The only movies that cannot be copied cannot be seen. The only music that cannot be copied cannot be heard.
Yup. Herr Mozart took that brat little Wolfgang A. Mozart to the Vatican to hear a celebrated mass some person wrote but didn't want published because he was afraid it would be pirated (no copyright then).
So Mozart listened and then went back to his room, took some pen and paper, and wrote the whole mass from memory.
Some copy protection. Put the kid in jail instead of giving him a prize for his genius?
Am I the only one to remember "Savvy," the natural language command line interface that worked on Apple// and IBM PCs?
There were two basic parts to it. A Forth interpreter came with predefined "pages" for standard office procedures such as word processor, spreadsheet, database, and so on. A ROM on a card contained some logic to interface between whatever you typed and the Forth system. Since Forth is extensible, it was simple to add new commands.
For example, if the system already had built into it a command to "list all paychecks in the last week" and you typed "lsit..." instead, the system would ask you what you meant, give you some previous times you typed in something like that, and ask you to either select one of them, or define your new command (in terms of old commands, or in a simple programming language that was near to English and not even related to Forth).
I rather liked the Savvy system, since it gradually learned from the user instead of always forcing the user to learn the correct way to do things. And it was pretty amazing to have such a system with virtual memory on an Apple//. With a hard disk it was fast and easy to get common jobs done.
Of course it was too expensive. The idea came out of the space program and was sold for something like $1,295 at first. Then they moved it to the IBM PC and eventually the price fell to less than $100. Excalibur Systems sold it; last I heard the company was doing document management systems.
On the down side, it was completely incompatible with any other software. It didn't even have a communications program to be able to use a modem to import data. And when the Macintosh came along a lot of users thought that a windowing system with a mouse was better than a keyboard.
But a lot of people have used command line interfaces as in Unix and the power is attractive for experienced users. Even with Unix shells one can get some of the same power as Savvy simply by creating aliases or small scripts.
Maybe voice recognition or some other form of natural language system or pattern recognition will be invented. But Savvy proved that you could do a lot of it in just 64KB, on a 1MHz CPU. It didn't try to do everything, just accommodate the user as best as it could. Neat idea. Will we learn from our past failures? Don't count on it!
This is the sort of lies your local newspaper prints (from Newsday, 2000-07-25:
"Respect for private property serves a bedrock of civilization. And despite the difficulties of enforcing property rights, this is a core function of government, which shouldn't be diminished in the zeal to promote technology. Unfortunately for many in our society, people feel they are entitled to art or other goods, and no entrepreneur or business has the right to control those items with so-called "unfair" prices. Such thinking is not just a failure to understand the free market, but a failure to understand adulthood. "
Do you believe they might be referring to you? Have you read your Constitution lately? Do you know how to send an email to the Editor of Newsday or your local newspaper? Or do you care only enough to spew off on Slashdot?
I really do think there is a connection between what is going on in the MPAA-2600 case and Eldred v Reno.
Disney and Warner were big backers of both bills in 1998 and gave lots of campaign contributions to everyone they could think of, both Democrats and Republicans.
I believe they were very scared of the Internet and the new freedom of everyone to publish. They wanted to be able to control the Internet and keep it safe for e-commerce and pay-TV and their profit stream using a business model of licensing and staged releases.
In each case, I believe Congress went too far. They didn't realize what they were up against--us! Not only do we understand the Constitution and our rights, we are also the citizens and consumers. When we get mad, they eventually suffer and have to back down.
We can fight in the courts. But I don't think a boycott would be sufficient. What we need to do is encourage all citizens to publish their ideas themselves instead of relying on the television networks or Hollywood or Microsoft. We have to help them with the tools and access. We don't need lots of money to do this because the costs of publishing are so low now.
Turn off the television. Buy only used books and not from Amazon. Use your computer to write programs and produce your own art and share it. Help Project Gutenberg and other programs to share information.
Sooner or later the big companies will realize the only way they can respond is by providing the customer with a good product at a fair price. They can't lock up ideas like DeCSS forever. But they are desperately trying.
You can help support my case to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act with your own ideas. Visit http://eon.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno and add your own ideas to the Open Law discussion. Written briefs in the appeal are now being filed and oral arguments will be in October in Washington, D.C. And, please visit my site and read anything you like for free. You own most of it--in the public domain for as long as we have it.
I firmly believe it is as important as the Scopes trial, the attempt in Tennessee to suppress the teaching of Darwinism. The DeCSS case is an attempt to make an idea--a piece of software-- illegal.
Please go to http://www.eff.org/ and read the testimony in the MPAA vs. 2600 case in New York, that will continue next week. (And please consider sending a little money along to EFF to help their defense.)
The movie studios have now stipulated they cannot find one case of DeCSS being used to copy a movie or trade it on the Internet. Instead, what they seek is to have a federal judge declare DeCSS illegal. They want to sell you a DVD and a DVD player, then tell you that you can't play that DVD on your Linux or BSD computer, because it isn't "authorized". You can't write a DeCSS program, you can't even link to a web page with the program, according to the MPAA, and according to federal law if they win.
Where does this "authorization" come from, if not from the first sale of the disc? And how could you even use DeCSS if you didn't have an "authorized" DVD and an "authorized" player?
This is code vs. code. Sorry, you guys, it's not about piracy. It's about "hackers"--and which definition of "hacker" do you think will prevail?
If you want the right to code, if you want to be able to enjoy free speech and a free press, and not have all our ideas controlled by Microsoft or Hollywood, now is the time to speak up. In a few days it will be too late.
(And read the testimony of the "investigation" of the over-paid, incompetent "anti-piracy" expert at MPAA. She read about DeCSS on Slashdot, went to the site linked by Slashdot, and told her supervisor about it. No report, no "investigation," just call in the lawyers and circle 'round the flag boys, we made a big boo-boo and we have to deny everything and shoot the messengers.)
Waggoner-Edstrom (Microsoft PR agency) has a talent for hyping old news that Microsoft suddenly discovers it has (re)invented.
If you read the article and web page of this technology you can see that Bayesian analysis was used during the 1970s in medicine extensively. The programmer in question was a physician. "Artificial intelligence" at the time was an attempt to use computers to solve complicated problems such as diagnosis in medicine. The program "MYCIN" was able to give advice on antibiotic use to physicians, based on expert rules.
This technique never quite succeeded. The answers were probably right, but physicians didn't have full confidence in them, since the argument process was a bit mysterious. This was disturbing to psychologists, who had concluded that humans were conservative Bayesian in decision making under uncertainty.
A new wave of psychologists had to come along and show that humans are not Bayesian in their thinking. It might be that computer aids could help humans to decide matters better, and help solve complex problems, but pure Bayesian analysis would not provide a full answer to our problems. This unfortunate conclusion should have been foreseen when one considers that the rationalist agenda to reduce arithmetic and logic to a complete and consistent decision theory was doomed by Goedel long ago.
Human-computer interface theory has moved away from Bayesian analysis in another respect. The complexity of modern technology has caused enormous problems, even disasters, for which we would like to have some procedure to prevent such errors in the future. It turns out that the great technology errors such as Chernobyl or Challenger were not human-operator errors or technology-operation errors, so much as human-organizational errors and technology-design errors. The errors were latent in the design and just waiting for the random events to be exposed. Bayesian analysis would only predict what could be foreseen and calculated--these errors were overlooked in the design stage, and Bayesian analysis could never reveal them.
Experts such as Don Norman and James Reason have written extensively on the failures of rationalist Bayesian analysis to manage complex technology. They propose concrete solutions for the design stage. I wish Microsoft would pay more attention to their ideas, instead of fooling around with this Bayesian stuff.
