In my opinion, the MPAA is used to exhibiting their works under terms where they control all aspects of the experience. They publicly exhibit their works in theatres where they can legally impose more restrictions than, say someone who publishes a book. They can forbid admittance to people with videocameras, for example even though some might only tape a portion as a fair use.
They want the economic advantages of publishing (low cost to produce and distribute works) without giving up any of the rights that publishers do under the First Sale doctrine. They want to control access to works, not sell copies.
She still doesn't mention that DeCSS is very useful for people with unsupported platforms.
That's all in the briefs. Her job is not to repeat everything that the briefs have to say about the case. Her job is to fill in the holes that the questioners think they see. So when she says "multiple purposes" and refers to the record, all the stuff about that in the trial transcript and briefs are being referenced. She saves prescious time by referencing the record.
I think we should consider what it means that the justices gave her a lot of extra time to answer questions about her brief. If they were ready to dismiss it out of hand, she wouldn't have had an extra minute. The fact that they wanted her to answer questions over her time limit tells me that the judges are very interested in her answers and in the case she's making.
Some very unsavory characters ahev won First Amendment cases. I think appeals court judges take the First Amendment *very* seriously -- even more so than district judges. 2600's status as a "hacker" magazine shouldn't count against them at the appeals court level any more than Larry Flynt's status as a foul mouthed, publisher did.
It's difficult to predict how justices will rule from their questions. Sometimes they ask tough questions of the side that they are leaning towards just so that the holes they percieve in the argument can be patched up.
Simms for the MPAA and the DOJ representative got very challanging questions as well and I don't think they came out with any good answers to the judge's questions.
Speech is not a magic incantation. The Supreme Court has ruled that speech may be regulated. Laws and regulations that restrict speech are subject to either strict or intermediate scrutiny depending on whether the regulation is content-neutral or not.
The O'Brien case considered the act of burning a draft card. The act was both conduct and speech, since he burned the card to protest the Vietnam War. The SC ruled that the government could ban burning the draft card because the law was narrowly tailored and was the least restrictive means available to further an important government interest.
So, the question is not "Is DeCSS speech?" There's no question on that issue. The question is "Should DeCSS be subject to a strict or an intermediate scrutiny" and, if it is strict scrutiny, is it the least restrictive means to further an important government interest?
Sullivan was trying to bring out an *important* point in a strict scrutiny argument. If the speech is predominantly "functional speech", it may be held to a stricter regulation. She was looking to play up the expressive aspects of DeCSS -- elements that weigh against it being purely functional.
What was the name of the terminal system that France was promoting when the Internet started to take off? They wanted to put one of these text-only devices in every home with a phone. They did chat and email and provided phone number lookups. But they also delayed the Internet in France.
I fear that the French promoting Jabber might just be the kiss of death.
.NET could also end up like MSN -- an expensive investment in a also-ran package. I expect many corporate sites to firewall.NET. I expect that it will only penetrate slowly into the home market because people don't buy OS upgrades like they once did..NET will probably be an also ran for years to come.
MS can afford to hire lots of people whose sole job in life is to come up with ways to break WINE, so that counting on WINE is agreeing to be perpetually in catch-up, "me too" mode. (You need only look at the history of runnning Windows software under OS/2 to see this.)
The difference between now and when OS/2 was competing with Windows3.x is that MS' installed base won't upgrade as quickly as they once did. This additional lag time between when a MS OS with "enhancements" is released and when software developers can count on the functionality being available is increasing.
Jon's made an insightful point here by noting the MS attack on OS/FS and the secure music initiatives that MS has bought into. The OS/OF attack is more than "don't use this software because IP made this nation great and we want to own the IP on our software". It's also "IP made this nation great and these OS hackers will steal your music and books and patents and any other IP that you have". This is a much broader attack and one which is much more sophisticated than I would expect from MS.
Before PCs, software was licensed with an annual fee. IBM had elaborate price lists for all kinds of software you could add from sort programs to programming languages. Any companyies tended to buy the licenses.
When PCs came along, (a) you couldn't trust the date on the computer because anyone could change it and (b) the users wouldn't put up with it.
That didn't stop companies like SAS witha a big mainframe/Unix presence to have the same kind of licensing on PCs.
In the Unix world, it was high software license fees that drove people to write free software. But there were still packages that use/used flexlm (one of the most common license managers) to have an annual fee licensing structure.
Frankly, most people won't pay annual renewals. Maybe Office comes bundled with their PC. After a year, they get an email. Pay up or the software won't work. Most people don't use the Office that's bundled and they'll say "Screw this." and let it expire.
