This is absolutely verboten in (to my knowledge) any western European country.
In Switzerland, for example, it is even illegal for cops to tap into the unemployments office database, since this is in no way related to their official tasks. They may tap into the DMV (equivalent) database, since this is significant for their work.
Save for th UK, which appears to be in the process of killing off any form of privacy, all European countries have similar or comparable data protection laws.
You might want to check out the European Data Protection Directive; a piece of legislation which pisses a lot of US business monsters mightily off.
This is not a theoretical problem: on advice of counsel, Edward Felton of Princeton University has refrained from publishing his cracks of several Secure Digitial Music Initiative watermarking systems
I consider this little tidbit the absolutely most frightening part of the ongoing saga of turning an innocious act (copy a song I like for you) into the heinous criminal act of piracy, which supports terrorists and drug dealers (official BSA PR spiel, unfortunately The Register link to the story is broken).
I sure like this definition! Been there ssen it; and it didn't work out too well.
There was a big database vendor killing off their OpenVMS port.
So they sent off their (local) top sales - and support manglement yokels to one of their most important customers. A support engineer and a technical consultant (me) where tagging along on the important mission to make the customer see the light and migrate the database servers to a U*X flavour.
After the manglement guys gave their spiel the customers head of nasty dealings looked at them and said:
"Now look: We developed the whole application under OpenVMS in ADA and even custom wrote the connectivity libraries and header files, because your ADA ones suck!"
"Now, I see two options: We can either changes the operating system or we can change the database! Now guess what..."
Unfortunately I wasn't in the position to laugh out loud, but it was hard not to when I saw that evil smirk in the guys face.
Probably the biggest mistake is to underestimate the resources (energy and money) required for sales and marketing.
I've worked for a version 1 company in '94 and everything imploded, despite the fact that the product was good, well ahead of its time, customer driven and it filled a market demand.
I agree so much with your statements about planning. Looking back on founding my own company (a modest database consultancy outfit) my best decision (apart from running a decent OS) was to craft a business plan.
The important part is not the plan as such, but the fact that you are forced to really confront all those issues (product, market need, competition, financing whathaveyou...) that solely exist somewhat neboulusly in your head.
You are absolutely right and I wholeheartedly support your opinion, if:
you use your PC to play [insert favorite game]
the main purpose is to listen to ripped off MP3s
the sole purpose is to watch pr0n
it's mainly used to troll/.
However, you should recognize that some of us actually use computers for professional purposes, that others are in charge of multy terabyte databases, that some of us are responsible to guarantee a mere 3'000'000 transactions a day on our clustered systems and that - if our systems crash - every minute might cost 10'000s of $.
Go ahead, use your PC as a toy, but please don't slam us professionals whose lifehoods actually depend on the fact that the systems for which we are responsible don't get corrupted.
You can go now and play with your personal computer
Anyway, I disagree with what you're saying. Using Greenpeace's logo without their permission is a trademark violation
That's questionable and probably has to be decided by the courts (sigh) eventually. I urge you to have a look at the Monsantos web site. An activists website which makes multiple use of the Monsanto trademark and has a site design which precisely resembles the Monsanto corporations old site. BTW: This is not a parody site.
Is it possible that Monsanto just doesn't care ? Given their history in litigation happyness it's not likely (but what do I know?). It's actually more likely that the activists can get away under some fair use doctrine.
Now, using a logo for a link is probably far less misleading then the example above.
Nothing here to apologize. You are not likely to get a lot of visitors that get off on dancing coffee cups or a streaming video from President Dubia.
You need basic information on that side and a possibility to get involved and organized. All of that is there and for the rest: So what ?
The directive has already been accepted by the EU Parliament, and from my understanding it will be hard to make wide-ranging amendments to the directive without public outcry.
I didn't know that and consider it even more important to get started now and get as many people (especially the mainstram) involved in issues like
Copy control
Content censorship and
Abuse of our legal system to push an agenda of greed while depriving us of rights which where developed in centuries (maybe beginning with Gutenberg)
Although restricing linking (by definition of the web) is a stupid idea, organizations do have valid reasons to restrict linking.
For example: Greenpeace should be very weary about corporations that are in reality environmental pigs, but try to obsfucate this by displaying the Greenpeace logo and link to their site.
Same applies for Amnesty International. Should Amnesty accept links from a government site of a country that is known to literally stomp over human rights, just so they can abuse the organization for a bit of PR of their own ?
