Based on his girlfriend's story I'd say the guy is probably guilty. A person who logs all network traffic is smart enough to know how to post.
Oh, that's good. The new legal standard will be, "If you're smart enough, you're guilty". If he's that smart, how did he get caught? Well, we won't know, will we -- because RangerNIC and the MPAA won't give details. They didn't even show him any evidence that his IP number was used. This could have been the equivalent of a type, but we'll never know -- because the MPAA need never offer any evidence.
It is amazing to me how many people don't seem to get the point here: The MPAA is operating completely without accountability to anyone. They have deep pockets, so they can certainly intimidate any ISP into rolling over.
And the best the drones on slashdot can say is, "Well, he probably deserved it." Indeed, what we're seeing is, "Well, of course he's guilty. They never would have fingered him otherwise." That's right: trust the Corporation. The Corporation is your friend.
Sometimes I wonder why anyone even bothers anymore.
Effectively the MPAA has the power to have anyone disconnected from the net whenever they feel like doing so.
Who provides service for the MPAA? Somewhere along the line, they have to connect to the Net, just like us. What if a bunch of people just started accusing them of copyright infringement and getting their service cut?
Or, perhaps more effectively: What about senators and representatives? They often quote an awful lot of stuff; surely one might feel some of it is in violation. And of course, the beauty is, there doesn't have to be a violation, just an accusation of one.
That's what the police do every day: when they think so one has committed a crime, they arrest him.
Of course, in such a case, the police must charge the person in a timely manner or release them. Judges have ruled that only administrative delays -- and not even those, if egregious -- can warrant holding someone without arraignment. The person arrestesd is entitled to a lawyer and to a full reading of charges. No other action -- forfeiture, etc. -- can be taken until the person is charged, I believe.
Officers who merely hold a suspect while they go fishing open themselves to charges of false arrest and conceivably to civil and criminal penalties. So there are incentives not to go around arresting anyone who might be connected to a crime.
In other words, there are ways to handle these situations and in the real world, the weight falls on those making the accusation: Proof must be offered and the officer will be held accountable. In the bizarro-world of DMCA, though, the weight falls on the individual user.
What if some of the anonymous posters had been indeed posting trade secrets or posting defamatory statements ("Pre-Paid workers eat alive children for lunch on every sunday, poison their bones and then give those to dogs!!! Really!" or some crap like that)?
Then, presumably, the court would have ordered the revelation of their identities... after the damages had been proved . It's possible to sue "John Doe" and then obtain the identities.
Now anyone with a grudge is free to say "Joe Blow of Joe's Carpentry shop talks to lima beans and eats babies"
And you're free to weigh that opinion appropriately. If it worries you that some people are abusing the right to post anonymously, simply discount their input. I'm all for free speech, and I'm even all for anonymous posting... but anonymous posts carry a lot less weight with me, because I can't integrate them into my web of trust.
The key thing here, as far as I can see, is whether the company could go after people who might have defamed the company, violated trade secrets, or whatnot. PPL wanted to get the names before proving any damage was done; and the court rightly stopped them.
Not to disparager Sklyarov, but if you've attended any major research conferences, you know that merely giving a talk makes no implicit statement about your command of English. I'm not saying this as a bit of Know-Nothingism; it's simply true.
In order to have a copyright on it, you must put "(C) Copyright 2001, by [your name here]" somewhere on the document.
This gives you the copyright on it. Posting something (or emailing) without a Copyright notice on it, effectivly makes it Public Domain.
This is a common and dangerous misconception. Whereas it used to be that to have copyright you had to use the (c) and register it, this is no longer true, and hasn't been since (I believe) 1989. See, for further info, "10 Big Myths about Copyright Explained" (http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html).
What I'm wondering is, what exactly do they want with Sklyarov?
He's the perfect scapegoat:
He's a foreigner -- no built-in sympathy and likely a lot of built-in antipathy among American citizens
He's Russian... and we've had nearly fifty years of programming that Russian == Evil
He's unlikely to be articulate in English in his own defense -- and even if he is, he'll have an accent (see first point).
Many Americans feel that the rights under the Constitution do not apply to non-citizens (although the Supreme Court has repeatedly -- and correctly -- ruled they do).
His company is in Russia and does not have the legal infrastructure to mount a defense for him.
It can be cast as a fight to defend "the American way of life" from the ruthless Cossack hackers.
They can get a ridiculously high bail set, because -- as a foreign national -- he's automatically a major flight risk.
Of course they picked a non-citizen for the first test case.