Corporations are already amortizing their software cost over 3 years, so they'll compare the annual cost to the annual amortization and they'll probably pay. But they will install controls to make sure they don't pay for a single copy more than is needed.
In the long run, annual licensing models help free software because people have an ongoing incentive to find a free package that meets their needs.
Every single one of these pictures has been manually "tweaked" for optimal contrast and color balance, according to the page. In fact, it says that different regions of the same image are tweaked differently. Basically, someone brightened and sharpened in Photoshop, making the colors hyperrealistic and more pleasing to the eye. But what you see is not necessarily the natural or original colors that were photographed.
Without knowing the optical characteristics of the filters used, a precise reconstruction is impossible. But, having looked at the results, the sky looks sky-colored. The grass looks grass-colored. The colors look quite appropriate in large portions of the images. What do you mean by hyperrealistic? Too good to be true?
Yes, they have tried to correct for defects in the emulsions, but the result appears to be quite accurate.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the GPL is ruled unenforcable as a matter of law. (What is more likely is that one or more terms of the GPL would be ruled unenforcable)
How does that affect any user of the software? They don't have a license to use it. So what? Could the FSF or other copyright holder sue anyone for distributing it? No. The legal doctrine of estoppel would prevent it.
The GPL is a license, not a contract. It is unrevokable. You worry over nothing.
However, with software, when you purchase it (or acquire it via another means, such as downloading), you're not buying a physical thing. You're purchasing a "license" to "use" it. This places restrictions on your behaviour in most cases. It is literally the difference between owning and leasing: You "own" the book, but not the rights to the words inside it. You've "leased" the software, and thus have the ability to use it, but the fundamental ownership of the 'thing' still belongs to the software manufacturer.
Bullshit. You've fallen for the legal fiction that the software industry wants you to fall for. When you buy media containing a copy of the software in a fixed media (in the sense that copyright law speaks of expression being fixed in a media) you have certain rights already. You may utilize the software just as you may make use of a book. That in order to use the software means that you have to install it and make another copy and even make a third copy when you load it into RAM is inconsequential. That's how you use software.
When you read a book, you display an image of the book on the back of your retina. Do you need a licence to read a book you have bought? Of course not.
So, a software company could sell software without any EULA at all. The buyers would not have the right to make additional copies and distribute them. The buyers would be able to use them without any additional license. Existing copyright law gives you all of these rights.
EULAs only exist to restrict your rights from those granted by copyright law. To the extent that they do so, they may not be enforceable. The question of whether a contract (interpreted under state laws) may give away rights granted by Federal law has never been litigated.
The GPL expands your rights in exchange for . EULAs restrict your rights in exchange for nothing. By buying a copy of copywrited software, you already have the right to use it under the Fair Use and First Sale doctrines. You don't need a EULA at all.
The GPL does not require you to release the source code of any changes that you may make. You only have to release the source if you *distribute* the changed version. You can monkey around with your version of Ximian without releasing a thing if you keep the changes to yourself.
The first stage was the trial court with Judge Kaplan where questions of fact and the trial court's interpretation of the law were set down in the first ruling.
This was the first appeal from that trial court. The Court of Appeals reconsiders the legal arguments while using the factual record established in the trial court. Thus you see references to the MPAA not being able to demonstrate a single instance of copyright violation due to DeCSS -- a stipulation that the MPAA made during the trial.
From here there are several different paths. If the Court of Appeals upholds Kaplan's runling, there's no where else to go but up. An "en banc" hearing before the full Court of Appeals could be requested. (This hearing was in front of only three of the 10 or so Court of Appeals justices in the 2nd District.) This is more likely if the ruling is a split decision 2 to 1 with a stron dissent. The only other place to appeal to is the Unites States Supreme Court which could decide to hear or not to hear the case. We're probably not going to see a SC hearing before late 2002.
This court could rule and issue an opinion remanding the case to the trial court to consider some question that wasn't addressed or for the trial court to consider the law in a different way. So it's possible for the case to bounce around the different layers of the court system a few times. Eventually, it will bubble up a last time to the Court of Appeals and become a candidate for the Supreme Court.
It looks like this case is destined for the SC because of the deep constitutional issues involved. Copyright, first amendment, a first impression DCMA case, there's lots of reasons why the SC would be interested.
From reading the NYTimes version, it appears that they've seen fluctuations in the microwave background that they are attributing to quantum fluctuations in the pre-inflated universe. The original microwave observations could not detect fluctuations in the intensity of the radiation. It appeared uniform to a very high precision. COBE was able to detect fluctuation these only within the last decade but by operating outside the atmosphere. To be able to do it from the Earth's surface is a significant development.