Deep linking is another issue and I can accept a site owners desire that you enter through their main page (portal if you wish).
All that said, it should not be up to courts or legisilators to regulate this. This should be handled by software. Other advantages could be to display selected pages to "abusive linkers".
Just imagine a page like:
Thank you for visiting greenpeace.org. You are visiting from http://www.dubia.com which intends to use our site and organization for some cheap propaganda.
We would like to inform you, that the current American government has turned back the wheel on environmental issues 30 years in just 3 month and we thought you should be aware of that.
Armed with that knowledge: Wlecome to greenpeace.org
With such a scheme in place cheap PR tricks could be the equivalent of aiming a double barreled shotgun at your feet while pulling both triggers.
Man, will that be moded down as redundant, but it's so nice to find a likeminded European, especially since this important subject has drawn all of 17 comments (1+) at this time.
This is already happening, but so slowly we don't notice it. Ostensibly to appear more "user-friendly", computers now come with Windows pre-installed, with no Windows CD, just a "Restore kit".
Wow, don't even get me started. When I ordered my neato 3'000 quid Dell laptop (+# whatever for Win2K) I got one of those thingies. Now, this renders this paid for license useless. I have a 5 gig Windoze partition to edit DOCuments on a train ride and was seriously considering a Linux only laptop instead of forking another 100 quid for a W2K upgrade for my (hear, hear) legal NT license. I cannot have a dual boot with that utter piece of trash CD that Dell ships on behalf of Microsoft. A polite letter to Dell on the subject went unanswered, which I consider rotten customer care. And don't even get me started on Winmodems. They suck away CPU cycles and essentially represent a piece of shit software.
Furthermore, you will be forced to watch the adverts (leaving the
room whilst the adverts are playing being in breach of the licence you implicitly agreed to by playing the disc)
Man, you're a cynic with a problem. The problem is you're possibly dead on! And that's the precise reason why we have to fight even slight tendencies pointing into such a direction and thatswhy such a mailing list is important as a starting point for all of us to get our lazy asses of the couch and actually do something before we don't even know what hit us.
Although there's not mutch there yet. I urge every European (actually everybody) to subscribe to the mailing list.
First for the record: I never downloaded an MP3 (too cumbersome, to expensive in Europe), I watch movies preferredly in theatres with a 250m2 screen and an outrageous sound system and each and every piece of software I use is licensed.
This is not necessarily because I share the RIAAs moral values, or microsofts ideas about business ethics, but for media, see above and for software, it could wreck my business and ultimately me.
But, the development we see in the US is frightening. Computers are driven either into totally dumbed down, copy control encrypted, AOL compliant Idiot Boxes (or might be rendered illegal as a copy protection circumvention device eventually), media, especially movies and music, are turned into a pay per view event, provided you have the properly licensed Idiot Box - or be prepared to learn an instrument if you want music (watch out for books soon to come) and the American courts (well, at least in DCMA related cases) appear to have lost every last single ounce of common sense.
What's even more frightening (and somewhat related) is the tendency to drive us more and more into content control. Your Idiot Box is soon to come with pre-installed censor-ware, or your ISP is forced to filter stuff deemed bad for kiddies or for our spiritual well being (and who the hell decided that anyway)!
In the US those changes came in somewhat at a sneeky pace and - with few exceptions - nobody actually realized the impact of those changes until some courts showed us with a vengeance what this actually means.
This is not to be allowed happening in Europe
Although, I have _some_ confidence, that European legislators and courts value the individual somewhat higher then the business entity, this can change mighty rapidly, given enough money for bribi^H^H^H^H^H lobbying purpose and has to be fought before we suddenly find our self on Times Square just after the Disney Corporation was there for "refurbishing".
I hope this makes it to the Supreme Court and becomes case law of the 1st Amendment variety.
Although I agree in theory, this would backfire big time.
Given the current political climate in the US where corporate greed is valued far above general welfare, the environment and the individual I fear for the worst.
Especial if Mr. Bush gets the chance to replace more supreme court judges with corporate apologists.
I mean, just imagine you're sitting at home, watching a nice, educational gameshow on telly and suddenly the cravings kick in.
Now, instead of just calling the Chinese delivery for that evil MSG infested food, you can fire up your WAP browser and after 10-30 minutes just crank out your order for the mixed deluxe Sushi platter; all conveniently charged to your credit card.
Then, two days later UPS is at your doorstep with that package from Omaha, which you open and inhale the smell...
