When did the US sink so low as to allow pigs to break into a man's home--his castle--and listen to his private conversations?
Um, since about 1928 (the first rulings on wiretapping from the Supreme Court). But since 1967 or so, the Court has ruled that gathering evidence by wiretap (or bug) is essentially the same as gathering it in person; that is, a warrant is needed.
The issue here is not, Are there any circumstances under which the government has a compelling issue in obtaining evidence by wiretap, bug, or whatever? The issue is, how high should the bar be set? How hard should it be for the government to show such need?
The FBI argues that this is not a wiretap and so it meets low standards. The defendant holds that it was a wiretap and hence needed a specific warrant to be placed.
People like to cast these things as black-and-white: Either the government can't bug us, and we are totally free; or the government can, and we are entirely enslaved. Unfortunately for such extremists, history has always been more nuanced: The American judicial system always works on the principle of balances and tensions. What's important is to set the price of such invasions so high that they be used only in the most extreme, most justifiable conditions.
This case is, in large part, not about the technology that is used but about the accountability of those who use it.
To me, the issue isn't the patent. Heck, I have nowhere near the competence to evaluate that. (Hey! I could work at the PTO!)
For me, the issue is the allegation that a URL to a website that might contain the software that violates the patent, is construed to be a violation of the patent itself. In other words, Dolby now wants to control to whom I can link.
And in time honored fashion, this simply means a lot of us will have to link to that site.
I wonder if this means Disney will finally get off theif duffs and authorize Wendy Carlos to do a remastered CD version of the soundtrack. Tron had a, well, different sound to it which I happened to have enjoyed. Yet despite the techno-intense nature of the movie, the music has never been released in digital.:(
Indeed, the proponents of DMCA made precisely this argument: "we can't put a fair use provision into this statute because if we did, it would be treated under the Copyright Clause."
Title I is called the "WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act of 1998"?
Title II is called the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act"?
Title III "creates an exemption for making a copy of a computer program
by activating a computer for purposes of maintenance or repair", according to the report and summary of the Office of Copyright in the Library of Congress?
"Title IV contains six miscellaneous provisions, relating to the
functions of the Copyright Office, distance education, the exceptions
in the Copyright Act for libraries and for making ephemeral recordings,
"webcasting" of sound recordings on the Internet, and the applicability
of collective bargaining agreement obligations in the case of transfers
of rights in motion pictures."? (same source)
Oh, by the way, the DMCA accomplishes its nefarious purposes by amending Title 17 of the United States Code. And amazingly enough, that title is called "Title 17: Copyrights".
Do you really think any competent, impartial judge is going to buy an argument that the DMCA is not a copyright law and therefore authorized by the Copyright Clause?
Um, I'm not the original poster, so maybe I'm wrong... but it seemed pretty obvious to me that the line
Do you still wonder why people protest at the G-8 and other such summits?"
was referring to the growing power of transnational corporations to impose their will and agenda on formerly sovereign nations... which is exactly one significant reason people protest at the G8 and such.
I don't think the original poster was asserting that protestors are all Free-DVD agitators; just that they're expressing their frustration with the same root causes as we do, even if the issues involved are superficially different.
[Congress shall have the power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing
for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
respective Writings and Discoveries. [emphasis added]
Fact: The DMCA makes it illegal to reverse-engineer or otherwise circumvent any "acces control mechanism", even when such circumvention is intended to exercise Fair Use rights.
Fact: The DMCA does not specify, grant, or recognize any time limitation on the validity of the access-control mechanisms. That is, there is no given time after which it becomes legal to circumvent the mechanism.
Fact: For now, at least, copyright does expire (if only in 120 years or whatever) and hence, works will pass into public domain. In fact, DMCA could be used to protect works copyrighted long ago as long as the mechanism is true. Therefore, at some point (perhaps soon), public domain works will be locked behind proprietary access-control mechanisms.
Implication: By wrapping content in access-control mechanisms, a content provider can charge access fees and so control the distribution, even of a public domain work, essentially forever.
Fact: "Forever" cannot be properly encompassed within the term "limited Times".
Conclusion: The DMCA is unconstitutional.
