We even have several. DMCA, RIAA, MPAA... The plague of 4 letter acronym bad things has not lessened. And lo, it HAS united us. We all complain in unison now...
...How long until bionic machine-gun arms come out?
And beyond that, how long until cyber-battle-roids are created?
Ok, maybe that's a little silly. But you know, there is no reason that I can think of (although I Am Not A Biotechnician) that you would have to make the bionic limb necessarily arm shaped... What would happen if you gave it 10 fingers, for example? Or made it double jointed? Or attactched laser beams or missile launchers, or some other b-grade sci-fi flick attchment? (Obviously some method of controling it would be needed, but that could probably be delt with, especially if you started using the destructo-hand (TM) young enough) While we're obviously not QUITE to the technical level to create fully modular limbs, it's still something to think about...
I feel I should offer a minor clarificiation/rebuttal here:
In my post, I was NOT criticizing (or even remarking on) the french law. What I found ridiculous (and continue to find ridiculous) is the idea that the judge seems to think that the rest of the world should moderate it's content (which is not even hosted in france) to suit this particular french law. I consider it the equivalent of sending nasty letters to newspapers in foreign countries, because someone in france subscribes to them and might be offended by their content.
I have no problem or complaint with countries making laws as they see fit, and enforcing them. But if you want to see things that adhere to all laws within your country, then perhaps you shouldn't be using the world wide web, which contains content from quite a few people who are outside your jurisdiction. As I stated above, you are obviously free to make any laws you see a need for. But, being in a seperate country, we are also entitled to make judgements reguarding which laws we think need passing. And at the moment at least, yahoo, (A U.S. based company) is perfectly within the laws of the country it belongs to.
So, as I see it, france has three realistic options:
Sever as much contact with the outside world as possible, so that it can regulate all content comming to it's people. (a.k.a. the China approach)
Take over the rest of the world, so that it rules all, and can impose it's laws everywhere as it sees fit.
Learn to live with it the way it is, somehow.
Ok, maybe only one and a half of those are realistic.
We simply need to have yahoo put a big button up on it's site to get in, asking: "Are you french?" (Yes/No). If they answer No, then everything is fine. If they answer yes, then it takes them to pokemon.com or something.
But wait, it gets better.
Under the DMCA, they could claim that this is an access control measure! And since american corperations have already demonstrated their willingness and ability to go after people in foreign countries, any evil French 1337 h4x0rz who got around the protection and offended themselves by accident could be hanged by the Yahoo mafia, as an example to others!
And if anyone in france complained, we could just say something witty like "if you expect us to adhere to your ridiculous laws, then you have to adhere to ours. And ours are riduclouser."
That's it, rather than fight all these annoying, yet legally powerful examples of absurdity in action, we should just get them to fight each other! I imagine that it wouldn't take more than a few hangings for french judges to get the point...
Even though we went over this back when the FIRST french judge ruled this, I still have to wonder:
Why are they stopping with Yahoo? I'm sure that there are other sites, accessable from France, which show nazi parephanalia. Is it just that Yahoo is big, and they want to make a statement? Are they just that clueless? I have to admidt, that I consider it extremely unlikely that the entire rest of the internet will kindly decide to censor itself in favor of french sensibilities...
Oh well, if the french REALLY want to make sure that no innocent frenchman sees anything offensive on his computer, there IS a very easy solution:
Walk around france with a big pair of clippers, and snip every internet line running into or out of France. Seriously folks, if you don't want to see anything offensive beyond your control, don't leave home.
This is definatly a scary possibility... Up until now, if you buy software, it stays bought. You buy it and depend on it, and while it may have bugs, or whatever, it stays yours. So of course people are going to dislike the possibility of having their software say "Sorry, I don't feel like working for you anymore until you give my owner some more cash..." This puts you FAR more at the mercy of the company than before. After all, what's to stop them from saying, two years later, "we changed our minds, it now costs $150 per year, instead of $100. What will you do? Lose all your data? Change all your records to a different format? Or knuckle under and pay the extra cash, since it's cheaper than moving everything over to some other system? I work as a company programmer, and I can tell you for sure that our company would probably end up just paying it. Not because they like it. Not because they're stupid (they're not), but for the simple reason that they have a HUGE number of records, and converting them all would be prohibitive.