One example: I sat in the audience in the big tent at the launch of Windows 95 and watched Bill Gates and Jay Leno show off the spell-checking ability of WinWord 95. Bill typed in something like, "We are at the premierr of Windows 95" and the word beginning with "p" was underlined with a red wavy line. Jay and Bill clicked on the word and accepted Word's suggested correction "premier". Based on Bayesian analysis, quite likely that would be the most probable spelling. However, it is wrong in this context: instead, the more unusual spelling "premiere" is correct. Since Jay and Bill didn't know any better, they took the word of the computer expert.
If we follow strict Bayesian tools, this situation of exposure to unexpected errors will increase. That is why users turn off Microsoft Bob--the technology is wrong, annoying, and causes more problems than it is worth.
Most lawyers I've talked to have said that judges should not issue warrants unless the search net is as narrow as possible. Thus Carnivore or any other sniffer should never copy traffic from innocent Internet users on the segment, only that to or from the "suspect"--i.e., the wiretap must be on the segment most restricted to the suspect.
However, the FBI has in the past been able to get around this requirement for wiretaps. Several years ago the FBI arrested a man in New England who attempted to buy missles for the IRA. The Boston Globe revealed that the suspect used random pay phones in Nashua, New Hampshire. The FBI apparently tapped all the pay phones in the area, and used voice recognition technology to filter the conversations from the suspect out of all the conversations copied. The lawyers I talked to said that such a practice would not be constitutional, since it involved wiretaps on too many innocent people. However, it apparently held up in court. The U.S. government also supplied the technology to the Colombian government to track down "narcoterrorists" using cell phones. In that case, the wiretaps must have been extensive, network-wide.
I believe the question is not whether or not Carnivore is technically feasible, nor whether or not it is legal when it is intended as a wiretap authorized by a court, but rather whether or not it invades all our privacy. If the FBI wiretaps my conversations I should be allowed to go to court and get a hearing about it. Just because a criminal is using the network segment at the same time should not authorize the FBI to wiretap me.
Will Reno understand this issue and overrule the FBI? Don't count on it.
Anyone remember the old Borland software licenses? They were worded along the lines of, 'So long as only the same person will use it, make as many copies as you like.' Now/that/ was an enlightened age.
Yes, I remember! That was a company that respected users and customers. What was the point of ripping them off when the real thing was so cheap and convenient and good? In those days making copies of the diskettes wasn't cheap, just as making copies of a DVD today isn't cheap.
So what this shows is that when a company finds out how to use this technology to satisfy the customer's needs--and make a little money at the same time--then quickly the laws will change to accommodate the new technology. Just as Hollywood adapted to the VCR after the Betamax case.
What I don't like, however, is the implication from what Hatch says, that the music industry needs to get its act together and make us consumers accept encryption and 'rights management systems.' That type of technology was rejected when it came in the form of Circuit City's DIVX. I think it's premature for the government to mandate a particular technology here--even to back up the old technology of the music industry with bad laws such as DMCA. The music industry can't get the computer industry to accept hardware locks on DVD machines--the computer manufacturers rightly point out that the devices have multiple purposes and the music industry should not be allowed to take them over and enrich themselves at everyone's expense.
Back to Borland. I bought my first home computer in 1980 with VisiCalc on Apple ][. But VisiCalc would only provide you one program diskette for one machine. I got another Apple for work. I copied the program disk and used the copy on the work machine. Software Arts (producer of VisiCalc) made it as hard as they could to prevent copying, but Locksmith and other programs defeated that. Since Software Arts could not satisfy the legitimate needs of customers, other companies came along and ate their lunch.
Whatever happened to old Frank Borland anyway? Is he back in the desert with his burro?
It seems to me, if DMCA is used that broadly, couldn't it be used to argue against the FBI decrypting email communication?
Good point--that's obviously the reason the FBI and its friends are specifically exempted from the DMCA provisions. The FBI also requires telecommunications companies to provide facilities for wiretapping, at the companies' expense.
It used to be, the Constitution prohibited the government from taking away your rights. Now the Congress prevents you from taking away the rights of the police.
Last I looked at the Constitution of the U.S., prior restraint on publication was not allowed. I seem to remember the First Amendment referring to "no law," not "any law that is restricted to drugs, child pornography, infant baptism, etc."
What this means is the government is not supposed to prohibit anyone from publishing information, only that if the publication is not protected by the First Amendment (Holmes's "crying fire in the theatre") then the police can arrest you. A few of us oldtimers can remember the Pentagon Papers case, where The New York Times and The Washington Post had to go to the Supreme Court to establish their right to publish those papers, which the federal government claimed would violate our national security.
I would like to learn from anybody in the Denver area who could tell me what happened in the Tattered Cover Bookstore case. A few months ago a squad of police arrived there with a search warrant to go through their credit card records. They said they had found a receipt concerning a book on how to produce illegal drugs, at an empty methamphetamine lab.
The owner refused the police demands and got a writ from a court to stop the search. But I never heard what happened afterward. Her argument was that such a search would invade not only her rights as a bookseller to preserve privacy of clients, but also the right of the public to buy and read books no matter what. Perhaps if the issue pertained to web pages and ISPs then some computer geeks would make more noise.
It appears that this new attempt to amend the law is an effort to strengthen the hands of the police in such a case. I hope it is rejected by Congress. But I don't have any faith in their ability to read and understand the Constitution. If it passes, then I hope it is challenged by brave people like the owner of the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver.
MS might be able to buy "windows.net" as I can't find it listed.
But "office.net" and "bcentral.net" are already taken. Unless Microsoft has the power to throw them out on the basis of trademark infringement.
Perhaps somebody could help out Microsoft and pay for "windows.net" for them?
Will Microsoft now start claiming they are the "NET" in "dotNET" (Sun having already taken the DOT)?
I don't think I was the only one who advised Microsoft to change their strategy away from the PC and toward the Internet, long before 1995. But they threw us out then. Now the idea has been INVENTED HERE and is okay for Microsoft to market. That's the only news I can find in this hype.
Limited copyright term for software: 75 years was too short for you? Fifty years after your death? It had to be changed to 95 years, and 70 years--and likely "forever minus one day," as Representative Mary Bono and Jack Valenti wish? I am truly interested in how you make the "balance" here--and who you are "balancing" with--it can't be the public on the other side of the equation, because your software will never enter the public domain--the source code will never be available, and the binaries will not run on computers then.
suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers 2)be fair to the Companies' rights and 3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
Okay, how's this: Make the term short, say 7 years for software. If the software at that point is still commercially valuable, then give the company a choice. They can either renew it for another 7 years, or they can get a tax deduction on the full remaining value, by donating the rights to a tax-deductible, educational, publishing organization, such as the Free Software Foundation.
Nobody is stealing anything. The public is the one to pay, through taxes, since they will enjoy the benefits if it enters the public domain.
If you are seriously interesting in this proposal, please email me.
That's true. But it seems to me that the "rights management schemes," although they claim to be founded on copyright, are really attempts to subvert copyright and do not deserve copyright protection.
I think Lessig is pointing to the chasm between the "pirates" on the one hand and the "overprotectors" on the other, and is suggesting that a balanced copyright law fits between, and is indeed the best solution for the Constitutional reasons, to "promote Progress."
I would like to see U.S. copyright law turned back to the state it was before 1976. Fair use should be allowed as in Sony vs Universal Studios, the Betamax case.
But then the problem would be that publishers would insist on "rights management schemes" instead of relying on copyright law to protect them.
It seems to me that if publishers wish to enjoy protection by copyright law then they should openly publish (including source code for software) and the term needs to be very short, so the public enjoys the benefit of it while it is still useful. I don't understand why copyright term needs to protect works for so long, since very few of the works have lasting value. Instead they should be recycled into the public domain, from which all new works emerge.
