I have a package called Reaktor, which is a synth simulator for the PC. Reaktor v2 shipped with a system CD which had two holes drilled in it, for exactly the reason described here - to validate the CD. But the next version got rid of this and used a USB dongle instead.
Why? Because having to put a CD in the drive when you're using a piece of serious app software is a pain in the ass. To be honest it's a pain in the ass for games as well, but at least a game is likely to take over the whole system. On serious software, which can work together, a CD check is a serious pain. If serious software commonly used that, then if I wanted to drive Reaktor 2 and Vaz+ through Cubasis, I would need 3 CDROM drives. Great.
In short, this is going to be too expensive for games (and they've already found that serialised network play is the only protection they need), and apps software won't use it. Big hairy deal.
> Intellectual property laws exist only because > we have a slavery system. Our livelihood > depends on working for others so we can pay our > taxes. The reason that we have to work for > others is that 99% of people have been deprived > of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. > Income property is owned by a few and the > state.
If everyone owned some, it would no longer be income property. Why pay someone else to use their property if you can use yours just as well?
> The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and > inventors depend on their work to make a > living. Can we blame them?
Not at all. Artistic talent, programming acumen and inventiveness are amongst the few income properties which can't be taken away by the rich. The fact that in order to realise the income they have to sell their souls to distribution companies *IS* a problem, but the fact they live on their work ISN'T.
In the system you propose, a talented musician would be unable to write music because he'd have to spend all his time maintaining his physical 'income property', and he'd have no reason to release the music to others because they'd be no extra income for doing so.
> Intellectual property owners (such as > Microsoft, Adobe, and the music industry) will > fight freedom with everything they've got. > Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP > laws and powerful police states to enforce > them. But those who yearn to be free also have > a formidable weapon, the internet.
I hate to tell you this, but it simply isn't true. The internet isn't run by 'those who yearn to be free'. It's run by big companies who have just as many interests as the IP owners. Lemme guess, you're posting this in Internet Explorer?
> What will happen to a slave-based economy when > robots and advanced artificial intelligences > replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, > knowledge and expertise become worthless?
Everybody goes to work fixing the robots.
> We should all demand a system where everybody > is guaranteed income property, a piece of the > pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for > everybody.
Then you hit the above problem - it stops being income.
A better one would be to pass a law saying that the owners of income property must use it to the good of society (although of course they can use it for their own benefit too if that is compatible). In my home town, many small businesses are being crippled by the fact that the big firms have bought big chunks of commercial land in the town centre and have let it lie fallow and decrepit. They only bought it so a competitor couldn't. Eugh.
> Communism confiscates all property and enslaves > everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few > and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land > should not be divided for a price. It should be > an inheritance for us and our children and > their children.
It doesn't matter. If you so much as LOOK at a copyrighted work when producing something of your own, the result can be deemed to be a derivative work. In this new case, you have to look at J1 to work out your encoding scheme, so the encoding scheme is a derivative work.
What we can say with some confidence, though, is that sooner or later computers will be so fast and storage so massive that it will be possible to completely enumerate the space of digital IP in finite time. How fast do dedicated hardware counters count now?
They didn't. In the early days of DVD, the 'cheat codes' were always there because the DVD manufacturers knew it would put people off buying the disks. They only put the region coding in in the first place because it was mentioned in the license. The 'cheat codes' were a dodge around the license; the license presumably says that users shouldn't be able to turn the coding off, so they claim that the 'cheat codes' are maintenance access codes for callout engineers (which many appliances have), and aren't for users to use. But then there's no law restraining them from being distributed as long as the DVD company themselves didn't encourage it too blatantly.
This kind of thing isn't uncommon; the early portable MiniDesc recorders from Sony could have their 'one-generation-only' copy protection turned off by entering a code on the front panel buttons.
I don't think this is illegal even in the USA. In the UK and probably Europe it's directly plain; you can get multi-region DVD players in a supermarket (because they are cheap units from Asia which were region free in the first place), and there are commercial firms devoted to chipping players, which have gotten to seriously sophisticated levels now (change between regionless, auto adjusted locking, or locked to any region you choose; no macrovision; user prohibition override (ie, you can skip opening ads or studio screens); chip placed on a plug-in daughterboard so if the player breaks, you just pull the daughterboard then send it to Pioneer or whoever and there's no problem) and there's nothing illegal in it.
There's a simple reason for this: there are a HUGE number of cinemas in the US. If the movie studios had to make tapes for all the cinemas in the world, it would cost them a load of money; so instead, they make tapes for the cinemas in the US, run the film until its run ends, get the tapes back, clean them up, and send them to other countries. The number of tapes used in the US is enough to cover several smaller countries.
It just isn't clear what he's trying to encourage here.
Most sensible geeks, I think, are all in favour of copyright as long as it's in moderation. In other words, people should indeed get paid for their work. But we shouldn't get the loss of fair use, the loss of the right to create on an equal footing, and the sledgehammer DMCA.
