I think this is extreme, but not paranoid. You see, almost everything in this scenario has been predicted to happen by the present day in previous environmental doomsday scenarios such as "The Population Bomb," "Stand on Zanzibar," and "The Sheep Look Up."
The problem I have with doomsday scenarios is that they assume two incorrect things. First, that all things remain equal (that human ingenuity won't solve or further postpone some problems), and second, that people in power do not care about other people. Certainly this happens, but not as much as you might think. Ultimately, the people can overthrow even the worst despot, and in the industrial and post-industrial west, while monied interests dominate, people in government actually maintain some regard for their constituents. Also, the people running the companies doing harm to the environment will eventually see the consequences in costs and their behavior will change.
You see, the economy is a feedback system, just like the biosphere. The question to me is whether that feddback will be in time to prevent the breaking of some biosphere elastic, as it were. An open question to me. I certainly don't know the answer.
But humans are more social and cooperative than this horror story gives them credit. People band together to survive. They cooperate.
We don't we start simply. Replace you incandescent bulbs with compact flourescents. Do you have a programmable thermostat? Why not? Lower your winter thermostat and raise your summer thermostat. Replace inefficient applicances with efficient ones. You'll reduce greehouse gasses and create manufacturing jobs.
If you do not have to wear a sweater at home in the cold season, you are not doing your part. How many PC's do you have running now? How many monitors are on that no one is looking at?
We do not need to build cabins in the wilderness and live by the light of a naked 40 watt light bulb to improve the situation. Conserve first. You can also add solar power to your home right now. Visit an outfit like Real Goods (the Eddie Bauer of renewable energy) or better, start with Home Power magazine's web site. You can get part of your power from the sun today. It will take several years to "pay you back" in dollars, but it will give you some electricity that didn't pump carbon into the air or add to the pile of nuclear waste.
You and I are not helpless here. Individual action can and should be taken. Lead by example.
If I were running a business, the notion that I would have to expose all my systems to an outside key server for "validation" and that some third party (I don't care how "trustworthy") would be able to disable my software or systems would be totally unacceptable. I will *never* buy "Trusted COmputing Architecture" enabled hardware for anything, ever. Even if it means I stay with the technology I have right now.
Boy, I've never agreed so much with a person on the edge of paranoid hysteria before. It is all economics. Oil is too cheap right now to make investment in alternative technologies attractive. But look at who owns the major PV production facilities: Oil companies. Look at how much effort is going into alternative fuel vehicles even now. The money knows the party will be over in the next generation. My worry isn't a new "oil fascism," because abundant alternatives are more attractive than repressive rationing of ever more expensive oil. When oil gets too expensive, the alternatives become attractive.
My worry is the health of the planet in the mean time. I live in central Minnesota, USA. Our average high temperature this time of year is about 9 degrees F. Yesterday it was 55 degrees F. I know full well one warm winter does not global warming make, but we've had several bizzarely warm years lately. We're s--tting where we eat and it worries me.
You miss my point. My point is that the law is this way not because copyright holders wanted it this way, but because there was no alternative way to do it.
First sale is covered because no method to control subsequent sales that did not require unacceptable state intrusion (like having to title books like one titles automobiles and real estate) could be conceived. The same is true for fair use, expecially with regard to making tapes of LPs or CDs. The law generally arises from the "natural condition" of commerce and society. Prior to digital media, how would you have controlled second sale? If you owned, say, "Star Wars," mightn't you want to get money from that second, third, or Nth sale? I'm saying we have the principle of "first sale" because only by having the police check each sale (or some other such bureaucratic nonsense) could you prevent it. Even our most freedom-hating members of congress didn't want to make garage sales into criminal offenses. But now we have technologies that don't require a title transfer for each book. The book can refuse to sell itself. Now controlling second sale doesn't seem so unreasonable because it doesn't require state intervention. In fact, I am arguing, the DMCA already permits it.
So, with the rise of digital media we have a new technological regime which permits control over both subsequent sale and fair use. The DMCA actually gives content providers permission to control or eliminate your subsequent sale and fair use "rights."
To me, what distinguishes "rights" from "laws" is that "rights" are either natural or Consitutional and thus they are immane. Laws are created and changed at the whim of the legislature. Something is clearly not a right if it can be created or removed by act of Congress. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that guarantees that you have subsequent sale or fair-use rights, and, I could argue, the DMCA has already substantially eroded these "privledges" and that proposed legislation like Holling's CBDTPA would eliminate them entirely.
