with the state of the mail delivery as it is, a letter won't get through in a timely fashion. A handwritten fax will be delivered instantly, and will get you a letter in return, and possibly even make an impression.
I'm going to mark mine as Personal, and ask for a chance to speak face to face.
Monty Python, the Argument Sketch. We're going round and round without accomplishing much.
Devices that are equipped with microphones only record mp3 in monoaural at low bitrate. Nokia phones, as covered here earlier, only allow files to transfer off the device in DRM protected format, even if you imported them in mp3, and you are the owner of the file.
Minidisc suffers the same problem, where you can digitally import the file, but only export it via analogue even if you're the owner and creator of the file.
It's not so much that they refuse to allow you to record it, but that once you've recorded it, it's recorded with lousy quality even though the device is capable of better, or that the device refuses export of the file.
Here we are arguing about devices and the useless measures that artificially limit their capabilities, when the focus is the bad legislation and heavy handed lawyer threats that have inspired these limits on the devices. We're talking about the tool used in a hypothetical crime rather than talking about the badly written law that defines the crime.
I agree that there are no existing video cameras that recognize copyrighted material when I point the camera at a television, but don't rule out that such a thing could exist in the future. If we strike out against the bad legislation that inspires this, technologists won't have to spend time divising such recording equipment.
Have you read the draft of the SSSCA, that legislates all digital devices must have digital rights management incorporated?
Quote from Nindalf, the parent comment to my original reply:
To me, fair use rights aren't a big concern. If you can see it or hear it, you can get an adequate sample for fair use with a cheap camera or audio recorder. You don't need perfect digital video samples to make your point for a review.
You mention cheap cameras and audio recorders, which I took to mean analogue. I know of no cheap digital equipment.
You state that it would be horribly expensive and impractical for digital cameras and audio recorders to have digital rights management in them that recognizes recordings and prevents copying. I point you to iObjects whose DadioOS is used in HipZip, and plays.ogg,.wma,.mp3, and.aac files, and incorporates DRM into the OS of the player equipped with DadioOS. It may be horribly expensive and impractical (although at $149 USD, it's not that expensive) but it's being rammed into available devices, just as it's been rammed into law.
The DMCA that bars you from exercising it by hiding the work you own behind anything encrypted, is law, but it is not valid- it is bought, overbroad, and unconstitutional. I'm only waiting for the day when it will be recognized as such by the judiciary.
Cries of fair use do not render copyright obsolete, fair use coexists with copyright. Fair use does not coexist with sledgehammer-like copyright enforcement tactics, as fair use is the first thing to get trampled on.
You claim that copying in an analogue format is sufficient for fair use rights exercises.
That's fine and well, but analog formats are slowly being phased out and replaced with digital ones. When all the analogue equipment is gone, what will you use to exercise your right, then?
Sec. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether
such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit
educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in
relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or
value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
The rest of fair use comes from tradition. What is codified here, we need to fight to protect. What rights we assert from tradition, we need to fight harder to codify.
Except, as Dmitry Sklyarov learnt, if you write something outside the US, but it's available to those inside the US, and you travel to the US-- you'll be nabbed in a heartbeat.
plan your vacations carefully, until we get that law struck from the books.
Do I mean that you get a better warranty by buying the computer? Not often- depends on the vendor.
If your drive fails in a computer bought as a whole, the either the goofy kits shop has to replace it and install it for you. Or IBM will, if you've bought their kit. Gateway, HP, anything bought from a reseller like Best Buy, CompUSA, Time, Tiny, etc..., you're out of luck, unless you're loud.
My thought was, that if you've bought boxed goods originally, and knew that you were going to pay someone to install them or install them yourself, the warranty doesn't pay you for your time to install it a second time, same as in auto repair.
When the new car is under warranty, it had better work, and you can't always count on that: Hyundai Excel, Ford Pinto, Fiat, anything with Lucas electrics, etc.... With computers, the case is much the same, it had better work, but you can't count on it 100%, and we're far more accepting of the dregs of computers than we are of automobiles.
I installed an alternator in my co-op's car in the IBM parking lot two weeks ago.
Cadillac sold the Cimarron and now sells the Catera, both lesser machines, one a Chevy relabelled, and the other, an Opel. The Opel seems pretty good so far, but the Cimarron was a piece of yellow citrus if there ever were one.