The DMCA is about writing software which defeats protection of *copyrighted information*.
Under current copyright law, a work is copyrighted automatically upon creation. Thus, every piece of email you write and send is copyrighted. Say Alice writes a memo and send it using an MS email client that automatically encrypts it. Bob intercepts this email (illegitimately) and uses his Linus email client to decrypt it. He has used a device to defeat access restrictions on a copyrighted work. Bang! DMCA applies.
Of course most people would not be using the Linux client to crack unauthorized emails but to access ones addressed to them. And of course the Linux client is not really the crucial part here, since Bob could conceivably have used the MS program -- it was the interception that was wrong. But the RIAA, MPAA, and other evil acroynyms have been arguing that a single infringing use -- even one entirely hypothetical -- is enough to open the developer to charges or suit under the DMCA.
The DMCA is a bad law because of its creeping featurism. In the 21st century, copyright law will become one of the major areas of law at all.
I mean, not static, but not in constant freefall like your normal orbiting satellite either.
Since the point of using L1 would be to park the satellite without further energy input, it would most certainly be in free fall. In fact there would be no real inertial difference between something at L1 and something at GEO.
Read the U.S. Copyright Code, Criminal Prosecution section and find out yourself.
Actually, I have read Title 17 (which is the US Copyright Code). There is no exemption for personal use. It is true that, under Fair Use, a court is allowed to consider whether a usage is commercial or non-profit. But it isn't an automatic exemption.
If I thought you were actually interested in learning something -- something which might, just maybe, open your eyes to the past and current state of copyright law -- I'd probably suggest that you pick up Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman. It's a lucid and incisive analysis of recent legistlative and PR initiatives.
But I suspect you'll just want to go back to munching your Cheetos and bleating at Must See TV.
By the way, I am not against intellectual output, but I am foursquare and certain against the bastardization of the word "property" to describe it. I would think my.sig would have made that clear. And while I am probably ignorant on many things, I know that "piracy" has been (mis)used to describe copyright infringement for a long time. But the usage only penetrated to the mainstream relatively recently (thirty years or so), and it has always been a misappropriation of a word in order to derive benefit from the subconscious connotations it evokes.
I will not surrender the language just because the Content Cartel demands it.
If you spend the next two years working on an amazing little piece of software and you choose not to release it as freeware, you absolutely have the right to make that choice.
Indeed, I can certainly charge for it. That does not mean that I have the right to expect anyone to pay me for it. The right to compensation is not a natural inalienable right.
Now, we the public create artificial monopolies so that the software designer, or the author, or whoever has a chance of earning a living and thus an incentive to release the program, book, whatever. But that is a right granted by the public for the furtherance of a public good. If you want the public to grant that right, you sure as heck have to make the case that it benefits the public. And if your "right" requires the abridgement of important, even fundamental, rights of the public, then there is no bargain you can offer that justifies the granting.
Nested quote: (my post in italics)
somehow believes that digital copying is the same as rape, pillage, and murder with an eyepatch and a parrot
Of course it isn't. Anyone who claims they are the same is an idiot.
And there are a lot of idiots out there, who uncritically accept the tortuous redefinition of "copyright infringement" as "piracy".
Can an author hope to make a profit on a work? Sure. Can an author take steps to realize that profit? Sure. Should an author -- or a content holder -- have the right to call down at whim the full thunderous wrath of the American justice system? Absolutely not.
Infringement is not theft. It is still a crime, but it is not a theft. It is a crime which could not have been practiced until remarkably recently in human history, and not easily until only an eyeblink ago. Are there kinks and bugs to be worked out so that creators can be properly compensated while the public derives maximum benefit from their work? Sure.
But by calling it "theft" and -- worse -- "piracy", the Content Cartel isn't expressing a willingness to work out the bargain. They're attempting to shoe-horn this new type of activity into the models of the old, because they know they derive great (IMHO, unjustified) benefits from the old models, and the public be hanged.
Misuse of these terms obscures the issue, not clarifies it, and it is done solely to serve an agenda that cannot stand the light of public inquiry.
You own the phsyical DVD, you DON'T OWN THE MOVIE TO DO WITH IT WHAT YOU WISH
Sure I do. I can make a frisbee of the disc. I can watch the movie a hundred times; I can never watch it. I can give it to a friend, I can copy the movie onto VHS to watch at school, I can quote sections for a review.
Indeed, copyright law -- especially before the stillborn monstrosity called the DMCA -- recognized that, in creation of a work, an author is vested with certain rights and the public is vested with certain rights. Copyright has traditionally been seen as a balancing act between the public's interest in open sharing of the work, and the public's interest in encouraging other authors to come forward and create.
