with nary a mention of the fact that most of the world doesn't permit software patents at all.
He does nary mention it because it's nary relevant. One-click is a business process patent, not a software patent, and it's a patent in the USA, not a patent in "most of the world".
Question 1: Who has broken the law? Taco, the server owner or me? The RIAA has gone after the server owner, but that's largely pragmatics (not to mention PR).
All three of you, acting in concert. Which, I think, rather puts a hole in your otherwise clever scheme.
Because yes you are. Unless you're denying that Napster is used for trading mp3 files, to "share" a copy of the file on Napster is to commit a copyright violation. "Personal" copies are by the by, and they certainly aren't the main use to which Napster is put. Campaign against the law by all means, but don't pretend it doesn't exist.
As a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, I have to tell you that under commonwealth law, aiding and abetting an illegal act is always illegal, and that therefore, in Canada, it is indeed illegal to "maintain a database of [the locations of] MP3 data" if by doing so you are knowingly or recklessly aiding and abetting copyright violations.
In general, slashdot would do well to remember that clever-clever solutions which seem to magically get round the letter of the law have a long and depressing history in the courts.
a Canadian named Matt Goyer plans to set up a Napster clone server off the shores of the UK on a sovreign island
Indeed, and a young-at-heart Missourian of my acquaintance "plans" to father the children of Natalie Portman, but he'd be the first to admit it's a long and complicated process with no guarantee of success. For a start, he has no money, and therefore can't pay HavenCo's bills. For seconds, unless he intends to move to Sealand for the rest of his life, he'll end up in jail. For thirds, since "material that is ruled unlawful in the jurisdiction of the originating server" is against the AUP of Havenco, it's quite arguable that they won't let him do it.
I'm 6'2", heavyset, in top rubgy-playing physical condition.
For our USian readers, "top rugby-playing physical condition" means "I have a beer belly"
You would not want to mess with me unless you had a gun (or possibly a crossbow or syringe filled with HIV infected blood (the weapon of choice among muggers here in england))
Bring it on, you fat cunt. The fact that you swallow tabloid stories about "syringes full of HIV infected blood" gives absolutely every reader a crystal clear indication of how much real life experience of violence you have. Unless it involves sticking your head between a prefect's legs, or playing jolly knob games in the showers, you're all talk.
You'd be surprised how much similarity there is between running through dark cellars, fighting for your life with a shotgun and sitting on your fat ass playing computer games and masturbating. Absolutely none; I was amazed.
Indeed. Honour is like the hawk; sometimes it must go hooded. But on the other hand, sometimes a man has to stand up and be counted. Not only are you a jackass, Fascdot, I am also very afraid to have to inform you that you're also a cunt. I'm sure Shoeboy is with me on this one, though I believe he has religious and/or aesthetic objections to my precise choice of epithet.
yep, signature flamebaiting is cool. It's double cool because sigs don't show up in metamod, so the metamoderators never know why you were modded down.
It will probably be too much to hope for, that some of the "RMS will only accept GPL" people will take note.
Indeed it will, given that he has played this game of bait-and-switch before, when he started trying to deprecate LGPL. For Stallman, any other form of licence is just a tactical compromise on the way to finagling everyone into using his beloved GPL. He wants to try to promote Ogg to become the de facto standard, and then start including features in it with GPL code, so that anyone who wants to stay up with the development path has to join his merry band of intellectual property guerrillas. Of course, when Microsoft do this, it's called "embrace and extend", but Open Source's favourite sweaty hippie would never do anything so bad, would he?
The fair use exception to copyright is there to allow the production of scholarly, critical or satiric works based on copyrighted material. That's what it's for. So the question is always "is there some such work which I literally could not produce without something like DeCSS?".
The trailer(s) for the film itself
Available on other videotapes. If you're genuine about producing a fair use work, you'll get hold of them.
Alternate language soundtracks
You can simply record the sound made by your Windows DVD player by conventional means and add it to your fair use work. You don't need a digital-perfect copy for scholarship, satire or parody.
