Someday, someone is going to need to devise a technical solution to these political problems. This is why they are so afraid of geeks - they know we have it within our power to end this form of tyranny for good.
As others have mentioned, there are rarely technological fixes to political problems. What actually occurs is that technology obviates political problems by so utterly changing the world that the original assumptions, pro and con, simply don't apply.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself how the United States manages (more or less) to govern workably across a linear distance of 3000 miles. The States could never have remained an integrated political and culture whole without advances such as telegraphy and the railroads... ancient empires of comparable size were considerably less stable and considerably more decentralized.
Nobody seemed to cry "you're not standards compliant" then; instead, they hailed Netscape for their "innovation" (now a tainted word after Microsoft abused it so.)
Well, I (and I suspect a lot of others) dislike being called "nobody". Even back in the dim, dark days, people were upset with Netscape for forking HTML and making their own extensions. Sure, some of them were useful and a few have ended up in later versions of HTML. Others were stupid, unusuable, or crash-prone. The world is not a better place for the HTML schism.
My only consolation is picturing the guys in Redmond saying, "Hey, we own the browser market. How could anyone overcome our 86% market share?" and then Jacob Marley rattles his chains and moans, "It happened to Netscape..."
I think they might even have gone to court about this recently... guess they didn't learn anything from it.
Hmmm... When they break MS into OpCo and AppCo, who gets IE? From MS' arguments, I guess OpCo. But wait -- the browser is taking on some application roles, too, like calendaring. So shouldn't it be AppCo?
This is why I hope the breakup goes through... the logic puzzles alone will entertain for a thousand years.
But thankfully, traditional British TV is still available to those who desire decent, moral programming.
Yes, thank goodness we live in a world where you are free to seek programming with which you agree, free to buck the popular trend, free to make your own choices...
Oh, wait. You don't like that world. Apparently choice == bad for you.
Everyone likes a police state, when they get to be the police. But the only chance for true freedom, and true human dignity, comes from allowing the widest possible choice. For democracy to work, you have to trust the people. But a lot of those clamoring for "decency" can't be bothered with the arduous task of convincing their peers and compatriots to do the right thing... so they cry for the government to step in and do it for them.
Why the hell should the E.M. spectrum be "public property"? Is there any honest reason why it shouldn't become privately owned property, like any other natural resource?
Some might ask why natural resources should be private property, but hey... There is a sound technological reason why EM spectrum is regulated and licensed. If you choose to operate a transmitter at 100 MHz and I choose to, as well, we do not get a "market battle" wherein people listen to whatever best meets their interests and desires. We get interference, wherein people do not listen at all. Unlike physical property, where at least you can establish precedence by the simple fact of being there first, EM spectrum is open to any yahoo with A/C current.
Like it or not (and I guess most don't), there really are good reasons for government intervention sometimes.
Additionally, fair use isn't around b/c of being written into law; it has been around for a very long time in the courts before being written down. It's entirely possible for Congress's definition of what isn't fair use to be overturned in the courts. It's nigh-impossible for it to go the other way, however.
That really depends on the source for the courts' decisions. If they think it's a Constitutional right, then it's hard to overturn. If it stems from the Copyright Act (as amended), then Congress most certainly can legislate a new definition, etc.
Although it's sort of true that between the courts and Congress, the courts "win" (in that they have final say on legality), the purview of the courts is significantly bounded. They cannot simply rule the way they like, and one of their criteria is Congressional intent.
Yet another testament to the sheer genius of checks and balances...
Without this protection [of a creator's "right" to reap economic benefit], there's no incentive to innovate
I just hate it when this tripe is served up again. Granted, economic benefit is one motivator for people to create, and it is even one of the biggies. It is far from being the only motivator. People created long before copyright law was invented.
It might be nice, it might be advantageous, but it is not necessary. Most artists, true artists, create because they have no choice -- there is something inside them that must burst free and be shared. They are driven. Kudos to the copyright laws when they foster an environment wherein an artist can give birth to art without having to starve. Humbug to them when, as now, those copyright laws serve to hinder and impede artistic expression.