Billboards are passive; they do not take up any of your time if you don't choose to look at them. TV
and web ads are the price you pay for the content you view; you can choose to watch PBS instead
(or even read a book, imagine that!) or go to a website that doesn't have banners (or doesn't use
the web at all). Plus, all of these methods of advertising are fully paid for by the advertisers.
Nowhere in the constitution nor in the Bill of Rights does it say that you have the right to never be irritated. That is the price of freedom, and one that too many people are trying to legislate away. If we are to have true freedom of speech, you might actually hear something that could in some way be slightly unpleasant, disagreeable, or (horror of horrors) offensive to you.
Why, of course neither the American - nor any other constitution (yes indeed - there are others) provides a guarantee not to be irritated.
But probably most constitutions value the right of an individual to be left alone higher then the right of somebody yelling his message, by whatever means available, into my ear.
I also don't think that the American constitution grants you the freedom to forge e-mail addresses, to abuse third party networks or to crash computers to get your message across.
Further, you guys (usually) have flat rate network connections. Virtually the entire rest of the world does not. We might pay as much as 5$ an hour for a simple, local telephone connection. This means my bandwith comes at a price.
If you spam me (or any Asian, African, Australian or European) you are stealing, it costs. Does the American constitution mention a right to steal?
See, I didn't think so.
Free speech means you can stand on a park bench and blabber what you want to blabber, it means that you can publish text, image, video, music whatever. It means you have the right to publish, it doesn't however give you the right to force your publication on me. Especialliy not when I'm forced to pay for it.
You mention filters. Unusable for me. I run my own business and even when my primary e-mail address is spammed 9 times out of 10, I can't filter it. The risk that one legitimate message gets filtered is just too big. Such a filtered message could cost me ten thousands of $ in lost revenue.
So, to summarize:
You have the right to blurt your message, regardless how ludicrous
You have no right to force that message on me.
And you have especially no right to force your message at societys and my expense, OK?
This is not a case about spamming, it's a case about computer theft and damage.
It's nice to see that some jerks may do hard time for that, but it would be even nicer if they are punished becaause of the actual act of spamming.
Aparently legislators only get involved when business are hurt, but not when we, as individuals have to deal with this pest.
I fear this is not really a victory for the anti-spam league (although it might send a strong message to spam-wannabes).
On a sidenote: Salon ran a story a year ago, in which Janelle Brown actually tried to get rich quick, lose 90 pounds in a week or sign up for the greatest pr0n available TOTALLY FREEEEE!!!
The ironic thing is, that she had a really hard time actually contacting the seller and purchasing all those goodies...
Slashdot Mirror
By virtue of reading The Reg I got the impression that the UK is slowly turning into a freakazoid police state, led by clueless politicians.
There are rules about government departments not sharing data unless neccesary, but everyone knows that it still goes on.
Of course, but it's nevertheless a much better situation then a self regulating industry (ho!ho!).
I agree with your assessment that a central data vault is a dangerous preposition, but that was not at what I was getting at.
In Switzerland, for example, it is even illegal for cops to tap into the unemployments office database, since this is in no way related to their official tasks. They may tap into the DMV (equivalent) database, since this is significant for their work.
Save for th UK, which appears to be in the process of killing off any form of privacy, all European countries have similar or comparable data protection laws.
You might want to check out the European Data Protection Directive; a piece of legislation which pisses a lot of US business monsters mightily off.
I consider this little tidbit the absolutely most frightening part of the ongoing saga of turning an innocious act (copy a song I like for you) into the heinous criminal act of piracy, which supports terrorists and drug dealers (official BSA PR spiel, unfortunately The Register link to the story is broken).
I sure like this definition! Been there ssen it; and it didn't work out too well.
There was a big database vendor killing off their OpenVMS port.
So they sent off their (local) top sales - and support manglement yokels to one of their most important customers. A support engineer and a technical consultant (me) where tagging along on the important mission to make the customer see the light and migrate the database servers to a U*X flavour.
After the manglement guys gave their spiel the customers head of nasty dealings looked at them and said:
"Now look: We developed the whole application under OpenVMS in ADA and even custom wrote the connectivity libraries and header files, because your ADA ones suck!"
"Now, I see two options: We can either changes the operating system or we can change the database! Now guess what..."
Unfortunately I wasn't in the position to laugh out loud, but it was hard not to when I saw that evil smirk in the guys face.
I've worked for a version 1 company in '94 and everything imploded, despite the fact that the product was good, well ahead of its time, customer driven and it filled a market demand.