What I do not understand is how the copyright extension is not a "taking" (in the sense of the Constitution's prohibitions on the govt-sponsored taking of property without due compensation)...
It is. This was Lessig's own brilliant suggestion in the original complaint in Eldred v Reno. See the online briefs (some in PDF format only, sorry, I don't agree with Warnock and Lessig on that point!) at http://eon.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno.
Great minds think alike. Send Lessig a black eye-patch!
Works published with a copyright notice between 1923 and 1963 are in the public domain unless the copyright owner filed a renewal form with the copyright office at the correct time.
Probably only some 20% of works published between 1923 and 1963 were renewed--the rest have fallen into the public domain. Determining whether or not a work was renewed requires checking the Catalog of Copyright Entries from the Registrar of Copyrights in the Library of Congress--see, for books, online lists at the On-Line Books page at UPenn. You can determine registrations and renewals after 1977 online at telnet:locis.loc.gov.
Works that did expire were retroactively given their copyright back
Although jms is correct in the case of this film, it is also true that many works that had entered the U.S. public domain were placed back under copyright by means of the Uruguay Round of GATT, if the work was first published outside the U.S. more than a year before U.S. publication, and other complicated terms such as failure to renew when the author was not a U.S. citizen or resident.
Determining copyright status is not easy now. The Nolo Press book on Copyright by Stephen Fishman is excellent, and there are online resources at the web site mentioned above.
The general point, though is very good--copyright term is too long now. Larry Lessig is my lawyer in the suit Eldred v Reno to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. You can learn more and you can help us at http://eon.law.harvard.edu.
Now, my understanding is that even if these bootlegs were, somehow, legitimate and legal, I would have been required to remove/ban the auction until it could be proven that the item was acceptable to sell. Simply by someone claiming a wrong done, I would be required to behave and proceed with the assumption that, until proven otherwise, a wrong had been done. Is this correct?
No, not exactly. You may take the intermediate step of requesting that the copyright owner send you by snail mail proof that the copyright was indeed registered in the name of the complainer, and proof that the auction item infringes on the copyright. If you promptly respond this way, you may leave the auction item up until you are satisfied of the claim's proof.
If you are acting as an ISP, you can then claim immunity from copyright infringement by notifying the alleged perp. If the perp cannot produce evidence that shows there is no infringement, then you have a choice: you can either take down the auction item and claim immunity, or you can leave it up and possibly join in a lawsuit of the complainer against the auctioner and auctioneer.
DISCLAIMER: I cannot act as your attorney on the Internet, but I can on TV--but not in Texas, and not in a commercial.
I'm not sure anybody answered the original question. Instead, we got plenty of other ideas that pose other problems.
Apparently there is no good Free Software for OCR. Scanning with SANE to pbm files and then OCR with socr actually works. Since the project is Open Source software we ought to improve it. Then the output can go to HTML or text or PS or PDF or whatever--it can be part of a pipeline.
But free as in free beer software to OCR does work fairly well--there is a package called gocr that will scan to RTF files, on Windows 95-NT. Then you can print to Postscript and then to PDF.
A low cost and pretty effective package that works on Windows and Macs is TextBridge 98. Adobe actually uses TextBridge software as part of Capture. TP98 can be configured to scan directly to PDF files, with OCR and graphics.
It depends on what you want to accomplish, though, and this is where the multitude of responses becomes confusing. Using TB98 to PDF you can't correct misrecognized words. Instead, if the program can't recognize the word it places a tilde in it. When the user selects the word, an image of the word and context is displayed.
That style of archiving would seem quite appropriate for something like a legal archive. But in most cases going to HTML is simpler.
Note that (Xerox) ScanSoft's TextBridge Pro 98 is no longer the latest version of TextBridge--the latest version doesn't seem to scan to PDF, and its user interface seems to me to be more awkward than 98, so I actually bought the new version but after using it a while went back to 98. Since 98 is not the latest, you can find it very cheap on the remainder or used market. It's quite good at OCR, but more importantly it is very fast to make corrections without having to look at the paper proof.
Since Xerox sold off ScanSoft and ScanSoft bought up OmniPage, which had earlier bought Recognita, we can expect within about two years to have one replacement. Don't hold your breath--I don't believe they think there is a market for Linux desktops, and any improvements are not likely to be revolutionary. OCR software works pretty good in my estimate--much better than typing--you make mistakes doing either, but correcting them is easier after OCR.
In the end, we need more help with socr and related projects. OCR is really an interesting problem and programming it can be fun. Who wants to help--either by joining the programming project, or by donating resources to it?
Re:What do your examples have to do with anything?
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Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 1
I have one Windows machine I use for a few purposes running Windows98. I heard about the Outlook patch you mention and went to the download page. There is a logo after the notice of the file, and the logo says 98/97, meaning for Outlook 98 and 97, like the other files are.
After I downloaded the patch and tried to install it, it refused and told me the patch was only for Outlook 98, not the Outlook 97 that I apparently have. Consequently I have the choice of paying money to upgrade to Outlook 98, or to stop using Outlook completely because of the security problem.
I decided to uninstall Outlook 97. Your statement that Outlook has been patched to prevent the.vgs virus is apparently not correct. If you have better information, please let me know. Otherwise I will continue using open source software that I can patch myself.
Generally The Wall Street Journal has fairer news reporting that this piece (which nobody has discussed yet).
I was particularly appalled at this:
The volume of input and the passions of the various camps aren't business as usual at the Copyright Office. Even hackers themselves are taking aim. When General Counsel David Carson checked the office's e-mail repository a few months ago, he was surprised to find 57 e-mails -- some obscene -- attacking the new copyright law as too corporate-friendly and demanding that the Copyright Office take steps to fix it. He found what he believed to be the source of the e-mail blitz on Slashdot.org, a Web site popular with computer programmers.
"Spam all round, boys!" someone dubbed Anonymous Coward urged on the Slashdot site. "Let's make sure we Hormel them with fury!" Mr. Carson, a longtime copyright lawyer who once defended porn purveyor Larry Flynt before the Supreme Court, says, "I was appalled."
Well, I was one of those who wrote to comment on the DMCA provisions. And my comment was published, as part of the legal comment procedure that Slashdot encouraged the public to use. I don't recall any comments on Slashdot that encouraged spamming or obscenity directed against the Copyright Office, and as one of the commenters I respectfully decline to characterize my comment as "Spam" or as "obscene" (more like "tepid").
One might assume from Mr. Carson's (edited) response that he did not welcome comments from the public via e-mail, instead of via the tortuous process of PDF documents or snail mail. But one might remind Mr. Carson that he is a public servant bound to serve the public and not (just) the lobbyists and corporations who have been speaking out regularly on this issue.
Now, it appears to me that The Wall Street Journal in characterizing our comments as from "hackers" is also attempting to dismiss them. I would remind, respectfully, this great newspaper that it too has an obligation, to report the truth, especially when it has a financial interest in the matter (on the other side).
Finally, I was quite disappointed in reading the reported reaction of the Registrar of Copyright to our comments. 'At a recent hearing in Washington, Ms. Peters told a panel of librarians that, while they have "legitimate concerns," she fears that the broad exceptions they want could "eviscerate the very protection that Congress intended."'
If this concern is accurate and a complete response to our comments, then we might as well pack it in and not bother to follow the law and submit our honest comments. Because it is true, the DMCA does attempt to take away our fair use and First Amendment rights, and no amount of tinkering to try to satisfy the objections of librarians is going to solve that. The Registrar should communicate this to the Librarian of Congress, who should report exactly that to Congress, that he is unable to solve the problem that Congress has tossed in his lap to make the DMCA make sense.