As noted in Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman, it is only recently that the attitude has begun to shift toward investing "property" rights to the hands of copyright holders. Ironically, this means that almost all of the culture held up as a justification for the current system is actually a holdover from the earlier one.
I'm getting sick and tired -- really sick and tired! -- of hearing all of this whining from people who have a genuine hidden agenda.
Me too! Imagine the arrogance, of redefining a word like "piracy" -- with connotations of rape, pillage, the Jolly Roger and all that -- to apply to the non-violent act of digital copying!
Oh, wait. We're on opposite sides but seem to have the same complaint.
More amusingly,
shielded by one or two words of the English langugage in the code itself from actual criminal violations of the statute.
Um, what exactly does this mean? Isn't the law composed of words of the English language? Or are you saying that, for example, the press hides behind that annoying technical meaning of the word "no" when reading the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law...") If only we removed that technicality, then, hey, it'd be so much easier to make sure that only the "right" things get printed...
You buy a gun, put bullets in it, drive to my house, break down my door, threaten me, then point the loaded gun right in front of my face and cock it. Then you tell me you were just kidding around with me and expect me to believe you? Hey you didn't actually fire the gun right?
Ah, yes. The unauthorized copying of digital content is clearly exactly equivalent to breaking and entering, assault and battery, and attempted homocide. Wow, what a flat moral Universe you inhabit.
But I guess a crowd that equates digital information (infinitely copiable) with physics property (automatically scarce) -- and somehow believes that digital copying is the same as rape, pillage, and murder with an eyepatch and a parrot -- would have no trouble believing that unlocking ebooks is the same as attempting to shoot someone.
Sometimes I am tempted to believe the good guys will win this just because the other side is so, well, laughable.
Maybe. But I sure as heck wouldn't call down the almighty thunder of the Unites States legal system to crush them... In fact, I rather hope I wouldn't be "pissed off", because I like to think I'm more mature than that. If the clone ray is common knowledge, then it's pretty stupid of me not to anticipate that people will do this.
Do I somehow have a God-given right and a state-sanctioned guarantee to somehow make a living off the painting on my car? I don't think so... If that was my plan, and if the cloning ray exists, then it's a pretty dumb plan and I deserve what comes out.
Of course, the cloning ray will threaten the Association of Decorative Car Painters, and I imagine that the ADCP will lobby Congress for a draconian law that says, "No, you can't use the clone ray for anything because you might use it to undermine our business, so, to the starving children, sorry.."
HOWEVER, when you make a copy of a song in a digital format that you did not buy, it is stealing. Plain and simple.
No, it's not "stealing". It's "infringing". It could only be stealing if there was an actual removal of property and -- contrary to the myths promulgated by the Content Cartel -- there is no true property involved here. If someone steals my car, I can't use it anymore. If someone steals my book, I can't use it anymore. If someone copies my music file, I can still listen to it.
What has been affected is a potential revenue stream, not an actual piece of property. It's convenient for the Content Cartel to use intellectual "property" because it automatically activates subconscious connotations in those who hear the term. But IP simply does not behave the same way physical property does, and it makes less than zero sense to pretend they're the same.
Make no mistake: It's not that you have a copy that the RIAA objects to. It's that you have, potentially, cut off a sale that they might have made -- a chance for them to make a zero-cost reproduction and so even more massively inflate their profits.
There's a reason why copyright "owner" is not the preferred term and copyright "holder" is, in the laws...
I do belive that RIAA would be less insistent had the "online community" kept a higher moral standard.
Then, with all due respect, you're deluded. This have never been about right or wrong, or keeping a high moral ground, or enhancing user experience, or even about creativity. It's been about money and it's been about control.
Napster might have been the flash of lightning, but it's been raining for a long time, friend.
They did provide a convenient way to get the job done.
More aptly, one could say exactly the same thing with the understanding that "the job" was providing someone for the RIAA to sue. That is, it would have been extremely hard -- and outrageously bad PR -- for the RIAA to track down and sue millions of individual users who traded songs. If they had done that, the lopsidedness of the DMCA and modern copyright law would have become suddenly, painfully apparent to the sheep, whom they need to keep somolescent.
But, Napster provided a convenient intermediary whom they could demonize and sue. In other words, if Napster hadn't existed, they would have been forced to invent it... to have a proper target for their misinformation and lawyers.