So how are we supposed to code enabling technologies? Coding things that break existing copy protection is illegal, isn't achieving what we want, and is in fact making it worse - by driving in the perception that tools allowing fair use will inevitably be used illegally. File sharing apps like Napster are known about by now, and all those have done are - yet again - earned a bad reputation and brought consumer broadband into question.
The point is simple. We are NOT going to be able to do this by civil disobedience or any illegitimate means. We don't have enough sympathy in it; the one illegitimate act that IS popular amongst average folks (plain ol' piracy) is the one we DON'T want to encourage, and the one that is WORST for our cause; and we depend on too much. We depend on content producers, ISPs, phone companies, power companies, software makers, hardware makers, etc., none of whom need to care enough about our issues that they'd risk being associated with illegitimate activity for our sake.
Coders could, I suppose, try and work out a new kind of copy protection that would allow fair use but disallow illegal copying. But that would require the cooperation of the content owners; and as long as they're able to use protection methods that block fair use, they have no motivation to offer that cooperation. As long as the courts won't make those methods unusable - either by ruling that they cannot be used at base or ruling that it is legal to break them for fair use purposes in a way that's viable for Joe Average - nothing will move them from that stance. Distributing 'fair use' breakers that are deemed illegal will harm the cause.
The only people we could get on our side are small content creators - little bands, etc. - who are feeling the negative pinch on their side (horrible contracts that force them to abandon copyright, inability to get the technology allowing them to copy protect their works because they lack reputation, etc). But even that doesn't matter much, because the public won't be swayed by anyone who hasn't gone through the big publishers' publicity machines.
Other than that, about the only thing to do is to try and set up a truly enormous distributed machine to count up to 2^650000000, store every number and GPL it (this is equivalent to GPLing every possible CD image). If you're prepared to wait more than a hundred years and store terabytes squared of data, things could get very interesting. Otherwise, zip.
> RMS, who wrote the GPL and should know what > he's talking about, once said [rmz.priv.no] > that: "Sometimes I think that perhaps one of > the best things I could do with my life is: > find a gigantic pile of proprietary software > that was a trade secret, and start handing out > copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a > trade secret any more, and perhaps that would > be a much more efficient way for me to give > people new free software than actually writing > it myself; but everyone is too cowardly to even > take it."
Personally I wonder if it would be possible to simply announce that you have created a database of all possible digital intellectual property, and that you're GPLing the whole thing.
The database would be indexed only by serial number, so that to download any possible work you simply enter its serial number.
Of course, this serialisation system saves massively on disk space, as the work with serial number X is just the number X encoded into binary. This does not mean that the data is not stored in a database, though; it just means that the database is very well compressed. (For example, the database could be the binary encoding of each ASCII number in the database. Or a 650mb file of all binary 1's, which contains all the raw data needed to create any CD image.)
If you wanted to formalize the generation you could send out a distributed.net style system that just counts up very large numbers and reports to the central server the highest number that it has reached.
Any ideas why this wouldn't work? AFAIK, creative property is creative property even if it isn't produced by a creative process (if I just write random bits of music by rolling dice, I can still copyright all the music I write). As the computer is unaware of any other creative work, all copyrighted works it might discover while counting are parallel developments.
This could be an interesting twist to the situation with the big media companies. If a country has a very small, or almost no, media industry itself and the big multinationals (like the film firms, Microsoft, etc.) start throwing their weight around, the government always has the choice to simply nix their country's copyright law, so that piracy ceases to exist there.
The multinationals lose all their power to control distribution within the country, and they can't even just deny the software to that country at all - because they can just download warez copies from other countries, that cease to be illegal the moment they cross the border of the country in question. They could try and get the country's ISP to refuse them service, but they're unlikely to accept that, especially since all those warez downloads will mean a fat payoff to the ISP for the bandwidth. The country gets a massive boost to its citizens quality of life (hey, all the fun stuff is FREE now!), and its trade gap evens out.
What would happen if some country did this? Would countries go to war over a breach of the Berne convention?
Hmm, interesting. I've been using Dvorak for a while now (and yes, I can still type fast on qwerty with the occasional pause). However, one thing I found about Dvorak was that spelling checkers become less useful on it - because of the closeness of common letters to each other, a Dvorak miskey tends to generate a correct spelling of the wrong word, rather than an incorrect spelling. This confounds automated spell checking. Has anyone tried to make a layout which minimises cases in which letters which can be substituted in words being next to each other is a Bad Thing?
This already came up as a front news story - the fact that some states have laws prohibiting the government purchasing items from criminals, and therefore shouldn't be able to buy any MS software.
Probably a better one would be to challenge the 'campaign contributions' from felons...
With regard to TPF3, anyone know if there's a program yet which creates REAL traps for these things? As in, it'll occasionally change one of your MP3s to appear to be copied, or create a 'Warez' directory on your machine with stuff in it, or return false results from file system calls or similar. Of course, it doesn't do anything illegal. All it does is make the DRM reporting throw false positives.
