That's a bummer for gamers, but no problem at all for TLAsoft Annoying Meeting Generator or Very Large Corporation Enterprise Email Trasher. In fact "no video acceleration" is probably a bonus from the IT department's perspective.
Virtualization is definitely a better solution, but what they have now is a palce to start.
You're assuming that whoever wrote the Australian law (if their system works like it does in the US, probably a record company lobbyist) didn't inadvertantly write the law such that it's actually illegal for the copyright holder to make copies of his own works.
No, I'm not assuming that the law in Australia is sane, and it's quite possible that at least some of the non-infringing uses I thought of are actually illegal. But it's vanishingly unlikely that "There are absolutely no legal uses for a device like that here" is actually the case.
You know, there's a lot of developers who prefer VS6 to its successors, and there's even community patches to keep the libraries up to spec. It wouldn't surprise me if there's people in Microsoft still using VS6 and checking on VS200x occasionally to take advantage of its tighter syntax checking.
If this can be automated, and it sounds like it can, this can be used to get Macbooks into businesses, because it reduces the risk that an employee won't be able to use the latest middleware-client-of-the-week when they need it. The employees who get them may end up using rdesktop to a shared XP box for their timecard or purchasing, but they'll get them because they can say "if it doesn't work with Obscuresoft Collaboration Mangler I can always boot to XP".
Once you can live without threat of dying from starvation, and have a roof over your head, and can sustain that lifestyle, THEN you can worry about education and gaining such materialistic things such as computers.
I know it may be a big surprise to you, but most of the people in the third world are making out a lot better than that. It's not all scary pictures from Ethiopia and Bangladesh.
The last thing you want in a shared computer is local storage.
Really.
In fact the last thing you want in a shared computer is a computer.
A personal computer is great when you can afford all the support infrastructure for a computer, but you can build a terminal a lot cheaper and it can do 90% of the stuff 90% of the people actually need. Let's face it, for a lot of people a computer is primarily a communications device. When people say "World of Warcraft is the new golf" they mean "it's chat with scenery".
there's the question of how ALL programs run on it.
This isn't DOS, applications don't talk directly to the hardware any more. The NT kernel doens't even allow applications to access the hardware, so as long as the drivers are there why should there be a problem?
And who cares about Vista?
I'm still running Windows 2000 and at this point I can't see any reason why I should even consider "upgrading" to XP, let alone Vista. Let's face it, XP is just 2000 with ugly window decorations and a nerfed version of Terminal Server bundled in. Since they managed to get a reasonably unified driver model with Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000, they haven't gone anywhere. Half the stuff they promised originally for XP has been taken out, and most of the rest has been back-ported to NT5 (2000/XP). Internet Explorer is playing catch-up again... apparently choking Netscape off financially only gave it a bit of breathing room.
What's left for Vista? Translucent window borders (you know, like Mac OS *used* to have and removed because it was annoying)?
Don't be silly. Of course there's a legal use. If the copyright owner permits you to copy the CD to your iPod then your entitled to do so.
For example:
* You are the copyright owner. * You are a client of the copyright owner and you license that use. * The content is public domain. * The copyright owner explicitly permits this use for any reason.
For an example of the latter in the electronic book market, Baen Books has included a CD with a number of the novels they publish containing electronic versions of these books. They explicitly allow you to copy the CD for your friends.
``The best story about the Three Laws is one Asimov used to tell: he went to see 2001 and as HAL began to go psycho, Asimov says he got more and more agitated, finally jumping up and declaring to all around that: "HAL is breaking First Law!" to which his companion (sometimes supposed to be Carl Sagan, but it's surely apocryphal)replied: "So strike him with lightning Isaac."'' -- Some Guy on/..
I heard it was Clarke himself, not Sagan, but it's been so long since I read it first that I can't remember. "Any sufficiently old story is indistinguishable from an urban legend." -- Somebody's first law.
