This really isn't a big deal -- do you demand that Toyota build the trucks that haul their cars to market, or 3M use only their materials to build their offices? I think it's funny that Microsoft's outlook is so arrogant and monopolistic that they're embarassed to admit that "enemy" software is useful sometimes.
If the music industry starts selling new MP3 songs for $1/song and old ones for $0.25/song, they would likely see their profits higher than ever before, and kazaa would simply become a fringe group of people.
You should check out emusic, if you haven't. I haven't tried their service (since they won't accept payment by check), but it looks pretty solid: $15/month for all you can download from a half-decent catalog.
This is wrong -- Chris Hellwig wants him banned from LKML. Alan Cox, Roman Zippel, Adam Richter, Jeff Garzik, Andrew Morton, and Larry McVoy want not to have him banned (for reasons of free speech and the efficacy of killfiles for those who don't want to hear him), and so far no one's piped up agreeing with Hellwig. It would be correct to say that "a kernel developer" wants to have him banned.
Re:So what is it really?
on
Xandros 1.0
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· Score: 2
My point is that "rough consensus and running code" is anathema to the GNU project's philosophy; they'd rather have it done slow and clean than quick and dirty (especially when quick-and-dirty was already available -- it'd have wasted effort that went into Gnome, Gnumeric, and Gimp instead.)
Also, a lot more than a man-year went into Linux before it was usable -- if you say it was usable at 1.0 (reasonable for a Unixy OS, not so much for a Windows competitor), then three years went by between Linus' famous c.o.m announcement (25 Aug 1991) and 1.0's release (13 Mar 1994) -- and if you check through 1.0's CREDITS, you find quite a few names besides Linus's. head `find . -name '*.c' | scram` | less(*) showed Biro, Hannu Savolainen, Orest Zborowski, Biro again, Fred Kempen, Biro again, and then Linus in the copyright notices the first time I ran it on a 1.0 tree.
(*) scram is a locally-written script that randomly permutes the lines of its input. Let me know if you want a copy (or if you know a Unix-standard equivalent I should have used instead:-)
It's not that RMS "doesn't like" Linux, it's that he and the FSF deserve credit for writing pretty much all of the OS people call "Linux" (except the kernel and XFree86.)
It may well be that GNU's style (overblown, bloated with features, overdesigned) may be the 100% wrong way to build a kernel; we'll see.
If I were the GNU people, I wouldn't be working that hard on the HURD; there's already a perfectly functional GPLed kernel, so getting another one done simply isn't a high priority.
Also, GNU software has a reputation for being overdesigned and bloated with features; the HURD, I'm sure, is no exception, whereas Linux is massively underdesigned (it's been getting a lot better recently, but some of the in-kernel APIs are still disgusting.) The shocking thing would be if the HURD didn't take a lot longer than Linux to develop.
There's not really a way to say this without making people groan... moderators, do your worst:
The reason RMS carps endlessly about the GNU project deserving credit it, quite simply, that the FSF did most of the work that resulted in "Linux." Linus originally set out to write a Unix clone from scratch (a small hobbyist one, not "big and professional like gnu"), but for a variety of reasons the project scaled back to writing a kernel and a handful of userland kernel-glue (insmod, iptables, etc.), and "Linux" distributions are based on GNU userlands -- the C library, compiler toolchain, shell, basic Unix utilities, and desktop (if Gnome) are all GNU things. They make a fairly coherent whole, provide basic system services such as fopen() and ls, and define the user's interface with the computer (bash or Gnome) -- XFree86 and Linux (the kernel) are as essential as GNU is, but they're smaller and they do less to directly define the operation of the system.
The GNU/Linux beef is one thing (language is inaccurate; koala bears aren't really bears), but calling Linus "the inventor of the Linux operating system" is about like crediting NT to the team that wrote KERNEL32.DLL. RMS spent more than a decade of his life setting up an organization which still puts out voluminous Free code, and crippled himself with RSI writing code to give away, and I see high-modded posts here that treat him with more contempt than I've ever seen aimed at Jack Valenti or Fritz Hollings.