Now, Copyright is expressly in the constitution, and the First Amendment was a later addition. Which has precedence? (Trick question)
Neither "has precedence". The First Amendment is also "expressly" part of the Constitution. As soon as an amendment jumps through the final hoop, it becomes a fully-equivalent part of the Constitution. If the two are in direct conflict, then it's likely the Supreme Court would side with the amendment (as opposed to earlier stuff it contradicts), as it supposedly expresses the nation's current understanding of the judicial and political system.
But rather than opening that can of worms, the Court would almost certainly massage the case so that only one part of the Constitution applied.
The best advice I can give you is to be patient and don't hold your breath.
Actually, now is the time to start hunting down what happened. Events are beginning to move, and the @Large group said everyone should have received at least an email confirmation. Try contacting them at support@members.icann.org or visit the site at https://members.icann.org.
As to the law, it is not introduced to let Alice speak her mind (in fact most cultures do not allow free speech), the law is introduced to bring order and stability to the society.
Thank you, John Locke. For a long time this idea -- the "social contract" solely as a bulwark against random disorder -- has commanded a high philosophical respect, and rightly so. But remember that it evolved in a time when those in power ruled arbitrarily and by fiat. As such, eliminating disorder would be the first, necessary step in human progress.
We are not Locke. We inherit a rich political tradition that has, in part, been built around the rights and processes his ilk won. But here we must make a distinction about what we mean when we say what law "is for".
On the one hand, its purpose is quite clearly as suggested; to wit, to secure and maintain public order. To preserve property, as Locke put it. That is why law can exist in the most tyrannical regimes; why we find it in many societies, regardless of the rest of their political structure.
But in another, real, and more important sense, law exists to secure justice. It is no accident that we call our system of laws "the justice system". And though the implementation and even design of those laws often fall short of ideal, the assumption of justice is the engine that drives the system. It is the only thing that legitimatizes it.
In that sense, one must ask whether the current crusade to defend intellectual "property"(*) is actually just and whether the legal system should be pursuing it as strenuously as it is. By the twisting of the concept of "property", rights holders are also twisting the legal system into an engine for their self-enrichement regardless of whether the result is just or even whether the terms have been ratified by common usage. --- (*) Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's "gold" is to gold.
Copyright is the idea of ownership taken to a new domain.
No. That's what the copyright industry wants you to think but it historically is not so. You cannot "own" an idea; you can have rights to control the distribution of that idea (although in a limited way and -- as originally conceived -- for a limited time). Note that property never goes away -- if you own a piece of land, it is yours forever. It requires a very cumbersome process to seize that land, either for taxes or eminent domain or whatever. Copyright, on the other hand, simply expires (or rather, it is supposed to, if abdominations like the Sonny Bono Act don't interfere).
People, that's theft of intellectual property -- that's the same stuff that Microsoft is getting in trouble with the DOJ.
Um, no, that's "reverse engineering" -- a widely accepted practice. If Connectix had actually stolen patents, that would be "theft" of intellectual "property" (*), but of course, the point of the lawsuit would be to establish such infringement. No lawsuit, no establishment.
As for the MS/DOJ thing, it is not about patent infringement or IP. It is about predatory monopolistic practics at MS.
Also blockquoth the poster:
If I make a product, patent and trademark it, and someone comes along and makes a product that does in essence, the same thing my product does, causing me to lose sales, I'm going to sue for patent infringement.
A patent does not guarantee the right to make a profit from an invention. It does not guarantee the right to an exclusive market due to an invention. It does not prohibit others from fulfilling the same need you've chosen to address via the device patentned.
A patent does prevent someone else from implementing a solution in exactly the same way you do. In other words, I can't simply duplicate McCormick's reaper, but I sure as heck can come up with my own device for harvesting grain. It is not the concept of rotary blades that is patented; it's the particular form that is protected.
Admittedly, the federal courts and the PTO have really murked the waters by allowing software and "business model" patents (egregiously wrongly, IMHO). But even they don't say "MS patented Word, so no one else can make word processors" -- even ones that read Word files.
--- (*) Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's "gold" is to gold... It can't be "stolen", although one's rights vis-a-vis it can be infringed. Current usage is a deliberate obfuscation to play on the connotations of "theft".