Because we began this discussion by talking solely about hardware, I've avoided bringing MS into it. You're absolutely right when you imply that most problems are caused by software and you can't get a hardware manufacturer to recognise it until you've fdisk'ed your hard drive-
I'm finding that we're really in agreement here. Do you see anything left to argue over?
I think that the difference between the starter failing and the drive failing, and specifically being reimbursed for installation costs is this:
On the car, you don't buy your starter in a box, you buy it installed. You buy it installed, and the warranty is such that they pay for installation at the dealer.
A better comparison is this:
Your car is out of warranty, you buy a starter at AutoZone and install the starter while laying on your back in the driveway. The starter is under a warranty from AutoZone.
The starter fails, you take it out, go back to AutoZone, and they give you another boxed unit.
We're getting down to silly details, I agree it would be better if we could negotiate our own warranties- not that it'll happen anytime soon.
It's fine and well to bash the Mac for things that are factually correct, like the stock mouse as you point out. (Although it's worth noting that a standard USB scroll-wheel/three button mouse functions correctly with no drivers in OS X.)
It's not so good of you to try and represent falsehoods as truth:
It's easy to program on Macintosh, or at least, as easy or easier than it is on Linux or BSD. Mac OS X comes with the Developer Tools.
Audio applications benefit from the low latency in CoreAudio of Mac OS X.
My Lexicon Core2 card has drivers for Mac and Windows. Cubase is available for both. Sound Studio for OS X is nicely coded, and while not quite as feature rich, works better than SoundForge in many ways.
Darwin isn't proprietary, it's open, and GNU-Darwin is Free.
For the article author, Mac isn't an option. It is a valid option for many others, as long as they haven't got their thinking as clouded as yours appears to be.
Your reply gave me pause, and an opportunity to think about where I stand on limited warranties.
My best answer at this moment is,
Any law that exists for any reason other than to protect citizens and their property is generally bad.
In the specific example, a hard drive fails, we have to determine the value of the loss. How I value my Master's Dissertation and research may not be the same monetary value that you assign to it. Rather than engage in court proceedings to determine value each time data is lost, we have come to accept that our self-created IP is not valued by others, and that the hard drive itself will be replaced. The time and work for installing it isn't any greater than the first time the drive was purchased.
You may not like it, but unless we can come up with an easy way to work out value... The only other possibility is take out data loss insurance that could be used to pay for data recovery services.
If they deleted my Master's Dissertation and the two years' research that went into it, in their search for IP, I'd consider them liable for my two years' worth of time, the tuition I paid to the University, and the future income losses from the raise I would have gotten for having an M.A. degree.
You'd be right to bring a class-action suit, except that IBM is fulfilling their warranty in a speedy fashion.
The notion of a good being saleable for the purpose it was intended isn't separate from the warranty that's provided on the condition that the item fails before it's life expectancy.
Now, if IBM had failed to honor the warranty, and the alleged large number of drives had failed, then there'd be room for legal action. EXCEPT, IBM has acted honorably.
Actually, I gave up buying ANY CDs or DVDs over a year ago.
There are only a few musicians I'm interested in listening to, and only a few movies that might capture my attention.
The RIAA hasn't seen any profit from my in over a year. The MPAA got a few bucks when I saw Shreck in the theatre. (Couldn't resist taking my wife to the movies... what can I say?)
I'm with you in boycotting, and I hope others figure it out sooner rather than later.
As the son of an IBM employee with that same sense of pride, and now an IBM employee, I have to say (without commenting on the alleged bad batch of storage devices) that the IBM storage warranty is second to none.
The company lives up to it's responsibility to customers of drives that fail under warranty.
I was about to buy a HipZip *SOLELY* for the feature of playing OGG, when I read this on iObjects' site about Dadio, the OS that HipZip runs to read.OGG:
"Dadio supports multiple file formats as well as Digital Rights Management
Dadio provides sophisticated write once, read-ahead memory caching/buffering algorithms which enable high performance and skip free playback on spinning media. A robust Codec management subsystem currently supports MP3, MPEG-4, Microsoft WMA, Ogg Vorbis, Dolby AAC, and Voice Age Audible (spoken word) file formats. Additional formats can easily be added within this subsystem. Besides playing MP3s, digitally protected content is managed by Dadio's Digital Rights Management (DRM) subsystem. Much of the music and videos distributed in the future will be digitally protected from unauthorized copying. Dadio currently supports Microsoft and InterTrust digital rights schemes. Like the Codec Manager, the DRM manager is quickly modified by iObjects to accommodate other DRM schemes as they become commercially viable. "
So, what's the point of using a free file format when the OS will over-ride that with it's own DRM crap?