Valid? Through some crime of happenstance, I don't happen to sit on the Supreme Court, so I can't say so definitively. Is there enough there as to question the constitutionality of the DMCA? You bet.
PS: I really don't give a hairy fig if "any average IP holding millionaire" woulkd hate to be like me. I don't measure my self-worth in dollars. There exists value other than economic value.
Either Slashdot will continue limping along without a real identity,
I don't see Slashdot as having an "identity crisis". I think it's hard to pigeon-hole the site into a nice neat box (gadget links, geek news, cool pictures) but I don't think that's a weakness. I think it's a strength.
Maybe I just misfire on all the same cylinders as the editors, but I don't think I've ever had a day where more than one story made me think "What is that doing on slashdot?" The selections are eclective and the thread connecting them is sometimes tenuous, almost ineffable... but it's still there.
I guess I'm just one of those (few? silent?) people who think that, by and large, slashdot works.
If by "technically", you mean, as it applies to law and political acts, then, no. Treason is
the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign's family
There is an older sense which is closer to what you want:
the betrayal of a trust : TREACHERY
but that wouldn't be an actionable thing and you sure as heck wouldn't execute people for it. But beyond that, it can be argued (for it has been argued) that the people supporting the DMCA and the people incarcerating Sklyvarov are doing what they feel to be in the best interest of the nation. It just happens to coincide with their own best interest...
I guess what I'm saying is, don't throw around the justifiably serious charge of treason just because people disagree with you. Yes, the DMCA is a bad law. Yes, its passage was a classic snapshot of all that is ailing the legislative process in America these days. Yes, the reps and senators who wrote it, voted for it, and are still supporting it probably were swayed by the gobs of money thrown at them by the networks, the content providers, and the software issues. Yes, it sacrifices time-honored proctections of the public for the narrow self-interest of some corporations.
For these reason -- as well as the basic affront to the Constitution that it is -- the law is bad and should be amended, repealed, or overturned. For these reasons, its supporters are misguided at best and quite possibly cynically manipulative.
But they are not traitors. Do not so quickly cut people off from the body politic based on a difference of opinion. Do what we can do: Call your rep. Write your local TV station. Run for office.
The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to
comply with basic economic laws
Um, to the extent that economic laws are "Laws", as in science, it's impossible not to obey them. To the extent that they are prescriptions, they are mutable.
Beyond which, the "laws" of Adam Smith are based on one particular slice of economic phase space. They rely critically on control of scarce resources to maximize output or profit. On the Net, the resource most often bandied about -- ie., conent -- has no marginal cost. (There is a fixed cost to make the first copy of it, of course -- research, editing, whatnot) -- but not marginal cost. The "last item made" costs nothing.
Nolle is really whining "I don't know how you can make money on the Net. And who's going to pay for a consultant with no answers? This must be fixed! Boo hoo!"
Then he babbles on to say
The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't
have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored
network.
Leaving aside the reasonable counter-contention that perhaps its hippie-anarchist roots are precisely the source of the Net's strength, let's address that final sentence. "This" is a business. What is "this"? The Net as a whole? That's entirely laughable. That's like saying "The highway is a business." Or "Kings County" is a business.
The Net can be a medium in which business is done. It is far from a monolithic business of its own... which is great. It's a mechanism by which different businesses -- and sometimes even the forgotten citizen -- can interact and ease transactions. So let me shout it from the mountaintops: The Net is not a business! It was never meant to be. It never should be."
On the other hand, considering the origins, it actually is a government-sponsored network. That's a fact, jack. It might have grown beyond those origins but they're still there. And they should be retained, as well.
Let us now turn our attention to Michael Roberts, former chairman of the
Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers,
It's too big, too important, too
political to be treated as something for only a band of talented engineers to preside
over.
This, to me, sounds a lot like "War is too important to be left to the generals". (A philosophy that worked, oh so well, in the early 20th century.) Apparently Mr. Roberts would like un talented engineers to maintain the Net. (Of course, it's far from surprising that someone associated with ICANN would -- shocker! -- support more centralized control of the Net and its namespace.)