So the message, boys and girls, is simple: Don't count this out just yet. It's like crack. Microsoft will make it seem free and easy at the beginning, but believe me, once they get you hooked, they'll do everything they can to keep you hooked.
Also, has anyone considered what will happen if the company offering this "service" (using the term VERY loosely) goes out of buisness? Where will this leave all of the consumers? Unless they have some kind of "Indefinate Unlock Code" they can send to everyone, then the people depending on these programs will find themselves between a rock and a very hard place. Not many people like having their financial well-being directly tied to the financial well-being of another, entirely unrelated company, for some reason.
So yes, I consider this part of a VERY frightening trend. But I am not surprised by this in the least. It may look like a sudden, surprisng move by microsoft in a new direction, but let's look at a little history here:
This year has seen all sorts of things pass like the DMCA (which went fully into effect about a month or so ago... hmm...) and so on. RIAA and MPAA have been lobbying up a storm to convince congress to pass laws that in effect say "you may have bought the right to USE it from us, but it's on OUR terms, and we still can say what you can and can't DO with it." This is the logical extension of that: You don't purchase products, you purchase "use rights". Or rent them, in this case. And the worst part is that under current legeslation, they can do something as innane as using the expiration date as the key, or something like that, and under the DMCA, circumventing this is illegal, and has all sorts of nasty consequences. (And of course trafficing in this information is almost as bad...) So of COURSE, with such a wonderful legal enviornemnt (from their standpoint) this is going to be suggested. And executed. For no better reason than it can make them money, and is legaly fairly safe right now.
One more step towards a world where you can own nothing. And one more lurch towards more power for corperations, and less for consumers. Yay.
If Yahoo started charging for submissions, say, $5 per submission, they they could probably pay some poor intern $2.50 to review the site and make sure that it was legit, not a broken link, etc. This really isn't all that different from phone companies charging buisnesses for yellow page adds. In fact, it's fairly similar:
Everyone can be in the "white pages" (the standard list of indexed pages) but if you pay a little extra, then your buisness is more likely to be noticed first by someone searching for services....
Y'know, this makes me wonder... Who exactly decides what an "control measure" is? I mean, some things are obvious, (because the company has declared them to be) but since protections can now be as flimsy as they want to be, (Secure in their protection by the DMCA) how can you tell if something is intended as a protection or not? For example:
"FOOL! You opened up the shrink wrap on your action figure. It was SUPPOSED to be used for display. By circumventing our shrink wrap, you have bent our product to twisted ends, and run afoul of the DMCA! WOE IS YOU!"
Granted, this is an extreme and silly example, but can you honestly say that the whole DVD case is any less ridiculous? Or how about this:
"Silly, you WROTE with our pens. Our pens are designed to keep ink IN. By writing with it, you have circumvented... blah blah..."
The point I'm making here is, unless I've missed something obvious (and I hope I have) doesn't this give companies the right to arbitrarily decide at any time what you can't use their product for, and then back it up with the legal muscle of the DMCA? And doesn't that make using any product extremely risky then, since if you use a product, the company that makes it can sue you at will, should they feel the need?
Obviously, we'll just have to stop making brains, if we want to keep being good little consumers/citizens... On second thought, looking around at the general public, one is forced to wonder if this plan has already gone into effect...
Seriously, folks. Is anyone really surprised by this? Did anyone actually truely believe that the library of congress would come riding out like some kind of fairy tale prince on a white horse, and save us from the evil DMCA just because we pleaded? I'll admidt that the fact that they ignored EVERYONE was a little more shocking, but either way, I would have been surprised if they'd granted any exemptions that weren't effectivly meaningless. I think that if we need a savior of the DMCA, our only (increasingly dubious) protection at this point is the court system. We just have to hope that it's not composed ENTIRELY of loser-MPAA-patsy-Kaplan-alikes.
On the other hand, what you suggest is also somewhat dangerous... To continue your analogy, you'd have to make VERY sure that whoever was doing the audit was not a script kiddy, and was not being influenced by one. Otherwise they'd just use it as an opertunity to leave more root kits around, only this time the exploits would be intentionally created backdoors instead of loopholes and exploits. So they'd be considerably harder to patch...
Really. Who could you trust more than Sony intertainment corp? I mean, who better to supply and monitor your internet usage than the people who threatened to "build personal firewalls around everyone's computers, if that was what it takes to stop intellectual theft"?
