The DMCA is the U.S. implementation of the WIPO treaty. "IP" stands for "intellectual property" and, as far as these trade treaties is concerned, is now just some infotainment that the U.S. makes a lot of money exporting. "W" stands for "World."
Few nations have signed the treaty. Many poor nations believe it discriminates against them. You have the right to see how the law is being applied in the U.S. and speak to your own political representatives if you wish the same or different to be carried out where you live.
But only the U.S. citizens can claim that the DMCA violates the Constitution. And, in spite of all the chat here about voting, all our political representatives have to swear to uphold the U.S. Consitution. So voting for or against them won't force them to obey it. We have to take it to the courts instead.
And the current print edition of MIT's magazine "Technology Review" contains a letter from me restating this point--Microsoft Reader and Adobe Glassbook are all about locking up books--not serving users.
Instead of buying into this pay-per-view model where the big media giants own all the content, we should use computers and the Internet to make information and books more accessible and useful. All information need not be free--authors should experiment with selling works online too--as long as they are not locked up.
At the same time we should sue to overturn these laws that seek to privatize the public domain of books and other culture.
We should not waste time arguing over the right format--HTML is good enough now, it can be converted into XML if the content and structure is tagged properly, and even Project Gutenberg's ASCII can be coded so it doesn't lose information. The key is to eschew proprietary, binary formats, but publish freely online and link to other works to make the content come alive. Too many "eBook publishers" have no imagination and only shovel the text online, then complain that it's too hard to read and nobody buys it. So use computers wisely!
Microsoft Reader cannot lock up "eBooks" forever, though they will try to lock us up if we try to unlock them. In another/. thread, in YRO,
under "Microsoft Ebooks and Copy Protection," you can see that the encryption can be circumvented. So now let's compare the locked books to the unlocked ones to see which is better, on technical grounds.
Download one of the free eBooks, let's say "The Big Town" by Ring Lardner.
Note that you don't have to activate your Microsoft Reader or Microsoft Wallet if you just want one of these free books--but you do need to download Microsoft Reader, so you must use it only on a Microsoft Windows machine.
Now visit the Eldritch Press site and download the same book in HTML form,
http://www.eldritchpress.org/rl/bigtown.html --(note that the text and illustrations were produced by "circumventing" the Microsoft encryption scheme, demonstrating that it cannot work).
Read the two books on your favorite computer and display.
Observe that the open book was actually proofread and errors corrected.
Help me make a table that compares the two, pro and con, feature by feature.
OPEN:
Blind readers can "read" it with text-to-speech synthesizers or Braille printers.
Reader can copy it and share it with a friend.
Since it's on one web page, searching and copying text is easy.
Text can be piped into another Unix-type program for word count, glossary, index, concordance, dictionary etymology or corpus, reformat for another computer program, computer translation aids, and whatever you can think of.
Cascading style sheets in HTML code make it easy to create a better layout, typography, or style.
It's possible to link to other works on the web such as other Ring Lardner stories or sites such as Eldritch Press's Lardner site.
....what else?
CLOSED:
Works only on Microsoft Windows.
Have to have a credit card for Microsoft Passport
Locks book against blind readers
Proprietary user interface goes against all World Wide Web and Microsoft standards
Reader reveals private demographic information to publisher
Used bookstores go out of business if this technology widely adopted.
Encryption prevents fair use of a work in the public domain--not available to be cited in a student's paper, anthologized in a teacher's course book, and so on.
....what else?
Note that I refuse to share any circumvention methods with others. I believe the DMCA makes such sharing illegal--at least until we can get that law overturned. However, the DMCA has been interpreted by Judge Kaplan in SDNY to mean that if you can figure out a way to circumvent, then you can do so in order to make fair use of the encrypted work.
The reason I'm giving this information now is to warn authors not to believe what their publishers are telling them: that they should not publish online unless works are locked up in a format such as Microsoft Reader. Everybody should know now that there is no valid technology to prevent digital works from being read, shared, or copied. In fact, if it were possible, our civilization, built upon the open, real book, would be in danger of collapsing.
But you knew that already, didn't you? After all, I pointed this out two years ago, in the 1998 interview with myself, Battle of the Books. But at the time, too many gadget freaks were willing to swallow Microsoft's line that the display technology was key to getting people to read books online. Okay, now that you've done the experiment, browse through the other 12,000 free online books NOT in Microsoft Reader format: The On-Line Books Page or Internet Public Library, just for the English-language ones. After all, you own them!
I'm not privy to any inside story, but this one seems plausible and deserves to be moderated up. On the other hand, the RMS-bashing and utter nonsense from non-lawyers in other postings on this topic is excessive even by/. standards.
I respect Eben Moglen, the FSF attorney who is trying to help out here upon request of CNRI and the others involved. I think we should leave this matter to the expert lawyers and not feel afraid that somehow our interests as users or programmers will be hurt.
For example, one legal concern that has not been mentioned is that some U.S. states don't allow unconditional restriction of user rights in warranty disclaimers. You have probably seen such a statement on your cereal box in all capital letters, but failed to understand it. Maybe some CNRI attorneys are trying to suggest that either they should put such a statement into their disclaimer of warranty, or else restrict the contract enforcement to a state such as Virginia that doesn't void such disclaimers. Such a warranty concern might not have anything to do with UCITA at all!
The GPL has wisely adapted to new concerns by evolving the text of its license. One such concern has been the question raised by some distinguished legal experts that the contract might not be valid without some consideration exchange--at least a dollar bill. This was raised and never answered satisfactorily a few months ago on/. during the CyberPatrol fiasco.
Eben Moglen has been looking into such matters for the FSF. We ought to support such work financially, since at the moment it is done on a shoestring and with overworked volunteers. But instead of that, what do we see here but a bunch of opinionated crusaders pitching in with free legal advice on how others ought to do it for them. Is that what the Free Software movement is all about?
It's a pity more work is not apparently being done to bring M/MUMPS into the Free Software world.
M (also called MUMPS) is an ANSI standard for a programming language written in the 1960s at Massachusetts General Hospital, specially for the task of handling patient data. It uses persistent associative arrays, not a SQL database, and thus is good for many-to-many relations and sparse data--it can be used for writing a database. Since it is interpreted and was written for a DEC computer with very small amount of memory and a 100MB disk, it could run well on small PCs.
Unfortunately, I don't see a Linux implementation. No doubt it could be ported to Linux, but an interpreter would have to be written for it. It is difficult to compile M, though it can be sort of precompiled. The versions out there seem to be commercial and used by consultants to write custom software--sounds like what happened to BASIC when Microsoft took it on.
One advantage of using M is that many hospital programs have been written in it. One disadvantage is that the programs don't appear to be Free Software. This is a pity, because the Veterans Administration is a big user of MUMPS, and the hospitals are supposed to be non-profit. Sigh.
So those programmers who like M and want to see it run on Linux will have to write it themselves, it appears. The situation is like with COBOL on Linux--if GNU Cobol could reach a useful state, many many old COBOL programs could be ported to Linux and run very inexpensively, especially in poorer countries where it would be very suitable. After all, the world still runs virtually on COBOL and CICS. (A web server has been written in M, so MUMPS could enter the Internet world fairly easily too.)
Don't bother trying to give books to your local public library. They probably won't be able to circulate them, and will just try to sell them at the Friends of the Library book sale. But any not sold there just go to the dump (which is where I rescue some--I too can't help myself!).
If you decide to sell them, try half.com. It's easier for individuals to sell on that service than on directly e-Bay. And there are not many dealers online in the type of books you have, computer, recent science, and so on.
Even the Library of Congress doesn't keep up with every edition of textbooks, just keeps a sample and gives the rest away to other libraries or dumps them.
I too store my out-of-date books in a rented storage space. Judging from the perpetual shortage of storage space in Silicon Valley and other hightech locales, it seems I am not alone.
So why not help me to OCR them and put them on the web? Cheaper than sending the paper books to the needy.
There is more than one case involving DeCSS and the DMCA. I believe this discussion applied to the New York case, called Universal Studios vs. Remeirdes. The defendant has been dropped and replaced with Emmanuel Goldstein (Eric Corley), publisher of 2600.
The New York case turns not on the license agreement but the "trafficking" in "circumvention" "devices" part of the DMCA, which means it is a case in federal district court under copyright law. The district court judge has ruled that Internet hyperlinks to DeCSS code is in violation of this section of the DMCA. That decision is under appeal.
The California case is in a state superior court and does turn on "trade secret" violations alleged by many individuals on the Internet all over the world. It is possible that the DVD-CCA (Copyright Control Authority--it was set up by the movie studios and some hardware makers) will also claim violations of the click-on license agreement that may or may not have come with the Xing software DVD player.
Reverse engineering is a claim by defense in both cases. You are correct that plaintiffs' charges are baseless, for yours and other reasons. Nevertheless, defense costs a lot of money and time and your assistance is appreciated.
You may learn more about the cases at EFF and in the OpenLaw forum at Berkman Center at Harvard Law School.
I thought the most interesting part of the story was the idea that the project methodology of Free Software (or open source if you like) is becoming recognized as not only a "challenge," but a better way of doing things.
(The licensing issues of Free Software are not explained well in the article, but it has other virtues.)