So, again, I ask, where is the protection? It lies only in our own exercise of our right to participate in our own government. So again, I say, support the EFF and write your congressional delegation. Often.
into the Location bar and, viola! Google search on the words. Konqueror still has some bugs to work out, but it is a good browser. Much better than Netscape 4.x.
Back on topic: The most insightful remark in the interview has to be:
Just because you get a form letter doesn't mean you're not making a difference. I used to work for a Senator handling constituent mail, and it can make a big difference. When only a few letters come in, they get a generic "thanks for writing" note. Once it's a steady stream, a staffer looks into the issue, brief his boss, and composes an issue-specific form letter. Once it's a torrent, them members of Congress start calling each other and asking whether there's any legislation they can sign onto to take credit for fixing the problem.
So keep writing.
I cannot agree more with this. Friends of mine who have worked in congressional offices tell me that just ten letters on a single topic gets noticed. Why? Because there are probably ten people with similar feelings and thoughts on an issue for each one that actually writes. Many elections (esp. in the House) are won or lost by a few hundred or a few thousand votes. The mailbox and the ballot box are still your first best hope for Democracy.
I support the EFF also because lobbying is more direct than mailing and voting, but the influence of the EFF is enhanced with each letter your write. Write, write, write!
As in the Constitution specifically grants Congress the power to pass laws to "promote science and the useful arts" (which is where patent and copyright law get their Consitutional authority) and that "fair use" and "first sale" have no Constitutional language at all. They are specific provisions of the enabling legislation of copyright, given by Congress, not the Constitution, and thus they may be modified or revoked by Congress at will.
The recent Eldred v. Ashcroft case (oral arguments concluded, Supremes deliberating) is tresting the other part of the Consitutional language: "for limited terms"
That's a challenge not to the DMCA, but to the Sonnoy Bono Copyright Extension Act, aka "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act." Still, another important case...
Just to follow up: I was using "legal right" in a constitutional sense, pointing out that the privledge is one granted only in statute, which may be amedned by the legislature at any time. Many laws, including the Copyright Act of 1976, are the codification of the practical limits on enforcement. The DMCA is enabling legislation for a new set of technologies -- technologies that may be used to eliminate what was formerly meant by "first sale" and "fair use." Copyright law is complex, and the DMCA is itself pretty involved. A lot of its "goodness" or "badness" will depend on how it invoked and how its invocations proceed through the courts. The Elcomsoft and Johannsen cases give me some hope.
So, while I stand by my initial post, I will grant you that it was a bit shrill. Nonetheless, and recognizing that I am not a lawyer or legislator, the DMCA in the circumvention section appears to provide all the tools needed for a copyright holder to eliminate both second sale and fair use rights for any medium that has a copy protection technology. That will never happen with paper books, but it can with music, movies, and electronic books.
My argument is against complacency, and I don't think we can afford to be complacent if we beleieve that first sale and fair use are valuable priciples.
However, read the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to circumvent a copy protection device. Where is the principle of first sale then? It is NOT present. I was never saying the law didn't mention first sale, nor that fair use isn't mentioned in the law. But there is a new law in town. See HR2281, aka The Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which amends title 17. See the section starting on page 5 of the PDF file linked (Title 17, Chapter 12 [not in the Act of 1976, is it?] section 1201 - Circumvention of Copy Protection Systems, and 1203 - Civil remedies and 1204 - Criminal Offenses and Penalties).
The fact that the Act of 1976 codified some rights that came to exist through imperfect control does not grant those AS rights to the citizens. Read all of HR2281. It amends title 17 all over the place. I didn't just make this stuff up. Then go on and read the rest of it. Then come back and tell me you have those right enumerated in the Copyright Act of 1976.
This ability to transfer ownership of a DVD, book, CD, or VHS tape is because of the "principle of first sale." This is not a legal right, however, and only exists because it has been technologically impossible to prevent up to now, and because IP vendors were content with the revenue from the first sale.
The technology of perfect IP control is, however, either here now (in the case of software) or on the way (in the case of DVDs, CDs, and movies). It WILL be technologically possible to prevent recording, copying, or subsequent use. If you think you should be able to transfer without copying, then you had better get a bit more politically active. Consider joining/supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation and write your congressional deleagation in opposition to the DMCA (which is already law) and several other proposed but not-yet-passed pieces of legislation designed to control even your presently legal use of your purchases.