You've heard this all before, of course, and you're probably sick of it by now -- it's only the slow and plodding truth, and it has no punchline. Worst of all, it takes itself seriously, just like RMS. I really can't think of a short or funny way, though, to explain how wrong it is to shit on the guy who had the idea for the GPL, who argued with the world for years until the idea of open source software started to take hold, who at the time Linux was started had written a lot of the existing Free code personally, and who is directly responsible for the userland most of you supposedly use -- that's not RMS trying to grab credit for someone else's work, that's simply the way it happened, the truth.
Not funny, and not sexy like "Finnish teenager writes OS in basement; world stunned." But true.
I think you're forgetting the fact that the government DOES see the bin Laden videos before the media is allowed to show them. This is so they can make sure that there are no "hidden messages" in the tape that allow the terrorist to communicate.
That's not what made the "hidden messages" argument so asinine... while Bush & co. were wringing their hands over hidden messages that could survive a (probably semi-competent) English translation, the original Arabic videos were being broadcast in full over Al-Jazeera, available via satellite anywhere in the United States.
"Hidden messages" was a smokescreen for censorship, pure and simple.
If you go back and read the point that I end on, you might see why I chose to present it this way. I'll spell it out: don't cheer on the little guy, if by doing so you help to set a precedent that the big guy can exploit.
Duhh, okay... so my brain wasn't working that day. I stand by my position, though -- I think you have the right to do whatever you want to legally obtained "content," including modifying and/or reselling it, and I think that should apply to Microsoft as well as it does to you and I. The fact is that Microsoft would be more likely to use other, equally legal (monopoly issues aside) tactics to bury the hypothetical movie -- pressuring movie stores not to take it, making and giving away copies of a similar or counterpoint movie, etc.
I don't think "no harm, no foul" is setting a bad precedent that could lead to future fouls. Others may of course disagree. *shrug*
How do you know that they won't cut and resell it until you've sold it to them? You ask every purchaser? OK, what's to stop them lying about their intentions? Nothing. So what's the mechanism that protects you from this? Why, it's copyright law.
Copyright law doesn't protect against reselling (first sale) or modification (parody, time & space-shifting.) It protects against unauthorized duplication and public performance.
They'll be making copies of a single edited master. That's duplication. Do you need it explained further?
My feeling is that that's fair use -- i.e. that they're paying for as many copies as they're renting, which is legit (think of "copying" a computer program from HD to memory -- that's fair use, too.) I didn't see any mention of unauthorized copying in the DGA complaint, and I'm pretty confident that that would have made it to the top of the list if the renters had been anything but 100% up-and-up, since it is indeed out-and-out illegal.
if you support the small guy's ability to edit the big guy's movies and redistribute them, you must also support the big guy's ability to edit the small guy's movies.
Okay, there are two issues here -- morality and legality. Morally, I wouldn't support the situation described, for obvious reasons (censorship and deceitfulness.) My understanding of the law is that Microsoft has a legal right to do the thing described, but if someone found a technicality and nailed them on it, cool -- because what they're doing is censorship (or rather mouthsewing), and deceitful. I support the right to do what you wish with legally purchased "content" (beyond copying it etc.) enough to allow even Microsoft to do it, but that doesn't mean that I hope that this happens to (say) Freedom Downtime.
Further, if I were the judge/jury, a lot of what I thought of a case like this would hinge on the deceitfulness angle -- did people have an accurate understanding of how the movie they were seeing was edited? In the case of Cleanflicks, yes. In the case of Microsoft, no.
Making a censored copy of a movie entails, by definition, making a copy of it.
This seems like the same kind of thin technicality that led to the following ruling: Running a computer program involves making several copies (original media to hard disk, hard disk to memory), and this is prohibited without permission of the copyright holder, therefore, EULAs are 100% binding (I wish I could dig up the case itself -- can anyone help me out?) In my book (IANAL, naturally), making a copy as an incidental part of doing something un-copy-ish is fair use (as long as you don't rent both copies or anything.)
You have missed the whole point that Rogerborg was making. If you allow one to happen then the other extreme can happen too.
Okay, here's my thinking: If Microsoft did as described, I wouldn't like it, but I would grudgingly admit that it was legal (with Microsoft, I'm used to it.) However, since the most important facts of the situation were exactly reversed in the hypothetical situation, I didn't feel the need to give the analogy much thought.