Slashdot deserves an apology from Mr. Carson and The Wall Street Journal. If not, Mr. Carson should be fired and Slashdot editors should simply ignore WSJ articles in the future.
Apparently the three circuit Court judges who disqualified themselves did so because they were, before becoming judges, employed by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Looking over the judges' bios at http://www.cadc.uscou rts.gov/court_offices/judges/judges.html one might suspect that those missing judges might be more understanding of the antitrust issues and the government's case, than the others--but who knows.
That still doesn't explain why the Circuit Court so eagerly took the case, even before there was a formal appeal--the brief Circuit Court statement refers only to the great importance of the case--and that makes one wonder if the Supreme Court might wish to take it first.
I just spent a few hours looking over the book. After finishing it, I felt it was far too short.
The first part, on flat file databases, was really very good. Those chapters explain elegantly the pros and cons of flat files, and explain how to program with Perl if you wish. However, the relation to DBI was not very strong.
The second part, on Berkeley DB and GDBMs, was not quite so elegant. It might have tried to describe in more detail the fundamental differences between hashed databases and flat files on the one hand and RDBMs on the other. And then it could have offered some suggestions on which to use. Also, it had to cover a couple of DBI implementations at that point, and became a little confusing.
The last part, on ODBC, seemed full of wise ideas, but also was too short. Longer examples with more implementation details are needed here.
Finally, I would have like some long examples of applying DBI to various databases. For example, several comments here characterize MySql, and I'd like to hear more from the authors about using it in real, longer examples.
So I do hope O'Reilly will come out with a second edition, updated if we get new versions of interfaces, and with twice as many pages, giving some real, long examples.
Still, I have many first editions of O'Reilly books, and they have stood the test of time. So I wouldn't hesitate to buy the book if I were programming with Perl and databases. As it is, it could easily save you a lot of development time, and put you in touch with some good resources to solve your problems more easily.
What Harvard did was merely polite. If you received money from Coke, you shouldn't serve Pepsi.
I seem to remember a case last year of a high school student in Georgia who was suspended or expelled because he wore a Pepsi T-shirt on a day when Coke was sponsoring an event. Needless to say, the principal was embarrassed.
I don't think Harvard has anything they should hide, unlike the principal's embarrassment and retaliation to the student. But this incident does fit with many others that indicate Harvard and other institutions, that should be independent, are no longer performing as they should, but are becoming beholden to the bucks. I think we have a right to an response from the other side here.
I hope we get a better understanding of why the Appeals Court took the case even before the District Judge had issued an opinion about the stay.
But I wonder if Microsoft's haste and hyped claims of damages might not have the unintended effect of persuading the Supreme Court to take the case first. (I noted with amusement the angry comment in Microsoft's appeal brief that, prior to Judge Jackson's finding of fact, Microsoft enjoyed the largest capitalization of any firm--in other words, placing all the blame for the NASDAQ collapse on Judge Jackson's attempt to apply the law to technology economics--and not Microsoft's bad management.)
As one (in the case Eldred v Reno, to overturn the copyright extension act) who is now facing the exact same Circuit Court of Appeals, I ought to state that I do not believe they are biased, nor that one can predict which way they will rule by their political persuasion. However, I hope that the justices will examine the unprecedented 39-page appeals document with some care. For example, I hope they do not agree with Microsoft's characterization of Larry Lessig's friend of the court brief on the tying issue. (After all, Lessig is my lawyer too.) There they completely distort the brief and are trying to use psychology instead of logical legal arguments. Microsoft's usual practice is to keep trying with the hope that version 3 or 4 of the product will finally be okay. I hope nobody buys that here!
Re:Three questions towards innovation
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Cleartype In Depth
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· Score: 1
I agree, this technical discussion (unending) for geeks is really quite irrelevant to the product.
Microsoft with its Reader program is attempting to lock up books even more than the MPAA is trying to lock up DVDs and movies, and the RIAA trying to lock up music distribution. In the future, if these groups have their way, all "intellectual property" will be created by them and downloaded directly from the publishers to your dedicated appliance.
Microsoft Reader is an integral part of this plan, because it has the "rights management scheme" hooks in hardware and software so that the content cannot be "pirated."
Of course, electronic books have been published on CDs, or distributed for free or for sale for years, in many forms. These are designed to be read with a general purpose computer, and can benefit from links to pages on the Internet.
In contrast, Microsoft here is trying to divert our attention from this critical point, and claim that the web technology for reading books online is inadequate, and that users will not do so unless Microsoft packages Wozniak's technology into an expensive handheld gadget. The truth is more like this: publishers fear giving up control of books, and yearn for the day they can give up paper and printing costs, returns of inventory, bookstore markups, and all the other small matters that interfere with maximizing profit.
So in the future books will be "pay-per-view" products. Readers will have to buy expensive dedicated handheld gadgets with the right expensive color LCD displays. They will have to give up privacy and reveal demographic information and buying habits to the publishers. The books will never become part of our shared culture and exist in libraries or used bookstores--they will not enter the public domain when the copyright term expires--they will just evaporate when they are no longer profitable. And then consumers will own nothing--the content is only licensed, not sold.
This gee-whiz technology discussion completely misses the point that ljesse makes here--ClearType is a technology-driven product, not one that any consumer in her right mind would wish to buy. It's time that more technology wizards started thinking about the poor users and consumers of their products and listen to their needs first. Hardly one comment on this list has confirmed that ClearType delivers unequivocal and compelling improvement in usability. So what's the fuss about?
whether or not object code was even covered by copyright.
I agree we made a mistake in extending copyright to object code.
Another good reason is this: consider what happens when the copyright term expires. If the source code is available then the creative expression can become part of the public domain and be reworked into a new creative expression. If only the object code exists, then the work effectively disappears--and so is only personal property, not intellectual property that should be protected by copyright so as to enhance "the progress of science and the useful arts."
Even without getting into a debate about the virtues of "free software" vs. "open source software" one can see that there is a benefit in not protecting the object code.
Now, when the source code is copyrighted and published, it can be used in lawsuits against copyright infringement. If the source code is not available, but the alleged infringer simply "copies" the "look and feel" of what can be determined from running the binary, courts have been puzzled as to how copyright applies, and have had to come up with abstruse differentiations of APIs and whether or not reverse engineering is proper. (I still have a copy of Paperback Software's "clone" of Visicalc--it was written in Forth, not assembler, but Lotus forced it off the market because its menu structure was too similar to that other spreadsheet that 1-2-3 copied and then Lotus bought up.)
Today, for example, one can download for free the binary of the DOS 1.0 version of Visicalc, even though it is under copyright, but the source code is still protected. It's a shame--I'd love to see the tricks Bob Frankston pulled to make the code so compact and fast.
Bill Gates has always been paranoid about "hackers" stealing "his" software. It is a bit funny that rumor has it that he "lost" the source code to the first version of DOS (or so Microsoft stated to Caldera in that other suit--note that Gates did not write DOS, he bought rights to it).
Even so, Microsoft has always claimed that it has published all APIs and that other information needed to make programs interoperable can be obtained by NDAs or through MSDN. One reason they might want to do that is simply to keep applications from writing to internal pointers they might later change--or be unable to change because then existing programs would become incompatible. However, Microsoft has never been able to prevent programmers from finding "undocumented" calls that Microsoft's own programs use, and using them to make their own programs faster and better. For example, early DOS programmers were told to use the BIOS calls for I/O, but they were so slow everyone had to use undocumented calls to better routines.