Subtitles, both in other languages and for the hearing impaired
Screenplays are not hard to get hold of in paper form, or on the internet
Director's commentary
See above on foreign language soundtracks
Music-only soundtrack
ditto
Fair use exists to ensure that copyright does not stifle free speech. It can't be worked up into a right to have your kewl DVDs available in exactly the form you want. There is no such right.
First sale is extremely weak. For a start, it's not a First Amendment right. In fact it's not even a right at all; it's a doctrine by which the Copyright Act is interpreted. Second, it's subject to numerous limitations. Specifically, computer software vendors have the right to prevent unauthorised commercial rental of their products, although VCR vendors don't. The DMCA pretty much shot this one down through statute in the case of DVDs, and since it's a doctrine based on the Copyright Act rather than the Constitution, that pretty much wraps it up.
Think about it. How can choosing your player for a DVD be a free speech issue? Watching a DVD is consuming speech, not producing it.
If you think that the plethora of legal amateurs out there who think that they have a rock-steady legal case to litigate is a threat to the profession, dream on. The lawyer's summer homes are built on amateurs with legal aspirations
Doesn't work that way. Fair use doesn't give you the "right to use any player you wish", or anything remotely similar. Fair use is meant to protect your right to criticise, parody or make use of the ideas in a piece of work, not to make free with the specific protected expression. It's assumed that if you're serious about producing a work which requires fair use, you'll go to the trouble of borrowing a Windows box, or even, god help us, shelling out a few extra dollars for the screenplay or soundtrack album, depending on what you want to do. Fair use is actually an extremely weak right, because of the distinction under copyright law between (free) ideas and (protected) expressions of those ideas. It's very difficult to get any rights over expressions, and the ideas are not so difficult to get hold of.
The idea that DeCSS was necessary in order to produce a Linux player was not even seriously advanced by the Corley defence. It's full of holes; particularly shot down by the fact that DeCSS was written for Windows.
Well in that case, I think you should hole up in a shack in Montana, and prepare for the end times while you pack bags of fertilizer onto a Ryder truck. Seriously, if you're that serious about the doctrine of original intent, and if you think that it's at all possible to be certain of what the Constitution either "says" or "means", then your only real option is violent revolution. But, since we must consider the possibility that your revolution may fail, could you perhaps take a minute or two to look at the US Govt's amicus brief in this case and point out any technical errors which you are qualified to comment on?
No, the defence under DMCA is that it is permissible to cirumvent if you do so for the purpose of advancing knowledge of encryption. As is so often the case in law and so rarely the case in computing, intention matters. In any case, this is an appeal of a previous case in which that defence wasn't offered, so all your help would achieve would be to waste clerical time; this is something that can only benefit the side with more resources.
Lawyers are going to be the ones who interpret the Constitution no matter what you want or say. Think for yourself by all means, but when one of our friends is on trial for his liberty and rights we hold dear are at stake, it would be better for you to concentrate your help on where it is most practical use. Once the immediate problem is over, I'd love to discuss the Constitution with you, but for the time being, we need more noise and less signal
Corley should drop the case. The only real hope he has is the overbreadth attack on the DMCA; Kaplan was entirely right to say that while code is speech, the DMCA is a constitutionally permissible restriction on speech.
So all that's left is to say that the DMCA is overbroad because it restricts fair use. And that's going to be very difficult to establish while DVD remains a minority format and all the material you might want to use is available elsewhere. The US Govt. is right that "having to buy another copy or make do with an inferior recording" is not the sort of impediment to fair use of which overbreadth defences are made.
So Corley should drop his appeal, take his licks and come back with a better case once copy-prevention has become ubiquitous, at which time the constitutional argument will be stronger. Losing on this one due to contingent facts of the case is going to make it much more difficult to win in future with a stronger case.