Or maybe there are other entities involved such as Xerox which don't have as great an interest in academic freedom as does a university. It not just Felton who is the author of this paper.
are anything but. Several different kinds of national standards organizations propose and distribute "uniform" or "model" laws from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to the people behind the Uniform Commercial Code. Each state decides if they will enact the model law as is or make changes to it. They do so usually by considering if the change puts state residents or domiciled companies in a disadvantageous position.
Virginia passed UCITA, VA is the home of AOL. MD passed a consumer protected (less consumer adverse?) version,
Contract law is state law. No one can agree to have the laws of another state apply unless the local state allows it.
So what happens if you live in, say, California, and your Delaware insurance company sues you? The trial takes place in California, but the California court applies Delaware law (if that's the law the contract specifies).
Bad example. Insurance contracts must be approved by the state in which it is sold before it can be sold. If you are a resident of California and you buy and insurance policy, the laws of California apply. Period.
If you live in Delaware, buy a contract and then move to California, the laws of Delaware, the state in which you bought the contract apply.
I too started noticing SciAm getting all "wired" on us about 3 years ago and have since watched it get progressively worse. It's really a shame.
It started long before that. Ad pages began dropping in the 70s and continued in the 80s. Since ad pages is a decent measure of the profitability of a magazine, I thought SciAm was a goner. They've retooled the look of the magazine and some of the content and their readership has gone back up. Sure I preferred the old SciAm, but the magazine was dying.
These days, you tend to get more articles written by science journalists and not as many by the researchers themselves. On the other had, it used to be the case that I could read and understand an average of two complete articles a month. Now that average has gone up significantly. I still learn new science from SciAm, but it is not the same magazine that it once was.
Face it. There just wasn't a big enough market for the old Scientific American.
NSI used to have a monopoly on making policy for the TLDs. They still control the root servers. The Commerce Department seperated policy from administration. Were we better off before? I don't think so.
NSI should either provide the root servers or they should be a registrar.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion, the MPAA is used to exhibiting their works under terms where they control all aspects of the experience. They publicly exhibit their works in theatres where they can legally impose more restrictions than, say someone who publishes a book. They can forbid admittance to people with videocameras, for example even though some might only tape a portion as a fair use.
They want the economic advantages of publishing (low cost to produce and distribute works) without giving up any of the rights that publishers do under the First Sale doctrine. They want to control access to works, not sell copies.
She still doesn't mention that DeCSS is very useful for people with unsupported platforms.
That's all in the briefs. Her job is not to repeat everything that the briefs have to say about the case. Her job is to fill in the holes that the questioners think they see. So when she says "multiple purposes" and refers to the record, all the stuff about that in the trial transcript and briefs are being referenced. She saves prescious time by referencing the record.
I think we should consider what it means that the justices gave her a lot of extra time to answer questions about her brief. If they were ready to dismiss it out of hand, she wouldn't have had an extra minute. The fact that they wanted her to answer questions over her time limit tells me that the judges are very interested in her answers and in the case she's making.
Some very unsavory characters ahev won First Amendment cases. I think appeals court judges take the First Amendment *very* seriously -- even more so than district judges. 2600's status as a "hacker" magazine shouldn't count against them at the appeals court level any more than Larry Flynt's status as a foul mouthed, publisher did.
It's difficult to predict how justices will rule from their questions. Sometimes they ask tough questions of the side that they are leaning towards just so that the holes they percieve in the argument can be patched up.
Simms for the MPAA and the DOJ representative got very challanging questions as well and I don't think they came out with any good answers to the judge's questions.
Speech is not a magic incantation. The Supreme Court has ruled that speech may be regulated. Laws and regulations that restrict speech are subject to either strict or intermediate scrutiny depending on whether the regulation is content-neutral or not.
The O'Brien case considered the act of burning a draft card. The act was both conduct and speech, since he burned the card to protest the Vietnam War. The SC ruled that the government could ban burning the draft card because the law was narrowly tailored and was the least restrictive means available to further an important government interest.
So, the question is not "Is DeCSS speech?" There's no question on that issue. The question is "Should DeCSS be subject to a strict or an intermediate scrutiny" and, if it is strict scrutiny, is it the least restrictive means to further an important government interest?
Sullivan was trying to bring out an *important* point in a strict scrutiny argument. If the speech is predominantly "functional speech", it may be held to a stricter regulation. She was looking to play up the expressive aspects of DeCSS -- elements that weigh against it being purely functional.