This makes any spy functions useless, as the results will be riddled with false positives. And it doesn't violate the DMCA, because it doesn't disable the DRM, in fact it deliberately activates it.
> In my mind it seems like if microsoft took a > stance where they wanted to protect the > customer from big business insted of subject a > user to it, the popularity of Microsoft would > jump enormously.
The point you're missing is, MS no longer has to give a damn about being unpopular with customers. MS execs aren't exactly crying rivers over the fact that people are "indifferent" about Microsoft; most of those same people are probably booting up Windows and Office because from their point of view there is no other choice. Yea, there are other OSs, but what those people are interested in is functionality and content and MS can fight tooth and nail to ensure that they are the only way of delivering that.
About the only thing that could be done legally to prevent them at this point would be to drop the bomb on the applications barrier by creating a law regarding Aiding And Abetting Antitrust.
> That's not going to stop the software from > disabling other software on your machine, > interfering with its operation in a supposed > attempt to ensure "Digital Rights" are > observed, or installing other components into > your OS automatically, without asking you for > permission.
Actually, the company would be committing theft of services (processor time and hard disk space) without some license that was at least implicit.
DIVXITY? If you look at the site, it uses MS VB runtimes and DirectX media. MS can stick DRM in those anytime. Heck, it's probably just the same as Media Player but with a different interface.
> If you define capitalism as the "Golden Rule" > of "he who has the gold rules", then perhaps by > vision of capitalism should really be > called "laissez-faire socialism" or something. > If we were to continue on the present course, I > think in the next the next 30 years, we're > going to see the game of capitalism end once > and for all, and the handful of winners of that > game forming an oligarchy that will control the > U.S. and its sphere of influence for the > forseeable future. We would get to the point > where each major sector of the economy is > subject to the stranglehold one company which > carries enough power to destroy any challenger > to its market share before it can gain a > foothold
You might be interested to know that this is EXACTLY what Lenin and Marx predicted as the eventual problem with capitalism. (No, it wasn't just to do with 'workers being exploited'.)
> It isn't advertising that breaks the grip of the > dead hand. It's stupidity. If someone decides to > pay more for a worse product, they are a moron.
Fine, but the insults don't stop money flowing to the company. Adverts make people buy stuff - if they didn't, companies wouldn't buy adverts. Even if only 'morons' buy it, there are plenty of them and their greenbacks are as good as anyone else's.
Suppose there was no advertising. Every product had to be sold in a plain wrapper stating only what it was and who made it, and shops were forced by law to present one of every product at eye level. Then, customers would have to actually try multiple products to find out what the best was, and when they found out, they would know what the actual best was (instead of the one that was best at saying it's best). To find any product they would have to search the shelves rather than just sitting on their chair and waiting for it to be waved in front of them. Being stupid would not be an option - if they dumbed out like they can now, they just wouldn't get to buy any stuff.
> When it becomes too "easy" to make a product, or > when there are too many manufacturers vying for > the same consumer, or there are too many similar > products with similar benefits and features, > advertising budgets help you win the battle.
Which is exactly wrong. Suppose there was no advertising. Then, those manufacturers would instead have to improve their PRODUCTS to stand out from the crowd, rather than spending the money on making themselves well-known, which gives no long-term benefit to consumers.
> But that doesn't mean I, as a consumer, go in > for the product that had the most airtime on TV > or radio
No, but SOMEBODY does - otherwise the companies wouldn't be paying the big bucks for it.
Well, the first problem is that the entire system of advertising is broken, IMHO. A fundamental assumption of capitalism is that those who make the best and most useful products get the money rewards. Advertising breaks this: it effectively allows people to buy an increased chance of getting a money reward for a product, regardless of how good or bad that product is. This means that those who have more money now are more likely to make more later, regardless of the quality of the stuff they and their poorer competitors make. As documented years ago, this causes the concept of the free market to decay, until it dies and you are left with a socialism in which the former 'market winners' of the capitalism stand in for the socialist government. We are practically at that point now.
As mentioned elsewhere, the reason that radio is different is that it's ambient (even if you don't ever actively listen to the radio you'll hear things that are on it), it's a locked monopoly (there are only so many frequencies), and it consumes a public good (those frequencies). You can open your own store to sell your records, but you can't start your own radio station.
>You miss the point. This wasn't about which > codec wins, but about whether or not it's a > problem for open source whether or not open > source OS's provide something first. Of course > having something everyone else doesn't have is > an advantage. But is it still an advantage > after the difference is erased? I claim that > it usually isn't, since the typical consumer > couldn't care less, and usually won't even know > or remmber, who were first.
No. The typical consumer, however, probably BOUGHT the product that was first with the new features - because those features were a selling point at the time. If another product catches up with the features, that still gives the consumer no reason to buy it. It has to catch up and add new features to be interesting - and it has to catch up and add new features in the same timescale in which the leaders will just be adding new features.
