I doubt that Microsoft weeps too many tears over the revenue they lose from not having the intellectual property of someone who appears to be unable to write a coherent paragraph.
OK, the above is a bit long for today's foreshortened attention spans, so here's a summary:
A lone obsessive nut threatened a gang of obsessive nuts and somehow the government got involved. We hate the Scientologists, but we're a bit scared to say so.
A court steno machine would be extremely unlikely to screw up "amicae", and in fact cryptome notes:
8 May 2001
Source: EFF, with thanks for transcription of audio tapes by San Francisco firm of Farella, Braun and Martel. EFF emphasizes "that it is NOT an official transcript, just one that a volunteer did for us."
In other words, "Misheard" was an absolutely accurate criticism.
heh. You'll see numerous references in the transcript to "the Umeki". Don't worry, the court hasn't been invaded by any mysterious gray-skinned race. The person taking the transcript misheard -- these are the "amicae", the friends of the court, the people who filed amicus curae briefs. Perhaps cryptome might care to correct this mistake; if they do, this comment will have become redundant.
However, if IBM used the BSD license their code would be quietly snapped up and used in their competitors products, without any compensation to IBM. That's the inexcusable (to stockholders) action.
Nahhh. For a start, as any Red Hat stockholder will tell you, the code is like 5% of the product in most cases. In many ways, IBM benefits from assured compatibility.
The real reason that GPL is a bad idea for companies is that most companies have a whole load of code (internal tools, etc, etc) which their competitors wouldn't bother looking at if you sent it round Federal Express, plus a small bit of code which absolutely has to remain proprietary. If the 95% of grunge code is GPL, then Murphy's Law guarantees that someday, somebody, no matter what processes you have in place, is going to copy 'n'paste code in such a way as to make something which ought to be part of the 5% of absolutely proprietary "franchise" code, into a derivative work of a piece of GPL software.
Newtonian physics would never have been patentable in any day or age because it is an idea, not a device. So that leaves you with gunpowder, the arch and the wheel. Not a lot to show for the five thousand years of the pre-patent era, huh?
all of these were obtained during an era that didn't have patents to protect the "Intellectual Property" of these ideas.
In fact, the first workable steam engine (certainly the first that could have supported the Industrial Revolution) was patented by James Watt on 25th April 1769, receiving patent number 913 just to prove it.
It does make you wonder how in the world everyone got to be using that magnet material without *realizing* it was under patent, though
Well, the explanation is that everyone in the funky world does in fact realise it's under patent. It's just that some suppliers have been engaging in "magnet piracy", selling on more Magnequench magnets than they have paid a royalty on. Sony, Cisco et al have been brought into the suit because 1) they have deep pockets 2) It's arguable that they knew, or should have known, what was going on, which makes them co-conspirators and 3) they are likely to force the real offenders to settle out of court. It's fairly standard legal tactics.
Just another small battalion in the war against slashdot cluelessness.
There appears to be a double standard at work here:
Management don't understand the technology: dolts! They're inept! Coders, those legendary judges of what users will pay for, should run the show.
"Coders" can't handle human interaction: that's totally acceptable! They can't be expected to communicate clearly, that's the job of management.
The truth is clearly somewhere in between -- it is the responsibility of management to understand the technology to a degree, and the responsibility of programmers to communicate properly. What I don't understand is this Slashdot mentality that whines non-stop about "PHBs stopping me from doing my job properly!" while failing to condemn pointy-headed geeks who systematically make it impossible for managers to do their job properly.
Managers are paid to manage people. A normal manager can manage normal people. To find someone who's capable of instantly interpreting the hundred and one varieties of geekish grunt? Maybe one in a thousand, and you bet he'll be well paid. If you expect a reasonably competent manager to communicate with an entire room full of "problem" employees, you will get the same results that you get by giving the coders inadequate tools. It cuts both ways, and nine times out of ten, aggrieved geeks have received precisely the management they derserved.
If one were to use DeCSS to rip a movie onto their hard drive (stating parenthetically that their computer has no networking cababilities including sneakernet, just the DVD-ROM drive), but did have a video card, isn't it fair use that they are simply archiving their possessions for backup purposes?
Yes, which is why the onus is on the industry to prove that this fair use can be satisfied through some means without the general distribution of decryption tools. AFAICT, if they can't, then DMCA is unconstitutional. They think they can.