Except the ammount of damages claimed is vastly different.
This is a difference in quantity, not a difference in quality. It is irrelevant to the original point; to wit,
Like it or not, the law takes a very different view between violating copyright for fun (such as taping a CD and giving the tape to a friend), and violating copyright for profit.
The law sees these as exactly the same. The remedy is to sue the infringer and recover damages. Sure, if Alice is a "pirate"(*) and produces 50,000 illegal copies, then she has caused more damage than Bob, who copied the CD once.
But say Bob makes copies for 50,000 of his closest friends. Then the copyright owner would be able to go after Bob for the loss of 50,000 sales, just as if he had sold the copies. It doesn't matter if he profits from the copying or not, or whether he's into it "commercially" or "casually". Under the law, infringement is infringement.
The real-world effects might be different (there's more to recover from the "pirate") and the politics might be different (the company might not want the PR of pursuing, say, teenagers). But the law is the same.
--- (*) Unless Alice wears an eyepatch and goes around saying "Avast! Aargh!", she is not a pirate. But for the sake of discussion, let us temporarily agree to the cynical and silly extension of the meaning of the word "pirate". ---
No, the right thing would be to conform to the existing standard rather than extend it in some arbitrary way Please tell that to the GNU folks as well. When you use bash extensions, your scripts no longer work with the industry standard sh. Ditto for gmake, bison, etc.
It's been a while since I've slogged through this sort of thing, but... bash, make, etc. are intended for use on a single system. It's unlikely and unwise that you'd want or allow someone to run a program remotely that needs, say, bash.
The Kerberos mechanism, on the other hand, is intended to help different machines talk to each other. Thus, it will often be used to talk to machines completely beyond your control. As long as they all follow the standard, and as long as the standard hasn't been "embraced and extended", it won't matter if the different machines use different software.
The poster made it sounds like people were criticizing MS for making Word files incompatible with, say, WordPerfect. But it's more like Microsoft "extending" HTML so that a Unix machine can't connect to them.
NOTICE SPECIFIC TO DOCUMENTS AVAILABLE ON THIS WEBSITE. Permission to use Documents (such as white papers, press releases, datasheets and FAQs) from this server ("Server") is granted, provided... use of such Documents from this Server is for informational and non-commercial or personal use only...
Doesn't this read more like a license than a statement of copyright? If fact, it appears to be an attempt to control the usage of something published, even though the "something" isn't software. This is, of course, not legally valid and hence not legally binding (but IANAL). They just hope you won't notice.
To my increasingly paranoid eye, this is yet another attempt to seize by misdirection and intimidation rights and protections not actually granted by law, and to deny by those same tactices the rights accorded to actual breathing citizens.
Well, I was wrong; Microsoft followed me to the net, and I will never forgive them for it
"I come from the 'Net... infecting systems, peoples, and cities, to this place -- Wintel, MY domain... My format: Microsoft. To corrupt and conquer." -- MegaGates
Like it or not, the law takes a very different view between violating copyright for fun (such as taping a CD and giving the tape to a friend), and violating copyright for profit
Like it or not, this is not true. In both cases, the crime is the same (copyright infringement) and the punishment is the same (suit for damages). Sure, a company is far less likely to go after you for a single, not-for-profit infringement... but the law does not distinguish between the two.
Blockquoth the poster, quoting Bill Gates (emphasis added by me):
The fact is, no one besides us has
invested a lot of money in hobby software...
And in this quote, we see many things. We see why Bill Gates is the exemplar of his time, and why Microsoft is evil(tm) and why, perhaps, in the end, they are going to lose... Astonishingly, all of these are the same reason: To a corporate droid, economic value is the only value. Unless you invest money, a project isn't worthwhile.
But Open Source derives from a different model. People aren't doing it for economic gain. There's something more, be it acclaim, strutting rights, or (gasp!) the joy of doing well something worth doing. Open Source partakes of an impulse similar to artistry, and so it is incomprehensible to droids like Gates. Traditional business is, by its construction, soulless. Open Source leaves room for human dignity.