> My example of the Sony Walkman is a valid one: > How many consumers buy Sony Walkmans because > they were first? Most consumers won't even know > they were first, nor know that Walkman refers > to a trademarked Sony product, not to the type > of product itself.
When the Panasonic Walkmans came out, the consumers who'd already bought their Sony ones didn't rush out and buy the Panasonic ones too.
Yes, alright, *nowadays* it doesn't matter, but that's because Walkmans are old tech.
>The thing is, except for geeks, nobody cares > whether or not open source OS's or Windows or > MacOS or whatever had a codec first.
THAT's true, but only because except for geeks nobody uses open source OS's.
>What matters to ordinary consumers is what is > available now, today, when someone sends them a > video clip and they want to watch it.
Right. And now, today, they already have their QuickTime, Real, and WMV players installed. They don't have their Theora players installed. Why? Because QuickTime, Real, and WMV got there earlier. This isn't difficult.
>Yes, it would be beneficial for open source to > lead the way in many ways. But is it critical? > I'd say no. What is important is to support > something as soon as it gains widespread usage, > not as soon as it is available.
No! When it gains widespread usage, everyone already HAS it. You've then got to persuade people to switch. That's going to be pretty tough when you're competing against a company with a product already in widespread usage.
>To comment on your claim that open source > software isn't ever the one that breaks the > mold, I'd say you are doubly wrong. First and > foremost, open source software has broken the > mold time and time again. If it hadn't been for > most of the internet protocols implemented as > open source, for instance, the evolution of the > internet would have had to wait much longer to > achieve a size large enough for commercial > vendors to be interested.
Ummm... I don't think TCP/IP was open source *when it was INVENTED*, was it?
> That's your first error. The second is related: > OSS can easily be first, because many OSS > programmers are motivated by whats cool and > interesting to work on,
"What's cool." Exactly. If you want to be first, you can't wait for things to already be cool. Once it's cool, it's known, and you're too late. You have to find it yourself and make it cool.
>Yes, in the long run somebody could reimplement > the ideas as proprietary software. But who > cares? As much as I despise Microsoft, I'd > think it was great if they supported Ogg in > their products, for instance, as that would > make it much more likely that Ogg would gain > widespread use.
Yes. Until MS threw a rights management system into Vorbis, to make it incompatable with the open source players. You couldn't use their code because it's proprietary, and you couldn't even make the open source version compatible because doing so would violate the DMCA.
Exactly. Most people don't care about much other than ability to play stuff. (The Walkman example doesn't fit, because all walkman-equivalents play the same format.)
The codec that gets there first will be able to play more stuff. It be able to play the stuff that was produced at the time when there was no codec available, and it will be better established and more likely to be selected by content producers.
Consumers only care about whether or not a technology is new. When they first hear that they can watch a video over the web, they'll go "Wow!" and happily download their QT player. But once they've had that for a while, they won't any more. And when they see content coded in Theora, they'll say "what a pain in the ass to have to get yet another player". Content producers know this and don't use new players.
Why isn't Open Source software ever the one that breaks the mold? Because the main motivation for working on Open Source software tends to be "to drag down the big boys". If there's no big boys there, there's no real interest in working on a project that may not (probably won't) take off. And if it did, OSS would still be screwed, because the GPL covers only code, not ideas; any truly new idea in OSS could be copied by a commercial firm (provided they didn't reuse any source), who could inevitably develop it faster as they can reward their programmers. I don't know if anyone has attempted to put a GNU-style "viral OSS" license on a *patent* yet...
Also the viral license hurts OSS in media players; they are seen as having no effective copy protection, and a little spin by lawyers can make it look like the license virus will force the encoded media into open source.
I think there was at one stage, a web page describing how to make a wossname for attaching an exercise bike to your PC as a Quake controller. You rode around on the level firing with buttons mounted on the handlebars.;)
> Then maybe it's time for a second class action > lawsuit, against publishers that extort (copy-) > rights out of artists.
The only problem is that nobody has the right to get their music published. So they are doing nothing wrong.
A right of equal market access would be a wonderful thing, but also far too dangerous for anyone to consider.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmm, it's a bit daft. Who's going to use it?
I have a package called Reaktor, which is a synth simulator for the PC. Reaktor v2 shipped with a system CD which had two holes drilled in it, for exactly the reason described here - to validate the CD. But the next version got rid of this and used a USB dongle instead.
Why? Because having to put a CD in the drive when you're using a piece of serious app software is a pain in the ass. To be honest it's a pain in the ass for games as well, but at least a game is likely to take over the whole system. On serious software, which can work together, a CD check is a serious pain. If serious software commonly used that, then if I wanted to drive Reaktor 2 and Vaz+ through Cubasis, I would need 3 CDROM drives. Great.
In short, this is going to be too expensive for games (and they've already found that serialised network play is the only protection they need), and apps software won't use it. Big hairy deal.
I am not quite sure
This will do much good at all.