Oh yeh, and people, can we stick to pointing out technical errors in the document? The amateurish "according to my reading of the Constitution" analysis of people who don't know shit about the case law is embarrassing, unhelpful, and only raises the overall signal/noise ratio
... and this is a very, very bad argument. The whole point of the refutation of the Argument from Design was that the current state of something does not give you any information about how it got that way. You simply cannot say that any given DNA sequence "proves we are descended from bacteria" without assuming something more or less equivalent to what you are trying to prove.
When people use bad arguments in the service of evolution, they legitimise the use of bad arguments, and that can only help one side....
Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 2
Remember, I said "as practiced" in the real world
Well, "as practiced in the real world", Open Source is a bunch of hobbyists struggling to reproduce a 1970s operating system, some of whom have managed to dupe venture capitalists for long enough to become unprofitable companies, but I didn't see you criticisng that.
ESR is a main board director of VA Linux, which dumped 25% of its "open source" employees today. Either he didn't know about the layoffs, or he knew and didn't care. Not sure which is worse.
Slashdot Mirror
He does nary mention it because it's nary relevant. One-click is a business process patent, not a software patent, and it's a patent in the USA, not a patent in "most of the world".
Nary. For fuck's sake.
Well, no. With sufficient training, a *monkey* can put glue onto paper, but that doesn't invalidate the patent for Post-it notes.
You absolutely are, given that your business plan appears to be to steal other peoples' reviews.
People have long memories, you know.
All three of you, acting in concert. Which, I think, rather puts a hole in your otherwise clever scheme.
Because yes you are. Unless you're denying that Napster is used for trading mp3 files, to "share" a copy of the file on Napster is to commit a copyright violation. "Personal" copies are by the by, and they certainly aren't the main use to which Napster is put. Campaign against the law by all means, but don't pretend it doesn't exist.
In general, slashdot would do well to remember that clever-clever solutions which seem to magically get round the letter of the law have a long and depressing history in the courts.
Indeed, and a young-at-heart Missourian of my acquaintance "plans" to father the children of Natalie Portman, but he'd be the first to admit it's a long and complicated process with no guarantee of success. For a start, he has no money, and therefore can't pay HavenCo's bills. For seconds, unless he intends to move to Sealand for the rest of his life, he'll end up in jail. For thirds, since "material that is ruled unlawful in the jurisdiction of the originating server" is against the AUP of Havenco, it's quite arguable that they won't let him do it.
For our USian readers, "top rugby-playing physical condition" means "I have a beer belly"
You would not want to mess with me unless you had a gun (or possibly a crossbow or syringe filled with HIV infected blood (the weapon of choice among muggers here in england))
Bring it on, you fat cunt. The fact that you swallow tabloid stories about "syringes full of HIV infected blood" gives absolutely every reader a crystal clear indication of how much real life experience of violence you have. Unless it involves sticking your head between a prefect's legs, or playing jolly knob games in the showers, you're all talk.
You'd be surprised how much similarity there is between running through dark cellars, fighting for your life with a shotgun and sitting on your fat ass playing computer games and masturbating. Absolutely none; I was amazed.
Indeed. Honour is like the hawk; sometimes it must go hooded. But on the other hand, sometimes a man has to stand up and be counted. Not only are you a jackass, Fascdot, I am also very afraid to have to inform you that you're also a cunt. I'm sure Shoeboy is with me on this one, though I believe he has religious and/or aesthetic objections to my precise choice of epithet.
yep, signature flamebaiting is cool. It's double cool because sigs don't show up in metamod, so the metamoderators never know why you were modded down.
Indeed it will, given that he has played this game of bait-and-switch before, when he started trying to deprecate LGPL. For Stallman, any other form of licence is just a tactical compromise on the way to finagling everyone into using his beloved GPL. He wants to try to promote Ogg to become the de facto standard, and then start including features in it with GPL code, so that anyone who wants to stay up with the development path has to join his merry band of intellectual property guerrillas. Of course, when Microsoft do this, it's called "embrace and extend", but Open Source's favourite sweaty hippie would never do anything so bad, would he?