Half the "Robot" stories are set pieces with the robot apparently breaking the Three Laws and Susan Calvin (or whoever) figuring out that the Three Laws were intact... because the rbot didn't recognise the human, or the robot didn't know the human could be damaged that way, or the robot was actually protecting the human from a greater harm...
In the real world, well, expecting a robot to figure out what's safe or not without human intervention is silly. Which is why I'm still amazed that Microsoft insists on making the Microsoft HTML control do that very thing...
The first law of gaming is that you don't make the player do anything that isn't fun, unless you get more money by doing it. Back when computer games were just starting to take over from arcade games and many of them had the same "you get 5 ships, and when they're gone you have to start over" format, my buddy Karl put it this way: if you're not making the guy pump quarters into the game, let him keep playing forever.
Later on games developed "infinite" lives and save points and when killing the same things over and over again palled you got zones and bosses and mini-bosses and super-bosses and puzzles... and games where you had to do the same things over and over got panned.
If there's anything in the game that can be automated by a keystroke sequence, then that's something that's going to be insanely boring for a human, and it shouldn't be in the game.
the OP could have been correct in their jurisidction, and you correct in yours.
Doesn't matter. It wasn't qualified by "in this jurisdiction". It was a blanket statement that the only actions DRM prevents you from performing are illegal anyway.
Consider a DRM which allows one backup copy, vs, a copyright law which contains no such allowance
That's not the DRM allowing it, it's the license allowing it.
How is this any different from any other closed proprietary system?
It's not.
But if they do this, shouldnt they also say MS must allow office for example to run on any OS?
There's actually a better case for that.
If there existed music where the only way to hear it without distortion was to use iTMS, like the only way to access some kinds of documents without losing formatting is to use Microsoft Office, one could argue that equal access requires making at least a Word format reader available for any operating system.
So, DRM has limited my legal activities, right ? Wrong - it has only stopped me doing something which is actually illegal
I've already addressed this.
The original statement I was responding to was an unconditional statement that unless you (the generic you) want to break the law, DRM doesn't matter.
Not "unless you want to break the law or you live in a country with restrictive copyright law".
The statement I disagreed with was: "DRM restricts your rights more than copyright law does"
OK, "DRM restricts your rights no less than copyright law does, and any effective implementation of DRM must of necessity restrict your rights more than copyright law does."
At the very least an open-source implementation of a DRM-enabled viewer is impossible in practice, so you can't use an open-source viewer to view DRM-protected files even if you are legally entitled to view those files. Where a viewer contains open-source components, it has to have a mechanism to restrict you from replacing any of those components even if that's necessary for you to view the content you're legally entitled to view.
Whether this is a restriction you are likely to find burdensome isn't the point. Whether some reading of someone's laws can be interpreted to make this illegal isn't the point. The point is that theer are people who are not interested in breaking the law whose rights are restricted beyond the restrictions established in copyright law by any moderately effective DRM scheme.
IMO we should on principle _not_ be attacking _technologies_ simply because they "can be used" to do something we don't like.
I also covered this.
I repeat: I'm not attacking anything.
I'm simply explaining why you do need to care about DRM even if you're not planning on violating copyright law.
Oh, good, can you tell me the commands and settings I can use in Vista to make these things work using unmodified applications and no custom code?
I suspect I could do most of them by running UNIX applications under Interix, but that's not using Windows... that's using a hosted UNIX under the NT kernel, you might as well save your miney and use Linux or FreeBSD. Windows isn't the NT kernel, it's the kernel, Win32/Win64, and all the other bits distributed with it. The kernel itself is rather nice (though I've run into single-instance issues that seem tro be pretty deeply embedded) but it's not where most of the problems are.
passing input to the existing instance of an app isn't the default behaviour on windows either
Doesn't that depend on the libraries you use? It seems unlikely to me that so many applications would have this single-instance behaviour if the system software didn't make it easy to do. Apple, I know, has a framework for such multi-document applications, and Microsoft has promoted it (with or without MDI) from the beginning.
the same sort of thing can happen on linux too from what i can gather.