After all, there's no more respected voice in freedom of ideas, freedom of speech, and all those other nifty ideals that large parts of the net are founded upon. Just ask Connectix, Offspring, or anyone connected with DeCSS!
[/sarcasm]
Ok, I'll be the first to know that I know fairly little about how band contracts work, but this just seems too ridiculous to me...
What legal leg exactly does Sony HAVE here? I was under the (aparently misguided) impression that bands simply had to go through record lables to get their works published in the mainstream. If Offspring hasn't released the album yet, how can Sony legaly make them not give it away? Or is it that they have already sold the album to Sony? (And if this is the case, how much of the rights to the album did they have to give up in order to sign a contract?!?) Does this really mean that if you sign a contract with Sony, you lose the right to distribute your own creative work?!?!?
Am I the only one who thinks that there is something terribly wrong here?
You know, that's a good question... Can the RIAA retroactivly declare your activities illegal? They put up the file(s) on the internet, and invite people to hack them, poke them, prod them, mess with them on your computer and see what happens...
Can they really then say, a month later, that the files that they offered for download off their website (And which are now on your hard drive) are now contraband, and cannot be poked/prodded/hacked? The legality of this seems slightly questionable. On the other hand,IANAL, and laws havn't been impressing me recently with their adherance to common sense...
Maybe it's because I'm an old guy, but why are slashdotters so obsessed about their "right" to be able to steal copyrighted content?
I think you are missing the point that most people are upset about. The issue here isn't that it would prevent you from doing illegal/immoral things. The troubling fact is that someone else, some faceless, nameless division of some company somewhere is the one who would get to decide for YOU what would be moral usages of their device. And that kind of large corperation hasn't been especially renouned recenetly for acting in the best interest of the consumer. (or anyone else but themselves, really...) So you can see how it would make people edgy letting such an organization dictate what is ethical.
The other issue is that this is yet one more step in a fairly disturbing trend that has been going on recently in corperate thinking. As you has doubtlessly often heard quoted in DMCA discussions, originally when you bought a product, it was yours, you could do whatever you wanted to it, since as soon as you purchased it, it was entirely your proprety. However, corperations seem to want to change that, and retain quite a bit more control over their products, even after purchase, and dictate what you can and cannot do with them. For example region codes on DVDs. Region codes allow companies to make arbitrary decisions about what you can do with DVDs you legally purchased, and enforce them. (For example, you can't play them in a country different from the one you bought it in. There is no law to this effect, but Sony effectivly enforces one anyway with their region coding. And there is no apeal to this kind of law.
And lets not forget the ever popular problem of pattern matching errors. Such as the problems that have plagued nearly all "net nanny" software packages since the dawn of time. (or at least "net nannies") While deciding what is "moral and legal use" of a product is ticklish enough, programming the product to recognize the difference and act on this information is even trickier. And judging from the actions of Hasbro & Co, most companies don't seem to even care much if they make mistakes that inconvienence users, as long as they keep the majority of people happy and/or oblivious to the problem. (*cough*hasbro*cough*)
This is what makes people edgy about this kind of thing: This product would give someone else (who's trustworthyness is questionable) the ability to create "laws" governing the useage of their product, with no real apeal. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but that's a little more trust than I'm willing to give them. And judging from the general tone of most of the responses to this artical, I think I'm not the only one.
The problem with this kind of ruling is that it is extremely vague for what constitutes a "Direct clone". For example, suppose I played asteroids, loved the game, and decided to make a similar game. Suppose I then make asteroids, but instead of starting with 2 asteroids, I start with 3. Or give your ship a grenade launcher. Or add asteroid bases hidden inside some asteroids. Or whatever other improvements over the original I think are necessary. Under this decision (Which is thankfully a settlement and not a ruling) I might still be in legal trouble. After all, how far do you have to go from the original game to be safe? How do you even MEASURE such distance? Obviously changing the title is not enough. Minor changes are not enough... If interpreted liberally enough, you could even argue hasbro now owns the entire genera. Imagine if CAPCOM tried to argue this way, and said that Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, Tekken, King of Fighters, whatever...... were all in violation of being variations on their original Street Fighter game? Or Nintendo demanding that all side-scrolling platform games cease production, as they are clearly very similar to the original Super Mario Brothers? These is probably a bit less likely to happen, since those games have been out for a while, and the companies owning them are quite a bit better able to defend themselves. But think for a moment, how far removed are these (absurd) cases from the Hasbro case?