The really sad thing is, these people -- by proclaiming themselves experts -- will convince the average citizen that business should warp the Internet into whatever generates the highest short-term profits. *sigh*
I prefer "greasing the wheels of innovation and helping the proletariat achieve a lifestyle that has never been known before" capitalism. The wealth is spread as reinvestment of capital is made. There isn't a country on earth who distributes more of it's wealth to more of it's people than the US
Heck, it's pretty clear that a free market is just about the strongest economic engine you can have, or more accurately, that humankind has yet seen. Despite what gets lobbed around slashdot, not everyone supporting an injunction on Microsoft is a dyed-in-the-wool commie.
But, granting that the free market is a powerful engine, I am lead to remember an important fact from engineering: Almost nothing is more damaging than a powerful engine improperly directed. That is, a totally free market could itself be a disaster. And just as its benefits could be unparalled in economic history, its harm could be unmatched in the sad annals of human history.
I am very much a Reform Capitalist: There are things the market does well, and we should let it do them. But there are also values that are not economic values. Government has a legitimate role in ensuring that the forces of capitalism do actually produce all those wonderful things you mention. Something has to set the inputs to the market, and one of the things that does is -- legitimately -- the political process.
As for creating the highest standard of living ever (which is true): The US is not now, nor has it ever been, a pure free market capitalist state. We veered close to that in the last quarter of the 19th century, but luckily people came to their senses and reined things in somewhat. I find it far from convincing that it is the free market alone that produced that transfer of wealth. In fact, I think the evidence lies the other way: That government intervention has played a role in preventing a disastrous stratification of wealth.
If this were the foundation of a successful economy and market then the soviet experiment would have turned out to be a wonderful utopia instead of the dismal failure it is.
I believe this is called a "straw man" argument: The Soviet model was based on State control of the economy. The Soviet model failed. This action implies some state influence on the economy. Therefore it is the Soviet model. Therefore it is doomed to fail.
It might play well in Peoria, but it is of course complete and utter nonsense. It simply isn't true that our only choices are restricted to "Workers unite!" Sovietism and "Greasing the wheels of industry with the blood of the proletariat" capitalism.
Much of the American experiment has dealt with searching for that third way.
We can bitch, we can moan, we can hang politicians by their ankles, but we can't prevent this from happening.
We can prevent this from happening. Well, maybe not the small "this" of the.us giveaway (that seems to be on the express track to Hell) but the larger "this" of laws, courts, and politicians bought and sold by monied interests quite contrary to the public interest they are sworn to uphold...
And part of it is the bitching and moaning. But the biggest thing we can do is the one thing most won't: Get off your lazy behinds and vote! It's a bit amusing and a bit sad to see everyone whining about how "they" are taking away our rights, yet half the people in the nation don't even bother to vote in presidential elections.
The system stinks? The people in power don't listen? Make them listen. Better yet, run for office and become a person in power. Democracy ain't easy.
And it sure as heck isn't served by pre-defeatism.
And the non-cynic side of me can't think of any reason that its not true.
The ground must be prepared before a crop can take root... We should be outraged and exploring our options because we know and we can. You don't fight the Good Fight because you're likely to win. You fight it because the alternative -- the silent submission to a slow strangling -- is unthinkable.
Who is the infamous Joe Sixpack going to look to when abusive prosecution finally does enter his consciousness? He's going to look to the info-enthusiasts, the tech heads, the geeks. Hasn't anyone ever asked your opinion on electronics? When someone asks about buying a DVD player, shouldn't you inform them about region encoding, etc.?
If we fight the system and lose, then we lose. But if we do nothing, we lose, too. At least the first way, we might win. And at least, the first way, we'll have salvaged a tiny bit of human dignity from the corporate trainwreck that is the human experience today.
AFAIK (and IMHO, IANAL:), Louisiana's law is constituted under "Napoleonic Code", not English common law. The Napoleanic Code is a massive codification instigated by, well, Napolean and carried by the French Army to much of Western Europe.
Again, AFAIK, Napoleanic Code is generally construed as more restrictive (read: state-favoring) than English Common Law.