IBM discovered long ago that programming teams don't get the job done faster if you throw more bodies at it. Yet Microsoft and other proprietary software makers really stick to the same old project methodology. In one way or other it is quite similar to the old "waterfall" methodology, with a schedule driven by market needs, and features and bug fixes dropped at the last moment so the buggy release goes out the door.
Consequently, Microsoft attracts highly-skilled, highly-paid engineers to enlist in these "death march" projects and rewards them with stock options based on performance. No doubt few at MS feel able to work 40-hour weeks.
But the result is more and more massive software, more and more legacy code to maintain, more and more bugs to fix, more and more releases to fix the bugs, and software never seems to get radically better.
This is the old "software crisis" of the 1970s, back again with a vengance. Now that Microsoft has gained a monopoly in certain areas, they have little incentive to innovate or find better ways to do things.
Many of you will argue about this point. But again I say the projects are market-driven by the bosses, not customer-driven. The aim never seems to be delivering code that is elegant or really functional, but only shipping it out the door and charging money later for a release that promises to fix those bugs (and introduces more). And the software gets bigger and bigger, with an idea to include as many functions as possible. The customer more and more relies on the behemoth manufacturer to fix things and customize them and support them, and those jobs aren't being done better now than ever.
On the other hand, a team of variable size that is distributed over the Internet does seem to work in certain situations. The code it produces is closer to what customers want and need. Even though in many cases it is not finished, it provides enough for a custom programmer to fill in the missing parts. The C and Unix environments have become a lingua franca for professional programmers.
The eXtreme Programming model does not use teams distributed over the Internet. Instead, it puts the much smaller teams near the customer. Like the open source model, it releases in stages, and it reuses components and other programs well. And it leverages software as a profession. Programmers should not work more than 40 hours a week. Instead, they need to get out of the office, become human beings, relate to their families and societies, and become inspired once again why programming is important, and why it is so important for all of us to do our best job.
When Microsoft programmers start working 40 hours a week then I know they will have learned something from these new methodologies. But they won't be able to do that unless their bosses learn it first. It might indeed taking a lot of shrinking of the big software factories before this happens.
Can this technology be used to cancel noises as well as generate sound?
I am thinking that current noise-cancelling technology seems to rely on headphones, since noise is generally omnidirectional. But if this technology were used to determine the direction of the noise source, and shift phase of sounds so the sounds appeared to be coming from the same direction, then one might not have to use headphones.
For example, in a cubicle there are noises all around, from telephones to people talking, and it would be extremely useful to be able to selectively tune out the noises and work without headphones. Currently, I believe "noise cancelling" area systems just generate white noise, which doesn't fix the problem, only create more.
The lower bass tones could be handled in an area system, I think, because they wouldn't be so directional.
I mean, doesn't the world suffer from increasing amounts of "noise pollution" as machines proliferate in our increasingly urban environments? Many people including myself would love to be able to take action to control this environment for ourselves and filter out the annoying noises. A much better use than increasily annoying sales pitches beamed directionally at us without any choice.
MPAA is missing something: the California Trade Secrets Act provides a complete defense:
They say:
Pavlovich knew DeCSS was developed by reverse engineering (Pavlovich Aug. Depo., pp. 32-33) and that such reverse
engineering is illegal (LiVid posting, October 1, 1999, attached as Exhibit C to 23 Shapiro Decl.);
Pavlovich sought to distribute plaintiff s trade secrets while knowing that such action was illegal (LiVid postings, November 10, 1999,
attached as Exhibit C to Shapiro Decl.);
At the time Pavlovich posted DeCSS on the Internet, he knew that DeCSS facilitates the pirating of DVDs (Pavlovich Aug. Depo., pp.
59- 2 60);
At the time Pavlovich posted DeCSS on the Internet, he knew that pirating DVDs is wrongful conduct (Pavlovich Aug. Depo., p. 71).
3426. This title may be cited as the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
3426.1. As used in this title, unless the context requires
otherwise:
(a) "Improper means" includes theft, bribery, misrepresentation,
breach or inducement of a breach of a duty to maintain secrecy, or
espionage through electronic or other means.Reverse engineering or
independent derivation alone shall not be considered improper means.
(b) "Misappropriation" means:
(1) Acquisition of a trade secret of another by a person who knows
or has reason to know that the trade secret was acquired by improper
means; or
(2) Disclosure or use of a trade secret of another without express
or implied consent by a person who:
(A) Used improper means to acquire knowledge of the trade secret;
or
(B) At the time of disclosure or use, knew or had reason to know
that his or her knowledge of the trade secret was:
(i) Derived from or through a person who had utilized improper
means to acquire it;
(ii) Acquired under circumstances giving rise to a duty to
maintain its secrecy or limit its use; or
(iii) Derived from or through a person who owed a duty to the
person seeking relief to maintain its secrecy or limit its use; or
(C) Before a material change of his or her position, knew or had
reason to know that it was a trade secret and that knowledge of it
had been acquired by accident or mistake.
(c) "Person" means a natural person, corporation, business trust,
estate, trust, partnership, limited liability company, association,
joint venture, government, governmental subdivision or agency, or any
other legal or commercial entity.
(d) "Trade secret" means information, including a formula,
pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process,
that:
(1) Derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from
not being generally known to the public or to other persons who can
obtain economic value from its disclosure or use; and
(2) Is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the
circumstances to maintain its secrecy.
[Emphasis added. So not only is reverse engineering perfectly legal under California trade secret law, it is also perfectly legal under the DMCA right now, and in Norway, where the reverse engineering took place. Send check to EFF.org now!]
Windows NT got through the back door via a "Posix subsystem" on the kernel. Using this subsystem you can boot into the Posix subsystem but not use the other Windows NT (2000) features. The Posix subsystem uses programs from such other vendors as Mortice Kern Systems to give it Posix compatibility. DEC's VMS used a similar technique.
But just because an OS has a Posix subsystem does not mean that the applications that run on the other subsystems are Posix-compatible at all. Microsoft Office is not, for sure.
In addition, many computer systems used by DOD are supposed to have a certified level of security--C2, even B1 in some cases. Windows NT did get C2 certification, but only for the NT 4.0 version, not for the 5.0 version many departments bought. This includes both hardware and software in one security level.
No doubt RedHat or VA Linux or IBM or Compaq could cobble together a GNU/Linux or OpenBSD or whatever system and pay the money to have an independent body certify it at the appropriate security level. At least one Posix-certified version of Linux has been released. Then DOD could buy the Linux or BSD OS and hardware from an approved list.
I worked for the Navy as a contractor Unix sys admin. We had on our base about a thousand SCO Unix clients running on Everex-type PCs. The idea of the managers was to dump SCO and go to Microsoft Windows NT. Linux could have been chosen as the client instead of Windows, but it would have to be locked down.
The huge Solaris enterprise systems that ran the base used Oracle databases and ran many old Cobol programs too. It's possible that Windows could run those programs, but they would need a great deal of rewriting. Linux as yet probably doesn't have the beef to run the big Navy RAID systems and databases--but Linux will get there soon. Maybe IBM will port CICS to Linux--it's already on AIX.
The reason for "standardizing" on Windows NT was that it would be "uniform" across the network. A stupid reason, and one that will cost the Navy lots of money. For example, there is no reason to give many of the users a whole Office platform--all they do is enter numbers into a database screen in their job. On the other hand, getting Windows email working right will be a nightmare for such a huge system. The big brass don't listen to the users any more than Billg does.
There are a lot of Linux users in the military, and they would love to talk some sense into the brass on this subject. Government Computer News has been educating them for years. But military brass are the last to regain any common sense.
Garbage in, garbage out. Make a model and then dig up the evidence the model fits the evidence. How is it that Slashdot escapes this paradox--do 99% of Slashdot users read instead of posting? I don't think so.
Commonsense ought to tell anybody that new popular sites get more links than older, static sites. But Huberman has to publish a paper in Nature to prove that. He also contorts his brain to try to prove the power law distribution and page count of sites.
There's nothing new to these ideas--they are just trotting out the old "Pareto principle" that hardly anybody tries to explain. You find self-help books now in the Business section on how to "apply" the 80/20 rule. But the "law" that Pareto discovered is too universal in nature to provide an answer to inequality in the social realm, and too abstract for anybody to say that it is greed that motivates Gnutella sharing.
Even if one admits that music sharing is a market (not clear what the costs are) or that some market principles can help in distribution (it's too early to tell, the Net is an experiment, bandwidth increases to meet demand, it is still almost too cheap to meter, it's becoming easier for everybody to publish their own works, people have other motivations to publish than to make money, and so on) Huberman still don't have the right answers--and they can't derive them simply from the data they produce.
Instead, look at the work of Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mezard
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0002374. As explained ably by Mark Buchanan in New Scientist 19 August 2000, pp22-26, the natural laws of physics can explain the inequality in the power law distribution much better than economists in the past have attempted to do.
If one needs to remedy inequality then there are several programs one can attempt. One is taxes--tax the rich and give the money to the poor. But taxes often are captured back by the rich and the poor stay poor. With music sharing, if the receivers paid a small tax to the system, with the money going to the producers, one might or might not see the receivers producing more files on their own. Maybe they are motivated by fame instead of money. Or the big collectors might not increase their collections if they were given a small amount of money.
