listen to you tell them how stupid they are.
Re:Computer Science Major and Political Science Mi
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Blockquoth the poster:
The DMCA is a hassel and should definantelly be considered in the supreme court, why it's still in circut court is far beyound me, I guess EFF is just trying to go through the motions of getting it directly to the supreme court.
It usually takes quite some time for an issue to percolate up to the Supreme Court. It has to show up at the district and appellate levels for two separate districts. Generally, there also has to be an obvious collision between appellate rulings. The Supremes are loth to get involved with anything, since their authority is largely smoke-and-mirrors. The more a wise man talks, the less wise he is, I guess.
Why the DoJ would make a motion to dismiss is beyound me though. The United States division of powers The Legislative Branch is checked by the Judicial Branch THROUGH court rulings, but I guess someone forgot to mention this plain key fact to the DoJ,
You can rant and rave but let's face it: one of the jobs of the DoJ is to defend the government. They are the government's lawyers. So if you sue against this (or any other) law, it's the DoJ who'll show up opposite you in court. And what's more, they're professionally obligated to do the best defense they can, and this motion falls under that. It would have been irresponsible not to file it.
Here's my point: Like all other institutions, the federal judiciary is not monolithic. Yet we have a lot of good news coming out of there, too... perhaps more than good. At the very least, these rulings show that the pot is beginning to boil -- that the whole IP mess has wormed its way into and throughout the federal court system, and will soon have to be dealt with.
If you really believe you're right, how can that be a bad thing?
Huh what? Re:Time to stop the madness
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
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· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
The only way to fight this very disturbing trend is to grow up and stop hacking... We can't fight them on their own terms so the only way we have to preserve our freedoms is to stop abusing them.
I admit to being a little confused: The best way to protect your freedom is to stop exercising it? I always thought that the best way to protect your freedom was exactly to excercise it, long and loud and often.
Should people be making malicious programs and cracking sites? Surely not. But to say that our best bet lies in being good sheep and just playing along -- that to be heard, we should cower in a corner and plead, "Don't hurt me" -- is simply absurd.
Assuming Big Bang theory, yadda yadda, the reason the universe expands is because of kinetic energy -- mass moving away from the "big bang".
Actually, the Universe expands because, well, the Universe expands... it's in the nature of the spacetime metric, as one of the solutions to Einstein's equations. It doesn't (necessarily) have anything to do with kinetic energy... it's not that planets, stars, etc., are flying into empty space. It's that space itself is growing larger with time.
What could make a judge so hostile to clearly valid academic concerns? Pressure from DOJ or other big- buisiness government interests? The knowledge that her decision ultimately didn't mean squat since the decision would get appealed for decades?
... really bad experience in a math class in college?
I'm honestly curious, someone explain to me why someone would go through the time/money/trouble to create a competing system.
I guess for the same reason monopolies make people antsy: the Europeans probably don't like their increasing dependence on a system administered by a single nation, especially one which, from time to time, trumpets "unilateralism".
There might be some concern, too, that the system would be suspectible to terrorist or other hostile action. Two systems might provide the redundancy to salvage a disaster.
I thought Patents etc. only remained valid when you actively defended them.
Slashcode should be modified so that, whenever a story on patents, trademarks, or copyright is run, an HTML reference (not a hyperlink:)) is created to a FAQ on patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Maybe then we wouldn't see the same "Don't you have to defend these?" posts on inappropriate topics.
Government Trap #9: The belief that government provides protection. Just look at the crime statistics. (or recent events in New York City)
Today's irony: Who collects and collates those statistics? Government, of course, even though the page makes it sound like government is pointless and useless.
I suppose that pointing out a decade of falling crime statistics doesn't earn me any points toward proving that government can offer protection?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I diagree, strongly. Movies most often go wrong when they attempt to show Ultimate Evil. (Except Time Bandits, of course, since Ultimate Evil was indeed a named character). Ultimate Evil is best kept in the shadows, so that you sense it viscerally. No amount of Hollywood SFX -- not even these -- can live up to the conception we carry inside.