DeCSS remains a tool which can be used for good or ill, it requires user actions beyond the simple usage of the tool
The same is true of fully-automatic rifles or lumps of uranium-235. When things can be used "for good or ill" and when there is reason to suppose that they will typically be used for ill, then those things will typically be heavily regulated.
Clintonesque dodging as ever, I see, Woodentop? If we're going to be making unsupported accusations, then I think the words "petty confidence trickster" are going to be walking in the direction of this conversation quite soon.
What pressure?
The pressure from all the posters who accused you of lying, and pressed you to substantiate your claims, woodentop.
You think I give a damn about what anyone thinks?
Well, I wonder how I ever got that idea... could it be because your own fucking website admits that you changed your mind about non-profit status because of all the adverse comment? Or possibly because of all the whining articles you posted, claiming that people who had, in fact, seen right through you were "misunderstanding"? Or indeed, because you abused the k5 moderation system to get your own back on me, at least? Or because of your disgusting Clintonian evasivness and wriggling throughout the whole fiasco, affecting not to know what a "co-operative" was? Get real, Woodentop.
Were I as talentless as you, I certainly wouldn't flaunt it and make an ass of myself as you do.
Your actions belie your words.
Oh and by the way, given that my signature, appended to every post I make, contains the words "Linux is for cunts", to call me a "wannabe troll" is to make a very poor flame indeed. Fucking Clinton impersonator.
But somehow under Alter's analysis, 2600 came up lacking while the NYT did not.
Unless I have been living under a rock for a while and "New York Times" is actually slang for a means of stealing telecom services, I think that his analysis is pretty hard to fault here. 2600 magazine has a long history ("Fun at Costco") of giving people instructions on how to knowingly break the law, and it's pointless to pretend otherwise.
Furthermore, two of michael's points seem to contradict each other. We have
Technically-literate people may realize that mass DVD copying is performed by stamping complete copies of the DVDs, encryption and all, no decryption required,
and
Apparently, in the attorney's world, once that lone copy is made, it pretty much automatically puts itself on the Internet with no further acts by any individual
Which misses the states' point about DeCSS -- it's uniquely dangerous precisely because it *isn't* a copying utility -- it's a decryption utility. Because of that, it makes it possible to "rip" protected content and convert it to all manner of different (more easily traded and recopied) formats.
I make no comment on the rights and wrongs of the case, btw.
The "+4 conspiracy post" was just a part-time spork-wielding goatrapist pictured here (don't click that unless you want your eyes to pop out) whom we pissed off by voting down his article on K5. At that time, he had created an 17-page, intricate conspiracy theory about an organization that had a net profit of about $400 and one employee (me).
What utter, self-serving rot.
There are a few of us here who remember the whole story of this matter, Lucas, and your misrepresentation of it is, frankly, dishonest. The posts on the slashdot thread linked to above, and on the corresponding kuro5hin story quite clearly say what a number of other people, including myself were saying, which is that, at the time when you first started publicising this project:
It was based around a for-profit business, owned by you
It was representing itself as a "co-operative", which carries the strong implication of being a non-profit
You were using the word "GNU" in your promotion, implying a link to the Free Software Foundation which did not, at that time, exist.
And therefore, that it was using misleading publicity, about which the public ought to be warned.
Since the beginning of this, you appear (I have *not* checked this, and would appreciate it if someone else would) to have addressed all of these issues. For which, you have my congratulations. But it is very poor indeed of you to pretend that these concerns were not entirely rational at the time, because they very definitely were.
You started with a project which misleadingly pretended to be a non-profit. In response to pressure from posters on slashdot and kuro5hin, you have turned it into a genuine non-profit. Don't you dare stigmatise the people who have been trying to keep you honest from day one as "conspiracy theorists". Spiers and flatpack (I make no comment on my own minor role) are the only people who come out of this with their reputations entirely intact.
As a means of removing oneself from the gene pool, that strikes me as not quite as efficient as strapping a JATO rocket to your Chevy Impala, but 'twill serve, 'twill serve.