I think in general the original question is good: publishing source code ought not to prevent one from protecting copyright. If source code is not available to the user, then the user is completely controlled by the software maker. And in this case that manufacturer is a monopolist in violation of antitrust law. Copyright is no defense.
Extending copyright from source code to object code has now led to this terrible situation: eBooks are now being published that are completely locked up and controlled by publishers and protected not only by copyright but also the DMCA. Will these eBooks ever become public property? No.
Slashdot Mirror
The only movies that cannot be copied cannot be seen. The only music that cannot be copied cannot be heard.
Yup. Herr Mozart took that brat little Wolfgang A. Mozart to the Vatican to hear a celebrated mass some person wrote but didn't want published because he was afraid it would be pirated (no copyright then).
So Mozart listened and then went back to his room, took some pen and paper, and wrote the whole mass from memory.
Some copy protection. Put the kid in jail instead of giving him a prize for his genius?
Am I the only one to remember "Savvy," the natural language command line interface that worked on Apple // and IBM PCs?
There were two basic parts to it. A Forth interpreter came with predefined "pages" for standard office procedures such as word processor, spreadsheet, database, and so on. A ROM on a card contained some logic to interface between whatever you typed and the Forth system. Since Forth is extensible, it was simple to add new commands.
For example, if the system already had built into it a command to "list all paychecks in the last week" and you typed "lsit..." instead, the system would ask you what you meant, give you some previous times you typed in something like that, and ask you to either select one of them, or define your new command (in terms of old commands, or in a simple programming language that was near to English and not even related to Forth).
I rather liked the Savvy system, since it gradually learned from the user instead of always forcing the user to learn the correct way to do things. And it was pretty amazing to have such a system with virtual memory on an Apple //. With a hard disk it was fast and easy to get common jobs done.
Of course it was too expensive. The idea came out of the space program and was sold for something like $1,295 at first. Then they moved it to the IBM PC and eventually the price fell to less than $100. Excalibur Systems sold it; last I heard the company was doing document management systems.
On the down side, it was completely incompatible with any other software. It didn't even have a communications program to be able to use a modem to import data. And when the Macintosh came along a lot of users thought that a windowing system with a mouse was better than a keyboard.
But a lot of people have used command line interfaces as in Unix and the power is attractive for experienced users. Even with Unix shells one can get some of the same power as Savvy simply by creating aliases or small scripts.
Maybe voice recognition or some other form of natural language system or pattern recognition will be invented. But Savvy proved that you could do a lot of it in just 64KB, on a 1MHz CPU. It didn't try to do everything, just accommodate the user as best as it could. Neat idea. Will we learn from our past failures? Don't count on it!
This is the sort of lies your local newspaper prints (from Newsday, 2000-07-25:
"Respect for private property serves a bedrock of civilization. And despite the difficulties of enforcing property rights, this is a core function of government, which shouldn't be diminished in the zeal to promote technology. Unfortunately for many in our society, people feel they are entitled to art or other goods, and no entrepreneur or business has the right to control those items with so-called "unfair" prices. Such thinking is not just a failure to understand the free market, but a failure to understand adulthood. "
Do you believe they might be referring to you? Have you read your Constitution lately? Do you know how to send an email to the Editor of Newsday or your local newspaper? Or do you care only enough to spew off on Slashdot?
I really do think there is a connection between what is going on in the MPAA-2600 case and Eldred v Reno.
Disney and Warner were big backers of both bills in 1998 and gave lots of campaign contributions to everyone they could think of, both Democrats and Republicans.
I believe they were very scared of the Internet and the new freedom of everyone to publish. They wanted to be able to control the Internet and keep it safe for e-commerce and pay-TV and their profit stream using a business model of licensing and staged releases.
In each case, I believe Congress went too far. They didn't realize what they were up against--us! Not only do we understand the Constitution and our rights, we are also the citizens and consumers. When we get mad, they eventually suffer and have to back down.
We can fight in the courts. But I don't think a boycott would be sufficient. What we need to do is encourage all citizens to publish their ideas themselves instead of relying on the television networks or Hollywood or Microsoft. We have to help them with the tools and access. We don't need lots of money to do this because the costs of publishing are so low now.
Turn off the television. Buy only used books and not from Amazon. Use your computer to write programs and produce your own art and share it. Help Project Gutenberg and other programs to share information.
Sooner or later the big companies will realize the only way they can respond is by providing the customer with a good product at a fair price. They can't lock up ideas like DeCSS forever. But they are desperately trying.
You can help support my case to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act with your own ideas. Visit http://eon.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno and add your own ideas to the Open Law discussion. Written briefs in the appeal are now being filed and oral arguments will be in October in Washington, D.C. And, please visit my site and read anything you like for free. You own most of it--in the public domain for as long as we have it.
I firmly believe it is as important as the Scopes trial, the attempt in Tennessee to suppress the teaching of Darwinism. The DeCSS case is an attempt to make an idea--a piece of software-- illegal.
Please go to http://www.eff.org/ and read the testimony in the MPAA vs. 2600 case in New York, that will continue next week. (And please consider sending a little money along to EFF to help their defense.)
The movie studios have now stipulated they cannot find one case of DeCSS being used to copy a movie or trade it on the Internet. Instead, what they seek is to have a federal judge declare DeCSS illegal. They want to sell you a DVD and a DVD player, then tell you that you can't play that DVD on your Linux or BSD computer, because it isn't "authorized". You can't write a DeCSS program, you can't even link to a web page with the program, according to the MPAA, and according to federal law if they win.
Where does this "authorization" come from, if not from the first sale of the disc? And how could you even use DeCSS if you didn't have an "authorized" DVD and an "authorized" player?
This is code vs. code. Sorry, you guys, it's not about piracy. It's about "hackers"--and which definition of "hacker" do you think will prevail?
If you want the right to code, if you want to be able to enjoy free speech and a free press, and not have all our ideas controlled by Microsoft or Hollywood, now is the time to speak up. In a few days it will be too late.
(And read the testimony of the "investigation" of the over-paid, incompetent "anti-piracy" expert at MPAA. She read about DeCSS on Slashdot, went to the site linked by Slashdot, and told her supervisor about it. No report, no "investigation," just call in the lawyers and circle 'round the flag boys, we made a big boo-boo and we have to deny everything and shoot the messengers.)
Waggoner-Edstrom (Microsoft PR agency) has a talent for hyping old news that Microsoft suddenly discovers it has (re)invented.
If you read the article and web page of this technology you can see that Bayesian analysis was used during the 1970s in medicine extensively. The programmer in question was a physician. "Artificial intelligence" at the time was an attempt to use computers to solve complicated problems such as diagnosis in medicine. The program "MYCIN" was able to give advice on antibiotic use to physicians, based on expert rules.
This technique never quite succeeded. The answers were probably right, but physicians didn't have full confidence in them, since the argument process was a bit mysterious. This was disturbing to psychologists, who had concluded that humans were conservative Bayesian in decision making under uncertainty.
A new wave of psychologists had to come along and show that humans are not Bayesian in their thinking. It might be that computer aids could help humans to decide matters better, and help solve complex problems, but pure Bayesian analysis would not provide a full answer to our problems. This unfortunate conclusion should have been foreseen when one considers that the rationalist agenda to reduce arithmetic and logic to a complete and consistent decision theory was doomed by Goedel long ago.
Human-computer interface theory has moved away from Bayesian analysis in another respect. The complexity of modern technology has caused enormous problems, even disasters, for which we would like to have some procedure to prevent such errors in the future. It turns out that the great technology errors such as Chernobyl or Challenger were not human-operator errors or technology-operation errors, so much as human-organizational errors and technology-design errors. The errors were latent in the design and just waiting for the random events to be exposed. Bayesian analysis would only predict what could be foreseen and calculated--these errors were overlooked in the design stage, and Bayesian analysis could never reveal them.