Please let me explain:
Personal use is free,
But they charge firms to use it.
Not all firms will pay.
Most folks will prefer
To get a thousand spam than
To lose one real mail.
If it's mail from firms
That's more likely to get lost
That is even worse:
Mail folk WANT from firms
Tends to be most important:
Reciepts, upgrades, on..
In the article
They said mail lacking haiku
Should not be destroyed;
Yet having the mail
Brought to your attention is
Yes/No, no degree.
Even if you store
Suspect mail apart from clean
In case real mail's lost,
To check for that loss
You must sort through all the spam
Which defies the point.
Also mentioned was
Countries which don't have these laws
Can spam just the same:
So how long before
They set up remailer bots
That add the haiku?
Even if the mail
Didn't come from China when
It was written first,
The 'criminal' act -
Adding haiku without leave -
will have happened there.
Spam filters should be
Based on what mail to turn down,
Not what to accept.
> Intellectual property laws exist only because
> we have a slavery system. Our livelihood
> depends on working for others so we can pay our
> taxes. The reason that we have to work for
> others is that 99% of people have been deprived
> of an inheritance in the wealth of the land.
> Income property is owned by a few and the
> state.
If everyone owned some, it would no longer be income property. Why pay someone else to use their property if you can use yours just as well?
> The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and
> inventors depend on their work to make a
> living. Can we blame them?
Not at all. Artistic talent, programming acumen and inventiveness are amongst the few income properties which can't be taken away by the rich. The fact that in order to realise the income they have to sell their souls to distribution companies *IS* a problem, but the fact they live on their work ISN'T.
In the system you propose, a talented musician would be unable to write music because he'd have to spend all his time maintaining his physical 'income property', and he'd have no reason to release the music to others because they'd be no extra income for doing so.
> Intellectual property owners (such as
> Microsoft, Adobe, and the music industry) will
> fight freedom with everything they've got.
> Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP
> laws and powerful police states to enforce
> them. But those who yearn to be free also have
> a formidable weapon, the internet.
I hate to tell you this, but it simply isn't true. The internet isn't run by 'those who yearn to be free'. It's run by big companies who have just as many interests as the IP owners. Lemme guess, you're posting this in Internet Explorer?
> What will happen to a slave-based economy when
> robots and advanced artificial intelligences
> replace everybody, i. e., when human labor,
> knowledge and expertise become worthless?
Everybody goes to work fixing the robots.
> We should all demand a system where everybody
> is guaranteed income property, a piece of the
> pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for
> everybody.
Then you hit the above problem - it stops being income.
A better one would be to pass a law saying that the owners of income property must use it to the good of society (although of course they can use it for their own benefit too if that is compatible). In my home town, many small businesses are being crippled by the fact that the big firms have bought big chunks of commercial land in the town centre and have let it lie fallow and decrepit. They only bought it so a competitor couldn't. Eugh.
> Communism confiscates all property and enslaves
> everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few
> and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land
> should not be divided for a price. It should be
> an inheritance for us and our children and
> their children.
These are incompatible, I'm sure you see.
It doesn't matter. If you so much as LOOK at a copyrighted work when producing something of your own, the result can be deemed to be a derivative work. In this new case, you have to look at J1 to work out your encoding scheme, so the encoding scheme is a derivative work.
What we can say with some confidence, though, is that sooner or later computers will be so fast and storage so massive that it will be possible to completely enumerate the space of digital IP in finite time. How fast do dedicated hardware counters count now?
They didn't. In the early days of DVD, the 'cheat codes' were always there because the DVD manufacturers knew it would put people off buying the disks. They only put the region coding in in the first place because it was mentioned in the license. The 'cheat codes' were a dodge around the license; the license presumably says that users shouldn't be able to turn the coding off, so they claim that the 'cheat codes' are maintenance access codes for callout engineers (which many appliances have), and aren't for users to use. But then there's no law restraining them from being distributed as long as the DVD company themselves didn't encourage it too blatantly.
This kind of thing isn't uncommon; the early portable MiniDesc recorders from Sony could have their 'one-generation-only' copy protection turned off by entering a code on the front panel buttons.
I don't think this is illegal even in the USA. In the UK and probably Europe it's directly plain; you can get multi-region DVD players in a supermarket (because they are cheap units from Asia which were region free in the first place), and there are commercial firms devoted to chipping players, which have gotten to seriously sophisticated levels now (change between regionless, auto adjusted locking, or locked to any region you choose; no macrovision; user prohibition override (ie, you can skip opening ads or studio screens); chip placed on a plug-in daughterboard so if the player breaks, you just pull the daughterboard then send it to Pioneer or whoever and there's no problem) and there's nothing illegal in it.
There's a simple reason for this: there are a HUGE number of cinemas in the US. If the movie studios had to make tapes for all the cinemas in the world, it would cost them a load of money; so instead, they make tapes for the cinemas in the US, run the film until its run ends, get the tapes back, clean them up, and send them to other countries. The number of tapes used in the US is enough to cover several smaller countries.