In Linux, Firefox had to go to a lot of extra trouble to make it behave like it does on Windows. There's nothing in the UNIX environment that makes a single-instance application natural... the original Netscape didn't work that way, for instance, if you wanted to open a URL in an existing instance of Netscape you had to pass it a fragment of Javascript to tell the running Netscape to open.
That's what happens in UNIX when an application doesn't "think of the multiple sessions in one account". To get the Windows behaviour you have to deliberately deal with multiple instances and change your behaviour.
In many places it is not, regardless of DRM. In some places, the act of circumventing the DRM makes it illegal.
Erm, if your computer is properly secured you will never know that Sony's DRM is on the disc, because your computer won't be looking for files on an audio CD.
If the DRM makes it impossible for me to properly secure my computer... then again it makes legal activities impossible... and therefore DRM does matter even if you're not interested in stealing copyrighted files.
That doesn't make the original false-to-fact statement correct: not only was it not qualified by "in this country" or "in that country" but no matter what the laws are DRM can be used to restrict you further than the laws do.
It could - but then so could other laws, or contracts etc. Or, on the other hand it could restrict you less, or about the same.
So? That doesn't mean 'you don't have to care aboutthe law if you're not doing anything illegal' or 'you don't have to care about your rental contract if you're not planning on stealing the car'. It doesn't matter whether DRM might issue in an era of previously unknown creativity or a dictatorship worse than the world has ever seen... it doesn't change the fact that you are effected by it even if you're not looking to play illegal content.
Shouldn't matter what the runtime libraries involved are, it's the operating system's job to create an environment for another instance of the program to run in.
Windows 2000 Terminal Services allows for two sessions under the same user id.
I used to be able to do this under some of the early versions of what became Terminal Services, but it wasn't practical to try and do it on a regular basis. Too much software, even the stuff that shipped with Windows, got really cranky. I assume that some library/DLL/COM component/VXD/wotever got all worked up over seeing things changing behind its back.
And they certainly don't allow it for user switching, which is annoying. Neither does Apple, for that matter, probably there's left-over bits of the old single-user Mac OS 9 universe that freak out if multiple instances are run.
I could run one copy of IIS in two instances on separate addresses.
I could run one copy of the Windows Networking service in two instances on two addresses, so that the files and other objects visible in each instance could be completely unrelated... with one only exposing "D:" as "\\servername1\ftp" and the other on the other interface exposing "\\servername2\C", "\\servername2\D", and so on...
I could run one copy of Active Directory in two instances and serve two completely serapate DNS hierarchies on different interfaces.
I could create an environment where "C:" was mapped to "C:\chrooted\C" and so on, and even registry access from that environment went to hives in C:\chrooted\C\Windows...?
And what part of "do not have anything to do with" do you not understand? If you have only approved content in your possession (you created or someone else created and said it was OK)? Then DRM is absolutely irrelevent.
You changed the language. You originally wrote "illegal". It's legal for me to rip a CD whether it's protected by Sony's DRM or not. It's legal for me to make a copy of a video, or create a new work of art based on its content. It's legal for me to copy and modify any work that is in my posession.
What's illegal is redistributing it without authorization except as is allowed under fair use.
If the creator wants me to play the work only on alternate tuesdays while showering for no more than 30 minutes at a time, they can implement it in DRM, but that doesn't make it illegal for me to use it in other ways. It's not even illegal for me to download a copy that someone else has already extracted from the DRMed package I purchased so I'm not put to the trouble of muffling my shower and taping it myself. It may be illegal for them to distribute it (though not necessarily, if they were (for example) paying all the appropriate broadcast fees), but it's not illegal to download it.
DRM restricts your rights more than copyright law does, therefore even if you are obeying all the relevant laws DRM is a burden.
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No working video acceleration?
That's a bummer for gamers, but no problem at all for TLAsoft Annoying Meeting Generator or Very Large Corporation Enterprise Email Trasher. In fact "no video acceleration" is probably a bonus from the IT department's perspective.
Virtualization is definitely a better solution, but what they have now is a palce to start.