There actually have been cases similar to this before. Lotus, when they came out with Lotus1-2-3 had a very nice menu system, composed of heiarchical menus. When other companies said "woah, good idea" lotus tried to sue them for incorperating "lotus-like menus". Fortunatly Lotus lost, or the suit was dropped or something. (I forget which)
The thing that worries me about this decision is that it mirrors other very disturbing events a little too closely for my taste. Consider the similarities between this and the DeCSS trial: DeCSS has NOTHING stolen from anything copyrighted, it was an entirely original work. It functioned as a "black box", where given the same input, it would produce the same output as the DVD hardware. It was basically an emulator. The companies that Hasbro was going after had produced games that were also entirely original works; they shared no code with the hasbro originals. They just looked fairly similar, and had similar play styles.
A couple of years ago, judging from other precedents, Hasbro's case would have been tossed out. The siding of courts against vague, poorly defined "imitation" demonstrates a swing in the pendulum that I don't like.
Who's more likely to GET the lesson
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Lawsuits Suck
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SUCK is right; if we don't start DOING something instead of whining on/. then that's probably EXACTLY what will happen. Corperations are comming to the internet with just as much care for it's current inhabitants as european settlers had for indians. (i.e. very little, except when we're useful to exploit) Obviously, if we don't start doing something productive NOW, Coperations will regulate the internet, and if we're lucky, we'll end up with nothing but university networks to play on as reservations.
Do not forget. History will be written by the winners.
Only one company would have access to this particular resource, and would zealously protect it from other companies, because having exclusive control of this resource gives it an extreme advantage...
Isn't this what is usually refered to as a monopoly?
And while I suppose that monopolies are a natural result in captialism, arn't they usually an undesired one? With unplesant effects on the market as a whole? *cough* microsoft/time warner/RIAA/MPAA *cough*
Have you considered WHY biological organisms have evolved the "feel good" stimulus to mate? While I am also not a biologist, I think it has something to do with the fact that species that didn't mate tended to die out...
So the solution in genetic programming is fairly similar... If you want to create machines that reproduce, you simply arrange for them to be in an envirorment where if they DON'T reproduce, they are replaced by something that does. Just like most species on the planet are constantly in. (For example, if tomorrow, all people stopped reproducing, we would shortly be replaced by the chipmonks as the dominate species on the planet.)
Like all such simulations of evolution, the program can't really create something novel that the programmer hadn't already thought of -- just combinations of preprogrammed parts. What makes biological evolution interesting and powerful is that new parts arise without a pre-conceived design.
Not entirely true. Having written genetic programs myself, I can definatly attest that they are quite adept at comming up with things you havn't thought of. Here's an example: (true story!) I was writing a program to generate algorithms to solve the santa fe trail problem. (You can find details of the problem if you do a web search, it was first described by John Koza, I believe) I was running it, and suddenly it started generating programs that were ungodly good at solving the problem. How good is ungodly good, you ask? Well, the scale went from 1 to 80. These were scoring somewhere around 44497 or so. Pretty darn good. So good that obviously something was wrong. Well, after investigating further, I realized that I had a minor bug in my program where the ants [the little algorithms it was generating] could manage to escape the memory bounds I'd set, if they did just the right thing while they were being tested. And after they got out, they would be wandering around in program memory, changing things. Well, guess what they figured out how to change? The variable that listed their score. So even though I gave them the basic tools they could work with, they came up with an entirely unique thing to do with it, which was completely unforseen by me. (namely they figured out how to do well by modifying my program's records of their performance).
I think this constitutes the programs finding something "novel, that the programer hasn't already thought of." It's similar to regular DNA: We understand how matter works, for the most part. All life we've found so far has been made of matter, arranged in various ways. It's just the clever things that are done with it that tend to impress us.
So don't tell me that Genetic Programming never comes up with anything unique or unforseen. 'Cause I know better; I've seen it evolve 37331 h4x0rs!
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, first we have bionic hands... Then mutants with advanced abilities walking among... Now star-trek visors!
Maybe superhuman bionic cyber-commandos arn't so far in the future as we thought...
(heck, we could even give them robotic combat exoskeletons!)
Beware, humans. The future is now!