... but you are at least partly the author of your own misfortunes. Let me analyse this vignette from an alternative point of view:
The most frustrating experience I can recall in recent memory is when I had been working on learning our new system and porting my bug fixes to it (despite being told that I'd be a valuable team member, come up with neat stuff, etc, I ended up getting assigned to bug fix after bug fix) when I was told that I absolutely needed to drop everything and work on getting a new QA server set up. So I did. I got in sometime in the morning and worked completely straight until 1900, no breaks of any sort, my coworker hovering over my shoulder and breathing tobacco-smoke-tinged breath on me. Finally, I finished what I could do, and with a splitting headache, I took my laptop and sat on one of our futons.
"Did you finish the bug fixes?" I look up to see my boss standing over me. "What?" I am the tiniest bit incredulous. "What's the status of the bug fixes?" "Not done." "Why not?" "Because you told me I had a new top priority." "Well, yes, but you have other priorities as well." Apparently "drop everything" has a different meaning for different people.
Yes. "Drop everything" does indeed have a different meaning for different people. For a lot of people it just means "this is urgent". For a lot of people it means "drop everything, do this right now, but not at the expense of severely delaying something else". It's a very ambiguous term. Which is why you should check what the person who spoke to you meant.
Instead, what you did was to take the most literal interpretation possible, literally stop work on another important task, and assume that you had made the correct interpretation of someone else's priorities from a quick, rushed conversation.
Your boss comes back, and the bug fixes aren't done. Now, it's very hard to say the sentence "But you said, 'drop everything'" without it sounding like a smart-ass remark (try). I'm guessing that, whatever you intended, it in fact did sound like a smart ass remark. So from his point of view, he's not got the bug fixes he wanted, he's got an employee who failed to remind him of other tasks he was carrying out at the same time and (from his POV) randomly reprioritized the job queue, and that employee has justified his action by acting like Mr Fucking Spock and hanging everything on the phrase "drop everything". Frankly, in that manager's position, I would strongly suspect that you had just blown off the job and were using "drop everything" as an excuse.
In short, you're in the position you're in because you're a poor communicator. You don't make an effort to find out what people mean, you don't give information to the system about your status (something that even C++ objects can manage) and you make smart-ass remarks to justify your behaviour. No wonder your manager regards you as a management problem.
Being talented with computers is not an excuse to act the stereotyped g**k. It is not reasonable to demand of busy people that they submit their requests as if they were a Unix kernel, and it is *your* responsibility to ensure that someone else knows what your workload is like. Burning midnight oil in a heroic quest to get half a job done as a one-man team is no substitute for communicating and prioritising.
And when people say "work smarter, not harder", that's what they mean.
By my logic, you should be beaten around the arms, legs and head with iron fucking bars every time you whistle anything by the godawful Barenaked Ladies or any similar wanky g**k band, but that's beside the point.
You see, this is the "geeklawyer" approach at work. On the left, we have a legal system which has a vast heap of precedent, technical language and provision for review in order to ensure that the spirit of the law as well as the letter is obeyed and that massive injustices don't result. It doesn't work all the time, but it works well enough and it works a fuck sight better than the Linux kernel's still non-existent DirectX support.
Over on the right, we have a smart-alec, painfully literal-minded nimrod who thinks that because he's spotted a minor linguistic infelicity in a hastily drafted post, the entire legal system has been savagely indicted by his genius. And therefore if only "engineers" (ie; fat arsed Quake-jockey sysadmins) could take over the legal system, blah blah wank. Get bent, the fucking lot of you.
Ok, let me spell this out in plain language. Whistling a tune in the street is not "using" that tune. You're not using it because "use" is use for a purpose, to gain some benefit, as opposed to enjoying something for its own sake in a way which does not detract from the creator's rights over his creation.
But what if I sing the song to put a baby to sleep? Surely that's a "use"?
No it isn't, not in any normal circumstance outside a concocted science fiction story, and certainly not in any sense that would allow you to extend it to making Napster legal again.
But what if I recorded myself whistling and...
No. Whatever it is, no. And the answer is "No" to all the other fucking thousand and one hypothetical examples you're about to come up with, if they mean a legal loophole to allow something obviously fucking criminal.
But what are these "rights"? I'm not actually taking anything! What do you mean "benefit"?!
Sorry, not listening any more. Please remember this; I'm going to repeat it three times, with increasing emphasis.
On the subject of copyright, all your arguments have been thought of before, better, by somebody else.