What was the name of the terminal system that France was promoting when the Internet started to take off? They wanted to put one of these text-only devices in every home with a phone. They did chat and email and provided phone number lookups. But they also delayed the Internet in France.
I fear that the French promoting Jabber might just be the kiss of death.
No. Pine Is Not An Emulator. ;^)
.NET could also end up like MSN -- an expensive investment in a also-ran package. I expect many corporate sites to firewall .NET. I expect that it will only penetrate slowly into the home market because people don't buy OS upgrades like they once did. .NET will probably be an also ran for years to come.
MS can afford to hire lots of people whose sole job in life is to come up with ways to break WINE, so that counting on WINE is agreeing to be perpetually in catch-up, "me too" mode. (You need only look at the history of runnning Windows software under OS/2 to see this.)
The difference between now and when OS/2 was competing with Windows3.x is that MS' installed base won't upgrade as quickly as they once did. This additional lag time between when a MS OS with "enhancements" is released and when software developers can count on the functionality being available is increasing.
Wine Is Not Elm
Jon's made an insightful point here by noting the MS attack on OS/FS and the secure music initiatives that MS has bought into. The OS/OF attack is more than "don't use this software because IP made this nation great and we want to own the IP on our software". It's also "IP made this nation great and these OS hackers will steal your music and books and patents and any other IP that you have". This is a much broader attack and one which is much more sophisticated than I would expect from MS.
Thanks, Jon.
Before PCs, software was licensed with an annual fee. IBM had elaborate price lists for all kinds of software you could add from sort programs to programming languages. Any companyies tended to buy the licenses.
When PCs came along, (a) you couldn't trust the date on the computer because anyone could change it and (b) the users wouldn't put up with it.
That didn't stop companies like SAS witha a big mainframe/Unix presence to have the same kind of licensing on PCs.
In the Unix world, it was high software license fees that drove people to write free software. But there were still packages that use/used flexlm (one of the most common license managers) to have an annual fee licensing structure.
Frankly, most people won't pay annual renewals. Maybe Office comes bundled with their PC. After a year, they get an email. Pay up or the software won't work. Most people don't use the Office that's bundled and they'll say "Screw this." and let it expire.
Corporations are already amortizing their software cost over 3 years, so they'll compare the annual cost to the annual amortization and they'll probably pay. But they will install controls to make sure they don't pay for a single copy more than is needed.
In the long run, annual licensing models help free software because people have an ongoing incentive to find a free package that meets their needs.
Every single one of these pictures has been manually "tweaked" for optimal contrast and color balance, according to the page. In fact, it says that different regions of the same image are tweaked differently. Basically, someone brightened and sharpened in Photoshop, making the colors hyperrealistic and more pleasing to the eye. But what you see is not necessarily the natural or original colors that were photographed.
Without knowing the optical characteristics of the filters used, a precise reconstruction is impossible. But, having looked at the results, the sky looks sky-colored. The grass looks grass-colored. The colors look quite appropriate in large portions of the images. What do you mean by hyperrealistic? Too good to be true?
Yes, they have tried to correct for defects in the emulsions, but the result appears to be quite accurate.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the GPL is ruled unenforcable as a matter of law. (What is more likely is that one or more terms of the GPL would be ruled unenforcable)
How does that affect any user of the software? They don't have a license to use it. So what? Could the FSF or other copyright holder sue anyone for distributing it? No. The legal doctrine of estoppel would prevent it.
The GPL is a license, not a contract. It is unrevokable. You worry over nothing.
However, with software, when you purchase it (or acquire it via another means, such as downloading), you're not buying a physical thing. You're purchasing a "license" to "use" it. This places restrictions on your behaviour in most cases. It is literally the difference between owning and leasing: You "own" the book, but not the rights to the words inside it. You've "leased" the software, and thus have the ability to use it, but the fundamental ownership of the 'thing' still belongs to the software manufacturer.
Bullshit. You've fallen for the legal fiction that the software industry wants you to fall for. When you buy media containing a copy of the software in a fixed media (in the sense that copyright law speaks of expression being fixed in a media) you have certain rights already. You may utilize the software just as you may make use of a book. That in order to use the software means that you have to install it and make another copy and even make a third copy when you load it into RAM is inconsequential. That's how you use software.
When you read a book, you display an image of the book on the back of your retina. Do you need a licence to read a book you have bought? Of course not.