Well, your car is actual property. Fair Use applies not to actual property but to intellectual "property", which behaves (economically and technically) in ways completely differently from actual property. Any similarity is essentially foisted on from the outside by the artificial monopolies called trademark and copyright.
Of course the Constitution is a common law docuement so isn't valid in these courts.....
Er, the definition of common law (according to Merriam Webster is
the body of law developed in England primarily from judicial decisions based on custom and precedent,
unwritten in statute or code, and constituting the basis of the English legal system and of the system in all of the U.S. except Louisiana [emphasis added]
Since the US Constitution is written down, how can it be a common law document? For that matter, how can any document?
However, it doesn't make it any less wrong to download mp3s that you didn't legally purchase. What amazes me is the/. attitude towards mp3s. I doubt most of the people who post here regularly would advocate going into a music store and stealing tapes or CDs.
Of course, the tape or CD is a physical object and your absconding with it deprives someone else of the ability to use it. MP3s are digital entities and therefore your copying it does not hinder my ability to listen to it.
Just to show that there is a difference betweeen the two, and hence, at least possible grounds for having different attitudes.
It's a shame to see how people are frigtheneed, not by the facts of others' views, not by the expression of others' views, but apparently by the existence of others' views.
I don't know if the poster is from the RIAA, and I don't agree with him/her, but why on Earth would we need to "get it off slashdot"? Slashdot's only value is as an open exchange of ideas. Sure, that one is unpopular. All the more reason to protect it, I say.
.I suppose you think that educating young people about what rape is, and offering any opinion about, say, forcing non-consensual sex on a drunken teenage girl would be wrong too.
You know, these circumstances aren't morally equivalent. Rape is a felony crime committed against the fundamental security of an actual citizen. Copyright infringement is an economic crime committed against the revenue stream of some entity (possibly a person, usually a corporation).
Also, the legal and moral issues in rape are relatively stable, universal, and understood. The issues in IP law are evolving, dissonant, controversial, and muddied. Presenting it as a done deal is a disservice and a danger.
Is copyright infringement a crime? Yes. Is it a crime on a par with rape? No, not at all. In the limited time with the limited resources available to a school for a civics program, I think it immensely obvious that teaching about rape, murder, etc., is much much much more important than a four-week unit on copyright law.
ObAside: And I'd be mightily surprised if the issues of Fair Use and First Sale (assuming a British equivalent exists) will be raised and treated properly.
Besides, you don't have to declare the fact that you are ignoring a law. You just do it
To shroud yourself in the moral mantle of civil disobedience, your violation of the law must be public (and, IMHO, actually punished). Otherwise, you're just a law-dodger.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue here is not, Are there any circumstances under which the government has a compelling issue in obtaining evidence by wiretap, bug, or whatever? The issue is, how high should the bar be set? How hard should it be for the government to show such need?
The FBI argues that this is not a wiretap and so it meets low standards. The defendant holds that it was a wiretap and hence needed a specific warrant to be placed.
People like to cast these things as black-and-white: Either the government can't bug us, and we are totally free; or the government can, and we are entirely enslaved. Unfortunately for such extremists, history has always been more nuanced: The American judicial system always works on the principle of balances and tensions. What's important is to set the price of such invasions so high that they be used only in the most extreme, most justifiable conditions.
This case is, in large part, not about the technology that is used but about the accountability of those who use it.
For me, the issue is the allegation that a URL to a website that might contain the software that violates the patent, is construed to be a violation of the patent itself. In other words, Dolby now wants to control to whom I can link.
And in time honored fashion, this simply means a lot of us will have to link to that site.
I wonder if this means Disney will finally get off theif duffs and authorize Wendy Carlos to do a remastered CD version of the soundtrack. Tron had a, well, different sound to it which I happened to have enjoyed. Yet despite the techno-intense nature of the movie, the music has never been released in digital. :(
- Title I is called the "WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act of 1998"?
- Title II is called the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act"?
- Title III "creates an exemption for making a copy of a computer program
by activating a computer for purposes of maintenance or repair", according to the report and summary of the Office of Copyright in the Library of Congress?