Copyright infringement is, and should be illegal, but the principle of first sale, the right to archive, fair use, and the other consumer "rights" that came only from imprefect control technologies are in grave danger. If you think these should be rights of yours, by thunder, say so!
This is just dead wrong. I sniffed my network during the install. It opens an https session to a server at Intuit. About 30k of data is exchanged (being encrypted 128-bit I don't know what data). I can guarantee that if the reg key is included, they can cripple the next install. If you don't hook the machine to the internet, they don't let you pint or file. Don't make pronouncements out of ignorance.
I understand and accept the position of people like yourself who do not like the GPL. What I do not understand is precisely how your arrive at the conclusion that anyone (like myself) who does agree with the motives, purpose, and philosophy of the GPL cannot be thinking clearly.
The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that software releases under it and derived from such released software is in the commons and remains in the commons. The philosophy holds that any software license that permits software that was in the commons to be removed from the commons is not "Free." What is unclear about that?
One might argue that public domain or the Artisitic License is "more free" than the GPL, but I would argue that it is not, because works derived from such works may be released under a closed and proprietary license without consequence, thus removing them from the commons.
Where I do differ from Stallman is in my belief that it is okay for you to release your software under any old license you wish. He (based on some e-mail conversations I had with him following my receipt of a tirade purporting to be from him following release of my book -- an interesting story I would relate if anyone cares) seems to believe that one has that right, but that the choice is immoral. I certainly do not go that far. But support for the philosophy and the license terms of the GPL certainly does not automatically make me your mental inferior (I may be, but it is not because I support the GPL).
What any of this has to do with Kevin Mitnick, however, escapes me.
We do these things because they are conventional, and convention is how we know where we are in society and and how to behave. That people set themselves up to profit from social conventions should surprise no one.
The key is to live conciously. To know why you are doing something. To see the trappings and decide. Why do we marry? Why do we stop our cars when the red light is lit and not when the green one is lit? It is a sham, I tells ya! A sham!
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Chaucer isn't old English. It is what some folks call Middle English. It's post-Norman. It has modern grammar (non-inflected). The vocabulary is pretty old and the spelling is totally "pre-standard." Old English is very much harder to read than Middle English. (It really must be learned like a foreign language, but Middle English you can fight through.)
I don't think "easy to read" in any way correlates with quality. By analogy, McDonald's would be gourmet food because it easy to eat.
I also do not feel a compulsive need to categorize literature into a single specific genre. For example, I think Heinlien's "Double Star" can be put in both the "SF" genre and the "adventure" genre along with its literary cousin, "The Prisoner of Zenda" by Anthony Hope.
I don't recall seeing a manual that dictated what constitutes each genre. A novel like "Frankenstein" crosses many genres. Its also a damned good book.
Another writer I love who is, I think, underappreciated is Kipling. He's the "Mark Twain" of British Imperialism.
Someone took me to task for mentioning Doyle. Read some Doyle besides Sherlock and The Lost World. Read Micah Clarke or even the Gerard books. No, they are not great literature, but they are great fiction. I'd put most of the good SF out there in the same category. There are only a few SF novels that I would call "great" in the "Huckleberry Finn/Cannery Row/The Sea Wolf/Heart of Darkness" kind of great. (Feel free to disagree with me, like I need to give you folks permission, but I would put "Dune," "Stranger in a Strange Land," and the original "Foundation" trilogy in that category -- Asimov can't write real human beings, but neither could Dickens and I still think he's great).
For those moderators who think this is offtopic, the subject of whether Star Trek: Nemesis is good or bad opens up the whole topic of what "good" versus "bad" means. This is all very much on-topic. So nyah! Digression is the soul of wit.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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What is so difficult about Chaucer? Beowulf wasn't originally "in prose." It was an epic poem. And I didn't mention Beowulf, although, yes, it is something you should read, since it is a "pattern story" that is reused all the time. If you can read French (which I can), then by all means read Voltaire in the original French. A good translation will do just fine.
I don't know who "Heming Way" is, but when you get your Nobel Prize in literature, I'll take your criticism seriously. I'm not telling you to like all of this. I'm suggesting that it might be a good idea to crawl out of the genre closet and widen your horizons. You are free to like or dislike as you please, but the people who write good science fiction are generally well-read people and they are influenced by the body of world literature. You get more out of the stuff you like the more you know of what came before. The great works echo and reverberate through all writing that follows.