You're assuming that whoever wrote the Australian law (if their system works like it does in the US, probably a record company lobbyist) didn't inadvertantly write the law such that it's actually illegal for the copyright holder to make copies of his own works.
No, I'm not assuming that the law in Australia is sane, and it's quite possible that at least some of the non-infringing uses I thought of are actually illegal. But it's vanishingly unlikely that "There are absolutely no legal uses for a device like that here" is actually the case.
The $100 laptop is a feelgood solution looking for a problem.
That may be true, but not because it doesn't have a disk drive.
You know, there's a lot of developers who prefer VS6 to its successors, and there's even community patches to keep the libraries up to spec. It wouldn't surprise me if there's people in Microsoft still using VS6 and checking on VS200x occasionally to take advantage of its tighter syntax checking.
If this can be automated, and it sounds like it can, this can be used to get Macbooks into businesses, because it reduces the risk that an employee won't be able to use the latest middleware-client-of-the-week when they need it. The employees who get them may end up using rdesktop to a shared XP box for their timecard or purchasing, but they'll get them because they can say "if it doesn't work with Obscuresoft Collaboration Mangler I can always boot to XP".
Once you can live without threat of dying from starvation, and have a roof over your head, and can sustain that lifestyle, THEN you can worry about education and gaining such materialistic things such as computers.
I know it may be a big surprise to you, but most of the people in the third world are making out a lot better than that. It's not all scary pictures from Ethiopia and Bangladesh.
The last thing you want in a shared computer is local storage.
Really.
In fact the last thing you want in a shared computer is a computer.
A personal computer is great when you can afford all the support infrastructure for a computer, but you can build a terminal a lot cheaper and it can do 90% of the stuff 90% of the people actually need. Let's face it, for a lot of people a computer is primarily a communications device. When people say "World of Warcraft is the new golf" they mean "it's chat with scenery".
there's the question of how ALL programs run on it.
This isn't DOS, applications don't talk directly to the hardware any more. The NT kernel doens't even allow applications to access the hardware, so as long as the drivers are there why should there be a problem?
And who cares about Vista?
I'm still running Windows 2000 and at this point I can't see any reason why I should even consider "upgrading" to XP, let alone Vista. Let's face it, XP is just 2000 with ugly window decorations and a nerfed version of Terminal Server bundled in. Since they managed to get a reasonably unified driver model with Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000, they haven't gone anywhere. Half the stuff they promised originally for XP has been taken out, and most of the rest has been back-ported to NT5 (2000/XP). Internet Explorer is playing catch-up again... apparently choking Netscape off financially only gave it a bit of breathing room.
What's left for Vista? Translucent window borders (you know, like Mac OS *used* to have and removed because it was annoying)?
Don't be silly. Of course there's a legal use. If the copyright owner permits you to copy the CD to your iPod then your entitled to do so.
For example:
* You are the copyright owner.
* You are a client of the copyright owner and you license that use.
* The content is public domain.
* The copyright owner explicitly permits this use for any reason.
For an example of the latter in the electronic book market, Baen Books has included a CD with a number of the novels they publish containing electronic versions of these books. They explicitly allow you to copy the CD for your friends.
I've already got a tiny device that rips music directly to my iPod.
I think it may actually be smaller than the iUpload, but I had to BYODKM.
``The best story about the Three Laws is one Asimov used to tell: he went to see 2001 and as HAL began to go psycho, Asimov says he got more and more agitated, finally jumping up and declaring to all around that: "HAL is breaking First Law!" to which his companion (sometimes supposed to be Carl Sagan, but it's surely apocryphal)replied: "So strike him with lightning Isaac."'' -- Some Guy on /..
I heard it was Clarke himself, not Sagan, but it's been so long since I read it first that I can't remember. "Any sufficiently old story is indistinguishable from an urban legend." -- Somebody's first law.