It just isn't clear what he's trying to encourage here.
Most sensible geeks, I think, are all in favour of copyright as long as it's in moderation. In other words, people should indeed get paid for their work. But we shouldn't get the loss of fair use, the loss of the right to create on an equal footing, and the sledgehammer DMCA.
So how are we supposed to code enabling technologies? Coding things that break existing copy protection is illegal, isn't achieving what we want, and is in fact making it worse - by driving in the perception that tools allowing fair use will inevitably be used illegally. File sharing apps like Napster are known about by now, and all those have done are - yet again - earned a bad reputation and brought consumer broadband into question.
The point is simple. We are NOT going to be able to do this by civil disobedience or any illegitimate means. We don't have enough sympathy in it; the one illegitimate act that IS popular amongst average folks (plain ol' piracy) is the one we DON'T want to encourage, and the one that is WORST for our cause; and we depend on too much. We depend on content producers, ISPs, phone companies, power companies, software makers, hardware makers, etc., none of whom need to care enough about our issues that they'd risk being associated with illegitimate activity for our sake.
Coders could, I suppose, try and work out a new kind of copy protection that would allow fair use but disallow illegal copying. But that would require the cooperation of the content owners; and as long as they're able to use protection methods that block fair use, they have no motivation to offer that cooperation. As long as the courts won't make those methods unusable - either by ruling that they cannot be used at base or ruling that it is legal to break them for fair use purposes in a way that's viable for Joe Average - nothing will move them from that stance. Distributing 'fair use' breakers that are deemed illegal will harm the cause.
The only people we could get on our side are small content creators - little bands, etc. - who are feeling the negative pinch on their side (horrible contracts that force them to abandon copyright, inability to get the technology allowing them to copy protect their works because they lack reputation, etc). But even that doesn't matter much, because the public won't be swayed by anyone who hasn't gone through the big publishers' publicity machines.
Other than that, about the only thing to do is to try and set up a truly enormous distributed machine to count up to 2^650000000, store every number and GPL it (this is equivalent to GPLing every possible CD image). If you're prepared to wait more than a hundred years and store terabytes squared of data, things could get very interesting. Otherwise, zip.
> RMS, who wrote the GPL and should know what
> he's talking about, once said [rmz.priv.no]
> that: "Sometimes I think that perhaps one of
> the best things I could do with my life is:
> find a gigantic pile of proprietary software
> that was a trade secret, and start handing out
> copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a
> trade secret any more, and perhaps that would
> be a much more efficient way for me to give
> people new free software than actually writing
> it myself; but everyone is too cowardly to even
> take it."
Personally I wonder if it would be possible to simply announce that you have created a database of all possible digital intellectual property, and that you're GPLing the whole thing.
The database would be indexed only by serial number, so that to download any possible work you simply enter its serial number.
Of course, this serialisation system saves massively on disk space, as the work with serial number X is just the number X encoded into binary. This does not mean that the data is not stored in a database, though; it just means that the database is very well compressed. (For example, the database could be the binary encoding of each ASCII number in the database. Or a 650mb file of all binary 1's, which contains all the raw data needed to create any CD image.)
If you wanted to formalize the generation you could send out a distributed.net style system that just counts up very large numbers and reports to the central server the highest number that it has reached.
Any ideas why this wouldn't work? AFAIK, creative property is creative property even if it isn't produced by a creative process (if I just write random bits of music by rolling dice, I can still copyright all the music I write). As the computer is unaware of any other creative work, all copyrighted works it might discover while counting are parallel developments.
This could be an interesting twist to the situation with the big media companies. If a country has a very small, or almost no, media industry itself and the big multinationals (like the film firms, Microsoft, etc.) start throwing their weight around, the government always has the choice to simply nix their country's copyright law, so that piracy ceases to exist there.
The multinationals lose all their power to control distribution within the country, and they can't even just deny the software to that country at all - because they can just download warez copies from other countries, that cease to be illegal the moment they cross the border of the country in question. They could try and get the country's ISP to refuse them service, but they're unlikely to accept that, especially since all those warez downloads will mean a fat payoff to the ISP for the bandwidth. The country gets a massive boost to its citizens quality of life (hey, all the fun stuff is FREE now!), and its trade gap evens out.
What would happen if some country did this? Would countries go to war over a breach of the Berne convention?
Hmm, interesting. I've been using Dvorak for a while now (and yes, I can still type fast on qwerty with the occasional pause). However, one thing I found about Dvorak was that spelling checkers become less useful on it - because of the closeness of common letters to each other, a Dvorak miskey tends to generate a correct spelling of the wrong word, rather than an incorrect spelling. This confounds automated spell checking. Has anyone tried to make a layout which minimises cases in which letters which can be substituted in words being next to each other is a Bad Thing?
This already came up as a front news story - the fact that some states have laws prohibiting the government purchasing items from criminals, and therefore shouldn't be able to buy any MS software.