We even have several. DMCA, RIAA, MPAA... The plague of 4 letter acronym bad things has not lessened. And lo, it HAS united us. We all complain in unison now...
...How long until bionic machine-gun arms come out?
And beyond that, how long until cyber-battle-roids are created?
Ok, maybe that's a little silly. But you know, there is no reason that I can think of (although I Am Not A Biotechnician) that you would have to make the bionic limb necessarily arm shaped... What would happen if you gave it 10 fingers, for example? Or made it double jointed? Or attactched laser beams or missile launchers, or some other b-grade sci-fi flick attchment? (Obviously some method of controling it would be needed, but that could probably be delt with, especially if you started using the destructo-hand (TM) young enough) While we're obviously not QUITE to the technical level to create fully modular limbs, it's still something to think about...
In my post, I was NOT criticizing (or even remarking on) the french law. What I found ridiculous (and continue to find ridiculous) is the idea that the judge seems to think that the rest of the world should moderate it's content (which is not even hosted in france) to suit this particular french law. I consider it the equivalent of sending nasty letters to newspapers in foreign countries, because someone in france subscribes to them and might be offended by their content.
I have no problem or complaint with countries making laws as they see fit, and enforcing them. But if you want to see things that adhere to all laws within your country, then perhaps you shouldn't be using the world wide web, which contains content from quite a few people who are outside your jurisdiction. As I stated above, you are obviously free to make any laws you see a need for. But, being in a seperate country, we are also entitled to make judgements reguarding which laws we think need passing. And at the moment at least, yahoo, (A U.S. based company) is perfectly within the laws of the country it belongs to.
So, as I see it, france has three realistic options:
Ok, maybe only one and a half of those are realistic.
I've got it! It's all so simple!
We're going about this ALL wrong!
We simply need to have yahoo put a big button up on it's site to get in, asking: "Are you french?" (Yes/No). If they answer No, then everything is fine. If they answer yes, then it takes them to pokemon.com or something.
But wait, it gets better.
Under the DMCA, they could claim that this is an access control measure! And since american corperations have already demonstrated their willingness and ability to go after people in foreign countries, any evil French 1337 h4x0rz who got around the protection and offended themselves by accident could be hanged by the Yahoo mafia, as an example to others!
And if anyone in france complained, we could just say something witty like "if you expect us to adhere to your ridiculous laws, then you have to adhere to ours. And ours are riduclouser."
That's it, rather than fight all these annoying, yet legally powerful examples of absurdity in action, we should just get them to fight each other! I imagine that it wouldn't take more than a few hangings for french judges to get the point...
Even though we went over this back when the FIRST french judge ruled this, I still have to wonder:
Why are they stopping with Yahoo? I'm sure that there are other sites, accessable from France, which show nazi parephanalia. Is it just that Yahoo is big, and they want to make a statement? Are they just that clueless? I have to admidt, that I consider it extremely unlikely that the entire rest of the internet will kindly decide to censor itself in favor of french sensibilities...
Oh well, if the french REALLY want to make sure that no innocent frenchman sees anything offensive on his computer, there IS a very easy solution:
Walk around france with a big pair of clippers, and snip every internet line running into or out of France. Seriously folks, if you don't want to see anything offensive beyond your control, don't leave home.
This is definatly a scary possibility... Up until now, if you buy software, it stays bought. You buy it and depend on it, and while it may have bugs, or whatever, it stays yours. So of course people are going to dislike the possibility of having their software say "Sorry, I don't feel like working for you anymore until you give my owner some more cash..." This puts you FAR more at the mercy of the company than before. After all, what's to stop them from saying, two years later, "we changed our minds, it now costs $150 per year, instead of $100. What will you do? Lose all your data? Change all your records to a different format? Or knuckle under and pay the extra cash, since it's cheaper than moving everything over to some other system? I work as a company programmer, and I can tell you for sure that our company would probably end up just paying it. Not because they like it. Not because they're stupid (they're not), but for the simple reason that they have a HUGE number of records, and converting them all would be prohibitive.
So the message, boys and girls, is simple: Don't count this out just yet. It's like crack. Microsoft will make it seem free and easy at the beginning, but believe me, once they get you hooked, they'll do everything they can to keep you hooked.