Another remedy these physicists suggest trying is simply raising the "temperature" of the system.
By increasing the transactions in the system, through free trade, fair rules, more exchange, and some competition, then there is less volatility for individuals--less chance for somebody to go down and stay down.
Libertarians such as Huberman might be interested in this idea. Certainly they worship free trade. But they ought to be careful of bringing stale models to the new Internet. It might not work the same way they predict in other systems.
I for one don't really see the Gnutella "discrepancies" as a problem. There is certainly not yet any "tragedy of the commons." Because "tragedy" implies that there are limited resources. For example, on my cable modem segment I am no doubt considered a "hog" because my web server gives out big text files to people all over the world. But even if I increased my bandwidth usage tremendously, I would still be far from saturating the system. All that would happen is that some people might be delayed a few seconds by collisions. If the system ever got saturated, I would have to take my server off anyway, and then the system can work toward a new stability.
Since I don't think Huberman's economic, market model is very good at the moment, I think that we ought to explore other alternatives. For example, Frances Cairncross, editor of The Economist, in her excellent book The End of Distance, refers to at least three other ways markets could succeed in music publishing: the advertising model (Cairncross attaches Ester Dyson's name to that), the performance model (John Perry Barlow), or the sort of subscription model (Wall Street Journal formally, Stephen King less formally, ideas that date back to de Sola Pool's idea of the Internet as a model for freedom).
You're right. New businesses have no idea how to make office space work, because they have very little idea of how to plan robustly for their future more than a few months ahead.
So most new dot coms and other high tech businesses end up leasing space in an office building that was built on spec. What are the implications of that?
Such buildings are built cheap. The "efficiency" of a commercial building as measured by real estate pros is the "net-to-gross ratio"--the rentable worker area, that you can charge rent for, divided by the total square feet, part of which is the core functions of elevators, corridors, and so on.
Landlords consider 90 per cent efficiency optimal--since individual offices would be too small then, they cut down on corridors by using open space plans or cubicles. Then they save money (energy) by reducing ventilation, thus increasing inhalation of noxious gases emitted by the building contents--the plague of "sick buildings". They have to build large cubes with most of the space far away from walls and natural light. The more windows, the more energy loss. Elevators shut off communication between floors.
The "churn rate" on many office buildings is very high today, maybe 70 per cent move every year. Rents can thus increase more rapidly. If the building does not have computer room raised floors, it becomes a nightmare to string cable and the individual users can't do it themselves.
Many of these office buildings are built in "edge cities," supposedly more convenient for automobiles, but far from the conveniences of the downtown city and public transport. Cars soon clog the roads.
What people have been saying here is that this way of designing offices doesn't work. And your point is very valuable--this is the way businesses in America feel they have to start.
What are the alternatives, that can give the end users the control they need? One possibility is to build incrementally--instead of leasing a huge new office space, rent part of a larger building, with the option to grow into the other space as the business grows, or shrink the space if the business doesn't need to grow in size. Don't plan for the latest high tech gear--instead, create a strategy so that growth can be flexible, and respond appropriately no matter what happens.
I really think that such businesses ought to consider moving closer to downtowns than stay in edge cities. The reason for separation of industry and residences has been in the past that industry pollutes and makes noise. But this is not something to complain about for high tech industries. Another point is that high tech workers are valuable and it is worth investing in better and more expensive space in order to keep them.
Finally, many office buildings, like too many schools, are just too big. They become like factories. Occupants don't even know names of neighbors--there are too many. Computers and the Internet can allow smaller teams to branch out and work in a decentralized fashion.
I believe if new businesses gave more control to employees they would not only prosper but also be able to retain happy people who work hard to make the business prosper. Let's give more control to users to shape their own environments!
I like GNU/Linux, and I flourished best in a company that downsized the excess crud. Then I and a few other people could roam around and pick up all the goodies and ornament our personal spaces. Essentially, we served as our own architects, and could fix or repair anything without calling in some other professionals.
Read Christopher Alexander's books for some tips. I need a window to be able to think. I also appreciate a little privacy when I talk on the phone, and I don't like hearing others talk on the phone either.
Like some programmers, too many office architects look for the "magic bullet." They jump from fad to fad without any empirical evidence. When the space no longer works, they tear it down and start over.
Here are almost a dozen names for schemes to rework the office environment:
Non-territorial office--term devised by MIT researcher Timothy Allen--no desks for specific individuals--activity zones instead of offices
Free address--Japanese term for much like (1)--in IBM-speak, an area without assigned desks, used without restrictions by anyone in the company
Group address--an area for a group or department, but without assigned desks
Just-in-time office--Andersen Consulting, SFO--offices assigned temporarily, about 1/2 day to 3 days each, by reservation
Hoteling--Ernst and Young, Chicago--automated hotel-type reservation system, with chargeback to projects
Shared assigned--Cornell, >1 employee/desk, at different times
Hot desking--term derived from Navy's "hot bunking," now pejorative
Desk sharing--like 6
Red carpet--HP, PHB term for 7
Drop-in--just for a few hours, no reservation
Virtual office--wherever
The list is from "Building Evaluation Techniques," ed. Baird, ISBN 0-07-003308-0.
The idea of this book is to make formal evaluations of how the environment affects productivity, and adjust as needed. It depends on a certain amount of flexibility built into the space, not everything predetermined by the architect down to the last millimetre and cent. Here is a good book too: "How Buildings Learn: What happens after they're built," by Stewart Brand, Penguin, ISBN 0-14-013996-6.
In fact, after evaluation, many businesses drop these new-fangled ideas as impractical. Workers don't like them, and find ways to resist or work around them.
The eXtreme Programming idea is new, but it puts forward a model of having a big room with high-powered workstations in the center on tables. Programmers work as two-member teams on the same computer. All around the center, at the borders, are cubes or private spaces for times when a person needs to work alone or with privacy.
Another idea that aids in personalizing and customizing office space is the HVAC system from Johnson Controls, that allows desk users to tune white space to control the sonic environment, as well as temperature, air flow, and lighting. This can be employed in any of the office environments, cubicles, offices, big rooms.
There are many models for forming social space in a business. There are many programming languages, and each has virtues and faults. It is up to us to choose the best tools. Professional architects and design engineers can help, but can't design everything perfect to begin with.
Hey, Ketzer, thanks for the "explanation" but it is even worse than Kaplan's decision. How you got a "2" for "Informative" is beyond belief.
No, because it doesn't have to say that. Just like guns don't have to say "don't shoot people!" on them, because it's already the law.
So guns are now illegal?
You didn't buy a movie, you bought a DVD. Nobody signed over ownership of the information contained on the DVD to you. So you
don't have the right to do whatever you want with it.
Well, I say I did buy it and I claim I have those rights. Show me the piece of paper that proves you are correct. You refer to some "license" I never saw nor heard of, even from Kaplan.
In the
case of VHS, they license you to view it under certain conditions, and if you view it under different conditions (like in a big movie
theater with 1000 "friends" who paid to get in) then you are breaking the licensing agreement.
No, you might be breaking copyright law (it depends on what the copyright owner agrees to, when it comes to redistribution--it is not always illegal--look at the GPL for example). However, in some "license" (but not with DVDs) a copyright owner might try to restrict you from making a backup copy. In that case, you need not comply with the license, because that is unconstitutional.
In the case of DVDs, those conditions are a bit stricter, in the sense that they restrict the method of viewing to a licensed viewer.
Who says? I never made a contract or bought a license from the DVD-CCA.
The
legal difference is that for VHS, the conditions are determined by Fair Use laws, which say what conditions you are allowed to copy
or view the info.
There are no "Fair Use" laws, there are only copyright laws, and DMCA is part of the same Title 17 now. There is no difference between VHS and DVD. Both have Macrovision, and both try to keep the user from exercising fair use rights of copyright law.
DCMA makes it illegal
to break that encryption,...
DMCA (not DCMA) doesn't make it illegal to "break that encryption." If that were true, any playing of a DVD in a player would be illegal, because every player has to decrypt the scrambled files.
which protects information owned by the movie studio.
There is no "property owned by the movie studio." The movie studio has certain statutory rights for a limited time. But the purchaser of a DVD owns the DVD and can use it, view it, decrypt it, resell it, put it under a scanning electron microscope to examine the pits on the disc, play it on her dishwasher, use it to shingle the roof, or whatever use she wants, after she has bought it. There is no license, no different law for DVDs than for other digital or analog content under copyright law.
it's a crime to break it and take their info.
Yeah, this is the "crime" that the MPAA accused 15-year-old Jon Johansen of, "breaking into" his own computer and "taking their info" so he could play the DVDs that he purchased on his own computer (GNU/Linux).
So you want to lock this kid up or give him a medal?
I am convinced now more than ever that the best way to destroy DMCA is to use it. Make a CSS-protected DVD...
It only takes a little money and the cooperation of one DVD mastering and manufacturing company.
Create 4.7GB of Free Software (including, of course, DeCSS.c). Encrypt it with the CSS algorithms derived from the DeCSS reverse engineering. Prominently display a copyright notice, together with a license that the only way the disc can be used is with DeCSS. Supply DeCSS and necessary other viewing programs on an accompanying floppy. Take it to a friendly DVD manufacturer. Print up a license and contract to go with it. Have all the Linux distros sell it online.