On the subject of copyright, all your arguments have been thought of before, better, by somebody else
ON THE SUBJECT OF COPYRIGHT, ALL YOUR ARGUMENTS HAVE BEEN THOUGHT OF BEFORE, BETTER, BY SOMEBODY ELSE!
I don't disagree with anything you say. However, this story is entirely about the practice of making popular tunes available for download over mobile phones on a commercial basis. This is a common practice in the UK; perhaps it isn't in the USA (I know you always used to have decidedly inferior mobile technology).
Fair use depends upon exactly what it says; the use. If my business model is to take the week's top 40, then to convert them into ringtone format, then to place advertisements in the newspapers inviting people to dial a premium rate phone number in order to download the ringtone tune, then it seems pretty obvious to me that I am making money out of someone else's copyrighted work and ought to pay the royalty. Guess what -- that's exactly the business model discussed in this story, and the vast majority of these ringtone operations in fact *do* pay royalties to the Performing Rights Society. There are presumably a few cowboys who don't.
On reflection, I think that on this occasion it's likely to be differences between US mobile phone technology and the rest of the world rather than widespread ignorance of copyright which is responsible for the toxic level of cluelessness in this slashdot thread. Happy to help to clear up this misunderstanding.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad news for JunkBuster, huh?
If she's well enough to strangle doctors, she's well enough to type.
Distributing books is the business of Federal Express.
Selling books is the business of amazon.com.
I can tell you to fuck off in Welsh if that's what you mean.
I doubt that Microsoft weeps too many tears over the revenue they lose from not having the intellectual property of someone who appears to be unable to write a coherent paragraph.
I'm sorry; I'll try to speak slower next time.
A lone obsessive nut threatened a gang of obsessive nuts and somehow the government got involved. We hate the Scientologists, but we're a bit scared to say so.
8 May 2001 Source: EFF, with thanks for transcription of audio tapes by San Francisco firm of Farella, Braun and Martel. EFF emphasizes "that it is NOT an official transcript, just one that a volunteer did for us."
In other words, "Misheard" was an absolutely accurate criticism.
heh. You'll see numerous references in the transcript to "the Umeki". Don't worry, the court hasn't been invaded by any mysterious gray-skinned race. The person taking the transcript misheard -- these are the "amicae", the friends of the court, the people who filed amicus curae briefs. Perhaps cryptome might care to correct this mistake; if they do, this comment will have become redundant.
Nahhh. For a start, as any Red Hat stockholder will tell you, the code is like 5% of the product in most cases. In many ways, IBM benefits from assured compatibility.
The real reason that GPL is a bad idea for companies is that most companies have a whole load of code (internal tools, etc, etc) which their competitors wouldn't bother looking at if you sent it round Federal Express, plus a small bit of code which absolutely has to remain proprietary. If the 95% of grunge code is GPL, then Murphy's Law guarantees that someday, somebody, no matter what processes you have in place, is going to copy 'n'paste code in such a way as to make something which ought to be part of the 5% of absolutely proprietary "franchise" code, into a derivative work of a piece of GPL software.
And that's when the stockholders get antsy.
Newtonian physics would never have been patentable in any day or age because it is an idea, not a device. So that leaves you with gunpowder, the arch and the wheel. Not a lot to show for the five thousand years of the pre-patent era, huh?
In fact, the first workable steam engine (certainly the first that could have supported the Industrial Revolution) was patented by James Watt on 25th April 1769, receiving patent number 913 just to prove it.
Well, the explanation is that everyone in the funky world does in fact realise it's under patent. It's just that some suppliers have been engaging in "magnet piracy", selling on more Magnequench magnets than they have paid a royalty on. Sony, Cisco et al have been brought into the suit because 1) they have deep pockets 2) It's arguable that they knew, or should have known, what was going on, which makes them co-conspirators and 3) they are likely to force the real offenders to settle out of court. It's fairly standard legal tactics.
Just another small battalion in the war against slashdot cluelessness.
In my world, this behaviour is known as "trying to extract valuable information from someone who can't or won't communicate".
Management don't understand the technology: dolts! They're inept! Coders, those legendary judges of what users will pay for, should run the show.
"Coders" can't handle human interaction: that's totally acceptable! They can't be expected to communicate clearly, that's the job of management.