Probably a better one would be to challenge the 'campaign contributions' from felons...
With regard to TPF3, anyone know if there's a program yet which creates REAL traps for these things? As in, it'll occasionally change one of your MP3s to appear to be copied, or create a 'Warez' directory on your machine with stuff in it, or return false results from file system calls or similar. Of course, it doesn't do anything illegal. All it does is make the DRM reporting throw false positives.
This makes any spy functions useless, as the results will be riddled with false positives. And it doesn't violate the DMCA, because it doesn't disable the DRM, in fact it deliberately activates it.
> In my mind it seems like if microsoft took a
> stance where they wanted to protect the
> customer from big business insted of subject a
> user to it, the popularity of Microsoft would
> jump enormously.
The point you're missing is, MS no longer has to give a damn about being unpopular with customers. MS execs aren't exactly crying rivers over the fact that people are "indifferent" about Microsoft; most of those same people are probably booting up Windows and Office because from their point of view there is no other choice. Yea, there are other OSs, but what those people are interested in is functionality and content and MS can fight tooth and nail to ensure that they are the only way of delivering that.
About the only thing that could be done legally to prevent them at this point would be to drop the bomb on the applications barrier by creating a law regarding Aiding And Abetting Antitrust.
> That's not going to stop the software from
> disabling other software on your machine,
> interfering with its operation in a supposed
> attempt to ensure "Digital Rights" are
> observed, or installing other components into
> your OS automatically, without asking you for
> permission.
Actually, the company would be committing theft of services (processor time and hard disk space) without some license that was at least implicit.
DIVXITY? If you look at the site, it uses MS VB runtimes and DirectX media. MS can stick DRM in those anytime. Heck, it's probably just the same as Media Player but with a different interface.
> If you define capitalism as the "Golden Rule"
> of "he who has the gold rules", then perhaps by
> vision of capitalism should really be
> called "laissez-faire socialism" or something.
> If we were to continue on the present course, I
> think in the next the next 30 years, we're
> going to see the game of capitalism end once
> and for all, and the handful of winners of that
> game forming an oligarchy that will control the
> U.S. and its sphere of influence for the
> forseeable future. We would get to the point
> where each major sector of the economy is
> subject to the stranglehold one company which
> carries enough power to destroy any challenger
> to its market share before it can gain a
> foothold
You might be interested to know that this is EXACTLY what Lenin and Marx predicted as the eventual problem with capitalism. (No, it wasn't just to do with 'workers being exploited'.)
> It isn't advertising that breaks the grip of the
> dead hand. It's stupidity. If someone decides to
> pay more for a worse product, they are a moron.
Fine, but the insults don't stop money flowing to the company. Adverts make people buy stuff - if they didn't, companies wouldn't buy adverts. Even if only 'morons' buy it, there are plenty of them and their greenbacks are as good as anyone else's.
Suppose there was no advertising. Every product had to be sold in a plain wrapper stating only what it was and who made it, and shops were forced by law to present one of every product at eye level. Then, customers would have to actually try multiple products to find out what the best was, and when they found out, they would know what the actual best was (instead of the one that was best at saying it's best). To find any product they would have to search the shelves rather than just sitting on their chair and waiting for it to be waved in front of them. Being stupid would not be an option - if they dumbed out like they can now, they just wouldn't get to buy any stuff.
> When it becomes too "easy" to make a product, or
> when there are too many manufacturers vying for
> the same consumer, or there are too many similar
> products with similar benefits and features,
> advertising budgets help you win the battle.
Which is exactly wrong. Suppose there was no advertising. Then, those manufacturers would instead have to improve their PRODUCTS to stand out from the crowd, rather than spending the money on making themselves well-known, which gives no long-term benefit to consumers.
> But that doesn't mean I, as a consumer, go in
> for the product that had the most airtime on TV
> or radio
No, but SOMEBODY does - otherwise the companies wouldn't be paying the big bucks for it.
Well, the first problem is that the entire system of advertising is broken, IMHO. A fundamental assumption of capitalism is that those who make the best and most useful products get the money rewards. Advertising breaks this: it effectively allows people to buy an increased chance of getting a money reward for a product, regardless of how good or bad that product is. This means that those who have more money now are more likely to make more later, regardless of the quality of the stuff they and their poorer competitors make. As documented years ago, this causes the concept of the free market to decay, until it dies and you are left with a socialism in which the former 'market winners' of the capitalism stand in for the socialist government. We are practically at that point now.
As mentioned elsewhere, the reason that radio is different is that it's ambient (even if you don't ever actively listen to the radio you'll hear things that are on it), it's a locked monopoly (there are only so many frequencies), and it consumes a public good (those frequencies). You can open your own store to sell your records, but you can't start your own radio station.