The point is, DeCSS does decryption--but so does any CSS implementation. Obviously, in this case, DeCSS would be doing it with the consent of the copyright holder--the Free Software Foundation and all the other copyright holders on the DVD.
Yes, the MPAA and the DVD-CCA will not like this. So they sue. On what grounds? It could only be on trade secrets--but that is a loser--they would have used that in New York if they thought it would win. They use Judge Kaplan's decision, that distributing DeCSS is illegal? But where in his decision does it say that it is illegal to distribute and decrypt a copyrighted work with the authorization of the copyright holder?
I am really offended by Kaplan's decision. It almost libels the Free Software movement. If it is allowed to stand, then the liberty of all of us using computers and the Internet is in question. Even reporting the code to a virus would be illegal, according to his way of thinking.
Fairly soon, we will think about using the expanded storage power of DVDs to record computer data. It is time we made sure that we will be free of the monopoly on DVDs by Hollywood. They don't want us to produce content--they want to rent us content on pay-per-view.
I'm willing to donate money and help for this project. Anybody else?
I too used to puzzle about the "productivity paradox." But I think you are off base in thinking that the data is as refined as you say. The "computer productivity paradox" more simply is the observation that--in the aggregate--increased investments in computers has not increased--in the aggregate--overall productivity.
But when I recently read "Roadside Empires" (How the Chains Franchised America, by Stan Luxemburg--look for it at www.bookfinder.com), I saw that this amazing franchising process can account for much of the paradox, alone.
Investment has gone in recent years in the U.S. to service industries such as franchise restaurants (now >61% of our food dollar). Productivity is low, the wages are low, and owners have little incentive to use computers to displace cheap labor. The productivity relation stills works in manufacturing industries, or agriculture, or the larger service industries such as banking and insurance, which automated earlier.
Reading this book made me angry. I don't think you can blame IT for the problems--they are much larger, and would involve rethinking much of our modern social structure.
The idea of "network effects" creating a de facto monopoly for Microsoft is one that economists such as Hal Varian try to teach us. It seems that no matter if GNU/Linux or another UNIX is techically superior, Microsoft as a monopolist hogs market share.
This is interesting in light of a recent report from China at Salon magazine. Even though Linux is free and the government officially supports it, Microsoft still has a huge market share in China. There might be a couple of reasons for this. One is that "everybody else uses Microsoft" and the network effects become predominant. Another is that the pirates actually make money marketing copies of Microsoft products, even though the price is very cheap--they don't make money marketing Linux, it seems.
So there is a puzzling problem here: nobody can make and sell better software than Microsoft's, and even stealing it helps Microsoft by promoting their market share, because of the network effects.
Consequently, Microsoft has no incentive to open source code, to port to non-Microsoft platforms, or to spend money to increase market share at all, since they own the market already.
Therefore, the only way Microsoft would port to Linux any applications would be if it thought it could make a little money in a new market, similar to the way it writes applications for Apple computers. And it would not hurt if a small Israeli company would do all the work and take the risks for the big company, which can then come in and pick up the marbles whenever it wants to.
The result--short of an enforced breakup of the company by the courts--seems to me bad in any case for GNU/Linux and Free Software. The dominance of this big company with closed, proprietary code and environments, would be harmful to the movement to empower users and small companies. It would just be another dinosaur that squashes new growth by thrashing around adding features and diseases. There is no chance for Microsoft to learn this lesson unless some asteroid like a Supreme Court decision lands on the back of this monster.
The Boston Globe reports that fiction writer Harlan Ellison is suing Critical Path, owner of Remarq.com, for copyright infringement. Trial set to go to court next month.
Surely this has nothing to do with Remarq going off the air. But it does indicate the depths to which Usenet has fallen. I remember when Usenet used to be civil and productive, and it is a shame that it has become like CB radio.
According to the report, "in June, he [Ellison]
won a judgment against Stephen Robertson of California, who admitted posting
Ellison's stories online and agreed to pay Ellison's legal fees." Ellison, it says, uses a manual typewriter. Evidently he also has some strong ideas about art and technology.
Well, I am fighting that battle too, with a lawsuit against the Copyright Term Extension Act. See the OpenLaw site and add your comments.
It is sad, but maybe we can use some judo on the system to turn it to good ends.
Some old software has been published for free. For example, Visicalc, Borland C, even Microsoft Word 5. But what we need is to have the source code go back into the public domain so the public can benefit from it. Then the ideas can be reworked by the next generation and better products developed from it.
So we need an incentive to accomplish this. Simply publishing or stealing the object code is not enough. Of course, it would have been better if the Copyright Office had required registration and deposit of the entire source code, but it hasn't. So we need to develop some private institutions that can perform the way the Framers intended, and reinstitute the idea of copyright as a way to produce more for the public good.
Many posters comment that Abandonware sites are technically illegal. So here's a plan. Provide an incentive for copyright and patent owners to donate their works to the public, in return for a tax deduction. Don't steal the works, pay for them.
Set up an Intellectual Property Conservancy that is a non-profit, educational, publishing corporation. Donations of intellectual property could be tax-deductible (Congress could even make the tax deduction higher than normal for a superincentive, or provide a monetary incentive in lieu of tax deduction). Accept donations of copyright, online publication rights, source code, patents, trademarks, books, software, development environments, the whole lot.
When a company finds the income from an old work no longer makes maintenance worthwhile, then they can donate it to the public domain and the rest of us will distribute it and support it for free (or even for money). They will have an incentive to consider this, and if the company goes under the creditors will probably force it, since otherwise they would not get money back.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution wisely set up a balance between the rights of authors and inventors, and the public domain, by limiting copyright term and recognizing fair use rights. However, copyright term in recent years has been extended far too long. While it started at 14 years, now it is 95 years for a work made for hire (in other Berne Convention nations, it is 70 or 50 years after the author's death).
The copyright holders (mostly big publishers) howled that they needed protection for more years, because works had value that long. This is doubtful, but if it is true, then surely the copyright holders will get behind this plan, and find a way to realize more profits.
Since the public is the one to benefit, the public should pay. A difficulty with previous ideas is that the government does a bad job of setting prices for public goods. Okay, I say let the normal process of the market or fair appraisals, as is done today with tax deductions, be used instead.
Richard Stallman has pointed out that it might be immoral to reward those who take out software patents, for example. It might be considered like paying money to redeem a child from slavery. So there is room for a lot of debate and discussion on the issue. What do you think? Can you help get the services of a tax lawyer to vet this plan?
in any event there is no antitrust issue in the DeCSS litigation.
How can you be so sure? The court excluded testimony intended to determine the facts on this very matter. What would you call the DVD-CCA but a "trust"?
If you read the postings to the DVD OpenLaw forum, referred to above, you will see that the movie studios have historically been prone to misuse of copyright in restraint of trade, and there is plenty of precedent.
Misuse of copyright in restraint of trade is a legitimate defense to copyright infringement charges, and DeCSS is alleged to be illegal because it enables such infringement.
MPAA asserts that DMCA gives them authority to require all DVD players to be licensed, and any use by consumers of discs and players must be controlled by DVD-CCA licenses and "authority" (separate from first sale and fair use). If the automobile industry asserted similar control over keys to cars, and sought to jail consumers who "circumvented" the authority from their trust, don't you think that would be a matter of antitrust concern?
But neither MPAA nor DVD-CCA will reveal these licenses. Judge Kaplan won't get into the matter because he is afraid testimony will force his recusal.
Likely all this will be taken up at appeal.
If you have any evidence to provide please do so at that time.
We agree with plaintiffs and the Court that the authority of the copyright owner is a matter of law, not a matter of fact.
Yes, this sentence can be confusing if taken out of context.
What I believe is the point here is that MPAA has failed to establish any "authority model" that applies under DMCA, other than the confusing wording of the DMCA. In this law, "authority" is never defined, but is used in determining if a "device" does any "circumvention," thus distinguishing illegal use from legal use.
If one looks only at the facts, defense does fine, because DeCSS can be used only with the title key and the player key and a valid DVD that the user purchases and wishes to play on a GNU/Linux machine.
However, MPAA wants the interpretation to be just one clause of the law and therefore not include any consideration of "fair use," even when Congress deliberately put restrictive clauses in the DMCA for that very purpose.
You can see the fallacy of doing that--look at the MPAA comparison of DeCSS to "keys" or the "numeric combination of a lock to a bank vault."
Under plaintiffs' interpretation of DMCA, the physical key is equivalent to a string of numbers describing the key. They say that automobile manufacturers retain all rights to make keys to cars. They would say that a newspaper or a novel cannot publish the combination to a safe. What they are saying is that if any speech has any possible use under DMCA that they have not authorized in some way other than selling the keys, then the speech must be outlawed.
So plaintiffs' argument is circular. They never explain how authority is conveyed, unless it is by the consumer purchasing a DVD with the title keys, and a player with the player keys--which you have to do in order to use DeCSS--or how DMCA could ever retain control over all use of the keys, as for example to prevent consumers in certain regions from playing DVDs they had purchased, or to buy only DVD-CCA-authorized players and not LiViD players.