And you know what? You're right. Shakespeare is crap. What the hell made me think that writing Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and A Midsummer Night's Dream made him worthy of inclusion is a list of great writers? Boy, I won't make that mistake again.
Am I the only one who initially thought he meant the miniseries "V" with the nearly-talented Marc Singer?
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Thanks for the correction. Spelling? What's that?;-)
Yeah, I was trying to come up with a list of great writing that included some writers outside of the pure, stuffy, "Masterpiece Theater" crowd. If I were being a bit more middle-brow, I'd have included Anthony Hope, Alexandre Dumas, and Raphael Sabatini. Great stuff...
Actually, Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. Nothing about equal power...
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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While we're at it, there's a lot of other good writing out there. Have you read Voltaire, Dickens, Bronte, Shelly, Twain, Crane, Poe, Swift, Doyle, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Morrison, Moliere, Angelou, Morrow, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Perleman, Woodhouse, Dahl, and thousands of others writing every kind fiction, illuminating every corner of human experience. Sure, there are some great writers of science fiction, there are even some great works of science fiction that stand up well alongside the whole body of world literature, but skip around a few genres. You'll be surprised by what you get out of it, including a deeper appreciation for some of your favorite genre fiction which was written by people who read things besides science fiction.
Re:It all went downhill when Gene died
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Aw, baloney. Gene Roddenberry was the author all that was hokum in Star Trek. He was the force that winnowed the soul out several stories. He was the gloryhog who constantly took credit for the work of others. He had no control over any of the movies except for the dismal first one. I would say that the quality of TNG leapt forward upon his death. That it is spirialing down now is more a measure of idea exhaustion than the lack of the "Great Bird of the Galaxy."
Gene loved being benevolent head of a benign cult and would tell lie upon lie to maintain that position. See Harlan Ellison's book version of his script "The City on the Edge of Forever" for an unvarnished look at Trek Trough.
Believe what you will, but tell the truth you know.
You know something? I am sick and tired of people claiming that they actually know something about masses of people in other countries. You don't. You don't have the slightest idea how many Americans can locate Iraq on a map. You don't have the slightest idea how many residents of Airstrip One know that Iraq, err, Oceania hasn't always been our enemy, nor do you have the slightest idea how many residents of the United States are polyglots. You know what? Neither do I. People hear a statistic about how many people in this population are ignorant of a fact the poll-taker believes everyone should know, and from this people draw absurd conclusions about the overall ignorance of an entire population!
American's look ignorant overseas because of a simple phenomenon that is certainly not confined to the USA: Ignorant people are loudmouths. Ignorant people believe their prejudices are facts, and they give voice to every damnfool idea that comes into their heads because they do not know that they do not know anything
It would be best if you took a good look at your own attitudes and inflammatory statements before you accuse Americans as a class, as if there were a monolithic "American" opinion or personality.
I'm not proud of of my country's present administration. My overall impression is that George W. Bush may be one of the least intelligent people to hold the Presidency in many years. I understand that the world is nervous about a "cowboy" President backed by an angry population, and so am I. But remember that while this man appears popular in our polls, this is more a result of our collective outrage than an endorsement of the policies of this administration. Remember he was barely elected, and some still dispute that he was elected. In two years there will be another election, and even if he wins, in four more years he will be out.
Will we start another war? Personally, I doubt it. But let me ask you this: Would there be UN inspectors in Iraq right now if the threat had not been built to a very real level? Diplomacy sometimes has a gunboat component. So even here, while I do not personally know what our government intends, an intelligent person may draw a very different conclusion from the facts than you appear to do.
Ignorance and arrogance are clearly not confined to the United States. The fact that America weilds vast military power does, I grant you, make American ignorance and arrogance of greater import. But even here, consider that North Korea is flexing its nuclear muscles again because Pyongyang (Wow! He knows a foreign capital!) has made the reasonable calculation that we cannot build up the interational tolerance nor perhaps the military capability for two engagements a continent apart. Perhaps America is under greater constraints than you realize.
So this jejune attitude of superiority requires some additional reflection, perhaps, on both sides of the ocean.
Uh, I was the guy pointing out the Linux kernel is NOT inferior remember? I was asking the person calling the NT kernel "superior" to give me one objective criterion whereby it was. I already believe the Linux kernel to be superior in features and performance, although "traditional" in architecture. I was arguing that having a newer and "more sophisticated" design doesn't make it superior. A sledgehammer with a fibreglass handle has a "more sophisticated" design than one with a hickory handle, but I don't think it can be said to be superior. So, thanks for violently agreeing with me!