A nice thought, but my University will only accept submissions for my classwork on paper. I'm in the States, they're in England, so I must print and pay Airbone Express to handle them.
I have a script that I'm collaborating on with a person cross-country- he uses a typewriter. We send via-USPS.
I write and fax my legislators.
Sending physical pieces of paper may not be cost effective, but it's the only way to satisfy these particular communication needs.
I can do it in 800x600 happily, if I shrink the dock and the desktop icons.
I don't know if I'd want to do it in 640x480, or smaller, but then, that's something I'll have to try. Hang on, switching resolutions (I'm in OS X right now...)
GEEEZ!!!! THAT'S HUGE!!!! (640x480 on a 19" will do that to you)
If I ever start to go blind, this OS will draw at such a large size that I don't think I'll have to worry-- But here's the real test- launching iMovie for OS X... (nope, it requires 800x600)
Okay, launching Dreamweaver in Classic,
the answer is, it uses the whole screen to crowd in it's palettes. Same as if I did 640x480 on any other screen.
So other than, it's really easy on the eyes, I think the same maxims about screen resolution stand- user higher screen resolutions for apps that rely heavily on palettes.
only I don't know which part of what I wrote resembled some Tom Clancy quote. I wrote my comment without assistance or plagarizing, because my thoughts are my own.
I've seen you and posted replies with you here, at MacSlash, libertyboard, and others. Your public key isn't posted here anymore, nor is your email. I want to talk to you about running for office- I'm considering it as well, and wanted to talk about it with you.
Slashdot Mirror
Locally, NC, USA,
firewire cards are $40 USD for PCI. I think I saw them at about $60 for PCMCIA.
FAX OR CALL your senators now.
with the state of the mail delivery as it is, a letter won't get through in a timely fashion. A handwritten fax will be delivered instantly, and will get you a letter in return, and possibly even make an impression.
I'm going to mark mine as Personal, and ask for a chance to speak face to face.
Monty Python, the Argument Sketch. We're going round and round without accomplishing much.
Devices that are equipped with microphones only record mp3 in monoaural at low bitrate. Nokia phones, as covered here earlier, only allow files to transfer off the device in DRM protected format, even if you imported them in mp3, and you are the owner of the file.
Minidisc suffers the same problem, where you can digitally import the file, but only export it via analogue even if you're the owner and creator of the file.
It's not so much that they refuse to allow you to record it, but that once you've recorded it, it's recorded with lousy quality even though the device is capable of better, or that the device refuses export of the file.
Here we are arguing about devices and the useless measures that artificially limit their capabilities, when the focus is the bad legislation and heavy handed lawyer threats that have inspired these limits on the devices. We're talking about the tool used in a hypothetical crime rather than talking about the badly written law that defines the crime.
I agree that there are no existing video cameras that recognize copyrighted material when I point the camera at a television, but don't rule out that such a thing could exist in the future. If we strike out against the bad legislation that inspires this, technologists won't have to spend time divising such recording equipment.
Have you read the draft of the SSSCA, that legislates all digital devices must have digital rights management incorporated?
You mention cheap cameras and audio recorders, which I took to mean analogue. I know of no cheap digital equipment.
You state that it would be horribly expensive and impractical for digital cameras and audio recorders to have digital rights management in them that recognizes recordings and prevents copying. I point you to iObjects whose DadioOS is used in HipZip, and plays
Fair use is a valid law. 17 USC 107.
The DMCA that bars you from exercising it by hiding the work you own behind anything encrypted, is law, but it is not valid- it is bought, overbroad, and unconstitutional. I'm only waiting for the day when it will be recognized as such by the judiciary.
Cries of fair use do not render copyright obsolete, fair use coexists with copyright. Fair use does not coexist with sledgehammer-like copyright enforcement tactics, as fair use is the first thing to get trampled on.
You claim that copying in an analogue format is sufficient for fair use rights exercises.
That's fine and well, but analog formats are slowly being phased out and replaced with digital ones. When all the analogue equipment is gone, what will you use to exercise your right, then?