Defense retains the right to bring up these antitrust arguments later. I hope the DMCA is thrown out completely so MPAA cannot sue to restrain free speech and fair use in the future.
All the representatives from these great states are saying is Microsoft is wrong to give equal campaign contributions to both Democrats and Republicans.
The Republicans deserve to be bought a lot more than the Democrats do, look at what services the GOP can provide! Heck, look at the free TV time MSFT is being given. Isn't that worth something?
I'm unclear about Microsoft is handling one issue, client access licenses.
GartnerGroup has energetically represented companies against Microsoft pricing practices. Last February they revealed a similar sneaky MS tactic, to charge for a client access license with Windows 2000, even though one already had bought the OS for the server and client. See the CNET.com article on that issue.
So again there is confusion about what Microsoft is doing. If you buy a preinstalled Windows2000 PC and you remove the OS and install the Select version, do you need to pay a second time for the client access license?
I believe you do, because the client access license varies depending on volume, and would not be for the same version of the server OS.
But I may be wrong. I'd appreciate it if GartnerGroup could clarify this issue too.
It's likely we have not seen the end of these strange practices by the monopolist. I hope the Supreme Court takes the DOJ case soon and we can move to a stable situation for businesses.
But again Microsoft is its own worst enemy. I hope they convince many companies now is the time to move to Linux. Why move to ME when Whistler will quickly replace it? What will Microsoft do when DOS is finally gone from the OS, tell people to use WINE?
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA is the U.S. implementation of the WIPO treaty. "IP" stands for "intellectual property" and, as far as these trade treaties is concerned, is now just some infotainment that the U.S. makes a lot of money exporting. "W" stands for "World."
Few nations have signed the treaty. Many poor nations believe it discriminates against them. You have the right to see how the law is being applied in the U.S. and speak to your own political representatives if you wish the same or different to be carried out where you live.
But only the U.S. citizens can claim that the DMCA violates the Constitution. And, in spite of all the chat here about voting, all our political representatives have to swear to uphold the U.S. Consitution. So voting for or against them won't force them to obey it. We have to take it to the courts instead.
Two years ago I was ranting about this--see my dialog on this subject.
And the current print edition of MIT's magazine "Technology Review" contains a letter from me restating this point--Microsoft Reader and Adobe Glassbook are all about locking up books--not serving users.
Instead of buying into this pay-per-view model where the big media giants own all the content, we should use computers and the Internet to make information and books more accessible and useful. All information need not be free--authors should experiment with selling works online too--as long as they are not locked up.
At the same time we should sue to overturn these laws that seek to privatize the public domain of books and other culture.
We should not waste time arguing over the right format--HTML is good enough now, it can be converted into XML if the content and structure is tagged properly, and even Project Gutenberg's ASCII can be coded so it doesn't lose information. The key is to eschew proprietary, binary formats, but publish freely online and link to other works to make the content come alive. Too many "eBook publishers" have no imagination and only shovel the text online, then complain that it's too hard to read and nobody buys it. So use computers wisely!
Microsoft Reader cannot lock up "eBooks" forever, though they will try to lock us up if we try to unlock them. In another /. thread, in YRO,
under "Microsoft Ebooks and Copy Protection," you can see that the encryption can be circumvented. So now let's compare the locked books to the unlocked ones to see which is better, on technical grounds.
Scientific test:
OPEN:
CLOSED:
Note that I refuse to share any circumvention methods with others. I believe the DMCA makes such sharing illegal--at least until we can get that law overturned. However, the DMCA has been interpreted by Judge Kaplan in SDNY to mean that if you can figure out a way to circumvent, then you can do so in order to make fair use of the encrypted work.
The reason I'm giving this information now is to warn authors not to believe what their publishers are telling them: that they should not publish online unless works are locked up in a format such as Microsoft Reader. Everybody should know now that there is no valid technology to prevent digital works from being read, shared, or copied. In fact, if it were possible, our civilization, built upon the open, real book, would be in danger of collapsing.
But you knew that already, didn't you? After all, I pointed this out two years ago, in the 1998 interview with myself, Battle of the Books. But at the time, too many gadget freaks were willing to swallow Microsoft's line that the display technology was key to getting people to read books online. Okay, now that you've done the experiment, browse through the other 12,000 free online books NOT in Microsoft Reader format: The On-Line Books Page or Internet Public Library, just for the English-language ones. After all, you own them!
I'm not privy to any inside story, but this one seems plausible and deserves to be moderated up. On the other hand, the RMS-bashing and utter nonsense from non-lawyers in other postings on this topic is excessive even by /. standards.
I respect Eben Moglen, the FSF attorney who is trying to help out here upon request of CNRI and the others involved. I think we should leave this matter to the expert lawyers and not feel afraid that somehow our interests as users or programmers will be hurt.
For example, one legal concern that has not been mentioned is that some U.S. states don't allow unconditional restriction of user rights in warranty disclaimers. You have probably seen such a statement on your cereal box in all capital letters, but failed to understand it. Maybe some CNRI attorneys are trying to suggest that either they should put such a statement into their disclaimer of warranty, or else restrict the contract enforcement to a state such as Virginia that doesn't void such disclaimers. Such a warranty concern might not have anything to do with UCITA at all!
The GPL has wisely adapted to new concerns by evolving the text of its license. One such concern has been the question raised by some distinguished legal experts that the contract might not be valid without some consideration exchange--at least a dollar bill. This was raised and never answered satisfactorily a few months ago on /. during the CyberPatrol fiasco.
Eben Moglen has been looking into such matters for the FSF. We ought to support such work financially, since at the moment it is done on a shoestring and with overworked volunteers. But instead of that, what do we see here but a bunch of opinionated crusaders pitching in with free legal advice on how others ought to do it for them. Is that what the Free Software movement is all about?
It's a pity more work is not apparently being done to bring M/MUMPS into the Free Software world.
M (also called MUMPS) is an ANSI standard for a programming language written in the 1960s at Massachusetts General Hospital, specially for the task of handling patient data. It uses persistent associative arrays, not a SQL database, and thus is good for many-to-many relations and sparse data--it can be used for writing a database. Since it is interpreted and was written for a DEC computer with very small amount of memory and a 100MB disk, it could run well on small PCs.
Unfortunately, I don't see a Linux implementation. No doubt it could be ported to Linux, but an interpreter would have to be written for it. It is difficult to compile M, though it can be sort of precompiled. The versions out there seem to be commercial and used by consultants to write custom software--sounds like what happened to BASIC when Microsoft took it on.
One advantage of using M is that many hospital programs have been written in it. One disadvantage is that the programs don't appear to be Free Software. This is a pity, because the Veterans Administration is a big user of MUMPS, and the hospitals are supposed to be non-profit. Sigh.
So those programmers who like M and want to see it run on Linux will have to write it themselves, it appears. The situation is like with COBOL on Linux--if GNU Cobol could reach a useful state, many many old COBOL programs could be ported to Linux and run very inexpensively, especially in poorer countries where it would be very suitable. After all, the world still runs virtually on COBOL and CICS. (A web server has been written in M, so MUMPS could enter the Internet world fairly easily too.)
er, you mean "ESR" instead of "RMS"?
Don't bother trying to give books to your local public library. They probably won't be able to circulate them, and will just try to sell them at the Friends of the Library book sale. But any not sold there just go to the dump (which is where I rescue some--I too can't help myself!).
If you decide to sell them, try half.com. It's easier for individuals to sell on that service than on directly e-Bay. And there are not many dealers online in the type of books you have, computer, recent science, and so on.
Even the Library of Congress doesn't keep up with every edition of textbooks, just keeps a sample and gives the rest away to other libraries or dumps them.
I too store my out-of-date books in a rented storage space. Judging from the perpetual shortage of storage space in Silicon Valley and other hightech locales, it seems I am not alone.
So why not help me to OCR them and put them on the web? Cheaper than sending the paper books to the needy.
There is more than one case involving DeCSS and the DMCA. I believe this discussion applied to the New York case, called Universal Studios vs. Remeirdes. The defendant has been dropped and replaced with Emmanuel Goldstein (Eric Corley), publisher of 2600.
The New York case turns not on the license agreement but the "trafficking" in "circumvention" "devices" part of the DMCA, which means it is a case in federal district court under copyright law. The district court judge has ruled that Internet hyperlinks to DeCSS code is in violation of this section of the DMCA. That decision is under appeal.
The California case is in a state superior court and does turn on "trade secret" violations alleged by many individuals on the Internet all over the world. It is possible that the DVD-CCA (Copyright Control Authority--it was set up by the movie studios and some hardware makers) will also claim violations of the click-on license agreement that may or may not have come with the Xing software DVD player.
Reverse engineering is a claim by defense in both cases. You are correct that plaintiffs' charges are baseless, for yours and other reasons. Nevertheless, defense costs a lot of money and time and your assistance is appreciated.
You may learn more about the cases at EFF and in the OpenLaw forum at Berkman Center at Harvard Law School.
I thought the most interesting part of the story was the idea that the project methodology of Free Software (or open source if you like) is becoming recognized as not only a "challenge," but a better way of doing things.