The truth is clearly somewhere in between -- it is the responsibility of management to understand the technology to a degree, and the responsibility of programmers to communicate properly. What I don't understand is this Slashdot mentality that whines non-stop about "PHBs stopping me from doing my job properly!" while failing to condemn pointy-headed geeks who systematically make it impossible for managers to do their job properly.
Managers are paid to manage people. A normal manager can manage normal people. To find someone who's capable of instantly interpreting the hundred and one varieties of geekish grunt? Maybe one in a thousand, and you bet he'll be well paid. If you expect a reasonably competent manager to communicate with an entire room full of "problem" employees, you will get the same results that you get by giving the coders inadequate tools. It cuts both ways, and nine times out of ten, aggrieved geeks have received precisely the management they derserved.
.... and it's usually the wrong stuff.
Yes, which is why the onus is on the industry to prove that this fair use can be satisfied through some means without the general distribution of decryption tools. AFAICT, if they can't, then DMCA is unconstitutional. They think they can.
DeCSS remains a tool which can be used for good or ill, it requires user actions beyond the simple usage of the tool
The same is true of fully-automatic rifles or lumps of uranium-235. When things can be used "for good or ill" and when there is reason to suppose that they will typically be used for ill, then those things will typically be heavily regulated.
What pressure?
The pressure from all the posters who accused you of lying, and pressed you to substantiate your claims, woodentop.
You think I give a damn about what anyone thinks?
Well, I wonder how I ever got that idea ... could it be because your own fucking website admits that you changed your mind about non-profit status because of all the adverse comment? Or possibly because of all the whining articles you posted, claiming that people who had, in fact, seen right through you were "misunderstanding"? Or indeed, because you abused the k5 moderation system to get your own back on me, at least? Or because of your disgusting Clintonian evasivness and wriggling throughout the whole fiasco, affecting not to know what a "co-operative" was? Get real, Woodentop.
Were I as talentless as you, I certainly wouldn't flaunt it and make an ass of myself as you do.
Your actions belie your words.
Oh and by the way, given that my signature, appended to every post I make, contains the words "Linux is for cunts", to call me a "wannabe troll" is to make a very poor flame indeed. Fucking Clinton impersonator.
Unless I have been living under a rock for a while and "New York Times" is actually slang for a means of stealing telecom services, I think that his analysis is pretty hard to fault here. 2600 magazine has a long history ("Fun at Costco") of giving people instructions on how to knowingly break the law, and it's pointless to pretend otherwise.
Furthermore, two of michael's points seem to contradict each other. We have
Technically-literate people may realize that mass DVD copying is performed by stamping complete copies of the DVDs, encryption and all, no decryption required,
and
Apparently, in the attorney's world, once that lone copy is made, it pretty much automatically puts itself on the Internet with no further acts by any individual
Which misses the states' point about DeCSS -- it's uniquely dangerous precisely because it *isn't* a copying utility -- it's a decryption utility. Because of that, it makes it possible to "rip" protected content and convert it to all manner of different (more easily traded and recopied) formats.
I make no comment on the rights and wrongs of the case, btw.
What utter, self-serving rot.
There are a few of us here who remember the whole story of this matter, Lucas, and your misrepresentation of it is, frankly, dishonest. The posts on the slashdot thread linked to above, and on the corresponding kuro5hin story quite clearly say what a number of other people, including myself were saying, which is that, at the time when you first started publicising this project:
- It was based around a for-profit business, owned by you
- It was representing itself as a "co-operative", which carries the strong implication of being a non-profit
- You were using the word "GNU" in your promotion, implying a link to the Free Software Foundation which did not, at that time, exist.
- And therefore, that it was using misleading publicity, about which the public ought to be warned.
Since the beginning of this, you appear (I have *not* checked this, and would appreciate it if someone else would) to have addressed all of these issues. For which, you have my congratulations. But it is very poor indeed of you to pretend that these concerns were not entirely rational at the time, because they very definitely were.You started with a project which misleadingly pretended to be a non-profit. In response to pressure from posters on slashdot and kuro5hin, you have turned it into a genuine non-profit. Don't you dare stigmatise the people who have been trying to keep you honest from day one as "conspiracy theorists". Spiers and flatpack (I make no comment on my own minor role) are the only people who come out of this with their reputations entirely intact.