Much of fair use comes from 17 USC 107:
Sec. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether
such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit
educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in
relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or
value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
The rest of fair use comes from tradition. What is codified here, we need to fight to protect. What rights we assert from tradition, we need to fight harder to codify.
Except, as Dmitry Sklyarov learnt, if you write something outside the US, but it's available to those inside the US, and you travel to the US-- you'll be nabbed in a heartbeat.
plan your vacations carefully, until we get that law struck from the books.
Do I mean that you get a better warranty by buying the computer? Not often- depends on the vendor.
If your drive fails in a computer bought as a whole, the either the goofy kits shop has to replace it and install it for you. Or IBM will, if you've bought their kit. Gateway, HP, anything bought from a reseller like Best Buy, CompUSA, Time, Tiny, etc..., you're out of luck, unless you're loud.
My thought was, that if you've bought boxed goods originally, and knew that you were going to pay someone to install them or install them yourself, the warranty doesn't pay you for your time to install it a second time, same as in auto repair.
When the new car is under warranty, it had better work, and you can't always count on that: Hyundai Excel, Ford Pinto, Fiat, anything with Lucas electrics, etc.... With computers, the case is much the same, it had better work, but you can't count on it 100%, and we're far more accepting of the dregs of computers than we are of automobiles.
I installed an alternator in my co-op's car in the IBM parking lot two weeks ago.
Cadillac sold the Cimarron and now sells the Catera, both lesser machines, one a Chevy relabelled, and the other, an Opel. The Opel seems pretty good so far, but the Cimarron was a piece of yellow citrus if there ever were one.
Because we began this discussion by talking solely about hardware, I've avoided bringing MS into it. You're absolutely right when you imply that most problems are caused by software and you can't get a hardware manufacturer to recognise it until you've fdisk'ed your hard drive-
I'm finding that we're really in agreement here. Do you see anything left to argue over?
I think that the difference between the starter failing and the drive failing, and specifically being reimbursed for installation costs is this:
On the car, you don't buy your starter in a box, you buy it installed. You buy it installed, and the warranty is such that they pay for installation at the dealer.
A better comparison is this:
Your car is out of warranty, you buy a starter at AutoZone and install the starter while laying on your back in the driveway. The starter is under a warranty from AutoZone.
The starter fails, you take it out, go back to AutoZone, and they give you another boxed unit.
We're getting down to silly details, I agree it would be better if we could negotiate our own warranties- not that it'll happen anytime soon.
It's fine and well to bash the Mac for things that are factually correct, like the stock mouse as you point out. (Although it's worth noting that a standard USB scroll-wheel/three button mouse functions correctly with no drivers in OS X.)
It's not so good of you to try and represent falsehoods as truth:
It's easy to program on Macintosh, or at least, as easy or easier than it is on Linux or BSD. Mac OS X comes with the Developer Tools.
Audio applications benefit from the low latency in CoreAudio of Mac OS X.
My Lexicon Core2 card has drivers for Mac and Windows. Cubase is available for both. Sound Studio for OS X is nicely coded, and while not quite as feature rich, works better than SoundForge in many ways.
Darwin isn't proprietary, it's open, and GNU-Darwin is Free.
For the article author, Mac isn't an option. It is a valid option for many others, as long as they haven't got their thinking as clouded as yours appears to be.
I'm not going to insult your analogy.
Your reply gave me pause, and an opportunity to think about where I stand on limited warranties.
My best answer at this moment is,
Any law that exists for any reason other than to protect citizens and their property is generally bad.
In the specific example, a hard drive fails, we have to determine the value of the loss. How I value my Master's Dissertation and research may not be the same monetary value that you assign to it. Rather than engage in court proceedings to determine value each time data is lost, we have come to accept that our self-created IP is not valued by others, and that the hard drive itself will be replaced. The time and work for installing it isn't any greater than the first time the drive was purchased.
You may not like it, but unless we can come up with an easy way to work out value... The only other possibility is take out data loss insurance that could be used to pay for data recovery services.
Thanks
CT,
sorry, I'm vmarks on other boards-
lvmarks AT Mac dot com
I think I'll contact eagle, then.
Let me know your site when you get it up?
If they deleted my Master's Dissertation and the two years' research that went into it, in their search for IP, I'd consider them liable for my two years' worth of time, the tuition I paid to the University, and the future income losses from the raise I would have gotten for having an M.A. degree.