Experts such as Don Norman and James Reason have written extensively on the failures of rationalist Bayesian analysis to manage complex technology. They propose concrete solutions for the design stage. I wish Microsoft would pay more attention to their ideas, instead of fooling around with this Bayesian stuff.
One example: I sat in the audience in the big tent at the launch of Windows 95 and watched Bill Gates and Jay Leno show off the spell-checking ability of WinWord 95. Bill typed in something like, "We are at the premierr of Windows 95" and the word beginning with "p" was underlined with a red wavy line. Jay and Bill clicked on the word and accepted Word's suggested correction "premier". Based on Bayesian analysis, quite likely that would be the most probable spelling. However, it is wrong in this context: instead, the more unusual spelling "premiere" is correct. Since Jay and Bill didn't know any better, they took the word of the computer expert.
If we follow strict Bayesian tools, this situation of exposure to unexpected errors will increase. That is why users turn off Microsoft Bob--the technology is wrong, annoying, and causes more problems than it is worth.
Most lawyers I've talked to have said that judges should not issue warrants unless the search net is as narrow as possible. Thus Carnivore or any other sniffer should never copy traffic from innocent Internet users on the segment, only that to or from the "suspect"--i.e., the wiretap must be on the segment most restricted to the suspect.
However, the FBI has in the past been able to get around this requirement for wiretaps. Several years ago the FBI arrested a man in New England who attempted to buy missles for the IRA. The Boston Globe revealed that the suspect used random pay phones in Nashua, New Hampshire. The FBI apparently tapped all the pay phones in the area, and used voice recognition technology to filter the conversations from the suspect out of all the conversations copied. The lawyers I talked to said that such a practice would not be constitutional, since it involved wiretaps on too many innocent people. However, it apparently held up in court. The U.S. government also supplied the technology to the Colombian government to track down "narcoterrorists" using cell phones. In that case, the wiretaps must have been extensive, network-wide.
I believe the question is not whether or not Carnivore is technically feasible, nor whether or not it is legal when it is intended as a wiretap authorized by a court, but rather whether or not it invades all our privacy. If the FBI wiretaps my conversations I should be allowed to go to court and get a hearing about it. Just because a criminal is using the network segment at the same time should not authorize the FBI to wiretap me.
Will Reno understand this issue and overrule the FBI? Don't count on it.
Anyone remember the old Borland software licenses? They were worded along the lines of, 'So long as only the same person will use it, make as many copies as you like.' Now /that/ was an enlightened age.
Yes, I remember! That was a company that respected users and customers. What was the point of ripping them off when the real thing was so cheap and convenient and good? In those days making copies of the diskettes wasn't cheap, just as making copies of a DVD today isn't cheap.
So what this shows is that when a company finds out how to use this technology to satisfy the customer's needs--and make a little money at the same time--then quickly the laws will change to accommodate the new technology. Just as Hollywood adapted to the VCR after the Betamax case.
What I don't like, however, is the implication from what Hatch says, that the music industry needs to get its act together and make us consumers accept encryption and 'rights management systems.' That type of technology was rejected when it came in the form of Circuit City's DIVX. I think it's premature for the government to mandate a particular technology here--even to back up the old technology of the music industry with bad laws such as DMCA. The music industry can't get the computer industry to accept hardware locks on DVD machines--the computer manufacturers rightly point out that the devices have multiple purposes and the music industry should not be allowed to take them over and enrich themselves at everyone's expense.
Back to Borland. I bought my first home computer in 1980 with VisiCalc on Apple ][. But VisiCalc would only provide you one program diskette for one machine. I got another Apple for work. I copied the program disk and used the copy on the work machine. Software Arts (producer of VisiCalc) made it as hard as they could to prevent copying, but Locksmith and other programs defeated that. Since Software Arts could not satisfy the legitimate needs of customers, other companies came along and ate their lunch.
Whatever happened to old Frank Borland anyway? Is he back in the desert with his burro?
It seems to me, if DMCA is used that broadly, couldn't it be used to argue against the FBI decrypting email communication?
Good point--that's obviously the reason the FBI and its friends are specifically exempted from the DMCA provisions. The FBI also requires telecommunications companies to provide facilities for wiretapping, at the companies' expense.
It used to be, the Constitution prohibited the government from taking away your rights. Now the Congress prevents you from taking away the rights of the police.
I wonder how many people see the difference.
Last I looked at the Constitution of the U.S., prior restraint on publication was not allowed. I seem to remember the First Amendment referring to "no law," not "any law that is restricted to drugs, child pornography, infant baptism, etc."
What this means is the government is not supposed to prohibit anyone from publishing information, only that if the publication is not protected by the First Amendment (Holmes's "crying fire in the theatre") then the police can arrest you. A few of us oldtimers can remember the Pentagon Papers case, where The New York Times and The Washington Post had to go to the Supreme Court to establish their right to publish those papers, which the federal government claimed would violate our national security.
I would like to learn from anybody in the Denver area who could tell me what happened in the Tattered Cover Bookstore case. A few months ago a squad of police arrived there with a search warrant to go through their credit card records. They said they had found a receipt concerning a book on how to produce illegal drugs, at an empty methamphetamine lab.
The owner refused the police demands and got a writ from a court to stop the search. But I never heard what happened afterward. Her argument was that such a search would invade not only her rights as a bookseller to preserve privacy of clients, but also the right of the public to buy and read books no matter what. Perhaps if the issue pertained to web pages and ISPs then some computer geeks would make more noise.
It appears that this new attempt to amend the law is an effort to strengthen the hands of the police in such a case. I hope it is rejected by Congress. But I don't have any faith in their ability to read and understand the Constitution. If it passes, then I hope it is challenged by brave people like the owner of the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver.
MS might be able to buy "windows.net" as I can't find it listed.
But "office.net" and "bcentral.net" are already taken. Unless Microsoft has the power to throw them out on the basis of trademark infringement.
Perhaps somebody could help out Microsoft and pay for "windows.net" for them?
Will Microsoft now start claiming they are the "NET" in "dotNET" (Sun having already taken the DOT)?
I don't think I was the only one who advised Microsoft to change their strategy away from the PC and toward the Internet, long before 1995. But they threw us out then. Now the idea has been INVENTED HERE and is okay for Microsoft to market. That's the only news I can find in this hype.
Limited copyright term for software: 75 years was too short for you? Fifty years after your death? It had to be changed to 95 years, and 70 years--and likely "forever minus one day," as Representative Mary Bono and Jack Valenti wish? I am truly interested in how you make the "balance" here--and who you are "balancing" with--it can't be the public on the other side of the equation, because your software will never enter the public domain--the source code will never be available, and the binaries will not run on computers then.
suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers 2)be fair to the Companies' rights and 3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
Okay, how's this: Make the term short, say 7 years for software. If the software at that point is still commercially valuable, then give the company a choice. They can either renew it for another 7 years, or they can get a tax deduction on the full remaining value, by donating the rights to a tax-deductible, educational, publishing organization, such as the Free Software Foundation.
Nobody is stealing anything. The public is the one to pay, through taxes, since they will enjoy the benefits if it enters the public domain.
If you are seriously interesting in this proposal, please email me.
That's true. But it seems to me that the "rights management schemes," although they claim to be founded on copyright, are really attempts to subvert copyright and do not deserve copyright protection.
I think Lessig is pointing to the chasm between the "pirates" on the one hand and the "overprotectors" on the other, and is suggesting that a balanced copyright law fits between, and is indeed the best solution for the Constitutional reasons, to "promote Progress."