Also, has anyone considered what will happen if the company offering this "service" (using the term VERY loosely) goes out of buisness? Where will this leave all of the consumers? Unless they have some kind of "Indefinate Unlock Code" they can send to everyone, then the people depending on these programs will find themselves between a rock and a very hard place. Not many people like having their financial well-being directly tied to the financial well-being of another, entirely unrelated company, for some reason.
So yes, I consider this part of a VERY frightening trend. But I am not surprised by this in the least. It may look like a sudden, surprisng move by microsoft in a new direction, but let's look at a little history here:
This year has seen all sorts of things pass like the DMCA (which went fully into effect about a month or so ago... hmm...) and so on. RIAA and MPAA have been lobbying up a storm to convince congress to pass laws that in effect say "you may have bought the right to USE it from us, but it's on OUR terms, and we still can say what you can and can't DO with it." This is the logical extension of that: You don't purchase products, you purchase "use rights". Or rent them, in this case. And the worst part is that under current legeslation, they can do something as innane as using the expiration date as the key, or something like that, and under the DMCA, circumventing this is illegal, and has all sorts of nasty consequences. (And of course trafficing in this information is almost as bad...) So of COURSE, with such a wonderful legal enviornemnt (from their standpoint) this is going to be suggested. And executed. For no better reason than it can make them money, and is legaly fairly safe right now.
One more step towards a world where you can own nothing. And one more lurch towards more power for corperations, and less for consumers. Yay.
If Yahoo started charging for submissions, say, $5 per submission, they they could probably pay some poor intern $2.50 to review the site and make sure that it was legit, not a broken link, etc. This really isn't all that different from phone companies charging buisnesses for yellow page adds. In fact, it's fairly similar:
Everyone can be in the "white pages" (the standard list of indexed pages) but if you pay a little extra, then your buisness is more likely to be noticed first by someone searching for services....
Y'know, this makes me wonder... Who exactly decides what an "control measure" is? I mean, some things are obvious, (because the company has declared them to be) but since protections can now be as flimsy as they want to be, (Secure in their protection by the DMCA) how can you tell if something is intended as a protection or not? For example:
"FOOL! You opened up the shrink wrap on your action figure. It was SUPPOSED to be used for display. By circumventing our shrink wrap, you have bent our product to twisted ends, and run afoul of the DMCA! WOE IS YOU!"
Granted, this is an extreme and silly example, but can you honestly say that the whole DVD case is any less ridiculous? Or how about this:
"Silly, you WROTE with our pens. Our pens are designed to keep ink IN. By writing with it, you have circumvented... blah blah..."
The point I'm making here is, unless I've missed something obvious (and I hope I have) doesn't this give companies the right to arbitrarily decide at any time what you can't use their product for, and then back it up with the legal muscle of the DMCA? And doesn't that make using any product extremely risky then, since if you use a product, the company that makes it can sue you at will, should they feel the need?
Obviously, we'll just have to stop making brains, if we want to keep being good little consumers/citizens... On second thought, looking around at the general public, one is forced to wonder if this plan has already gone into effect...
...it was nice while it lasted.
Seriously, folks. Is anyone really surprised by this? Did anyone actually truely believe that the library of congress would come riding out like some kind of fairy tale prince on a white horse, and save us from the evil DMCA just because we pleaded? I'll admidt that the fact that they ignored EVERYONE was a little more shocking, but either way, I would have been surprised if they'd granted any exemptions that weren't effectivly meaningless. I think that if we need a savior of the DMCA, our only (increasingly dubious) protection at this point is the court system. We just have to hope that it's not composed ENTIRELY of loser-MPAA-patsy-Kaplan-alikes.
Wow! A whole 15.000 developers have downloaded it! Maybe if they're lucky, 5 more will get it, and they'll have a nice round 20.000 developers... :P
On the other hand, what you suggest is also somewhat dangerous... To continue your analogy, you'd have to make VERY sure that whoever was doing the audit was not a script kiddy, and was not being influenced by one. Otherwise they'd just use it as an opertunity to leave more root kits around, only this time the exploits would be intentionally created backdoors instead of loopholes and exploits. So they'd be considerably harder to patch...
Really. Who could you trust more than Sony intertainment corp? I mean, who better to supply and monitor your internet usage than the people who threatened to "build personal firewalls around everyone's computers, if that was what it takes to stop intellectual theft"?