Or, to put it another way: If all the locally-owned restaurants in an area colluded in some legal way to put a McDonald's out of business, I think that would be Right, but if all the fast-food chains colluded to kill a locally-owned place, that would be Wrong. Both would be legal, but since I think that locally-owned businesses are good for the world, I would support the first and object to the second. I don't think that's hypocrisy; "good for the world" isn't guaranteed to be preserved along all possible lines of extrapolation.
Sometimes you have to look at extemes to see the real issue.
What is at stake here is whether a commercial enterprise has the right to modify creative content, even at the behest of its clients, without the permission of the rights holder/creators - a case that clearly falls under current, existing (hell, even pre-DMCA) law.
Earlier in this thread, you said that it would be fine if people brought movies to CF, which then spliced them for a fee -- you're contradicting yourself again.
There is no law against modifying "creative content" which you legally own, at the behest of clients or anyone else. If you want to dispute this, please cite legislation or precedent.
Most of what you say I've already addressed upthread.
The main thrust of the DGA suit parallels my argument that distributing an edited work without the creators' consent effectively misrepresents the work (despite whatever disclaimers may have been inserted) because it was never authorized by the creator.
There is no freedom from misrepresentation (effective or otherwise) (libel and slander are illegal, of course, but that's so far afield of what's going on here as to be absurd) -- someone could fast forward through the fight scenes in a John Woo movie, or not understand the movie, and the same thing happens. Part and parcel of doing artistic work is that people say wrong-headed things about what you made; you don't get to ask the law to protect your work against unfair criticism.
Yes they knew it was edited. But did they know WHAT was edited? I think as a content creator, you have the right not to have inferior work distributed with your name on it.
Look, I can sympathize with what you're saying -- but there are real freedoms at risk, here, not just the director's natural desire to protect his creative ego and his reputation. The tendency lately (in rhetoric, and to a lesser extent in the courts) has been to pretend that holding the copyright on something gives you the unlimited ability to dictate how it's treated by the world. Linking to it, watching it on unauthorized devices, copying it for personal use, reverse-engineering it, benchmarking it, cloning its interfaces, and now watching a legal copy that's been edited -- all of these are verboten, because it would be bad for the copyright holder. Well, yes, some of these activities are, indeed, bad for the copyright holder -- but that's the breaks; life is hard; that doesn't mean they're illegal -- because almost none of these activities are actually bad for society, and some of them are good. The effort to prevent them, moreover, has already passed some really vomitous legislation, and it certainly seems that more is on the way.
The analogy I like for this goes as follows: Certainly, I don't want my daughter dating some tattooed asshole who just got out of prison. I would do everything in my power to prevent it. But that doesn't mean it should be illegal. Because then where would we be?
The main thrust of my argument was moral rights - you should make a decision based upon the entire work, and either view it as it was meant to be seen, or respect the director's vision and not see it at all (if that's the director's wish.)
I disagree with the main thrust of your argument. The question of what you "should" do is immaterial; personally, I think it's reasonable to want to watch "Leaving Las Vegas" with your teenaged kids without the rape scene. Even if I believed that this wasn't something you "should" do, though, I wouldn't think the use of law to prevent it was justified.
But would people stand for their mail to be subtly modified, even if they were notified of it?
Interpersonal mail isn't the same as movies -- if the mail was an open letter, and some news sites bleeped out the curse words, marked up the text (like this), or skipped sections of it (ellipsis), that would be find with me. One essential difference is that it's trivial (easier, in fact) to get an unedited copy of the movie; this is simply not censorship.
Personally, I have serious issues about taking this kind of activity to court, but after Clean-Flicks, in anticipation of being sued by the directors, sued first [bizjournals.com] to declare their activity explicity legal, the DGA didn't have any choice but to go ahead and sue to protect artists' rights.
... or to say, "Yep, that's legal," and get on with making movies. The fact that they're fighting indicates that Cleanflicks was wise to sue for a judgement.
I think what it will boil down to is that clean-flicks will have to stop pre-cleaning films directly, since they are serving in a distributory capacity (in my opinion.) Instructions on how to do it yourself, closing your eyes, having a friend take care of it, that's fine by me - but editing someone else's work for profit? Not cool. [emphasis is mine]
This contradicts your earlier argument about "moral rights" (nice soundbite, BTW.)