I agree so much with your statements about planning. Looking back on founding my own company (a modest database consultancy outfit) my best decision (apart from running a decent OS) was to craft a business plan.
The important part is not the plan as such, but the fact that you are forced to really confront all those issues (product, market need, competition, financing whathaveyou...) that solely exist somewhat neboulusly in your head.
Especially the last paragraph once again illustrates to me why it's worthwhile to hang in there and stick to ideals.
Here's a link which should answer your questions regarding registration policy.
From my own experience they do a fine job.
you use your PC to play [insert favorite game]
the main purpose is to listen to ripped off MP3s
the sole purpose is to watch pr0n
it's mainly used to troll /.
However, you should recognize that some of us actually use computers for professional purposes, that others are in charge of multy terabyte databases, that some of us are responsible to guarantee a mere 3'000'000 transactions a day on our clustered systems and that - if our systems crash - every minute might cost 10'000s of $.
Go ahead, use your PC as a toy, but please don't slam us professionals whose lifehoods actually depend on the fact that the systems for which we are responsible don't get corrupted.
You can go now and play with your personal computer
As is obvious: Me neither. But I figured it's a nice analogy :>
That's questionable and probably has to be decided by the courts (sigh) eventually. I urge you to have a look at the Monsantos web site. An activists website which makes multiple use of the Monsanto trademark and has a site design which precisely resembles the Monsanto corporations old site. BTW: This is not a parody site.
Is it possible that Monsanto just doesn't care ? Given their history in litigation happyness it's not likely (but what do I know?). It's actually more likely that the activists can get away under some fair use doctrine.
Now, using a logo for a link is probably far less misleading then the example above.
Nothing here to apologize. You are not likely to get a lot of visitors that get off on dancing coffee cups or a streaming video from President Dubia.
You need basic information on that side and a possibility to get involved and organized. All of that is there and for the rest: So what ?
The directive has already been accepted by the EU Parliament, and from my understanding it will be hard to make wide-ranging amendments to the directive without public outcry.
I didn't know that and consider it even more important to get started now and get as many people (especially the mainstram) involved in issues like
Copy control
Content censorship and
Abuse of our legal system to push an agenda of greed while depriving us of rights which where developed in centuries (maybe beginning with Gutenberg)
For example: Greenpeace should be very weary about corporations that are in reality environmental pigs, but try to obsfucate this by displaying the Greenpeace logo and link to their site.
Same applies for Amnesty International. Should Amnesty accept links from a government site of a country that is known to literally stomp over human rights, just so they can abuse the organization for a bit of PR of their own ?
Deep linking is another issue and I can accept a site owners desire that you enter through their main page (portal if you wish).
All that said, it should not be up to courts or legisilators to regulate this. This should be handled by software. Other advantages could be to display selected pages to "abusive linkers".
Just imagine a page like:
With such a scheme in place cheap PR tricks could be the equivalent of aiming a double barreled shotgun at your feet while pulling both triggers.This is already happening, but so slowly we don't notice it. Ostensibly to appear more "user-friendly", computers now come with Windows pre-installed, with no Windows CD, just a "Restore kit".
Wow, don't even get me started. When I ordered my neato 3'000 quid Dell laptop (+# whatever for Win2K) I got one of those thingies. Now, this renders this paid for license useless. I have a 5 gig Windoze partition to edit DOCuments on a train ride and was seriously considering a Linux only laptop instead of forking another 100 quid for a W2K upgrade for my (hear, hear) legal NT license. I cannot have a dual boot with that utter piece of trash CD that Dell ships on behalf of Microsoft. A polite letter to Dell on the subject went unanswered, which I consider rotten customer care. And don't even get me started on Winmodems. They suck away CPU cycles and essentially represent a piece of shit software.
Furthermore, you will be forced to watch the adverts (leaving the room whilst the adverts are playing being in breach of the licence you implicitly agreed to by playing the disc)
Man, you're a cynic with a problem. The problem is you're possibly dead on! And that's the precise reason why we have to fight even slight tendencies pointing into such a direction and thatswhy such a mailing list is important as a starting point for all of us to get our lazy asses of the couch and actually do something before we don't even know what hit us.
First for the record: I never downloaded an MP3 (too cumbersome, to expensive in Europe), I watch movies preferredly in theatres with a 250m2 screen and an outrageous sound system and each and every piece of software I use is licensed.