My usual case in point is Star Wars. Yes, Vader is evil and they show him. But he isn't Ultimate Evil, since it is always intimated that the Emperor is way more evil than him. In the first, the Emperor is hardly there at all. In The Empire Strikes Back, he shows up only as a vague, intimidating hologram.
Then in Return of the Jedi, he becomes an on-screen character and shrinks to merely human proportions. The showing of the Emperor is what undermines Jedi, for my money. Well, that and Ewoks -- just another manifestation of Ultimate Evil.
Um, yeah, if you don't mind destroying analog reception for all the legacy TVs out there... after all,
meaning those 100 lines are being used, just not to transmit the picture data.
Or I might just be talking about something where I have no actual technical competence.
I have to assume, if you read the article, that you are referring to David Sobel, whose "organization favored the commission's original "opt in" approach, which would have prohibited companies from using consumers' data without their express permission". Unfortunately, if you actually read the article carefully, you see that David Sobel works not for Qwest but for EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center).
If Qwest truly supported an opt-in policy, then they could create an opt-in policy. They could explicitly waive the rights they claim they are merely explicitly reserving via this notice. The federal government is not holding a gun to their heads saying "You must use opt-out." In this case, it most certainly is the corporation choosing to do the wrong thing.
Actually, strictly speaking, it sells because it is perceived to be a valuable, solid product. People stick with it in part because they see few viable alternatives. The Brit initiative is exploring those alternatives. Don't you see, just a smidge, the irony that they publish their survey in closed formats only?
Or, um, how about HTML? Which is, after all, the wrapper for the thing anyway...
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing, though. The sense of the phrase is to desire more than is reasonable; indeed, more than is possible. If it's ordered the way you suggest, that sense is no sense: of course, first you must have the cake and then you can eat it.
But actually, the order is reserved -- and it makes a lot more sense that way. Once you eat your cake, you no longer have it
A quick Net search lead to the following, from a phrase discussion group:
I've thought about the following for a while. There ought to be a two-track system of copyright. Whenever anything is released for public consumption, the publisher would make a choice:
In other words, the content publisher doesn't get to eat his/her cake and have it, too. By restricting Fair Use access, by cordonning off the material from the public domain (essentially forever), the publisher loses the protection of the courts. If you don't want to play ball with the justice system, you don't get to use it, either.
This approach is entirely justifiable, as copyright is a privilege granted by the state, not a right inherent in the content. As Litman and others point out, historically, copyright has been viewed as a bargain between the publishers and the public. If publishers try to unilaterally change the terms of the game -- by, for instance, encrypting data streams -- then the public has every right and justification to revoke the copyright.
Um, the Constitution? Congress has a law-making authority constrained by the Constitution. That bit of law cannot be overridden by a vote of Congress. (It can be amended by such, but that's not the same thing: the amendment process is spelled out in the document and, when followed, leads to new law under the Constitution.)
My other quip would have been, the laws of mathematics. Remember the state legislature that considered mandating a value of 3 for pi?
... which is good, since that's apparently where they're coding, too.
Um, no. Constant velocity does not to be explained in Newtonian physics. It is just every bit as "natural" as being at rest. You might have an intuition or a bias that everything "should" have begun at rest and therefore the current state of non-rest must be explained. But that isn't implicit in Newtonian physics. The advance made by Newton was exactly the realization that changes in velocity required agents but that constant velocity does not.
What is implied by the recent supernova observations -- and we will leave aside the argument over whether Type I supernovae are really standard candles that can be used for this sort of thing -- is that the rate of expansion of the Universe is accelerating. So much we agree upon, although we should both be cautious that these results are still preliminary (and in fact seem recently to have been scaled back some).
One possible explanation for this acceleration -- and the only one that I've seen attract serious attention from cosmologists, though they are far from unaminous on this -- is the presence of a cosmological constant in Einstein's equations. A cosmological constant acts like a pressure density defined everywhere in space and keeps the metric expanding ever faster. But it doesn't exert a "force" in any standard usage of the word. We don't need a repulsive force to accelerate the expansion, because space itself is exapnding and carrying the matter along with it.