- "Title IV contains six miscellaneous provisions, relating to the
functions of the Copyright Office, distance education, the exceptions
in the Copyright Act for libraries and for making ephemeral recordings,
"webcasting" of sound recordings on the Internet, and the applicability
of collective bargaining agreement obligations in the case of transfers
of rights in motion pictures."? (same source)
Oh, by the way, the DMCA accomplishes its nefarious purposes by amending Title 17 of the United States Code. And amazingly enough, that title is called "Title 17: Copyrights".Do you really think any competent, impartial judge is going to buy an argument that the DMCA is not a copyright law and therefore authorized by the Copyright Clause?
I don't think the original poster was asserting that protestors are all Free-DVD agitators; just that they're expressing their frustration with the same root causes as we do, even if the issues involved are superficially different.
Fact: The DMCA does not specify, grant, or recognize any time limitation on the validity of the access-control mechanisms. That is, there is no given time after which it becomes legal to circumvent the mechanism.
Fact: For now, at least, copyright does expire (if only in 120 years or whatever) and hence, works will pass into public domain. In fact, DMCA could be used to protect works copyrighted long ago as long as the mechanism is true. Therefore, at some point (perhaps soon), public domain works will be locked behind proprietary access-control mechanisms.
Implication: By wrapping content in access-control mechanisms, a content provider can charge access fees and so control the distribution, even of a public domain work, essentially forever.
Fact: "Forever" cannot be properly encompassed within the term "limited Times".
Conclusion: The DMCA is unconstitutional.
Valid? Through some crime of happenstance, I don't happen to sit on the Supreme Court, so I can't say so definitively. Is there enough there as to question the constitutionality of the DMCA? You bet.
PS: I really don't give a hairy fig if "any average IP holding millionaire" woulkd hate to be like me. I don't measure my self-worth in dollars. There exists value other than economic value.
Oh, yes, cell phones are much more secure. No loss of privacy there.
The right way to fight this is on constitutional grounds, as the Constitution is a law... the supreme law of the land.
Maybe I just misfire on all the same cylinders as the editors, but I don't think I've ever had a day where more than one story made me think "What is that doing on slashdot?" The selections are eclective and the thread connecting them is sometimes tenuous, almost ineffable... but it's still there.
I guess I'm just one of those (few? silent?) people who think that, by and large, slashdot works.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't throw around the justifiably serious charge of treason just because people disagree with you. Yes, the DMCA is a bad law. Yes, its passage was a classic snapshot of all that is ailing the legislative process in America these days. Yes, the reps and senators who wrote it, voted for it, and are still supporting it probably were swayed by the gobs of money thrown at them by the networks, the content providers, and the software issues. Yes, it sacrifices time-honored proctections of the public for the narrow self-interest of some corporations.
For these reason -- as well as the basic affront to the Constitution that it is -- the law is bad and should be amended, repealed, or overturned. For these reasons, its supporters are misguided at best and quite possibly cynically manipulative.
But they are not traitors. Do not so quickly cut people off from the body politic based on a difference of opinion. Do what we can do: Call your rep. Write your local TV station. Run for office.
Beyond which, the "laws" of Adam Smith are based on one particular slice of economic phase space. They rely critically on control of scarce resources to maximize output or profit. On the Net, the resource most often bandied about -- ie., conent -- has no marginal cost. (There is a fixed cost to make the first copy of it, of course -- research, editing, whatnot) -- but not marginal cost. The "last item made" costs nothing.
Nolle is really whining "I don't know how you can make money on the Net. And who's going to pay for a consultant with no answers? This must be fixed! Boo hoo!"
Then he babbles on to say
Leaving aside the reasonable counter-contention that perhaps its hippie-anarchist roots are precisely the source of the Net's strength, let's address that final sentence. "This" is a business. What is "this"? The Net as a whole? That's entirely laughable. That's like saying "The highway is a business." Or "Kings County" is a business.The Net can be a medium in which business is done. It is far from a monolithic business of its own... which is great. It's a mechanism by which different businesses -- and sometimes even the forgotten citizen -- can interact and ease transactions. So let me shout it from the mountaintops: The Net is not a business! It was never meant to be. It never should be."
On the other hand, considering the origins, it actually is a government-sponsored network. That's a fact, jack. It might have grown beyond those origins but they're still there. And they should be retained, as well.