This is not necessarily because I share the RIAAs moral values, or microsofts ideas about business ethics, but for media, see above and for software, it could wreck my business and ultimately me.
But, the development we see in the US is frightening. Computers are driven either into totally dumbed down, copy control encrypted, AOL compliant Idiot Boxes (or might be rendered illegal as a copy protection circumvention device eventually), media, especially movies and music, are turned into a pay per view event, provided you have the properly licensed Idiot Box - or be prepared to learn an instrument if you want music (watch out for books soon to come) and the American courts (well, at least in DCMA related cases) appear to have lost every last single ounce of common sense.
What's even more frightening (and somewhat related) is the tendency to drive us more and more into content control. Your Idiot Box is soon to come with pre-installed censor-ware, or your ISP is forced to filter stuff deemed bad for kiddies or for our spiritual well being (and who the hell decided that anyway)!
In the US those changes came in somewhat at a sneeky pace and - with few exceptions - nobody actually realized the impact of those changes until some courts showed us with a vengeance what this actually means.
This is not to be allowed happening in Europe
Although, I have _some_ confidence, that European legislators and courts value the individual somewhat higher then the business entity, this can change mighty rapidly, given enough money for bribi^H^H^H^H^H lobbying purpose and has to be fought before we suddenly find our self on Times Square just after the Disney Corporation was there for "refurbishing".
Add all the free beer supplied in the casinos and maybe it's not such a bad place after all...
Although I agree in theory, this would backfire big time.
Given the current political climate in the US where corporate greed is valued far above general welfare, the environment and the individual I fear for the worst.
Especial if Mr. Bush gets the chance to replace more supreme court judges with corporate apologists.
You surely ment to be funny, but I resent this.
I mean, just imagine you're sitting at home, watching a nice, educational gameshow on telly and suddenly the cravings kick in.
Now, instead of just calling the Chinese delivery for that evil MSG infested food, you can fire up your WAP browser and after 10-30 minutes just crank out your order for the mixed deluxe Sushi platter; all conveniently charged to your credit card.
Then, two days later UPS is at your doorstep with that package from Omaha, which you open and inhale the smell...
Err! Never mind...
Not if I tell telemarketers and doorbell ringers, that they are not welcome. At least it shouldn't be in my behavioural value system.
Hallelujah, brother !
Why, of course neither the American - nor any other constitution (yes indeed - there are others) provides a guarantee not to be irritated.
But probably most constitutions value the right of an individual to be left alone higher then the right of somebody yelling his message, by whatever means available, into my ear.
I also don't think that the American constitution grants you the freedom to forge e-mail addresses, to abuse third party networks or to crash computers to get your message across.
Further, you guys (usually) have flat rate network connections. Virtually the entire rest of the world does not. We might pay as much as 5$ an hour for a simple, local telephone connection. This means my bandwith comes at a price.
If you spam me (or any Asian, African, Australian or European) you are stealing, it costs. Does the American constitution mention a right to steal?
See, I didn't think so.
Free speech means you can stand on a park bench and blabber what you want to blabber, it means that you can publish text, image, video, music whatever. It means you have the right to publish, it doesn't however give you the right to force your publication on me. Especialliy not when I'm forced to pay for it.
You mention filters. Unusable for me. I run my own business and even when my primary e-mail address is spammed 9 times out of 10, I can't filter it. The risk that one legitimate message gets filtered is just too big. Such a filtered message could cost me ten thousands of $ in lost revenue.
So, to summarize:
You have the right to blurt your message, regardless how ludicrous
You have no right to force that message on me.
And you have especially no right to force your message at societys and my expense, OK?
It's nice to see that some jerks may do hard time for that, but it would be even nicer if they are punished becaause of the actual act of spamming.
Aparently legislators only get involved when business are hurt, but not when we, as individuals have to deal with this pest.
I fear this is not really a victory for the anti-spam league (although it might send a strong message to spam-wannabes). On a sidenote: Salon ran a story a year ago, in which Janelle Brown actually tried to get rich quick, lose 90 pounds in a week or sign up for the greatest pr0n available TOTALLY FREEEEE!!!
The ironic thing is, that she had a really hard time actually contacting the seller and purchasing all those goodies...
No argument here; make it half a dozen, to keep everybody happy :)
At least in the German speaking parts...
+5, funny
Yes, of course. This is because they are so concerned about our well-being.
Oh, and since I have the chance to educate you, never forget that the earth is flat and pigs can fly...