You didn't license the music on that CD; you bought a copy.
and by doing so, secured the right to make other copies of the disc for personal use (such as listening in the car or whatever). This right is encoded in actual law, the Audio Home Recording Act.
The oddity is, courts have ruled that if you make a copy of a disc you own, it's OK, but if someone else makes a copy for you -- even of a disc you own! -- it's verbotten. Never mind that the two copies are indistinguishable.
It's that simple. Since the equipment you are using belongs to the employers and the bandwidth you are using belongs to the employers, they have the right to state any policy they want.
It's not as simple as you -- and most employers -- believe. Look at the following:
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, that's good. The new legal standard will be, "If you're smart enough, you're guilty". If he's that smart, how did he get caught? Well, we won't know, will we -- because RangerNIC and the MPAA won't give details. They didn't even show him any evidence that his IP number was used. This could have been the equivalent of a type, but we'll never know -- because the MPAA need never offer any evidence.
It is amazing to me how many people don't seem to get the point here: The MPAA is operating completely without accountability to anyone. They have deep pockets, so they can certainly intimidate any ISP into rolling over.
And the best the drones on slashdot can say is, "Well, he probably deserved it." Indeed, what we're seeing is, "Well, of course he's guilty. They never would have fingered him otherwise." That's right: trust the Corporation. The Corporation is your friend.
Sometimes I wonder why anyone even bothers anymore.
Who provides service for the MPAA? Somewhere along the line, they have to connect to the Net, just like us. What if a bunch of people just started accusing them of copyright infringement and getting their service cut?
Or, perhaps more effectively: What about senators and representatives? They often quote an awful lot of stuff; surely one might feel some of it is in violation. And of course, the beauty is, there doesn't have to be a violation, just an accusation of one.
Of course, in such a case, the police must charge the person in a timely manner or release them. Judges have ruled that only administrative delays -- and not even those, if egregious -- can warrant holding someone without arraignment. The person arrestesd is entitled to a lawyer and to a full reading of charges. No other action -- forfeiture, etc. -- can be taken until the person is charged, I believe.
Officers who merely hold a suspect while they go fishing open themselves to charges of false arrest and conceivably to civil and criminal penalties. So there are incentives not to go around arresting anyone who might be connected to a crime.
In other words, there are ways to handle these situations and in the real world, the weight falls on those making the accusation: Proof must be offered and the officer will be held accountable. In the bizarro-world of DMCA, though, the weight falls on the individual user.
Of course it took a long time, and no one expected it quite to work that way, and it's not quite there yet...
The key thing here, as far as I can see, is whether the company could go after people who might have defamed the company, violated trade secrets, or whatnot. PPL wanted to get the names before proving any damage was done; and the court rightly stopped them.
Not to disparager Sklyarov, but if you've attended any major research conferences, you know that merely giving a talk makes no implicit statement about your command of English. I'm not saying this as a bit of Know-Nothingism; it's simply true.
- He's a foreigner -- no built-in sympathy and likely a lot of built-in antipathy among American citizens
- He's Russian
... and we've had nearly fifty years of programming that Russian == Evil
- He's unlikely to be articulate in English in his own defense -- and even if he is, he'll have an accent (see first point).
- Many Americans feel that the rights under the Constitution do not apply to non-citizens (although the Supreme Court has repeatedly -- and correctly -- ruled they do).
- His company is in Russia and does not have the legal infrastructure to mount a defense for him.
- It can be cast as a fight to defend "the American way of life" from the ruthless Cossack hackers.
- They can get a ridiculously high bail set, because -- as a foreign national -- he's automatically a major flight risk.
Of course they picked a non-citizen for the first test case.Of course most people would not be using the Linux client to crack unauthorized emails but to access ones addressed to them. And of course the Linux client is not really the crucial part here, since Bob could conceivably have used the MS program -- it was the interception that was wrong. But the RIAA, MPAA, and other evil acroynyms have been arguing that a single infringing use -- even one entirely hypothetical -- is enough to open the developer to charges or suit under the DMCA.
The DMCA is a bad law because of its creeping featurism. In the 21st century, copyright law will become one of the major areas of law at all.
If I thought you were actually interested in learning something -- something which might, just maybe, open your eyes to the past and current state of copyright law -- I'd probably suggest that you pick up Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman. It's a lucid and incisive analysis of recent legistlative and PR initiatives.
But I suspect you'll just want to go back to munching your Cheetos and bleating at Must See TV.