(The licensing issues of Free Software are not explained well in the article, but it has other virtues.)
IBM discovered long ago that programming teams don't get the job done faster if you throw more bodies at it. Yet Microsoft and other proprietary software makers really stick to the same old project methodology. In one way or other it is quite similar to the old "waterfall" methodology, with a schedule driven by market needs, and features and bug fixes dropped at the last moment so the buggy release goes out the door.
Consequently, Microsoft attracts highly-skilled, highly-paid engineers to enlist in these "death march" projects and rewards them with stock options based on performance. No doubt few at MS feel able to work 40-hour weeks.
But the result is more and more massive software, more and more legacy code to maintain, more and more bugs to fix, more and more releases to fix the bugs, and software never seems to get radically better.
This is the old "software crisis" of the 1970s, back again with a vengance. Now that Microsoft has gained a monopoly in certain areas, they have little incentive to innovate or find better ways to do things.
Many of you will argue about this point. But again I say the projects are market-driven by the bosses, not customer-driven. The aim never seems to be delivering code that is elegant or really functional, but only shipping it out the door and charging money later for a release that promises to fix those bugs (and introduces more). And the software gets bigger and bigger, with an idea to include as many functions as possible. The customer more and more relies on the behemoth manufacturer to fix things and customize them and support them, and those jobs aren't being done better now than ever.
On the other hand, a team of variable size that is distributed over the Internet does seem to work in certain situations. The code it produces is closer to what customers want and need. Even though in many cases it is not finished, it provides enough for a custom programmer to fill in the missing parts. The C and Unix environments have become a lingua franca for professional programmers.
The eXtreme Programming model does not use teams distributed over the Internet. Instead, it puts the much smaller teams near the customer. Like the open source model, it releases in stages, and it reuses components and other programs well. And it leverages software as a profession. Programmers should not work more than 40 hours a week. Instead, they need to get out of the office, become human beings, relate to their families and societies, and become inspired once again why programming is important, and why it is so important for all of us to do our best job.
When Microsoft programmers start working 40 hours a week then I know they will have learned something from these new methodologies. But they won't be able to do that unless their bosses learn it first. It might indeed taking a lot of shrinking of the big software factories before this happens.
Can this technology be used to cancel noises as well as generate sound?
I am thinking that current noise-cancelling technology seems to rely on headphones, since noise is generally omnidirectional. But if this technology were used to determine the direction of the noise source, and shift phase of sounds so the sounds appeared to be coming from the same direction, then one might not have to use headphones.
For example, in a cubicle there are noises all around, from telephones to people talking, and it would be extremely useful to be able to selectively tune out the noises and work without headphones. Currently, I believe "noise cancelling" area systems just generate white noise, which doesn't fix the problem, only create more.
The lower bass tones could be handled in an area system, I think, because they wouldn't be so directional.
I mean, doesn't the world suffer from increasing amounts of "noise pollution" as machines proliferate in our increasingly urban environments? Many people including myself would love to be able to take action to control this environment for ourselves and filter out the annoying noises. A much better use than increasily annoying sales pitches beamed directionally at us without any choice.
MPAA is missing something: the California Trade Secrets Act provides a complete defense:
They say:
And here is the defense, at eff.org:
CALIFORNIA CIVIL CODE : SECTION 3426.1
3426. This title may be cited as the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
3426.1. As used in this title, unless the context requires otherwise:
(a) "Improper means" includes theft, bribery, misrepresentation, breach or inducement of a breach of a duty to maintain secrecy, or espionage through electronic or other means. Reverse engineering or independent derivation alone shall not be considered improper means.
(b) "Misappropriation" means:
(1) Acquisition of a trade secret of another by a person who knows or has reason to know that the trade secret was acquired by improper means; or
(2) Disclosure or use of a trade secret of another without express or implied consent by a person who:
(A) Used improper means to acquire knowledge of the trade secret; or
(B) At the time of disclosure or use, knew or had reason to know that his or her knowledge of the trade secret was:
(i) Derived from or through a person who had utilized improper means to acquire it;
(ii) Acquired under circumstances giving rise to a duty to maintain its secrecy or limit its use; or
(iii) Derived from or through a person who owed a duty to the person seeking relief to maintain its secrecy or limit its use; or
(C) Before a material change of his or her position, knew or had reason to know that it was a trade secret and that knowledge of it had been acquired by accident or mistake.
(c) "Person" means a natural person, corporation, business trust, estate, trust, partnership, limited liability company, association, joint venture, government, governmental subdivision or agency, or any other legal or commercial entity.
(d) "Trade secret" means information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process, that:
(1) Derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to the public or to other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use; and
(2) Is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy.
[Emphasis added. So not only is reverse engineering perfectly legal under California trade secret law, it is also perfectly legal under the DMCA right now, and in Norway, where the reverse engineering took place. Send check to EFF.org now!]
Windows NT got through the back door via a "Posix subsystem" on the kernel. Using this subsystem you can boot into the Posix subsystem but not use the other Windows NT (2000) features. The Posix subsystem uses programs from such other vendors as Mortice Kern Systems to give it Posix compatibility. DEC's VMS used a similar technique.
But just because an OS has a Posix subsystem does not mean that the applications that run on the other subsystems are Posix-compatible at all. Microsoft Office is not, for sure.
In addition, many computer systems used by DOD are supposed to have a certified level of security--C2, even B1 in some cases. Windows NT did get C2 certification, but only for the NT 4.0 version, not for the 5.0 version many departments bought. This includes both hardware and software in one security level.
No doubt RedHat or VA Linux or IBM or Compaq could cobble together a GNU/Linux or OpenBSD or whatever system and pay the money to have an independent body certify it at the appropriate security level. At least one Posix-certified version of Linux has been released. Then DOD could buy the Linux or BSD OS and hardware from an approved list.
I worked for the Navy as a contractor Unix sys admin. We had on our base about a thousand SCO Unix clients running on Everex-type PCs. The idea of the managers was to dump SCO and go to Microsoft Windows NT. Linux could have been chosen as the client instead of Windows, but it would have to be locked down.
The huge Solaris enterprise systems that ran the base used Oracle databases and ran many old Cobol programs too. It's possible that Windows could run those programs, but they would need a great deal of rewriting. Linux as yet probably doesn't have the beef to run the big Navy RAID systems and databases--but Linux will get there soon. Maybe IBM will port CICS to Linux--it's already on AIX.
The reason for "standardizing" on Windows NT was that it would be "uniform" across the network. A stupid reason, and one that will cost the Navy lots of money. For example, there is no reason to give many of the users a whole Office platform--all they do is enter numbers into a database screen in their job. On the other hand, getting Windows email working right will be a nightmare for such a huge system. The big brass don't listen to the users any more than Billg does.
There are a lot of Linux users in the military, and they would love to talk some sense into the brass on this subject. Government Computer News has been educating them for years. But military brass are the last to regain any common sense.
Garbage in, garbage out. Make a model and then dig up the evidence the model fits the evidence. How is it that Slashdot escapes this paradox--do 99% of Slashdot users read instead of posting? I don't think so.
Commonsense ought to tell anybody that new popular sites get more links than older, static sites. But Huberman has to publish a paper in Nature to prove that. He also contorts his brain to try to prove the power law distribution and page count of sites.
There's nothing new to these ideas--they are just trotting out the old "Pareto principle" that hardly anybody tries to explain. You find self-help books now in the Business section on how to "apply" the 80/20 rule. But the "law" that Pareto discovered is too universal in nature to provide an answer to inequality in the social realm, and too abstract for anybody to say that it is greed that motivates Gnutella sharing.
Even if one admits that music sharing is a market (not clear what the costs are) or that some market principles can help in distribution (it's too early to tell, the Net is an experiment, bandwidth increases to meet demand, it is still almost too cheap to meter, it's becoming easier for everybody to publish their own works, people have other motivations to publish than to make money, and so on) Huberman still don't have the right answers--and they can't derive them simply from the data they produce.
Instead, look at the work of Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mezard http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0002374. As explained ably by Mark Buchanan in New Scientist 19 August 2000, pp22-26, the natural laws of physics can explain the inequality in the power law distribution much better than economists in the past have attempted to do.
If one needs to remedy inequality then there are several programs one can attempt. One is taxes--tax the rich and give the money to the poor. But taxes often are captured back by the rich and the poor stay poor. With music sharing, if the receivers paid a small tax to the system, with the money going to the producers, one might or might not see the receivers producing more files on their own. Maybe they are motivated by fame instead of money. Or the big collectors might not increase their collections if they were given a small amount of money.
Another remedy these physicists suggest trying is simply raising the "temperature" of the system. By increasing the transactions in the system, through free trade, fair rules, more exchange, and some competition, then there is less volatility for individuals--less chance for somebody to go down and stay down.
Libertarians such as Huberman might be interested in this idea. Certainly they worship free trade. But they ought to be careful of bringing stale models to the new Internet. It might not work the same way they predict in other systems.
I for one don't really see the Gnutella "discrepancies" as a problem. There is certainly not yet any "tragedy of the commons." Because "tragedy" implies that there are limited resources. For example, on my cable modem segment I am no doubt considered a "hog" because my web server gives out big text files to people all over the world. But even if I increased my bandwidth usage tremendously, I would still be far from saturating the system. All that would happen is that some people might be delayed a few seconds by collisions. If the system ever got saturated, I would have to take my server off anyway, and then the system can work toward a new stability.