You, the end user, can do whatever you want with the media. You can burn it, cut it up, remaster it, mix it, splice it, or throw it away. The instant you redistribute or start to share the results of your modifications, is where the creator becomes concerned - because it is then no longer their work, although it may be represented or assumed by the viewing public as such.
The instant where you redistribute for profit is where you cross the line - and that's what I assume the DGA is finding legal grounds to sue on.
BTW, I do believe that control over distribution is covered under the rights granted by the legislature.
Certainly you must follow the rules if you are copying or publically performing the work in question -- but if Cleanflicks were doing that, there wouldn't be any of this claptrap about editing; regardless, they'd be redistributing without permission, which is, of course, illegal. They're not, though, and it isn't.
If end users bought a copy of an "Austin Powers" videotape, delivered it to CF to sanitize, and then watched it, I don't think there would be an issue.
Again, this contradicts the "main thrust" of your argument.
However, they're offering edited films for rent, and are essentially acting as a distributor of altered content.
So if you do it one way (the pain in the ass), then it's okay, but if you do it another (the easy way), then it's fine, even though the ultimate effect is the same either way? Sounds like bad law to me.
The real problem with this lawsuit is over gizmos allowing the user to implement blocking, as you come dangerously close to censoring just pure information (they sell a kind of "safe movie" software that tells your DVD player to censor your DVD at appropriate places.)
Horrors! We wouldn't want to set upon the slippery slope that leads eventually to users controlling the content that appears on their hardware! Look, if the guy down the street wants his TV to say "Smurfs" for "Palestinians" every time he watches Fox News, that's fine with me -- even if it wasn't, it should certainly be legal. If people really want sanitized content, then let 'em have sanitized content -- it's part of the same bag of freedoms that lets me watch "Hot Naked Badgers in Bondage" without being hassled by all the people who choose not to watch that particular title.
A more accurate analogy would have them slapping "edited to remove socio-political expose" stickers on the side (since Cleanflicks seems to be honest about what they're doing.) Oh, and also "they" are the tiny shoestring operation (Cleanflicks), and "you" are Microsoft (Hollywood) -- your entire analogy hinges on the editing people being powerful enough to displace the "untainted" copies in the marketplace, which simply isn't happening here.
They can simply buy your rights away from you, even if you don't want to sell.
What rights are those? If you don't want someone cutting up your movie, and possibly reselling it, don't sell them a copy. That goes whether "them" is Joe Blow or Microsoft.
commercial editing and duplication
What duplication? You seem to be talking about situations that do not exist.
I honestly cannot believe that people take these arguments seriously -- all the comments like yours really make me think that this is a massive troll, or astroturf, or (most terrifying of all) that corporate America has successfully rewritten our moral code when it comes to "intellectual property." Lordy, where to begin?
People want web-filters to block "unsuitable" sites as well.
Okay, this one is interesting -- people get up in arms about web filters, yet not about AOL's parental controls. Why? Because web filters (a) do not filter pornography very well, (b) tend to filter certain types of political speech (2600.com is the classic example) not because they're obscene, but because they're "inappropriate," and (c) are often deployed on unwilling adults; sometimes a library or cybercafe computer will simply be useless for researching breast cancer. No one sane will argue against your right to deploy a perfectly accurate web filter on yourself -- which is pretty much exactly what's going on here.
What about a bookstore with "sanitized" versions of popular works? Would you support that, even though it violates the writer's moral rights (after all, you have changed their work WITHOUT their permission.)
No, I changed my bleedin' book WITHOUT their permission. Their work is the same as it always was. What about airing movies on TV without any nudity or violence? That actually is sanitization without the permission of the viewer, unlike this -- why aren't you up in arms about that?
This service takes that control away, and puts it in the hands of a third party censor, who then effectively controls the vision of what is seen by this particular population.
This bit could well be, word for word, the argument of a spammer trying the "free speech!" argument for why spamblock lists are a violation of all things holy. It's a stupid argument here for the same reason it's a stupid argument there -- because "that particular population" quite obviously would rather cede control to the hands of a third party, and in some cases (like this one) will actually pay for the privelege. The difference you're pretending to ignore is the difference between employment and slavery.