After all, there's no more respected voice in freedom of ideas, freedom of speech, and all those other nifty ideals that large parts of the net are founded upon. Just ask Connectix, Offspring, or anyone connected with DeCSS!
[/sarcasm]
Ok, I'll be the first to know that I know fairly little about how band contracts work, but this just seems too ridiculous to me...
What legal leg exactly does Sony HAVE here? I was under the (aparently misguided) impression that bands simply had to go through record lables to get their works published in the mainstream. If Offspring hasn't released the album yet, how can Sony legaly make them not give it away? Or is it that they have already sold the album to Sony? (And if this is the case, how much of the rights to the album did they have to give up in order to sign a contract?!?) Does this really mean that if you sign a contract with Sony, you lose the right to distribute your own creative work?!?!?
Am I the only one who thinks that there is something terribly wrong here?
You know, that's a good question... Can the RIAA retroactivly declare your activities illegal? They put up the file(s) on the internet, and invite people to hack them, poke them, prod them, mess with them on your computer and see what happens...
Can they really then say, a month later, that the files that they offered for download off their website (And which are now on your hard drive) are now contraband, and cannot be poked/prodded/hacked? The legality of this seems slightly questionable. On the other hand,IANAL, and laws havn't been impressing me recently with their adherance to common sense...
GPL it?
Maybe it's because I'm an old guy, but why are slashdotters so obsessed about their "right" to be able to steal copyrighted content?
I think you are missing the point that most people are upset about. The issue here isn't that it would prevent you from doing illegal/immoral things. The troubling fact is that someone else, some faceless, nameless division of some company somewhere is the one who would get to decide for YOU what would be moral usages of their device. And that kind of large corperation hasn't been especially renouned recenetly for acting in the best interest of the consumer. (or anyone else but themselves, really...) So you can see how it would make people edgy letting such an organization dictate what is ethical.
The other issue is that this is yet one more step in a fairly disturbing trend that has been going on recently in corperate thinking. As you has doubtlessly often heard quoted in DMCA discussions, originally when you bought a product, it was yours, you could do whatever you wanted to it, since as soon as you purchased it, it was entirely your proprety. However, corperations seem to want to change that, and retain quite a bit more control over their products, even after purchase, and dictate what you can and cannot do with them. For example region codes on DVDs. Region codes allow companies to make arbitrary decisions about what you can do with DVDs you legally purchased, and enforce them. (For example, you can't play them in a country different from the one you bought it in. There is no law to this effect, but Sony effectivly enforces one anyway with their region coding. And there is no apeal to this kind of law.
And lets not forget the ever popular problem of pattern matching errors. Such as the problems that have plagued nearly all "net nanny" software packages since the dawn of time. (or at least "net nannies") While deciding what is "moral and legal use" of a product is ticklish enough, programming the product to recognize the difference and act on this information is even trickier. And judging from the actions of Hasbro & Co, most companies don't seem to even care much if they make mistakes that inconvienence users, as long as they keep the majority of people happy and/or oblivious to the problem. (*cough*hasbro*cough*)
This is what makes people edgy about this kind of thing: This product would give someone else (who's trustworthyness is questionable) the ability to create "laws" governing the useage of their product, with no real apeal. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but that's a little more trust than I'm willing to give them. And judging from the general tone of most of the responses to this artical, I think I'm not the only one.
Sorry if I'm ranting, it's been a weird week.
"I'm sorry, but I can't let you send that, Dave... Would you like to play a game of chess?"
The problem with this kind of ruling is that it is extremely vague for what constitutes a "Direct clone". For example, suppose I played asteroids, loved the game, and decided to make a similar game. Suppose I then make asteroids, but instead of starting with 2 asteroids, I start with 3. Or give your ship a grenade launcher. Or add asteroid bases hidden inside some asteroids. Or whatever other improvements over the original I think are necessary. Under this decision (Which is thankfully a settlement and not a ruling) I might still be in legal trouble. After all, how far do you have to go from the original game to be safe? How do you even MEASURE such distance? Obviously changing the title is not enough. Minor changes are not enough... If interpreted liberally enough, you could even argue hasbro now owns the entire genera. Imagine if CAPCOM tried to argue this way, and said that Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, Tekken, King of Fighters, whatever... ... were all in violation of being variations on their original Street Fighter game? Or Nintendo demanding that all side-scrolling platform games cease production, as they are clearly very similar to the original Super Mario Brothers? These is probably a bit less likely to happen, since those games have been out for a while, and the companies owning them are quite a bit better able to defend themselves. But think for a moment, how far removed are these (absurd) cases from the Hasbro case?