I would like to see U.S. copyright law turned back to the state it was before 1976. Fair use should be allowed as in Sony vs Universal Studios, the Betamax case.
But then the problem would be that publishers would insist on "rights management schemes" instead of relying on copyright law to protect them.
It seems to me that if publishers wish to enjoy protection by copyright law then they should openly publish (including source code for software) and the term needs to be very short, so the public enjoys the benefit of it while it is still useful. I don't understand why copyright term needs to protect works for so long, since very few of the works have lasting value. Instead they should be recycled into the public domain, from which all new works emerge.
What I do not understand is how the copyright extension is not a "taking" (in the sense of the Constitution's prohibitions on the govt-sponsored taking of property without due compensation)...
It is. This was Lessig's own brilliant suggestion in the original complaint in Eldred v Reno. See the online briefs (some in PDF format only, sorry, I don't agree with Warnock and Lessig on that point!) at http://eon.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno.
Great minds think alike. Send Lessig a black eye-patch!
We are discussing U.S. copyright term here.
Works published with a copyright notice between 1923 and 1963 are in the public domain unless the copyright owner filed a renewal form with the copyright office at the correct time.
Probably only some 20% of works published between 1923 and 1963 were renewed--the rest have fallen into the public domain. Determining whether or not a work was renewed requires checking the Catalog of Copyright Entries from the Registrar of Copyrights in the Library of Congress--see, for books, online lists at the On-Line Books page at UPenn. You can determine registrations and renewals after 1977 online at telnet:locis.loc.gov.
Works that did expire were retroactively given their copyright back
Although jms is correct in the case of this film, it is also true that many works that had entered the U.S. public domain were placed back under copyright by means of the Uruguay Round of GATT, if the work was first published outside the U.S. more than a year before U.S. publication, and other complicated terms such as failure to renew when the author was not a U.S. citizen or resident.
Determining copyright status is not easy now. The Nolo Press book on Copyright by Stephen Fishman is excellent, and there are online resources at the web site mentioned above.
The general point, though is very good--copyright term is too long now. Larry Lessig is my lawyer in the suit Eldred v Reno to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. You can learn more and you can help us at http://eon.law.harvard.edu.
Now, my understanding is that even if these bootlegs were, somehow, legitimate and legal, I would have been required to remove/ban the auction until it could be proven that the item was acceptable to sell. Simply by someone claiming a wrong done, I would be required to behave and proceed with the assumption that, until proven otherwise, a wrong had been done. Is this correct?
No, not exactly. You may take the intermediate step of requesting that the copyright owner send you by snail mail proof that the copyright was indeed registered in the name of the complainer, and proof that the auction item infringes on the copyright. If you promptly respond this way, you may leave the auction item up until you are satisfied of the claim's proof.
If you are acting as an ISP, you can then claim immunity from copyright infringement by notifying the alleged perp. If the perp cannot produce evidence that shows there is no infringement, then you have a choice: you can either take down the auction item and claim immunity, or you can leave it up and possibly join in a lawsuit of the complainer against the auctioner and auctioneer.
DISCLAIMER: I cannot act as your attorney on the Internet, but I can on TV--but not in Texas, and not in a commercial.
I'm not sure anybody answered the original question. Instead, we got plenty of other ideas that pose other problems.
Apparently there is no good Free Software for OCR. Scanning with SANE to pbm files and then OCR with socr actually works. Since the project is Open Source software we ought to improve it. Then the output can go to HTML or text or PS or PDF or whatever--it can be part of a pipeline.
But free as in free beer software to OCR does work fairly well--there is a package called gocr that will scan to RTF files, on Windows 95-NT. Then you can print to Postscript and then to PDF.
A low cost and pretty effective package that works on Windows and Macs is TextBridge 98. Adobe actually uses TextBridge software as part of Capture. TP98 can be configured to scan directly to PDF files, with OCR and graphics.
It depends on what you want to accomplish, though, and this is where the multitude of responses becomes confusing. Using TB98 to PDF you can't correct misrecognized words. Instead, if the program can't recognize the word it places a tilde in it. When the user selects the word, an image of the word and context is displayed.
That style of archiving would seem quite appropriate for something like a legal archive. But in most cases going to HTML is simpler.
Note that (Xerox) ScanSoft's TextBridge Pro 98 is no longer the latest version of TextBridge--the latest version doesn't seem to scan to PDF, and its user interface seems to me to be more awkward than 98, so I actually bought the new version but after using it a while went back to 98. Since 98 is not the latest, you can find it very cheap on the remainder or used market. It's quite good at OCR, but more importantly it is very fast to make corrections without having to look at the paper proof.
Since Xerox sold off ScanSoft and ScanSoft bought up OmniPage, which had earlier bought Recognita, we can expect within about two years to have one replacement. Don't hold your breath--I don't believe they think there is a market for Linux desktops, and any improvements are not likely to be revolutionary. OCR software works pretty good in my estimate--much better than typing--you make mistakes doing either, but correcting them is easier after OCR.
In the end, we need more help with socr and related projects. OCR is really an interesting problem and programming it can be fun. Who wants to help--either by joining the programming project, or by donating resources to it?
I have one Windows machine I use for a few purposes running Windows98. I heard about the Outlook patch you mention and went to the download page. There is a logo after the notice of the file, and the logo says 98/97, meaning for Outlook 98 and 97, like the other files are.
After I downloaded the patch and tried to install it, it refused and told me the patch was only for Outlook 98, not the Outlook 97 that I apparently have. Consequently I have the choice of paying money to upgrade to Outlook 98, or to stop using Outlook completely because of the security problem.
I decided to uninstall Outlook 97. Your statement that Outlook has been patched to prevent the .vgs virus is apparently not correct. If you have better information, please let me know. Otherwise I will continue using open source software that I can patch myself.
Generally The Wall Street Journal has fairer news reporting that this piece (which nobody has discussed yet).
I was particularly appalled at this:
Well, I was one of those who wrote to comment on the DMCA provisions. And my comment was published, as part of the legal comment procedure that Slashdot encouraged the public to use. I don't recall any comments on Slashdot that encouraged spamming or obscenity directed against the Copyright Office, and as one of the commenters I respectfully decline to characterize my comment as "Spam" or as "obscene" (more like "tepid").
One might assume from Mr. Carson's (edited) response that he did not welcome comments from the public via e-mail, instead of via the tortuous process of PDF documents or snail mail. But one might remind Mr. Carson that he is a public servant bound to serve the public and not (just) the lobbyists and corporations who have been speaking out regularly on this issue.
Now, it appears to me that The Wall Street Journal in characterizing our comments as from "hackers" is also attempting to dismiss them. I would remind, respectfully, this great newspaper that it too has an obligation, to report the truth, especially when it has a financial interest in the matter (on the other side).
Finally, I was quite disappointed in reading the reported reaction of the Registrar of Copyright to our comments. 'At a recent hearing in Washington, Ms. Peters told a panel of librarians that, while they have "legitimate concerns," she fears that the broad exceptions they want could "eviscerate the very protection that Congress intended."'
If this concern is accurate and a complete response to our comments, then we might as well pack it in and not bother to follow the law and submit our honest comments. Because it is true, the DMCA does attempt to take away our fair use and First Amendment rights, and no amount of tinkering to try to satisfy the objections of librarians is going to solve that. The Registrar should communicate this to the Librarian of Congress, who should report exactly that to Congress, that he is unable to solve the problem that Congress has tossed in his lap to make the DMCA make sense.
Slashdot deserves an apology from Mr. Carson and The Wall Street Journal. If not, Mr. Carson should be fired and Slashdot editors should simply ignore WSJ articles in the future.