In the end though, I guess what really bothers me is the attitude that these people have. It's the kind of attitude, I want to consume all I want, but I don't want to deal with the consequences of my consumption.
Yesterday I went to Wendy's and got a burger, and I picked the pickles off before I ate it, so I guess I have the same attitude. Fortunately, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.
I think a good law would be that anyone involved in the "content creation" business these days has to write a hundred times on a blackboard: My rights regarding this copyrighted work are exactly the rights granted to me by the legislature, and no more.
The performance improvement won't mean much, but the POSIXization of the thread library might make a difference. Linux's thread support has up till now been pretty kludgy (signal handlers per-thread instead of per-process, wrong coredumps, etc.), and that made things like debugging threaded programs difficult; you may have run into this with gdb or whatever. Now that the Right Things have been coded in all over the map (kernel/libc/gcc/etc), we can drop the kludge and start doing it right.
I've read the GPL a couple times, and have never gotten the perception that it prevented a company from preserving its right to sell a product and not offer Joe Q. Hacker full rights to recompile the source.
Ah yes, when you download a pile of software other people wrote, slap a shiny new sticker on it, and sell it for a profit, nothing is more important than the right to prevent the greedy thieving unwashed masses from copying it amongst themselves without paying you for the privelege.
Pity the founding fathers didn't think of that one, isn't it? All this hassle could have been avoided.
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to
these terms and conditions. You
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restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to
this License.
Re:Guardian Interview with Christopher Reeve
on
Politicizing Science
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· Score: 2
It is interesting, given that the founders of our country picked no bones about having no such separation. In fact, the Declaration of Independence talks about the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and of the need for its direct influence on manmade government.
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." -Thomas Jefferson
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity." -John Adams
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church." -Thomas Paine
Our currency carries our motto, "In God we Trust!"
That came about much later, around the time of the civil war... along with the suspension of habeas corpus, the arrests of dissenting congressmen and newspaper editors, and a death toll so massive that the WTC attack fits comfortably under its noisefloor. Simply the fact that IGWT was put on our money at this time doesn't mean that it was bad, of course, but saying that it was the founding fathers, or the powers of Liberty and Justice, that put it there is untrue.
Our pledge states that we are a nation indivisible "under God"
Originally, it didn't. "Under God" was added to the pledge during, and as a direct result of, the rabid anti-Communism of the mid-50s. Again, not our finest hour.
Is it moral and upright to take a growing child and pervert them in a way that doesn't allow them to live a normal life or not? And God's law says it isn't.
Whose God's law? The bible?
And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight...Then he [the Lord] said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith. -Ezek. 4:12-15
Where, BTW, in the bible is the verse against stem cell research?
Slashdot Mirror
This really isn't a big deal -- do you demand that Toyota build the trucks that haul their cars to market, or 3M use only their materials to build their offices? I think it's funny that Microsoft's outlook is so arrogant and monopolistic that they're embarassed to admit that "enemy" software is useful sometimes.
You should check out emusic, if you haven't. I haven't tried their service (since they won't accept payment by check), but it looks pretty solid: $15/month for all you can download from a half-decent catalog.
This is wrong -- Chris Hellwig wants him banned from LKML. Alan Cox, Roman Zippel, Adam Richter, Jeff Garzik, Andrew Morton, and Larry McVoy want not to have him banned (for reasons of free speech and the efficacy of killfiles for those who don't want to hear him), and so far no one's piped up agreeing with Hellwig. It would be correct to say that "a kernel developer" wants to have him banned.
XFree86 4.2.1 is in Debian unstable now.
My point is that "rough consensus and running code" is anathema to the GNU project's philosophy; they'd rather have it done slow and clean than quick and dirty (especially when quick-and-dirty was already available -- it'd have wasted effort that went into Gnome, Gnumeric, and Gimp instead.)
:-)
Also, a lot more than a man-year went into Linux before it was usable -- if you say it was usable at 1.0 (reasonable for a Unixy OS, not so much for a Windows competitor), then three years went by between Linus' famous c.o.m announcement (25 Aug 1991) and 1.0's release (13 Mar 1994) -- and if you check through 1.0's CREDITS, you find quite a few names besides Linus's. head `find . -name '*.c' | scram` | less(*) showed Biro, Hannu Savolainen, Orest Zborowski, Biro again, Fred Kempen, Biro again, and then Linus in the copyright notices the first time I ran it on a 1.0 tree.