(Oh, just to prove that I'm fair to the opposition, "pluggable modules" and "kernel services" are similar in purpose, so, yes NT does have that. NTFS is a journaling filesystem. And if FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS can be said to be "multiple filesystems," then, yes, NT has that too. Zerocopy was one of the things NT folks used to beat up on Linux about. Yes, in many places they have zerocopy for slamming on benchmarks, mostly on the protocol stack and IIS. Linux zerocopy was in direct response. Yes, you can run encrypted filesystems on NT, if you BUY some software to do it. Personally, I think the Linux kernel is in most respects superior to the NT kernel, most notably in being Free Software, a value people tend to overlook when the start "feature flaming." When it comes down to non-MS kernel people talking about the merits of the NT kernel, we are a) guessing, b) parroting, c) reverse engineering d) any combination of the above. The fact that I can't know ANYTHING about the NT kernel but what MS tells me is the largest way in which Linux is superior to NT/2000/XP/MP/UP/KP whatever.)
"Inferior/superior" are such loaded words. Let's try to be a bit more objective. The design of NT is more "advanced" (incorporates more recent design concepts) than the Linux kernel (which holds to older and more "traditional" systems software designs). It is more "sophisticated" than the Linux kernel (again, a microkernel design where the "monolithic" part of the kernel handles only processes and interprocess communications) and thus permits a more modular OS that can be transformed, expanded, changed, with theoretically much greater speed and much smaller chance of unwanted side effects from those changes.
All of these advantages are theoretical. They also carry some disadvantages, notably in performance.
People have argued for years that traditional monolithic kernels must reach the point where network effects in the code make every change too expensive to make (too much chance of side-effects). So far, this hasn't happened with the Linux kernel. I'm only an amateur kernel hacker (working on reverse engineering an old framebuffer video card so I can make a kernel driver for it) and I don't claim to know much of the Linux kernel code (apart from the framebuffer), but it sure looks to me like the Linux kernel has managed to acheive a similar level of code independence by using good structure programming practice.
As for the superior "security" of the microkernel model, this comes from that same separation of service processes. Compromise a microkernel service and you cannot (in theory) leverage that into a compromise of other services. At the service level, this is true. A Mach or NT microkernel has this feature. The problem is that the Windows kernel isn't the Windows OS. The Windows OS is the gigantic flabby shared APIs written as DLLs. These are the things that are attacked and compromised. These sit on top of all of the sophisticated kernel plumbing and they provide a path to blithely leap between unprivlidged and privledged user space in the stuff that matters: network, file, and directory services. You don't need to compromise any kernel service to own a Windows box because it the is the Win32 APIs that have the holes, not the kernel services (Yes, I know I'm making rather broad generalizations, but the point is still true). Much of "Windows" privledge/authentication/authorization is in "user land" code. Microsoft emphasizes the sophistication of their underlying microkernel architecture. And I agree. The trouble is they have carried over the top much of the cruft from the design of the win16 and pre-NT win32 APIs in the name of backward compatibility and this has carried forward fundmental design weaknesses from those systems.
To be fair to Microsoft, these weakenesses weren't particularly problematic when they were introduced. At the time, each machine was an isolated, single-user device. Little or no networking was done with them. Also to be fair, Microsoft really didn't have a choice but to be backward compatible. They never would have got any users for NT if it didn't run all or nearly all existing software. I'll go further: they never would have got ISVs to switch to win32 if they hadn't done Windows95, marketed it like the second coming, and required ISVs to use win32 if they wanted the "Works with Windows95" logo. The much-maligned Windows 95 was the only reason every major piece of Windows software came to run well on NT.
So feel free to bandy the words "inferior" and "superior" but I defy you to provide and objective criterion by which you may fairly apply those words to the two kernels. "More advanced" v. "Less advanced", yes. "Sophisticated" v. "Simple", yes. I don't buy "superior" v. "inferior," unless you believe that newer necessarily means "better," which, obviously I do not accept.
I also do not buy the statement that these weaknesses "are a thing of the past." They have done a great job of cleaning up many of the holes, but the DLL hosted APIs are still a bridge that just circumvents the good kernel design. They have plugged thousands of holes, but the system design is still subject to them, just as the Linux kernel is.