I will admit to misusing the name "deSitter Universe", which is apparently not the construct of which I was thinking. I guess it's time to dust off ole MTW and try again.
I was fully aware that was the thrust. But I wanted to flag the incredibly dangerous idea that these freedoms are granted and can be revoked. It doesn't matter how many people "abuse" their right to free speech -- free speech remains a fundamental right of humankind and attempts to restrain it remain unjust.
Of course, people flagrantly flouting the law doesn't make it any easier to convince people that something serious is going on here, and in that light, the original post was good advice. But don't imply that, just because it makes its harder to exercise our rights, it's equivalent to abdicating them.
"This disc is intended for sale or viewing within Region 1 (US and Canada) only."
People keep saying that. I don't know if I intend to be insulted. I have read it. It does make illegal things that allow the exercise of long-established rights.
One might have wished they had continued their aggressive pursuit of Microsoft -- I know I wish they had. However, there is a world of difference between prosecuting a case and defending one. In the Microsoft thing, the DoJ was one of the initiators; they brought the suit. It's an active thing. In the Felten case, the researcher sued the government, and they defended. It's a reactive thing. Ethically, I believe, the DoJ cannot simply allow the progress of suits against the US government to proceed without challenge.
It's sort of along the lines of, your defense attorney isn't interested whether you're guilty. He's there to do his best to spring you.
I'm sorry to repeat myself, but you are in error here. Even in an empty Universe, the Einstein equations lead to a spacetime metric that is either expanding or contracting. (I believe this solution is called a deSitter Universe.) It doesn't take matter at all, so it can't depend on the kinetic energy of matter.
No, actually, it doesn't mean that at all. It means exactly what it says: the metric of spacetime -- the set of notional "metersticks" by which distance is defined -- is simply expanding as a function of time. It's in many ways the exact opposite of a force: there's no agent acting, no particle mediating the expansion, no interaction causing it. It just happens, because the structure of spacetime is such that it expands.
People intiuitively want a stable Universe, so they try to imagine things that "cause" the expansion. I believe it's very analogous to the Newtonian breakthrough in dynamics: For a long while everyone thought that the "natural" state of motion was to be at rest; therefore physical theories "had" to explain constant-velocity motion. But Newton saw that constant-velocity motion -- of which rest is just a particular case -- is the natural thing, and it is accelerations that must be explained. Likewise, people think the Universe "should" be stable and therefore think one must explain the expansion. But the Einstein equations show that the expansion is natural and therefore need not be explained further.
You keep using that word. I do not think it meanms what you think it means.
How are you supposed to distribute an unencrypted version of the work, if you are prohibited from using tools that decrypt the work? Or will it become the responsibility of each person to write his/her own version of deCSS -- without ever discussing any aspect of it with any other person -- so that he/she can decrypt works and allow the perfectly legitimate public domain usage of them?
I'm glad you feel that way. I wish the judge, whose opinion actually matters, felt that way, too. As it is, it is the "potentially infringing" use that sways him. When pressed, the DVDCCA was unable to offer even a single instance wherein DeCSS was implicated in violating copyright.
On the other hand, it was used by quite a number of people to view DVDs on Linux boxes, a completely legitimate use.
So apparently it's not a weight of usage argument after all. DMCA bans things like DeCSS on the mere potential of their misuse. It's like banning hammers because they could be used to kill someone.
Before the DMCA we had strong copyright laws -- some would say too strong -- that provided more than adequate tools to prosecute people actually engaging in copyright violation. The Content Cartel didn't like those laws because they required actual effort to uncover "piracy", assemble a case, etc. It's much easier to make the mere possibility of infringing illegal; the case is much easier to make, then.
It just didn't matter that this completely upends American standards of justice.
Well, first of all, they do. They are still protected by the Bill of Rights, for example; and it's still illegal to, say, randomly beat them.
Second, one would expect that even someone adhering to this principle recognizes a scaling in it. If you litter, is it really OK for the police to break down your door, drag you to a cell, beat you, and torture you? I would hope not.