(*) scram is a locally-written script that randomly permutes the lines of its input. Let me know if you want a copy (or if you know a Unix-standard equivalent I should have used instead
It's not that RMS "doesn't like" Linux, it's that he and the FSF deserve credit for writing pretty much all of the OS people call "Linux" (except the kernel and XFree86.)
It may well be that GNU's style (overblown, bloated with features, overdesigned) may be the 100% wrong way to build a kernel; we'll see.
If I were the GNU people, I wouldn't be working that hard on the HURD; there's already a perfectly functional GPLed kernel, so getting another one done simply isn't a high priority.
Also, GNU software has a reputation for being overdesigned and bloated with features; the HURD, I'm sure, is no exception, whereas Linux is massively underdesigned (it's been getting a lot better recently, but some of the in-kernel APIs are still disgusting.) The shocking thing would be if the HURD didn't take a lot longer than Linux to develop.
There's not really a way to say this without making people groan... moderators, do your worst:
The reason RMS carps endlessly about the GNU project deserving credit it, quite simply, that the FSF did most of the work that resulted in "Linux." Linus originally set out to write a Unix clone from scratch (a small hobbyist one, not "big and professional like gnu"), but for a variety of reasons the project scaled back to writing a kernel and a handful of userland kernel-glue (insmod, iptables, etc.), and "Linux" distributions are based on GNU userlands -- the C library, compiler toolchain, shell, basic Unix utilities, and desktop (if Gnome) are all GNU things. They make a fairly coherent whole, provide basic system services such as fopen() and ls, and define the user's interface with the computer (bash or Gnome) -- XFree86 and Linux (the kernel) are as essential as GNU is, but they're smaller and they do less to directly define the operation of the system.
The GNU/Linux beef is one thing (language is inaccurate; koala bears aren't really bears), but calling Linus "the inventor of the Linux operating system" is about like crediting NT to the team that wrote KERNEL32.DLL. RMS spent more than a decade of his life setting up an organization which still puts out voluminous Free code, and crippled himself with RSI writing code to give away, and I see high-modded posts here that treat him with more contempt than I've ever seen aimed at Jack Valenti or Fritz Hollings.
You've heard this all before, of course, and you're probably sick of it by now -- it's only the slow and plodding truth, and it has no punchline. Worst of all, it takes itself seriously, just like RMS. I really can't think of a short or funny way, though, to explain how wrong it is to shit on the guy who had the idea for the GPL, who argued with the world for years until the idea of open source software started to take hold, who at the time Linux was started had written a lot of the existing Free code personally, and who is directly responsible for the userland most of you supposedly use -- that's not RMS trying to grab credit for someone else's work, that's simply the way it happened, the truth.
Not funny, and not sexy like "Finnish teenager writes OS in basement; world stunned." But true.
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -Bush Jr.
That's not what made the "hidden messages" argument so asinine... while Bush & co. were wringing their hands over hidden messages that could survive a (probably semi-competent) English translation, the original Arabic videos were being broadcast in full over Al-Jazeera, available via satellite anywhere in the United States.
"Hidden messages" was a smokescreen for censorship, pure and simple.
No. The GNU GPL specifically defends your right (and Redhat's, etc.) to resell GPLed software for a profit.
You are aware, are you not, that part of the FSF agenda is funding the development of gcc, glibc, emacs, and Gnome?
Duhh, okay... so my brain wasn't working that day. I stand by my position, though -- I think you have the right to do whatever you want to legally obtained "content," including modifying and/or reselling it, and I think that should apply to Microsoft as well as it does to you and I. The fact is that Microsoft would be more likely to use other, equally legal (monopoly issues aside) tactics to bury the hypothetical movie -- pressuring movie stores not to take it, making and giving away copies of a similar or counterpoint movie, etc.
I don't think "no harm, no foul" is setting a bad precedent that could lead to future fouls. Others may of course disagree. *shrug*
Copyright law doesn't protect against reselling (first sale) or modification (parody, time & space-shifting.) It protects against unauthorized duplication and public performance.