Half the "Robot" stories are set pieces with the robot apparently breaking the Three Laws and Susan Calvin (or whoever) figuring out that the Three Laws were intact... because the rbot didn't recognise the human, or the robot didn't know the human could be damaged that way, or the robot was actually protecting the human from a greater harm...
In the real world, well, expecting a robot to figure out what's safe or not without human intervention is silly. Which is why I'm still amazed that Microsoft insists on making the Microsoft HTML control do that very thing...
The first law of gaming is that you don't make the player do anything that isn't fun, unless you get more money by doing it. Back when computer games were just starting to take over from arcade games and many of them had the same "you get 5 ships, and when they're gone you have to start over" format, my buddy Karl put it this way: if you're not making the guy pump quarters into the game, let him keep playing forever.
Later on games developed "infinite" lives and save points and when killing the same things over and over again palled you got zones and bosses and mini-bosses and super-bosses and puzzles... and games where you had to do the same things over and over got panned.
If there's anything in the game that can be automated by a keystroke sequence, then that's something that's going to be insanely boring for a human, and it shouldn't be in the game.
One user creates a file, another user obtains a read lock on the file. The file's owner can do *nothing* to that file until the read lock is removed.
Mandatory locking is actually quite common in multiuser systems. UNIX is a bit of an exception.
the OP could have been correct in their jurisidction, and you correct in yours.
Doesn't matter. It wasn't qualified by "in this jurisdiction". It was a blanket statement that the only actions DRM prevents you from performing are illegal anyway.
Consider a DRM which allows one backup copy, vs, a copyright law which contains no such allowance
That's not the DRM allowing it, it's the license allowing it.
How is this any different from any other closed proprietary system?
It's not.
But if they do this, shouldnt they also say MS must allow office for example to run on any OS?
There's actually a better case for that.
If there existed music where the only way to hear it without distortion was to use iTMS, like the only way to access some kinds of documents without losing formatting is to use Microsoft Office, one could argue that equal access requires making at least a Word format reader available for any operating system.
So, DRM has limited my legal activities, right ? Wrong - it has only stopped me doing something which is actually illegal
I've already addressed this.
The original statement I was responding to was an unconditional statement that unless you (the generic you) want to break the law, DRM doesn't matter.
Not "unless you want to break the law or you live in a country with restrictive copyright law".
The statement I disagreed with was: "DRM restricts your rights more than copyright law does"
OK, "DRM restricts your rights no less than copyright law does, and any effective implementation of DRM must of necessity restrict your rights more than copyright law does."
At the very least an open-source implementation of a DRM-enabled viewer is impossible in practice, so you can't use an open-source viewer to view DRM-protected files even if you are legally entitled to view those files. Where a viewer contains open-source components, it has to have a mechanism to restrict you from replacing any of those components even if that's necessary for you to view the content you're legally entitled to view.
Whether this is a restriction you are likely to find burdensome isn't the point. Whether some reading of someone's laws can be interpreted to make this illegal isn't the point. The point is that theer are people who are not interested in breaking the law whose rights are restricted beyond the restrictions established in copyright law by any moderately effective DRM scheme.
IMO we should on principle _not_ be attacking _technologies_ simply because they "can be used" to do something we don't like.
I also covered this.
I repeat: I'm not attacking anything.
I'm simply explaining why you do need to care about DRM even if you're not planning on violating copyright law.
That's it.
Oh, good, can you tell me the commands and settings I can use in Vista to make these things work using unmodified applications and no custom code?
I suspect I could do most of them by running UNIX applications under Interix, but that's not using Windows... that's using a hosted UNIX under the NT kernel, you might as well save your miney and use Linux or FreeBSD. Windows isn't the NT kernel, it's the kernel, Win32/Win64, and all the other bits distributed with it. The kernel itself is rather nice (though I've run into single-instance issues that seem tro be pretty deeply embedded) but it's not where most of the problems are.
passing input to the existing instance of an app isn't the default behaviour on windows either
Doesn't that depend on the libraries you use? It seems unlikely to me that so many applications would have this single-instance behaviour if the system software didn't make it easy to do. Apple, I know, has a framework for such multi-document applications, and Microsoft has promoted it (with or without MDI) from the beginning.
the same sort of thing can happen on linux too from what i can gather.