As a means of removing oneself from the gene pool, that strikes me as not quite as efficient as strapping a JATO rocket to your Chevy Impala, but 'twill serve, 'twill serve.
Instead, what you did was to take the most literal interpretation possible, literally stop work on another important task, and assume that you had made the correct interpretation of someone else's priorities from a quick, rushed conversation.
Your boss comes back, and the bug fixes aren't done. Now, it's very hard to say the sentence "But you said, 'drop everything'" without it sounding like a smart-ass remark (try). I'm guessing that, whatever you intended, it in fact did sound like a smart ass remark. So from his point of view, he's not got the bug fixes he wanted, he's got an employee who failed to remind him of other tasks he was carrying out at the same time and (from his POV) randomly reprioritized the job queue, and that employee has justified his action by acting like Mr Fucking Spock and hanging everything on the phrase "drop everything". Frankly, in that manager's position, I would strongly suspect that you had just blown off the job and were using "drop everything" as an excuse.
In short, you're in the position you're in because you're a poor communicator. You don't make an effort to find out what people mean, you don't give information to the system about your status (something that even C++ objects can manage) and you make smart-ass remarks to justify your behaviour. No wonder your manager regards you as a management problem.
Being talented with computers is not an excuse to act the stereotyped g**k. It is not reasonable to demand of busy people that they submit their requests as if they were a Unix kernel, and it is *your* responsibility to ensure that someone else knows what your workload is like. Burning midnight oil in a heroic quest to get half a job done as a one-man team is no substitute for communicating and prioritising.
And when people say "work smarter, not harder", that's what they mean.
You see, this is the "geeklawyer" approach at work. On the left, we have a legal system which has a vast heap of precedent, technical language and provision for review in order to ensure that the spirit of the law as well as the letter is obeyed and that massive injustices don't result. It doesn't work all the time, but it works well enough and it works a fuck sight better than the Linux kernel's still non-existent DirectX support.
Over on the right, we have a smart-alec, painfully literal-minded nimrod who thinks that because he's spotted a minor linguistic infelicity in a hastily drafted post, the entire legal system has been savagely indicted by his genius. And therefore if only "engineers" (ie; fat arsed Quake-jockey sysadmins) could take over the legal system, blah blah wank. Get bent, the fucking lot of you.
Ok, let me spell this out in plain language. Whistling a tune in the street is not "using" that tune. You're not using it because "use" is use for a purpose, to gain some benefit, as opposed to enjoying something for its own sake in a way which does not detract from the creator's rights over his creation.
But what if I sing the song to put a baby to sleep? Surely that's a "use"?
No it isn't, not in any normal circumstance outside a concocted science fiction story, and certainly not in any sense that would allow you to extend it to making Napster legal again.
But what if I recorded myself whistling and ...
No. Whatever it is, no. And the answer is "No" to all the other fucking thousand and one hypothetical examples you're about to come up with, if they mean a legal loophole to allow something obviously fucking criminal.
But what are these "rights"? I'm not actually taking anything! What do you mean "benefit"?!
Sorry, not listening any more. Please remember this; I'm going to repeat it three times, with increasing emphasis.
On the subject of copyright, all your arguments have been thought of before, better, by somebody else.
On the subject of copyright, all your arguments have been thought of before, better, by somebody else
ON THE SUBJECT OF COPYRIGHT, ALL YOUR ARGUMENTS HAVE BEEN THOUGHT OF BEFORE, BETTER, BY SOMEBODY ELSE!
Now stop bothering me.
Fair use depends upon exactly what it says; the use. If my business model is to take the week's top 40, then to convert them into ringtone format, then to place advertisements in the newspapers inviting people to dial a premium rate phone number in order to download the ringtone tune, then it seems pretty obvious to me that I am making money out of someone else's copyrighted work and ought to pay the royalty. Guess what -- that's exactly the business model discussed in this story, and the vast majority of these ringtone operations in fact *do* pay royalties to the Performing Rights Society. There are presumably a few cowboys who don't.
On reflection, I think that on this occasion it's likely to be differences between US mobile phone technology and the rest of the world rather than widespread ignorance of copyright which is responsible for the toxic level of cluelessness in this slashdot thread. Happy to help to clear up this misunderstanding.
Historical note; it clearly fucking isn't.