My feeling is that that's fair use -- i.e. that they're paying for as many copies as they're renting, which is legit (think of "copying" a computer program from HD to memory -- that's fair use, too.) I didn't see any mention of unauthorized copying in the DGA complaint, and I'm pretty confident that that would have made it to the top of the list if the renters had been anything but 100% up-and-up, since it is indeed out-and-out illegal.
Okay, there are two issues here -- morality and legality. Morally, I wouldn't support the situation described, for obvious reasons (censorship and deceitfulness.) My understanding of the law is that Microsoft has a legal right to do the thing described, but if someone found a technicality and nailed them on it, cool -- because what they're doing is censorship (or rather mouthsewing), and deceitful. I support the right to do what you wish with legally purchased "content" (beyond copying it etc.) enough to allow even Microsoft to do it, but that doesn't mean that I hope that this happens to (say) Freedom Downtime.
Further, if I were the judge/jury, a lot of what I thought of a case like this would hinge on the deceitfulness angle -- did people have an accurate understanding of how the movie they were seeing was edited? In the case of Cleanflicks, yes. In the case of Microsoft, no.
This seems like the same kind of thin technicality that led to the following ruling: Running a computer program involves making several copies (original media to hard disk, hard disk to memory), and this is prohibited without permission of the copyright holder, therefore, EULAs are 100% binding (I wish I could dig up the case itself -- can anyone help me out?) In my book (IANAL, naturally), making a copy as an incidental part of doing something un-copy-ish is fair use (as long as you don't rent both copies or anything.)
Okay, here's my thinking: If Microsoft did as described, I wouldn't like it, but I would grudgingly admit that it was legal (with Microsoft, I'm used to it.) However, since the most important facts of the situation were exactly reversed in the hypothetical situation, I didn't feel the need to give the analogy much thought.
Or, to put it another way: If all the locally-owned restaurants in an area colluded in some legal way to put a McDonald's out of business, I think that would be Right, but if all the fast-food chains colluded to kill a locally-owned place, that would be Wrong. Both would be legal, but since I think that locally-owned businesses are good for the world, I would support the first and object to the second. I don't think that's hypocrisy; "good for the world" isn't guaranteed to be preserved along all possible lines of extrapolation.
Extremes, yes. Opposites are a different story.
Earlier in this thread, you said that it would be fine if people brought movies to CF, which then spliced them for a fee -- you're contradicting yourself again.
There is no law against modifying "creative content" which you legally own, at the behest of clients or anyone else. If you want to dispute this, please cite legislation or precedent.
Most of what you say I've already addressed upthread.
There is no freedom from misrepresentation (effective or otherwise) (libel and slander are illegal, of course, but that's so far afield of what's going on here as to be absurd) -- someone could fast forward through the fight scenes in a John Woo movie, or not understand the movie, and the same thing happens. Part and parcel of doing artistic work is that people say wrong-headed things about what you made; you don't get to ask the law to protect your work against unfair criticism.
Look, I can sympathize with what you're saying -- but there are real freedoms at risk, here, not just the director's natural desire to protect his creative ego and his reputation. The tendency lately (in rhetoric, and to a lesser extent in the courts) has been to pretend that holding the copyright on something gives you the unlimited ability to dictate how it's treated by the world. Linking to it, watching it on unauthorized devices, copying it for personal use, reverse-engineering it, benchmarking it, cloning its interfaces, and now watching a legal copy that's been edited -- all of these are verboten, because it would be bad for the copyright holder. Well, yes, some of these activities are, indeed, bad for the copyright holder -- but that's the breaks; life is hard; that doesn't mean they're illegal -- because almost none of these activities are actually bad for society, and some of them are good. The effort to prevent them, moreover, has already passed some really vomitous legislation, and it certainly seems that more is on the way.
The analogy I like for this goes as follows: Certainly, I don't want my daughter dating some tattooed asshole who just got out of prison. I would do everything in my power to prevent it. But that doesn't mean it should be illegal. Because then where would we be?
I disagree with the main thrust of your argument. The question of what you "should" do is immaterial; personally, I think it's reasonable to want to watch "Leaving Las Vegas" with your teenaged kids without the rape scene. Even if I believed that this wasn't something you "should" do, though, I wouldn't think the use of law to prevent it was justified.