By the way, I am not against intellectual output, but I am foursquare and certain against the bastardization of the word "property" to describe it. I would think my .sig would have made that clear. And while I am probably ignorant on many things, I know that "piracy" has been (mis)used to describe copyright infringement for a long time. But the usage only penetrated to the mainstream relatively recently (thirty years or so), and it has always been a misappropriation of a word in order to derive benefit from the subconscious connotations it evokes.
I will not surrender the language just because the Content Cartel demands it.
Now, we the public create artificial monopolies so that the software designer, or the author, or whoever has a chance of earning a living and thus an incentive to release the program, book, whatever. But that is a right granted by the public for the furtherance of a public good. If you want the public to grant that right, you sure as heck have to make the case that it benefits the public. And if your "right" requires the abridgement of important, even fundamental, rights of the public, then there is no bargain you can offer that justifies the granting.
Nested quote: (my post in italics)
And there are a lot of idiots out there, who uncritically accept the tortuous redefinition of "copyright infringement" as "piracy".Can an author hope to make a profit on a work? Sure. Can an author take steps to realize that profit? Sure. Should an author -- or a content holder -- have the right to call down at whim the full thunderous wrath of the American justice system? Absolutely not.
Infringement is not theft. It is still a crime, but it is not a theft. It is a crime which could not have been practiced until remarkably recently in human history, and not easily until only an eyeblink ago. Are there kinks and bugs to be worked out so that creators can be properly compensated while the public derives maximum benefit from their work? Sure.
But by calling it "theft" and -- worse -- "piracy", the Content Cartel isn't expressing a willingness to work out the bargain. They're attempting to shoe-horn this new type of activity into the models of the old, because they know they derive great (IMHO, unjustified) benefits from the old models, and the public be hanged.
Misuse of these terms obscures the issue, not clarifies it, and it is done solely to serve an agenda that cannot stand the light of public inquiry.
Indeed, copyright law -- especially before the stillborn monstrosity called the DMCA -- recognized that, in creation of a work, an author is vested with certain rights and the public is vested with certain rights. Copyright has traditionally been seen as a balancing act between the public's interest in open sharing of the work, and the public's interest in encouraging other authors to come forward and create.
As noted in Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman, it is only recently that the attitude has begun to shift toward investing "property" rights to the hands of copyright holders. Ironically, this means that almost all of the culture held up as a justification for the current system is actually a holdover from the earlier one.
Oh, wait. We're on opposite sides but seem to have the same complaint.
More amusingly,
Um, what exactly does this mean? Isn't the law composed of words of the English language? Or are you saying that, for example, the press hides behind that annoying technical meaning of the word "no" when reading the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law...") If only we removed that technicality, then, hey, it'd be so much easier to make sure that only the "right" things get printed...But I guess a crowd that equates digital information (infinitely copiable) with physics property (automatically scarce) -- and somehow believes that digital copying is the same as rape, pillage, and murder with an eyepatch and a parrot -- would have no trouble believing that unlocking ebooks is the same as attempting to shoot someone.
Sometimes I am tempted to believe the good guys will win this just because the other side is so, well, laughable.
Do I somehow have a God-given right and a state-sanctioned guarantee to somehow make a living off the painting on my car? I don't think so... If that was my plan, and if the cloning ray exists, then it's a pretty dumb plan and I deserve what comes out.
Of course, the cloning ray will threaten the Association of Decorative Car Painters, and I imagine that the ADCP will lobby Congress for a draconian law that says, "No, you can't use the clone ray for anything because you might use it to undermine our business, so, to the starving children, sorry.."
But no one seems to believe me.
What has been affected is a potential revenue stream, not an actual piece of property. It's convenient for the Content Cartel to use intellectual "property" because it automatically activates subconscious connotations in those who hear the term. But IP simply does not behave the same way physical property does, and it makes less than zero sense to pretend they're the same.
Make no mistake: It's not that you have a copy that the RIAA objects to. It's that you have, potentially, cut off a sale that they might have made -- a chance for them to make a zero-cost reproduction and so even more massively inflate their profits.
There's a reason why copyright "owner" is not the preferred term and copyright "holder" is, in the laws...
Napster might have been the flash of lightning, but it's been raining for a long time, friend.
But, Napster provided a convenient intermediary whom they could demonize and sue. In other words, if Napster hadn't existed, they would have been forced to invent it... to have a proper target for their misinformation and lawyers.
The oddity is, courts have ruled that if you make a copy of a disc you own, it's OK, but if someone else makes a copy for you -- even of a disc you own! -- it's verbotten. Never mind that the two copies are indistinguishable.