Apparently the three circuit Court judges who disqualified themselves did so because they were, before becoming judges, employed by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Looking over the judges' bios at http://www.cadc.uscou rts.gov/court_offices/judges/judges.html one might suspect that those missing judges might be more understanding of the antitrust issues and the government's case, than the others--but who knows.
That still doesn't explain why the Circuit Court so eagerly took the case, even before there was a formal appeal--the brief Circuit Court statement refers only to the great importance of the case--and that makes one wonder if the Supreme Court might wish to take it first.
I just spent a few hours looking over the book. After finishing it, I felt it was far too short.
The first part, on flat file databases, was really very good. Those chapters explain elegantly the pros and cons of flat files, and explain how to program with Perl if you wish. However, the relation to DBI was not very strong.
The second part, on Berkeley DB and GDBMs, was not quite so elegant. It might have tried to describe in more detail the fundamental differences between hashed databases and flat files on the one hand and RDBMs on the other. And then it could have offered some suggestions on which to use. Also, it had to cover a couple of DBI implementations at that point, and became a little confusing.
The last part, on ODBC, seemed full of wise ideas, but also was too short. Longer examples with more implementation details are needed here.
Finally, I would have like some long examples of applying DBI to various databases. For example, several comments here characterize MySql, and I'd like to hear more from the authors about using it in real, longer examples.
So I do hope O'Reilly will come out with a second edition, updated if we get new versions of interfaces, and with twice as many pages, giving some real, long examples.
Still, I have many first editions of O'Reilly books, and they have stood the test of time. So I wouldn't hesitate to buy the book if I were programming with Perl and databases. As it is, it could easily save you a lot of development time, and put you in touch with some good resources to solve your problems more easily.
What Harvard did was merely polite. If you received money from Coke, you shouldn't serve Pepsi.
I seem to remember a case last year of a high school student in Georgia who was suspended or expelled because he wore a Pepsi T-shirt on a day when Coke was sponsoring an event. Needless to say, the principal was embarrassed.
I don't think Harvard has anything they should hide, unlike the principal's embarrassment and retaliation to the student. But this incident does fit with many others that indicate Harvard and other institutions, that should be independent, are no longer performing as they should, but are becoming beholden to the bucks. I think we have a right to an response from the other side here.
I hope we get a better understanding of why the Appeals Court took the case even before the District Judge had issued an opinion about the stay.
But I wonder if Microsoft's haste and hyped claims of damages might not have the unintended effect of persuading the Supreme Court to take the case first. (I noted with amusement the angry comment in Microsoft's appeal brief that, prior to Judge Jackson's finding of fact, Microsoft enjoyed the largest capitalization of any firm--in other words, placing all the blame for the NASDAQ collapse on Judge Jackson's attempt to apply the law to technology economics--and not Microsoft's bad management.)
As one (in the case Eldred v Reno, to overturn the copyright extension act) who is now facing the exact same Circuit Court of Appeals, I ought to state that I do not believe they are biased, nor that one can predict which way they will rule by their political persuasion. However, I hope that the justices will examine the unprecedented 39-page appeals document with some care. For example, I hope they do not agree with Microsoft's characterization of Larry Lessig's friend of the court brief on the tying issue. (After all, Lessig is my lawyer too.) There they completely distort the brief and are trying to use psychology instead of logical legal arguments. Microsoft's usual practice is to keep trying with the hope that version 3 or 4 of the product will finally be okay. I hope nobody buys that here!
Discuss in OpenLaw
I agree, this technical discussion (unending) for geeks is really quite irrelevant to the product.
Microsoft with its Reader program is attempting to lock up books even more than the MPAA is trying to lock up DVDs and movies, and the RIAA trying to lock up music distribution. In the future, if these groups have their way, all "intellectual property" will be created by them and downloaded directly from the publishers to your dedicated appliance.
Microsoft Reader is an integral part of this plan, because it has the "rights management scheme" hooks in hardware and software so that the content cannot be "pirated."
Of course, electronic books have been published on CDs, or distributed for free or for sale for years, in many forms. These are designed to be read with a general purpose computer, and can benefit from links to pages on the Internet.
In contrast, Microsoft here is trying to divert our attention from this critical point, and claim that the web technology for reading books online is inadequate, and that users will not do so unless Microsoft packages Wozniak's technology into an expensive handheld gadget. The truth is more like this: publishers fear giving up control of books, and yearn for the day they can give up paper and printing costs, returns of inventory, bookstore markups, and all the other small matters that interfere with maximizing profit.
So in the future books will be "pay-per-view" products. Readers will have to buy expensive dedicated handheld gadgets with the right expensive color LCD displays. They will have to give up privacy and reveal demographic information and buying habits to the publishers. The books will never become part of our shared culture and exist in libraries or used bookstores--they will not enter the public domain when the copyright term expires--they will just evaporate when they are no longer profitable. And then consumers will own nothing--the content is only licensed, not sold.
This gee-whiz technology discussion completely misses the point that ljesse makes here--ClearType is a technology-driven product, not one that any consumer in her right mind would wish to buy. It's time that more technology wizards started thinking about the poor users and consumers of their products and listen to their needs first. Hardly one comment on this list has confirmed that ClearType delivers unequivocal and compelling improvement in usability. So what's the fuss about?
whether or not object code was even covered by copyright.
I agree we made a mistake in extending copyright to object code.
Another good reason is this: consider what happens when the copyright term expires. If the source code is available then the creative expression can become part of the public domain and be reworked into a new creative expression. If only the object code exists, then the work effectively disappears--and so is only personal property, not intellectual property that should be protected by copyright so as to enhance "the progress of science and the useful arts."
Even without getting into a debate about the virtues of "free software" vs. "open source software" one can see that there is a benefit in not protecting the object code.
Now, when the source code is copyrighted and published, it can be used in lawsuits against copyright infringement. If the source code is not available, but the alleged infringer simply "copies" the "look and feel" of what can be determined from running the binary, courts have been puzzled as to how copyright applies, and have had to come up with abstruse differentiations of APIs and whether or not reverse engineering is proper. (I still have a copy of Paperback Software's "clone" of Visicalc--it was written in Forth, not assembler, but Lotus forced it off the market because its menu structure was too similar to that other spreadsheet that 1-2-3 copied and then Lotus bought up.)
Today, for example, one can download for free the binary of the DOS 1.0 version of Visicalc, even though it is under copyright, but the source code is still protected. It's a shame--I'd love to see the tricks Bob Frankston pulled to make the code so compact and fast.
Bill Gates has always been paranoid about "hackers" stealing "his" software. It is a bit funny that rumor has it that he "lost" the source code to the first version of DOS (or so Microsoft stated to Caldera in that other suit--note that Gates did not write DOS, he bought rights to it).
Even so, Microsoft has always claimed that it has published all APIs and that other information needed to make programs interoperable can be obtained by NDAs or through MSDN. One reason they might want to do that is simply to keep applications from writing to internal pointers they might later change--or be unable to change because then existing programs would become incompatible. However, Microsoft has never been able to prevent programmers from finding "undocumented" calls that Microsoft's own programs use, and using them to make their own programs faster and better. For example, early DOS programmers were told to use the BIOS calls for I/O, but they were so slow everyone had to use undocumented calls to better routines.
I think in general the original question is good: publishing source code ought not to prevent one from protecting copyright. If source code is not available to the user, then the user is completely controlled by the software maker. And in this case that manufacturer is a monopolist in violation of antitrust law. Copyright is no defense.
Extending copyright from source code to object code has now led to this terrible situation: eBooks are now being published that are completely locked up and controlled by publishers and protected not only by copyright but also the DMCA. Will these eBooks ever become public property? No.