Check this out: companies producing commercial (read, off the shelf) software in the early 80's included... well, MS was about it.
Um, excuse me? You mean that the hundreds of dollars I spent on programs for my VIC 20 and Commodore 64, or that my mom's school spent on her Apple II, or that my school spent on our Commodore PETs, was actually just vanishing? We could have gotten that software for free? D'oh!
Seriously, don't be so myopic. Believe it or not, there were personal computers before the IBM PC, and operating systems (and BASIC interpreters) before Microsoft. In fact, the success of these other models is what enticed Big Blue and the nascent Evil Empire into the field...
I understand that slashdotters too often knee-jerk condemn certain companies. But let's try not to swallow Microsoft propaganda hook, line, and sinker, OK?
This means that just under half the people you'll ever deal with are, frankly, shitheels. It is for this reason that you need - when dealing with anyone whose bona fides you are not absolutely sure of - the protection of a legal system that will enforce contracts and punish/compensate for wrongs done. Unless and until the human race cleans up its act, laws will be needed.
"The need for Law is evidence of humanity's fall from grace. The existence of Law is evidence of our long climb back." --- Karl Evander Kaufeld
What's that? The government wasn't collecting the data?
Since it is the government's computer that is directing your machine to the Doubleclick site (which then places and possibly reads) a cookie on your drive, it can be argued that the government is collecting, or abetting the collection of, data against its own policies.
As we are discovering, the lines of responsibility in this crazy, mixed-up, hyperlinked world are blurry indeed.
Maybe (too much to hope) this case would give the courts a chance to make law that tried to recognize that this is ONE country.
Heavens, I hope not. Perhaps the only important thing contributed by Americans to the science of human governance has been the federal model: three independent systems with overlapping jurisdictions and separate processes. One of the consequences -- and I believe a good one -- is a natural aversion toward nationalization and centralization. Different places are different and it's wonderful that we recognize that.
I cannot see it as a good if this law or a similar one goes any further towards eliminating the wonderful variety on the Net and moving towards even more of a homogenous gloop. I think the dot-coms are doing a good enough job of that already, thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't believe me? Ask yourself how the United States manages (more or less) to govern workably across a linear distance of 3000 miles. The States could never have remained an integrated political and culture whole without advances such as telegraphy and the railroads ... ancient empires of comparable size were considerably less stable and considerably more decentralized.
My only consolation is picturing the guys in Redmond saying, "Hey, we own the browser market. How could anyone overcome our 86% market share?" and then Jacob Marley rattles his chains and moans, "It happened to Netscape..."
This is why I hope the breakup goes through ... the logic puzzles alone will entertain for a thousand years.
Oh, wait. You don't like that world. Apparently choice == bad for you.
Everyone likes a police state, when they get to be the police. But the only chance for true freedom, and true human dignity, comes from allowing the widest possible choice. For democracy to work, you have to trust the people. But a lot of those clamoring for "decency" can't be bothered with the arduous task of convincing their peers and compatriots to do the right thing ... so they cry for the government to step in and do it for them.
Like it or not (and I guess most don't), there really are good reasons for government intervention sometimes.
Although it's sort of true that between the courts and Congress, the courts "win" (in that they have final say on legality), the purview of the courts is significantly bounded. They cannot simply rule the way they like, and one of their criteria is Congressional intent.
Yet another testament to the sheer genius of checks and balances...
I don't suppose you have a link for this? It's a great indication as to why the industry cannot be allowed to define the terms...
It might be nice, it might be advantageous, but it is not necessary. Most artists, true artists, create because they have no choice -- there is something inside them that must burst free and be shared. They are driven. Kudos to the copyright laws when they foster an environment wherein an artist can give birth to art without having to starve. Humbug to them when, as now, those copyright laws serve to hinder and impede artistic expression.
But rather than opening that can of worms, the Court would almost certainly massage the case so that only one part of the Constitution applied.
We are not Locke. We inherit a rich political tradition that has, in part, been built around the rights and processes his ilk won. But here we must make a distinction about what we mean when we say what law "is for".