I do agree that 2000 and XP are vastly more stable than any previous versions of Windows, but this is a product of API cleanup, not the inherent "superiority" of the NT kernel. The "NT" kernel has had these "superior" features from day one and it conferred no magic "superiority" or stability on early versions of NT.
It never ceases to amaze me. The human capacity for hipocrisy and our inability to learn from history.
The same people who scream about keeping big government out of our business scream that we need new laws and regulations to protect our business. But that is mere political hipocrisy and we all suffer from that (I've caught myself holding the odd inconsistent belief).
No, in this case we're talking about price. Sure, there are a handful of people who are totally opposed to any form intellectual property. I think that is a small minority, however.
Basically the 'net has moved the cost of media distribution to nearly zero and the time delay nearly to zero. People want to get music they want and they want it now. CDs cost so much that people are willing to steal the music because the convenience is worth the very small risk that they will be caught and prosecuted. But people would rather be honest, or at least legal, if they could. I think most people would be willing to pay a small subscription or a small fee to download music, so long as they had their traditional "fair use" rights once they have it. To support this argument, I would point at the VCR. The industry fought it tooth and nail. They lost. My old man was an "early adopter." We had a VHS VCR the size of a small electric piano with big clunking mechanical keys and only SP and LP speeds. We used to trade movies taped off of HBO with friends because you couldn't yet buy or rent movies. When you could first buy movies, they were priced too high. By the early 1980's, however, the price had dropped to a reasonable level and I never traded another video. I bought 'em all. Hollywood began to make money on movies both at the initial release and again on video. They forget that they didn't used to get that double payoff. But the VCR was going to DESTROY THE WORLD!
Sure, there is video piracy. But most of us, I think, became legal consumers when the price got reasonable.
They claim digital technology by allowing perfect copies will DESTROY THE WORLD, but all it really means is that people will be slightly more willing to copy things if the price is too high. And it is. I guarantee you that the marginal cost of a DVD is a tiny fraction of the marginal cost of VHS videocassette, and yet DVDs cost more and VHS tapes are selling at half the price they used to. What does that tell you about the profitability of DVDs? It is huge.
The efforts to suppress copying and peer-to-peer and even PVRs is the effort to maintain a price structure that technology has undermined. They want to replace economics with regulation. Protectionism, but not nation to nation: instead producer to consumer.
They don't want to let the market set the price.
How anti-capitalist can you get?
The "theft" of their product would drop to a trivial level if they let market forces set the price. Instead, they build elaborate Rube Goldberg technologies (like the supressed synch copy protection on many DVDs and videotapes -- what's the brand name of that again? -- and CSS, which isn't even copy protection. It is a way to artificially create and maintain separate price markets and to prevent free trade between those markets) to keep the price where they think it needs to be.
The music industry is hurting badly. They say it is the fault of those people copying songs. It is not. It is the fault of the companies that have failed to realize that the market has changed fundamentally. Instead of adapting, they are attempting to get government to put the genie back in the bottle. Not even this liberal Democrat can love this extension of government (and you thought we loved every intrusive government program!) authority.
Consumers need to take action. Consider supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation with your tax deductible contribution. No, I don't work for them, but I sent them what I could.
We need advocates for consumer rights in digital media. Without it, the common culture will become real estate, and culture will be nothing but a commodity. If I may also suggest, take a look at Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig's Web Site and read his books, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas, The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.
There is a cultural, political, and economic battle going on in our republic, and the media side has vast resources. The consumer side could use some. That means you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is extreme, but not paranoid. You see, almost everything in this scenario has been predicted to happen by the present day in previous environmental doomsday scenarios such as "The Population Bomb," "Stand on Zanzibar," and "The Sheep Look Up."
The problem I have with doomsday scenarios is that they assume two incorrect things. First, that all things remain equal (that human ingenuity won't solve or further postpone some problems), and second, that people in power do not care about other people. Certainly this happens, but not as much as you might think. Ultimately, the people can overthrow even the worst despot, and in the industrial and post-industrial west, while monied interests dominate, people in government actually maintain some regard for their constituents. Also, the people running the companies doing harm to the environment will eventually see the consequences in costs and their behavior will change.
You see, the economy is a feedback system, just like the biosphere. The question to me is whether that feddback will be in time to prevent the breaking of some biosphere elastic, as it were. An open question to me. I certainly don't know the answer.