Interpersonal mail isn't the same as movies -- if the mail was an open letter, and some news sites bleeped out the curse words, marked up the text (like this), or skipped sections of it (ellipsis), that would be find with me. One essential difference is that it's trivial (easier, in fact) to get an unedited copy of the movie; this is simply not censorship.
This contradicts your earlier argument about "moral rights" (nice soundbite, BTW.)
Certainly you must follow the rules if you are copying or publically performing the work in question -- but if Cleanflicks were doing that, there wouldn't be any of this claptrap about editing; regardless, they'd be redistributing without permission, which is, of course, illegal. They're not, though, and it isn't.
Again, this contradicts the "main thrust" of your argument.
So if you do it one way (the pain in the ass), then it's okay, but if you do it another (the easy way), then it's fine, even though the ultimate effect is the same either way? Sounds like bad law to me.
Horrors! We wouldn't want to set upon the slippery slope that leads eventually to users controlling the content that appears on their hardware! Look, if the guy down the street wants his TV to say "Smurfs" for "Palestinians" every time he watches Fox News, that's fine with me -- even if it wasn't, it should certainly be legal. If people really want sanitized content, then let 'em have sanitized content -- it's part of the same bag of freedoms that lets me watch "Hot Naked Badgers in Bondage" without being hassled by all the people who choose not to watch that particular title.
What rights are those? If you don't want someone cutting up your movie, and possibly reselling it, don't sell them a copy. That goes whether "them" is Joe Blow or Microsoft.
What duplication? You seem to be talking about situations that do not exist.
Okay, this one is interesting -- people get up in arms about web filters, yet not about AOL's parental controls. Why? Because web filters (a) do not filter pornography very well, (b) tend to filter certain types of political speech (2600.com is the classic example) not because they're obscene, but because they're "inappropriate," and (c) are often deployed on unwilling adults; sometimes a library or cybercafe computer will simply be useless for researching breast cancer. No one sane will argue against your right to deploy a perfectly accurate web filter on yourself -- which is pretty much exactly what's going on here.
No, I changed my bleedin' book WITHOUT their permission. Their work is the same as it always was. What about airing movies on TV without any nudity or violence? That actually is sanitization without the permission of the viewer, unlike this -- why aren't you up in arms about that?
This bit could well be, word for word, the argument of a spammer trying the "free speech!" argument for why spamblock lists are a violation of all things holy. It's a stupid argument here for the same reason it's a stupid argument there -- because "that particular population" quite obviously would rather cede control to the hands of a third party, and in some cases (like this one) will actually pay for the privelege. The difference you're pretending to ignore is the difference between employment and slavery.
Yesterday I went to Wendy's and got a burger, and I picked the pickles off before I ate it, so I guess I have the same attitude. Fortunately, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.
I think a good law would be that anyone involved in the "content creation" business these days has to write a hundred times on a blackboard: My rights regarding this copyrighted work are exactly the rights granted to me by the legislature, and no more.
The performance improvement won't mean much, but the POSIXization of the thread library might make a difference. Linux's thread support has up till now been pretty kludgy (signal handlers per-thread instead of per-process, wrong coredumps, etc.), and that made things like debugging threaded programs difficult; you may have run into this with gdb or whatever. Now that the Right Things have been coded in all over the map (kernel/libc/gcc/etc), we can drop the kludge and start doing it right.
Pity the founding fathers didn't think of that one, isn't it? All this hassle could have been avoided.
In the inimitable words of fark, Reno Smash Puny Humans.
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." -Thomas Jefferson
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere
in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths,
Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in
Christianity." -John Adams
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman
Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church,
nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church." -Thomas Paine
That came about much later, around the time of the civil war... along with the suspension of habeas corpus, the arrests of dissenting congressmen and newspaper editors, and a death toll so massive that the WTC attack fits comfortably under its noisefloor. Simply the fact that IGWT was put on our money at this time doesn't mean that it was bad, of course, but saying that it was the founding fathers, or the powers of Liberty and Justice, that put it there is untrue.
Originally, it didn't. "Under God" was added to the pledge during, and as a direct result of, the rabid anti-Communism of the mid-50s. Again, not our finest hour.
Whose God's law? The bible?
Where, BTW, in the bible is the verse against stem cell research?