In Linux, Firefox had to go to a lot of extra trouble to make it behave like it does on Windows. There's nothing in the UNIX environment that makes a single-instance application natural... the original Netscape didn't work that way, for instance, if you wanted to open a URL in an existing instance of Netscape you had to pass it a fragment of Javascript to tell the running Netscape to open.
That's what happens in UNIX when an application doesn't "think of the multiple sessions in one account". To get the Windows behaviour you have to deliberately deal with multiple instances and change your behaviour.
In many places it is not, regardless of DRM. In some places, the act of circumventing the DRM makes it illegal.
Erm, if your computer is properly secured you will never know that Sony's DRM is on the disc, because your computer won't be looking for files on an audio CD.
If the DRM makes it impossible for me to properly secure my computer... then again it makes legal activities impossible... and therefore DRM does matter even if you're not interested in stealing copyrighted files.
That doesn't make the original false-to-fact statement correct: not only was it not qualified by "in this country" or "in that country" but no matter what the laws are DRM can be used to restrict you further than the laws do.
It could - but then so could other laws, or contracts etc. Or, on the other hand it could restrict you less, or about the same.
So? That doesn't mean 'you don't have to care aboutthe law if you're not doing anything illegal' or 'you don't have to care about your rental contract if you're not planning on stealing the car'. It doesn't matter whether DRM might issue in an era of previously unknown creativity or a dictatorship worse than the world has ever seen... it doesn't change the fact that you are effected by it even if you're not looking to play illegal content.
Shouldn't matter what the runtime libraries involved are, it's the operating system's job to create an environment for another instance of the program to run in.
Windows 2000 Terminal Services allows for two sessions under the same user id.
I used to be able to do this under some of the early versions of what became Terminal Services, but it wasn't practical to try and do it on a regular basis. Too much software, even the stuff that shipped with Windows, got really cranky. I assume that some library/DLL/COM component/VXD/wotever got all worked up over seeing things changing behind its back.
And they certainly don't allow it for user switching, which is annoying. Neither does Apple, for that matter, probably there's left-over bits of the old single-user Mac OS 9 universe that freak out if multiple instances are run.
Vista is pretty much multi-user on the Unix level
So in one instance of Vista:
I could run one copy of IIS in two instances on separate addresses.
I could run one copy of the Windows Networking service in two instances on two addresses, so that the files and other objects visible in each instance could be completely unrelated... with one only exposing "D:" as "\\servername1\ftp" and the other on the other interface exposing "\\servername2\C", "\\servername2\D", and so on...
I could run one copy of Active Directory in two instances and serve two completely serapate DNS hierarchies on different interfaces.
I could create an environment where "C:" was mapped to "C:\chrooted\C" and so on, and even registry access from that environment went to hives in C:\chrooted\C\Windows...?
And what part of "do not have anything to do with" do you not understand? If you have only approved content in your possession (you created or someone else created and said it was OK)? Then DRM is absolutely irrelevent.
You changed the language. You originally wrote "illegal". It's legal for me to rip a CD whether it's protected by Sony's DRM or not. It's legal for me to make a copy of a video, or create a new work of art based on its content. It's legal for me to copy and modify any work that is in my posession.
What's illegal is redistributing it without authorization except as is allowed under fair use.
If the creator wants me to play the work only on alternate tuesdays while showering for no more than 30 minutes at a time, they can implement it in DRM, but that doesn't make it illegal for me to use it in other ways. It's not even illegal for me to download a copy that someone else has already extracted from the DRMed package I purchased so I'm not put to the trouble of muffling my shower and taping it myself. It may be illegal for them to distribute it (though not necessarily, if they were (for example) paying all the appropriate broadcast fees), but it's not illegal to download it.
DRM restricts your rights more than copyright law does, therefore even if you are obeying all the relevant laws DRM is a burden.