>You miss the point. This wasn't about which
> codec wins, but about whether or not it's a
> problem for open source whether or not open
> source OS's provide something first. Of course
> having something everyone else doesn't have is
> an advantage. But is it still an advantage
> after the difference is erased? I claim that
> it usually isn't, since the typical consumer
> couldn't care less, and usually won't even know
> or remmber, who were first.
No. The typical consumer, however, probably BOUGHT the product that was first with the new features - because those features were a selling point at the time. If another product catches up with the features, that still gives the consumer no reason to buy it. It has to catch up and add new features to be interesting - and it has to catch up and add new features in the same timescale in which the leaders will just be adding new features.
> My example of the Sony Walkman is a valid one:
> How many consumers buy Sony Walkmans because
> they were first? Most consumers won't even know
> they were first, nor know that Walkman refers
> to a trademarked Sony product, not to the type
> of product itself.
When the Panasonic Walkmans came out, the consumers who'd already bought their Sony ones didn't rush out and buy the Panasonic ones too.
Yes, alright, *nowadays* it doesn't matter, but that's because Walkmans are old tech.
>The thing is, except for geeks, nobody cares
> whether or not open source OS's or Windows or
> MacOS or whatever had a codec first.
THAT's true, but only because except for geeks nobody uses open source OS's.
>What matters to ordinary consumers is what is
> available now, today, when someone sends them a
> video clip and they want to watch it.
Right. And now, today, they already have their QuickTime, Real, and WMV players installed. They don't have their Theora players installed. Why? Because QuickTime, Real, and WMV got there earlier. This isn't difficult.
>Yes, it would be beneficial for open source to
> lead the way in many ways. But is it critical?
> I'd say no. What is important is to support
> something as soon as it gains widespread usage,
> not as soon as it is available.
No! When it gains widespread usage, everyone already HAS it. You've then got to persuade people to switch. That's going to be pretty tough when you're competing against a company with a product already in widespread usage.
>To comment on your claim that open source
> software isn't ever the one that breaks the
> mold, I'd say you are doubly wrong. First and
> foremost, open source software has broken the
> mold time and time again. If it hadn't been for
> most of the internet protocols implemented as
> open source, for instance, the evolution of the
> internet would have had to wait much longer to
> achieve a size large enough for commercial
> vendors to be interested.
Ummm... I don't think TCP/IP was open source *when it was INVENTED*, was it?
> That's your first error. The second is related:
> OSS can easily be first, because many OSS
> programmers are motivated by whats cool and
> interesting to work on,
"What's cool." Exactly. If you want to be first, you can't wait for things to already be cool. Once it's cool, it's known, and you're too late. You have to find it yourself and make it cool.
>Yes, in the long run somebody could reimplement
> the ideas as proprietary software. But who
> cares? As much as I despise Microsoft, I'd
> think it was great if they supported Ogg in
> their products, for instance, as that would
> make it much more likely that Ogg would gain
> widespread use.
Yes. Until MS threw a rights management system into Vorbis, to make it incompatable with the open source players. You couldn't use their code because it's proprietary, and you couldn't even make the open source version compatible because doing so would violate the DMCA.
"Serial port for attaching hardware key"!?!?!?
;)
Images of an open source 'build your own dongle' electronics project....
Exactly. Most people don't care about much other than ability to play stuff. (The Walkman example doesn't fit, because all walkman-equivalents play the same format.)
The codec that gets there first will be able to play more stuff. It be able to play the stuff that was produced at the time when there was no codec available, and it will be better established and more likely to be selected by content producers.
Consumers only care about whether or not a technology is new. When they first hear that they can watch a video over the web, they'll go "Wow!" and happily download their QT player. But once they've had that for a while, they won't any more. And when they see content coded in Theora, they'll say "what a pain in the ass to have to get yet another player". Content producers know this and don't use new players.
Why isn't Open Source software ever the one that breaks the mold? Because the main motivation for working on Open Source software tends to be "to drag down the big boys". If there's no big boys there, there's no real interest in working on a project that may not (probably won't) take off. And if it did, OSS would still be screwed, because the GPL covers only code, not ideas; any truly new idea in OSS could be copied by a commercial firm (provided they didn't reuse any source), who could inevitably develop it faster as they can reward their programmers. I don't know if anyone has attempted to put a GNU-style "viral OSS" license on a *patent* yet...
Also the viral license hurts OSS in media players; they are seen as having no effective copy protection, and a little spin by lawyers can make it look like the license virus will force the encoded media into open source.
I think there was at one stage, a web page describing how to make a wossname for attaching an exercise bike to your PC as a Quake controller. You rode around on the level firing with buttons mounted on the handlebars. ;)
> Then maybe it's time for a second class action
> lawsuit, against publishers that extort (copy-)
> rights out of artists.
The only problem is that nobody has the right to get their music published. So they are doing nothing wrong.
A right of equal market access would be a wonderful thing, but also far too dangerous for anyone to consider.
No, but they claim to be PC CD; there are fixed formats for data disks as well. Some Safedisk variants won't work on all PC CD drives.