Let us now turn our attention to Michael Roberts, former chairman of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers,
This, to me, sounds a lot like "War is too important to be left to the generals". (A philosophy that worked, oh so well, in the early 20th century.) Apparently Mr. Roberts would like un talented engineers to maintain the Net. (Of course, it's far from surprising that someone associated with ICANN would -- shocker! -- support more centralized control of the Net and its namespace.)The really sad thing is, these people -- by proclaiming themselves experts -- will convince the average citizen that business should warp the Internet into whatever generates the highest short-term profits. *sigh*
But, granting that the free market is a powerful engine, I am lead to remember an important fact from engineering: Almost nothing is more damaging than a powerful engine improperly directed. That is, a totally free market could itself be a disaster. And just as its benefits could be unparalled in economic history, its harm could be unmatched in the sad annals of human history.
I am very much a Reform Capitalist: There are things the market does well, and we should let it do them. But there are also values that are not economic values. Government has a legitimate role in ensuring that the forces of capitalism do actually produce all those wonderful things you mention. Something has to set the inputs to the market, and one of the things that does is -- legitimately -- the political process.
As for creating the highest standard of living ever (which is true): The US is not now, nor has it ever been, a pure free market capitalist state. We veered close to that in the last quarter of the 19th century, but luckily people came to their senses and reined things in somewhat. I find it far from convincing that it is the free market alone that produced that transfer of wealth. In fact, I think the evidence lies the other way: That government intervention has played a role in preventing a disastrous stratification of wealth.
It might play well in Peoria, but it is of course complete and utter nonsense. It simply isn't true that our only choices are restricted to "Workers unite!" Sovietism and "Greasing the wheels of industry with the blood of the proletariat" capitalism.
Much of the American experiment has dealt with searching for that third way.
The American electorate is a giant slumbering while the pygmies tie it down with strands of gold. *Sigh*
And part of it is the bitching and moaning. But the biggest thing we can do is the one thing most won't: Get off your lazy behinds and vote! It's a bit amusing and a bit sad to see everyone whining about how "they" are taking away our rights, yet half the people in the nation don't even bother to vote in presidential elections.
The system stinks? The people in power don't listen? Make them listen. Better yet, run for office and become a person in power. Democracy ain't easy.
And it sure as heck isn't served by pre-defeatism.
Who is the infamous Joe Sixpack going to look to when abusive prosecution finally does enter his consciousness? He's going to look to the info-enthusiasts, the tech heads, the geeks. Hasn't anyone ever asked your opinion on electronics? When someone asks about buying a DVD player, shouldn't you inform them about region encoding, etc.?
If we fight the system and lose, then we lose. But if we do nothing, we lose, too. At least the first way, we might win. And at least, the first way, we'll have salvaged a tiny bit of human dignity from the corporate trainwreck that is the human experience today.
Again, AFAIK, Napoleanic Code is generally construed as more restrictive (read: state-favoring) than English Common Law.
Well, your car is actual property. Fair Use applies not to actual property but to intellectual "property", which behaves (economically and technically) in ways completely differently from actual property. Any similarity is essentially foisted on from the outside by the artificial monopolies called trademark and copyright.
Just to show that there is a difference betweeen the two, and hence, at least possible grounds for having different attitudes.
I don't know if the poster is from the RIAA, and I don't agree with him/her, but why on Earth would we need to "get it off slashdot"? Slashdot's only value is as an open exchange of ideas. Sure, that one is unpopular. All the more reason to protect it, I say.
Also, the legal and moral issues in rape are relatively stable, universal, and understood. The issues in IP law are evolving, dissonant, controversial, and muddied. Presenting it as a done deal is a disservice and a danger.
Is copyright infringement a crime? Yes. Is it a crime on a par with rape? No, not at all. In the limited time with the limited resources available to a school for a civics program, I think it immensely obvious that teaching about rape, murder, etc., is much much much more important than a four-week unit on copyright law.
ObAside: And I'd be mightily surprised if the issues of Fair Use and First Sale (assuming a British equivalent exists) will be raised and treated properly.