Since I don't think Huberman's economic, market model is very good at the moment, I think that we ought to explore other alternatives. For example, Frances Cairncross, editor of The Economist, in her excellent book The End of Distance, refers to at least three other ways markets could succeed in music publishing: the advertising model (Cairncross attaches Ester Dyson's name to that), the performance model (John Perry Barlow), or the sort of subscription model (Wall Street Journal formally, Stephen King less formally, ideas that date back to de Sola Pool's idea of the Internet as a model for freedom).
You're right. New businesses have no idea how to make office space work, because they have very little idea of how to plan robustly for their future more than a few months ahead.
So most new dot coms and other high tech businesses end up leasing space in an office building that was built on spec. What are the implications of that?
Such buildings are built cheap. The "efficiency" of a commercial building as measured by real estate pros is the "net-to-gross ratio"--the rentable worker area, that you can charge rent for, divided by the total square feet, part of which is the core functions of elevators, corridors, and so on.
Landlords consider 90 per cent efficiency optimal--since individual offices would be too small then, they cut down on corridors by using open space plans or cubicles. Then they save money (energy) by reducing ventilation, thus increasing inhalation of noxious gases emitted by the building contents--the plague of "sick buildings". They have to build large cubes with most of the space far away from walls and natural light. The more windows, the more energy loss. Elevators shut off communication between floors.
The "churn rate" on many office buildings is very high today, maybe 70 per cent move every year. Rents can thus increase more rapidly. If the building does not have computer room raised floors, it becomes a nightmare to string cable and the individual users can't do it themselves.
Many of these office buildings are built in "edge cities," supposedly more convenient for automobiles, but far from the conveniences of the downtown city and public transport. Cars soon clog the roads.
What people have been saying here is that this way of designing offices doesn't work. And your point is very valuable--this is the way businesses in America feel they have to start.
What are the alternatives, that can give the end users the control they need? One possibility is to build incrementally--instead of leasing a huge new office space, rent part of a larger building, with the option to grow into the other space as the business grows, or shrink the space if the business doesn't need to grow in size. Don't plan for the latest high tech gear--instead, create a strategy so that growth can be flexible, and respond appropriately no matter what happens.
I really think that such businesses ought to consider moving closer to downtowns than stay in edge cities. The reason for separation of industry and residences has been in the past that industry pollutes and makes noise. But this is not something to complain about for high tech industries. Another point is that high tech workers are valuable and it is worth investing in better and more expensive space in order to keep them.
Finally, many office buildings, like too many schools, are just too big. They become like factories. Occupants don't even know names of neighbors--there are too many. Computers and the Internet can allow smaller teams to branch out and work in a decentralized fashion.
I believe if new businesses gave more control to employees they would not only prosper but also be able to retain happy people who work hard to make the business prosper. Let's give more control to users to shape their own environments!
I like GNU/Linux, and I flourished best in a company that downsized the excess crud. Then I and a few other people could roam around and pick up all the goodies and ornament our personal spaces. Essentially, we served as our own architects, and could fix or repair anything without calling in some other professionals.
Read Christopher Alexander's books for some tips. I need a window to be able to think. I also appreciate a little privacy when I talk on the phone, and I don't like hearing others talk on the phone either.
Like some programmers, too many office architects look for the "magic bullet." They jump from fad to fad without any empirical evidence. When the space no longer works, they tear it down and start over.
Here are almost a dozen names for schemes to rework the office environment:
The list is from "Building Evaluation Techniques," ed. Baird, ISBN 0-07-003308-0.
The idea of this book is to make formal evaluations of how the environment affects productivity, and adjust as needed. It depends on a certain amount of flexibility built into the space, not everything predetermined by the architect down to the last millimetre and cent. Here is a good book too: "How Buildings Learn: What happens after they're built," by Stewart Brand, Penguin, ISBN 0-14-013996-6.
In fact, after evaluation, many businesses drop these new-fangled ideas as impractical. Workers don't like them, and find ways to resist or work around them.
The eXtreme Programming idea is new, but it puts forward a model of having a big room with high-powered workstations in the center on tables. Programmers work as two-member teams on the same computer. All around the center, at the borders, are cubes or private spaces for times when a person needs to work alone or with privacy.
Another idea that aids in personalizing and customizing office space is the HVAC system from Johnson Controls, that allows desk users to tune white space to control the sonic environment, as well as temperature, air flow, and lighting. This can be employed in any of the office environments, cubicles, offices, big rooms.
There are many models for forming social space in a business. There are many programming languages, and each has virtues and faults. It is up to us to choose the best tools. Professional architects and design engineers can help, but can't design everything perfect to begin with.
Hey, Ketzer, thanks for the "explanation" but it is even worse than Kaplan's decision. How you got a "2" for "Informative" is beyond belief.
No, because it doesn't have to say that. Just like guns don't have to say "don't shoot people!" on them, because it's already the law.
So guns are now illegal?
You didn't buy a movie, you bought a DVD. Nobody signed over ownership of the information contained on the DVD to you. So you don't have the right to do whatever you want with it.
Well, I say I did buy it and I claim I have those rights. Show me the piece of paper that proves you are correct. You refer to some "license" I never saw nor heard of, even from Kaplan.
In the case of VHS, they license you to view it under certain conditions, and if you view it under different conditions (like in a big movie theater with 1000 "friends" who paid to get in) then you are breaking the licensing agreement.
No, you might be breaking copyright law (it depends on what the copyright owner agrees to, when it comes to redistribution--it is not always illegal--look at the GPL for example). However, in some "license" (but not with DVDs) a copyright owner might try to restrict you from making a backup copy. In that case, you need not comply with the license, because that is unconstitutional.
In the case of DVDs, those conditions are a bit stricter, in the sense that they restrict the method of viewing to a licensed viewer.
Who says? I never made a contract or bought a license from the DVD-CCA.
The legal difference is that for VHS, the conditions are determined by Fair Use laws, which say what conditions you are allowed to copy or view the info.
There are no "Fair Use" laws, there are only copyright laws, and DMCA is part of the same Title 17 now. There is no difference between VHS and DVD. Both have Macrovision, and both try to keep the user from exercising fair use rights of copyright law.
DCMA makes it illegal to break that encryption,...
DMCA (not DCMA) doesn't make it illegal to "break that encryption." If that were true, any playing of a DVD in a player would be illegal, because every player has to decrypt the scrambled files.
which protects information owned by the movie studio.
There is no "property owned by the movie studio." The movie studio has certain statutory rights for a limited time. But the purchaser of a DVD owns the DVD and can use it, view it, decrypt it, resell it, put it under a scanning electron microscope to examine the pits on the disc, play it on her dishwasher, use it to shingle the roof, or whatever use she wants, after she has bought it. There is no license, no different law for DVDs than for other digital or analog content under copyright law.
it's a crime to break it and take their info.
Yeah, this is the "crime" that the MPAA accused 15-year-old Jon Johansen of, "breaking into" his own computer and "taking their info" so he could play the DVDs that he purchased on his own computer (GNU/Linux).
So you want to lock this kid up or give him a medal?
I am convinced now more than ever that the best way to destroy DMCA is to use it. Make a CSS-protected DVD...
It only takes a little money and the cooperation of one DVD mastering and manufacturing company.
Create 4.7GB of Free Software (including, of course, DeCSS.c). Encrypt it with the CSS algorithms derived from the DeCSS reverse engineering. Prominently display a copyright notice, together with a license that the only way the disc can be used is with DeCSS. Supply DeCSS and necessary other viewing programs on an accompanying floppy. Take it to a friendly DVD manufacturer. Print up a license and contract to go with it. Have all the Linux distros sell it online.
The point is, DeCSS does decryption--but so does any CSS implementation. Obviously, in this case, DeCSS would be doing it with the consent of the copyright holder--the Free Software Foundation and all the other copyright holders on the DVD.
Yes, the MPAA and the DVD-CCA will not like this. So they sue. On what grounds? It could only be on trade secrets--but that is a loser--they would have used that in New York if they thought it would win. They use Judge Kaplan's decision, that distributing DeCSS is illegal? But where in his decision does it say that it is illegal to distribute and decrypt a copyrighted work with the authorization of the copyright holder?
I am really offended by Kaplan's decision. It almost libels the Free Software movement. If it is allowed to stand, then the liberty of all of us using computers and the Internet is in question. Even reporting the code to a virus would be illegal, according to his way of thinking.
Fairly soon, we will think about using the expanded storage power of DVDs to record computer data. It is time we made sure that we will be free of the monopoly on DVDs by Hollywood. They don't want us to produce content--they want to rent us content on pay-per-view.
I'm willing to donate money and help for this project. Anybody else?
I too used to puzzle about the "productivity paradox." But I think you are off base in thinking that the data is as refined as you say. The "computer productivity paradox" more simply is the observation that--in the aggregate--increased investments in computers has not increased--in the aggregate--overall productivity.