Third, even if you go so far as to say that no criminal has any rights, it would still apply only to criminals
Funny, I've talked to a lot of people who are far from geeks, much less "pirates". I've told them about the attempt to place unexpirable "access controls" on material slated to be public domain. I've told them about the arrest of a foreign national for writing a program legal in his country. I've told them about the intimidation and outright threatening of scientists who dare to expose flaws in a sham security system. I've told them about being blocked from watching a movie they've bought wherever they want on whatever machine they choose. I've told them about losing their time-honored rights to Fair Use, to First Sale, to archival copies...
You know what? They don't think any of those things should be occuring. They don't think that reverse engineering for system interoperability should be illegal. They don't think allowing backups should be illegal. They don't think allowing you to read an eBook on whatever machine you choose, should be illegal. They don't think control over your own movie collection should be illegal. They don't think that quotation from a digital source, for the purposes of scholarship, should be illegal. They don't think that scientific research should be illegal.
So don't get on your high horse and tell me what people think should be illegal and what not. You don't know a thing about what people want. When the mists are lifted, when the DMCA and its implications are laid bare in ordinary language, and not swirled up and hidden behind copyright-lawyerese, then even the "ordinary" people do care.
In this fight, the problem is not that the majority understand the issues and are against. The problem is that they do not understand the issues. They stand neither against us nor for us, for they have not yet thought it through. In my experience, when they do stop to think about it, when the shape of things is made clear, then the rational citizens I encounter invariable end up quite upset with the DMCA.
People are only as stupid as you seem to think they are, when they listen to you tell them how stupid they are.
It usually takes quite some time for an issue to percolate up to the Supreme Court. It has to show up at the district and appellate levels for two separate districts. Generally, there also has to be an obvious collision between appellate rulings. The Supremes are loth to get involved with anything, since their authority is largely smoke-and-mirrors. The more a wise man talks, the less wise he is, I guess.
You can rant and rave but let's face it: one of the jobs of the DoJ is to defend the government. They are the government's lawyers. So if you sue against this (or any other) law, it's the DoJ who'll show up opposite you in court. And what's more, they're professionally obligated to do the best defense they can, and this motion falls under that. It would have been irresponsible not to file it.
Right now people like to rag on the US judiciary. But just a few days ago, everyone was aglow (Message Boards are Opions and District Court Denies Injunction against bundlings and DeCSS Injunction reversed).
Here's my point: Like all other institutions, the federal judiciary is not monolithic. Yet we have a lot of good news coming out of there, too... perhaps more than good. At the very least, these rulings show that the pot is beginning to boil -- that the whole IP mess has wormed its way into and throughout the federal court system, and will soon have to be dealt with.
If you really believe you're right, how can that be a bad thing?
I admit to being a little confused: The best way to protect your freedom is to stop exercising it? I always thought that the best way to protect your freedom was exactly to excercise it, long and loud and often.
Should people be making malicious programs and cracking sites? Surely not. But to say that our best bet lies in being good sheep and just playing along -- that to be heard, we should cower in a corner and plead, "Don't hurt me" -- is simply absurd.
It won't work, because it never has worked.
Actually, the Universe expands because, well, the Universe expands... it's in the nature of the spacetime metric, as one of the solutions to Einstein's equations. It doesn't (necessarily) have anything to do with kinetic energy... it's not that planets, stars, etc., are flying into empty space. It's that space itself is growing larger with time.
... really bad experience in a math class in college?
:)
I guess for the same reason monopolies make people antsy: the Europeans probably don't like their increasing dependence on a system administered by a single nation, especially one which, from time to time, trumpets "unilateralism".
There might be some concern, too, that the system would be suspectible to terrorist or other hostile action. Two systems might provide the redundancy to salvage a disaster.
Slashcode should be modified so that, whenever a story on patents, trademarks, or copyright is run, an HTML reference (not a hyperlink
Maybe then we wouldn't see the same "Don't you have to defend these?" posts on inappropriate topics.
Today's irony: Who collects and collates those statistics? Government, of course, even though the page makes it sound like government is pointless and useless.
I suppose that pointing out a decade of falling crime statistics doesn't earn me any points toward proving that government can offer protection?