On the one hand, its purpose is quite clearly as suggested; to wit, to secure and maintain public order. To preserve property, as Locke put it. That is why law can exist in the most tyrannical regimes; why we find it in many societies, regardless of the rest of their political structure.
But in another, real, and more important sense, law exists to secure justice. It is no accident that we call our system of laws "the justice system". And though the implementation and even design of those laws often fall short of ideal, the assumption of justice is the engine that drives the system. It is the only thing that legitimatizes it.
In that sense, one must ask whether the current crusade to defend intellectual "property"(*) is actually just and whether the legal system should be pursuing it as strenuously as it is. By the twisting of the concept of "property", rights holders are also twisting the legal system into an engine for their self-enrichement regardless of whether the result is just or even whether the terms have been ratified by common usage. ---
(*) Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's "gold" is to gold.
As for the MS/DOJ thing, it is not about patent infringement or IP. It is about predatory monopolistic practics at MS.
Also blockquoth the poster:
A patent does not guarantee the right to make a profit from an invention. It does not guarantee the right to an exclusive market due to an invention. It does not prohibit others from fulfilling the same need you've chosen to address via the device patentned.A patent does prevent someone else from implementing a solution in exactly the same way you do. In other words, I can't simply duplicate McCormick's reaper, but I sure as heck can come up with my own device for harvesting grain. It is not the concept of rotary blades that is patented; it's the particular form that is protected.
Admittedly, the federal courts and the PTO have really murked the waters by allowing software and "business model" patents (egregiously wrongly, IMHO). But even they don't say "MS patented Word, so no one else can make word processors" -- even ones that read Word files.
--- (*) Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's "gold" is to gold... It can't be "stolen", although one's rights vis-a-vis it can be infringed. Current usage is a deliberate obfuscation to play on the connotations of "theft".
But say Bob makes copies for 50,000 of his closest friends. Then the copyright owner would be able to go after Bob for the loss of 50,000 sales, just as if he had sold the copies. It doesn't matter if he profits from the copying or not, or whether he's into it "commercially" or "casually". Under the law, infringement is infringement.
The real-world effects might be different (there's more to recover from the "pirate") and the politics might be different (the company might not want the PR of pursuing, say, teenagers). But the law is the same.
---
(*) Unless Alice wears an eyepatch and goes around saying "Avast! Aargh!", she is not a pirate. But for the sake of discussion, let us temporarily agree to the cynical and silly extension of the meaning of the word "pirate".
---
The Kerberos mechanism, on the other hand, is intended to help different machines talk to each other. Thus, it will often be used to talk to machines completely beyond your control. As long as they all follow the standard, and as long as the standard hasn't been "embraced and extended", it won't matter if the different machines use different software.
The poster made it sounds like people were criticizing MS for making Word files incompatible with, say, WordPerfect. But it's more like Microsoft "extending" HTML so that a Unix machine can't connect to them.
To my increasingly paranoid eye, this is yet another attempt to seize by misdirection and intimidation rights and protections not actually granted by law, and to deny by those same tactices the rights accorded to actual breathing citizens.
-- MegaGates
But it did take them a few seasons.
I suppose I must add IANAL. Like, duh!
But Open Source derives from a different model. People aren't doing it for economic gain. There's something more, be it acclaim, strutting rights, or (gasp!) the joy of doing well something worth doing. Open Source partakes of an impulse similar to artistry, and so it is incomprehensible to droids like Gates. Traditional business is, by its construction, soulless. Open Source leaves room for human dignity.
Seriously, don't be so myopic. Believe it or not, there were personal computers before the IBM PC, and operating systems (and BASIC interpreters) before Microsoft. In fact, the success of these other models is what enticed Big Blue and the nascent Evil Empire into the field...
I understand that slashdotters too often knee-jerk condemn certain companies. But let's try not to swallow Microsoft propaganda hook, line, and sinker, OK?
--- Karl Evander Kaufeld
As we are discovering, the lines of responsibility in this crazy, mixed-up, hyperlinked world are blurry indeed.
I cannot see it as a good if this law or a similar one goes any further towards eliminating the wonderful variety on the Net and moving towards even more of a homogenous gloop. I think the dot-coms are doing a good enough job of that already, thank you.