So, a software company could sell software without any EULA at all. The buyers would not have the right to make additional copies and distribute them. The buyers would be able to use them without any additional license. Existing copyright law gives you all of these rights.
EULAs only exist to restrict your rights from those granted by copyright law. To the extent that they do so, they may not be enforceable. The question of whether a contract (interpreted under state laws) may give away rights granted by Federal law has never been litigated.
The GPL expands your rights in exchange for . EULAs restrict your rights in exchange for nothing. By buying a copy of copywrited software, you already have the right to use it under the Fair Use and First Sale doctrines. You don't need a EULA at all.
The GPL does not require you to release the source code of any changes that you may make. You only have to release the source if you *distribute* the changed version. You can monkey around with your version of Ximian without releasing a thing if you keep the changes to yourself.
I'd make a joke, but nothing I could say could compete with that...
See Figure 1.
The first stage was the trial court with Judge Kaplan where questions of fact and the trial court's interpretation of the law were set down in the first ruling.
This was the first appeal from that trial court. The Court of Appeals reconsiders the legal arguments while using the factual record established in the trial court. Thus you see references to the MPAA not being able to demonstrate a single instance of copyright violation due to DeCSS -- a stipulation that the MPAA made during the trial.
From here there are several different paths. If the Court of Appeals upholds Kaplan's runling, there's no where else to go but up. An "en banc" hearing before the full Court of Appeals could be requested. (This hearing was in front of only three of the 10 or so Court of Appeals justices in the 2nd District.) This is more likely if the ruling is a split decision 2 to 1 with a stron dissent. The only other place to appeal to is the Unites States Supreme Court which could decide to hear or not to hear the case. We're probably not going to see a SC hearing before late 2002.
This court could rule and issue an opinion remanding the case to the trial court to consider some question that wasn't addressed or for the trial court to consider the law in a different way. So it's possible for the case to bounce around the different layers of the court system a few times. Eventually, it will bubble up a last time to the Court of Appeals and become a candidate for the Supreme Court.
It looks like this case is destined for the SC because of the deep constitutional issues involved. Copyright, first amendment, a first impression DCMA case, there's lots of reasons why the SC would be interested.
From reading the NYTimes version, it appears that they've seen fluctuations in the microwave background that they are attributing to quantum fluctuations in the pre-inflated universe. The original microwave observations could not detect fluctuations in the intensity of the radiation. It appeared uniform to a very high precision. COBE was able to detect fluctuation these only within the last decade but by operating outside the atmosphere. To be able to do it from the Earth's surface is a significant development.
Because you've posted to the thread, all your moderations are undone.
Or maybe there are other entities involved such as Xerox which don't have as great an interest in academic freedom as does a university. It not just Felton who is the author of this paper.
are anything but. Several different kinds of national standards organizations propose and distribute "uniform" or "model" laws from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to the people behind the Uniform Commercial Code. Each state decides if they will enact the model law as is or make changes to it. They do so usually by considering if the change puts state residents or domiciled companies in a disadvantageous position.
Virginia passed UCITA, VA is the home of AOL. MD passed a consumer protected (less consumer adverse?) version,
Contract law is state law. No one can agree to have the laws of another state apply unless the local state allows it.
So what happens if you live in, say, California, and your Delaware insurance company sues you? The trial takes place in California, but the California court applies Delaware law (if that's the law the contract specifies).
Bad example. Insurance contracts must be approved by the state in which it is sold before it can be sold. If you are a resident of California and you buy and insurance policy, the laws of California apply. Period.
If you live in Delaware, buy a contract and then move to California, the laws of Delaware, the state in which you bought the contract apply.
I too started noticing SciAm getting all "wired" on us about 3 years ago and have since watched it get progressively worse. It's really a shame.
It started long before that. Ad pages began dropping in the 70s and continued in the 80s. Since ad pages is a decent measure of the profitability of a magazine, I thought SciAm was a goner. They've retooled the look of the magazine and some of the content and their readership has gone back up. Sure I preferred the old SciAm, but the magazine was dying.
These days, you tend to get more articles written by science journalists and not as many by the researchers themselves. On the other had, it used to be the case that I could read and understand an average of two complete articles a month. Now that average has gone up significantly. I still learn new science from SciAm, but it is not the same magazine that it once was.
Face it. There just wasn't a big enough market for the old Scientific American.
Or perhaps it was a coup.
NSI used to have a monopoly on making policy for the TLDs. They still control the root servers. The Commerce Department seperated policy from administration. Were we better off before? I don't think so.
NSI should either provide the root servers or they should be a registrar.