You'd be right to bring a class-action suit, except that IBM is fulfilling their warranty in a speedy fashion.
The notion of a good being saleable for the purpose it was intended isn't separate from the warranty that's provided on the condition that the item fails before it's life expectancy.
Now, if IBM had failed to honor the warranty, and the alleged large number of drives had failed, then there'd be room for legal action. EXCEPT, IBM has acted honorably.
I'm still not a lawyer.
Actually, I gave up buying ANY CDs or DVDs over a year ago.
There are only a few musicians I'm interested in listening to, and only a few movies that might capture my attention.
The RIAA hasn't seen any profit from my in over a year. The MPAA got a few bucks when I saw Shreck in the theatre. (Couldn't resist taking my wife to the movies... what can I say?)
I'm with you in boycotting, and I hope others figure it out sooner rather than later.
As the son of an IBM employee with that same sense of pride, and now an IBM employee, I have to say (without commenting on the alleged bad batch of storage devices) that the IBM storage warranty is second to none.
The company lives up to it's responsibility to customers of drives that fail under warranty.
I was about to buy a HipZip *SOLELY* for the feature of playing OGG, when I read this on iObjects' site about Dadio, the OS that HipZip runs to read .OGG:
"Dadio supports multiple file formats as well as Digital Rights Management
Dadio provides sophisticated write once, read-ahead memory caching/buffering algorithms which enable high performance and skip free playback on spinning media. A robust Codec management subsystem currently supports MP3, MPEG-4, Microsoft WMA, Ogg Vorbis, Dolby AAC, and Voice Age Audible (spoken word) file formats. Additional formats can easily be added within this subsystem. Besides playing MP3s, digitally protected content is managed by Dadio's Digital Rights Management (DRM) subsystem. Much of the music and videos distributed in the future will be digitally protected from unauthorized copying. Dadio currently supports Microsoft and InterTrust digital rights schemes. Like the Codec Manager, the DRM manager is quickly modified by iObjects to accommodate other DRM schemes as they become commercially viable. "
So, what's the point of using a free file format when the OS will over-ride that with it's own DRM crap?
Scuse me, but you've forgotten
IDT/WinChip-
short lived, but a nice example of a chip that claimed to be reverse engineered.
Cyrix- National Semiconductor, and later IBM's take on an x86 chip.
AMD- yes, they had to pay licensing to Intel for many a year from their 486 work.
Perhaps you didn't choose the best of examples.
A nice thought, but my University will only accept submissions for my classwork on paper. I'm in the States, they're in England, so I must print and pay Airbone Express to handle them.
I have a script that I'm collaborating on with a person cross-country- he uses a typewriter. We send via-USPS.
I write and fax my legislators.
Sending physical pieces of paper may not be cost effective, but it's the only way to satisfy these particular communication needs.
I can do it in 800x600 happily, if I shrink the dock and the desktop icons.
I don't know if I'd want to do it in 640x480, or smaller, but then, that's something I'll have to try. Hang on, switching resolutions (I'm in OS X right now...)
GEEEZ!!!! THAT'S HUGE!!!! (640x480 on a 19" will do that to you)
If I ever start to go blind, this OS will draw at such a large size that I don't think I'll have to worry-- But here's the real test- launching iMovie for OS X... (nope, it requires 800x600)
Okay, launching Dreamweaver in Classic,
the answer is, it uses the whole screen to crowd in it's palettes. Same as if I did 640x480 on any other screen.
So other than, it's really easy on the eyes, I think the same maxims about screen resolution stand- user higher screen resolutions for apps that rely heavily on palettes.
Switching back to 1600x1200...
ahhhh.....
only I don't know which part of what I wrote resembled some Tom Clancy quote. I wrote my comment without assistance or plagarizing, because my thoughts are my own.
Just let Ashcroft call all virus-authors terrorists, then see what's criminal!
the 4th Amendment- it was nice while it lasted...
I also meant to say- want to take on running libertyboard? I'd share the duties with you-
Thaidog at macslash is a ref, and I mod at macnn.com forums.
CT,
I've seen you and posted replies with you here, at MacSlash, libertyboard, and others. Your public key isn't posted here anymore, nor is your email. I want to talk to you about running for office- I'm considering it as well, and wanted to talk about it with you.
use my email, and I'll give you my public key.