But when I recently read "Roadside Empires" (How the Chains Franchised America, by Stan Luxemburg--look for it at www.bookfinder.com), I saw that this amazing franchising process can account for much of the paradox, alone.
Investment has gone in recent years in the U.S. to service industries such as franchise restaurants (now >61% of our food dollar). Productivity is low, the wages are low, and owners have little incentive to use computers to displace cheap labor. The productivity relation stills works in manufacturing industries, or agriculture, or the larger service industries such as banking and insurance, which automated earlier.
Reading this book made me angry. I don't think you can blame IT for the problems--they are much larger, and would involve rethinking much of our modern social structure.
The idea of "network effects" creating a de facto monopoly for Microsoft is one that economists such as Hal Varian try to teach us. It seems that no matter if GNU/Linux or another UNIX is techically superior, Microsoft as a monopolist hogs market share.
This is interesting in light of a recent report from China at Salon magazine. Even though Linux is free and the government officially supports it, Microsoft still has a huge market share in China. There might be a couple of reasons for this. One is that "everybody else uses Microsoft" and the network effects become predominant. Another is that the pirates actually make money marketing copies of Microsoft products, even though the price is very cheap--they don't make money marketing Linux, it seems.
So there is a puzzling problem here: nobody can make and sell better software than Microsoft's, and even stealing it helps Microsoft by promoting their market share, because of the network effects.
Consequently, Microsoft has no incentive to open source code, to port to non-Microsoft platforms, or to spend money to increase market share at all, since they own the market already.
Therefore, the only way Microsoft would port to Linux any applications would be if it thought it could make a little money in a new market, similar to the way it writes applications for Apple computers. And it would not hurt if a small Israeli company would do all the work and take the risks for the big company, which can then come in and pick up the marbles whenever it wants to.
The result--short of an enforced breakup of the company by the courts--seems to me bad in any case for GNU/Linux and Free Software. The dominance of this big company with closed, proprietary code and environments, would be harmful to the movement to empower users and small companies. It would just be another dinosaur that squashes new growth by thrashing around adding features and diseases. There is no chance for Microsoft to learn this lesson unless some asteroid like a Supreme Court decision lands on the back of this monster.
The Boston Globe reports that fiction writer Harlan Ellison is suing Critical Path, owner of Remarq.com, for copyright infringement. Trial set to go to court next month.
Surely this has nothing to do with Remarq going off the air. But it does indicate the depths to which Usenet has fallen. I remember when Usenet used to be civil and productive, and it is a shame that it has become like CB radio.
According to the report, "in June, he [Ellison] won a judgment against Stephen Robertson of California, who admitted posting Ellison's stories online and agreed to pay Ellison's legal fees." Ellison, it says, uses a manual typewriter. Evidently he also has some strong ideas about art and technology.
we instead get Sonny Bono copyright extensions
Well, I am fighting that battle too, with a lawsuit against the Copyright Term Extension Act. See the OpenLaw site and add your comments.
It is sad, but maybe we can use some judo on the system to turn it to good ends.
Some old software has been published for free. For example, Visicalc, Borland C, even Microsoft Word 5. But what we need is to have the source code go back into the public domain so the public can benefit from it. Then the ideas can be reworked by the next generation and better products developed from it.
So we need an incentive to accomplish this. Simply publishing or stealing the object code is not enough. Of course, it would have been better if the Copyright Office had required registration and deposit of the entire source code, but it hasn't. So we need to develop some private institutions that can perform the way the Framers intended, and reinstitute the idea of copyright as a way to produce more for the public good.
Many posters comment that Abandonware sites are technically illegal. So here's a plan. Provide an incentive for copyright and patent owners to donate their works to the public, in return for a tax deduction. Don't steal the works, pay for them.
Set up an Intellectual Property Conservancy that is a non-profit, educational, publishing corporation. Donations of intellectual property could be tax-deductible (Congress could even make the tax deduction higher than normal for a superincentive, or provide a monetary incentive in lieu of tax deduction). Accept donations of copyright, online publication rights, source code, patents, trademarks, books, software, development environments, the whole lot.
When a company finds the income from an old work no longer makes maintenance worthwhile, then they can donate it to the public domain and the rest of us will distribute it and support it for free (or even for money). They will have an incentive to consider this, and if the company goes under the creditors will probably force it, since otherwise they would not get money back.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution wisely set up a balance between the rights of authors and inventors, and the public domain, by limiting copyright term and recognizing fair use rights. However, copyright term in recent years has been extended far too long. While it started at 14 years, now it is 95 years for a work made for hire (in other Berne Convention nations, it is 70 or 50 years after the author's death).
The copyright holders (mostly big publishers) howled that they needed protection for more years, because works had value that long. This is doubtful, but if it is true, then surely the copyright holders will get behind this plan, and find a way to realize more profits.
Since the public is the one to benefit, the public should pay. A difficulty with previous ideas is that the government does a bad job of setting prices for public goods. Okay, I say let the normal process of the market or fair appraisals, as is done today with tax deductions, be used instead.
Richard Stallman has pointed out that it might be immoral to reward those who take out software patents, for example. It might be considered like paying money to redeem a child from slavery. So there is room for a lot of debate and discussion on the issue. What do you think? Can you help get the services of a tax lawyer to vet this plan?
in any event there is no antitrust issue in the DeCSS litigation.
How can you be so sure? The court excluded testimony intended to determine the facts on this very matter. What would you call the DVD-CCA but a "trust"?
If you read the postings to the DVD OpenLaw forum, referred to above, you will see that the movie studios have historically been prone to misuse of copyright in restraint of trade, and there is plenty of precedent.
Misuse of copyright in restraint of trade is a legitimate defense to copyright infringement charges, and DeCSS is alleged to be illegal because it enables such infringement.
MPAA asserts that DMCA gives them authority to require all DVD players to be licensed, and any use by consumers of discs and players must be controlled by DVD-CCA licenses and "authority" (separate from first sale and fair use). If the automobile industry asserted similar control over keys to cars, and sought to jail consumers who "circumvented" the authority from their trust, don't you think that would be a matter of antitrust concern?
But neither MPAA nor DVD-CCA will reveal these licenses. Judge Kaplan won't get into the matter because he is afraid testimony will force his recusal.
Likely all this will be taken up at appeal. If you have any evidence to provide please do so at that time.
We agree with plaintiffs and the Court that the authority of the copyright owner is a matter of law, not a matter of fact.
Yes, this sentence can be confusing if taken out of context.
What I believe is the point here is that MPAA has failed to establish any "authority model" that applies under DMCA, other than the confusing wording of the DMCA. In this law, "authority" is never defined, but is used in determining if a "device" does any "circumvention," thus distinguishing illegal use from legal use.
If one looks only at the facts, defense does fine, because DeCSS can be used only with the title key and the player key and a valid DVD that the user purchases and wishes to play on a GNU/Linux machine.
However, MPAA wants the interpretation to be just one clause of the law and therefore not include any consideration of "fair use," even when Congress deliberately put restrictive clauses in the DMCA for that very purpose.
You can see the fallacy of doing that--look at the MPAA comparison of DeCSS to "keys" or the "numeric combination of a lock to a bank vault." Under plaintiffs' interpretation of DMCA, the physical key is equivalent to a string of numbers describing the key. They say that automobile manufacturers retain all rights to make keys to cars. They would say that a newspaper or a novel cannot publish the combination to a safe. What they are saying is that if any speech has any possible use under DMCA that they have not authorized in some way other than selling the keys, then the speech must be outlawed.
So plaintiffs' argument is circular. They never explain how authority is conveyed, unless it is by the consumer purchasing a DVD with the title keys, and a player with the player keys--which you have to do in order to use DeCSS--or how DMCA could ever retain control over all use of the keys, as for example to prevent consumers in certain regions from playing DVDs they had purchased, or to buy only DVD-CCA-authorized players and not LiViD players.
Defense retains the right to bring up these antitrust arguments later. I hope the DMCA is thrown out completely so MPAA cannot sue to restrain free speech and fair use in the future.
All the representatives from these great states are saying is Microsoft is wrong to give equal campaign contributions to both Democrats and Republicans.
The Republicans deserve to be bought a lot more than the Democrats do, look at what services the GOP can provide! Heck, look at the free TV time MSFT is being given. Isn't that worth something?
I'm unclear about Microsoft is handling one issue, client access licenses.
GartnerGroup has energetically represented companies against Microsoft pricing practices. Last February they revealed a similar sneaky MS tactic, to charge for a client access license with Windows 2000, even though one already had bought the OS for the server and client. See the CNET.com article on that issue.
So again there is confusion about what Microsoft is doing. If you buy a preinstalled Windows2000 PC and you remove the OS and install the Select version, do you need to pay a second time for the client access license?
I believe you do, because the client access license varies depending on volume, and would not be for the same version of the server OS.
But I may be wrong. I'd appreciate it if GartnerGroup could clarify this issue too.
It's likely we have not seen the end of these strange practices by the monopolist. I hope the Supreme Court takes the DOJ case soon and we can move to a stable situation for businesses.
But again Microsoft is its own worst enemy. I hope they convince many companies now is the time to move to Linux. Why move to ME when Whistler will quickly replace it? What will Microsoft do when DOS is finally gone from the OS, tell people to use WINE?