Tell that to the poor bastards VA Linux laid off.
The trailer(s) for the film itself
Available on other videotapes. If you're genuine about producing a fair use work, you'll get hold of them.
Alternate language soundtracks
You can simply record the sound made by your Windows DVD player by conventional means and add it to your fair use work. You don't need a digital-perfect copy for scholarship, satire or parody.
Subtitles, both in other languages and for the hearing impaired
Screenplays are not hard to get hold of in paper form, or on the internet
Director's commentary
See above on foreign language soundtracks
Music-only soundtrack
ditto
Fair use exists to ensure that copyright does not stifle free speech. It can't be worked up into a right to have your kewl DVDs available in exactly the form you want. There is no such right.
Think about it. How can choosing your player for a DVD be a free speech issue? Watching a DVD is consuming speech, not producing it.
If you think that the plethora of legal amateurs out there who think that they have a rock-steady legal case to litigate is a threat to the profession, dream on. The lawyer's summer homes are built on amateurs with legal aspirations
The idea that DeCSS was necessary in order to produce a Linux player was not even seriously advanced by the Corley defence. It's full of holes; particularly shot down by the fact that DeCSS was written for Windows.
Well in that case, I think you should hole up in a shack in Montana, and prepare for the end times while you pack bags of fertilizer onto a Ryder truck. Seriously, if you're that serious about the doctrine of original intent, and if you think that it's at all possible to be certain of what the Constitution either "says" or "means", then your only real option is violent revolution. But, since we must consider the possibility that your revolution may fail, could you perhaps take a minute or two to look at the US Govt's amicus brief in this case and point out any technical errors which you are qualified to comment on?
No, the defence under DMCA is that it is permissible to cirumvent if you do so for the purpose of advancing knowledge of encryption. As is so often the case in law and so rarely the case in computing, intention matters. In any case, this is an appeal of a previous case in which that defence wasn't offered, so all your help would achieve would be to waste clerical time; this is something that can only benefit the side with more resources.
Lawyers are going to be the ones who interpret the Constitution no matter what you want or say. Think for yourself by all means, but when one of our friends is on trial for his liberty and rights we hold dear are at stake, it would be better for you to concentrate your help on where it is most practical use. Once the immediate problem is over, I'd love to discuss the Constitution with you, but for the time being, we need more noise and less signal
Nobody wrote DeCSS to teach you encryption, and you'll never convince a court that they did.
Corley should drop the case. The only real hope he has is the overbreadth attack on the DMCA; Kaplan was entirely right to say that while code is speech, the DMCA is a constitutionally permissible restriction on speech.
So all that's left is to say that the DMCA is overbroad because it restricts fair use. And that's going to be very difficult to establish while DVD remains a minority format and all the material you might want to use is available elsewhere. The US Govt. is right that "having to buy another copy or make do with an inferior recording" is not the sort of impediment to fair use of which overbreadth defences are made.
So Corley should drop his appeal, take his licks and come back with a better case once copy-prevention has become ubiquitous, at which time the constitutional argument will be stronger. Losing on this one due to contingent facts of the case is going to make it much more difficult to win in future with a stronger case.
Oh yeh, and people, can we stick to pointing out technical errors in the document? The amateurish "according to my reading of the Constitution" analysis of people who don't know shit about the case law is embarrassing, unhelpful, and only raises the overall signal/noise ratio
When people use bad arguments in the service of evolution, they legitimise the use of bad arguments, and that can only help one side ....
Well, "as practiced in the real world", Open Source is a bunch of hobbyists struggling to reproduce a 1970s operating system, some of whom have managed to dupe venture capitalists for long enough to become unprofitable companies, but I didn't see you criticisng that.
ESR is a main board director of VA Linux, which dumped 25% of its "open source" employees today. Either he didn't know about the layoffs, or he knew and didn't care. Not sure which is worse.