There actually have been cases similar to this before. Lotus, when they came out with Lotus1-2-3 had a very nice menu system, composed of heiarchical menus. When other companies said "woah, good idea" lotus tried to sue them for incorperating "lotus-like menus". Fortunatly Lotus lost, or the suit was dropped or something. (I forget which)
The thing that worries me about this decision is that it mirrors other very disturbing events a little too closely for my taste. Consider the similarities between this and the DeCSS trial: DeCSS has NOTHING stolen from anything copyrighted, it was an entirely original work. It functioned as a "black box", where given the same input, it would produce the same output as the DVD hardware. It was basically an emulator. The companies that Hasbro was going after had produced games that were also entirely original works; they shared no code with the hasbro originals. They just looked fairly similar, and had similar play styles.
A couple of years ago, judging from other precedents, Hasbro's case would have been tossed out. The siding of courts against vague, poorly defined "imitation" demonstrates a swing in the pendulum that I don't like.
SUCK is right; if we don't start DOING something instead of whining on /. then that's probably EXACTLY what will happen. Corperations are comming to the internet with just as much care for it's current inhabitants as european settlers had for indians. (i.e. very little, except when we're useful to exploit) Obviously, if we don't start doing something productive NOW, Coperations will regulate the internet, and if we're lucky, we'll end up with nothing but university networks to play on as reservations.
Do not forget. History will be written by the winners.
Let me see if I got this right, then...
Only one company would have access to this particular resource, and would zealously protect it from other companies, because having exclusive control of this resource gives it an extreme advantage...
Isn't this what is usually refered to as a monopoly?
And while I suppose that monopolies are a natural result in captialism, arn't they usually an undesired one? With unplesant effects on the market as a whole? *cough* microsoft/time warner/RIAA/MPAA *cough*
Have you considered WHY biological organisms have evolved the "feel good" stimulus to mate? While I am also not a biologist, I think it has something to do with the fact that species that didn't mate tended to die out...
So the solution in genetic programming is fairly similar... If you want to create machines that reproduce, you simply arrange for them to be in an envirorment where if they DON'T reproduce, they are replaced by something that does. Just like most species on the planet are constantly in. (For example, if tomorrow, all people stopped reproducing, we would shortly be replaced by the chipmonks as the dominate species on the planet.)
Like all such simulations of evolution, the program can't really create something novel that the programmer hadn't already thought of -- just combinations of preprogrammed parts. What makes biological evolution interesting and powerful is that new parts arise without a pre-conceived design.
Not entirely true. Having written genetic programs myself, I can definatly attest that they are quite adept at comming up with things you havn't thought of. Here's an example: (true story!) I was writing a program to generate algorithms to solve the santa fe trail problem. (You can find details of the problem if you do a web search, it was first described by John Koza, I believe) I was running it, and suddenly it started generating programs that were ungodly good at solving the problem. How good is ungodly good, you ask? Well, the scale went from 1 to 80. These were scoring somewhere around 44497 or so. Pretty darn good. So good that obviously something was wrong. Well, after investigating further, I realized that I had a minor bug in my program where the ants [the little algorithms it was generating] could manage to escape the memory bounds I'd set, if they did just the right thing while they were being tested. And after they got out, they would be wandering around in program memory, changing things. Well, guess what they figured out how to change? The variable that listed their score. So even though I gave them the basic tools they could work with, they came up with an entirely unique thing to do with it, which was completely unforseen by me. (namely they figured out how to do well by modifying my program's records of their performance).
I think this constitutes the programs finding something "novel, that the programer hasn't already thought of." It's similar to regular DNA: We understand how matter works, for the most part. All life we've found so far has been made of matter, arranged in various ways. It's just the clever things that are done with it that tend to impress us.
So don't tell me that Genetic Programming never comes up with anything unique or unforseen. 'Cause I know better; I've seen it evolve 37331 h4x0rs!
Just go watch the classic movie "Real Genius". It contains the most obvious application of this technology...
Kent? Kent? This is Jesus, Kent...
Except now it doesn't require knockout gas and dental work!