But humans are more social and cooperative than this horror story gives them credit. People band together to survive. They cooperate.
We don't we start simply. Replace you incandescent bulbs with compact flourescents. Do you have a programmable thermostat? Why not? Lower your winter thermostat and raise your summer thermostat. Replace inefficient applicances with efficient ones. You'll reduce greehouse gasses and create manufacturing jobs.
If you do not have to wear a sweater at home in the cold season, you are not doing your part. How many PC's do you have running now? How many monitors are on that no one is looking at?
We do not need to build cabins in the wilderness and live by the light of a naked 40 watt light bulb to improve the situation. Conserve first. You can also add solar power to your home right now. Visit an outfit like Real Goods (the Eddie Bauer of renewable energy) or better, start with Home Power magazine's web site. You can get part of your power from the sun today. It will take several years to "pay you back" in dollars, but it will give you some electricity that didn't pump carbon into the air or add to the pile of nuclear waste.
You and I are not helpless here. Individual action can and should be taken. Lead by example.
If I were running a business, the notion that I would have to expose all my systems to an outside key server for "validation" and that some third party (I don't care how "trustworthy") would be able to disable my software or systems would be totally unacceptable. I will *never* buy "Trusted COmputing Architecture" enabled hardware for anything, ever. Even if it means I stay with the technology I have right now.
Boy, I've never agreed so much with a person on the edge of paranoid hysteria before. It is all economics. Oil is too cheap right now to make investment in alternative technologies attractive. But look at who owns the major PV production facilities: Oil companies. Look at how much effort is going into alternative fuel vehicles even now. The money knows the party will be over in the next generation. My worry isn't a new "oil fascism," because abundant alternatives are more attractive than repressive rationing of ever more expensive oil. When oil gets too expensive, the alternatives become attractive.
My worry is the health of the planet in the mean time. I live in central Minnesota, USA. Our average high temperature this time of year is about 9 degrees F. Yesterday it was 55 degrees F. I know full well one warm winter does not global warming make, but we've had several bizzarely warm years lately. We're s--tting where we eat and it worries me.
You miss my point. My point is that the law is this way not because copyright holders wanted it this way, but because there was no alternative way to do it.
First sale is covered because no method to control subsequent sales that did not require unacceptable state intrusion (like having to title books like one titles automobiles and real estate) could be conceived. The same is true for fair use, expecially with regard to making tapes of LPs or CDs. The law generally arises from the "natural condition" of commerce and society. Prior to digital media, how would you have controlled second sale? If you owned, say, "Star Wars," mightn't you want to get money from that second, third, or Nth sale? I'm saying we have the principle of "first sale" because only by having the police check each sale (or some other such bureaucratic nonsense) could you prevent it. Even our most freedom-hating members of congress didn't want to make garage sales into criminal offenses. But now we have technologies that don't require a title transfer for each book. The book can refuse to sell itself. Now controlling second sale doesn't seem so unreasonable because it doesn't require state intervention. In fact, I am arguing, the DMCA already permits it.
So, with the rise of digital media we have a new technological regime which permits control over both subsequent sale and fair use. The DMCA actually gives content providers permission to control or eliminate your subsequent sale and fair use "rights."
To me, what distinguishes "rights" from "laws" is that "rights" are either natural or Consitutional and thus they are immane. Laws are created and changed at the whim of the legislature. Something is clearly not a right if it can be created or removed by act of Congress. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that guarantees that you have subsequent sale or fair-use rights, and, I could argue, the DMCA has already substantially eroded these "privledges" and that proposed legislation like Holling's CBDTPA would eliminate them entirely.
So, again, I ask, where is the protection? It lies only in our own exercise of our right to participate in our own government. So again, I say, support the EFF and write your congressional delegation. Often.
gg:
into the Location bar and, viola! Google search on the words. Konqueror still has some bugs to work out, but it is a good browser. Much better than Netscape 4.x.
Back on topic: The most insightful remark in the interview has to be:
I cannot agree more with this. Friends of mine who have worked in congressional offices tell me that just ten letters on a single topic gets noticed. Why? Because there are probably ten people with similar feelings and thoughts on an issue for each one that actually writes. Many elections (esp. in the House) are won or lost by a few hundred or a few thousand votes. The mailbox and the ballot box are still your first best hope for Democracy.
I support the EFF also because lobbying is more direct than mailing and voting, but the influence of the EFF is enhanced with each letter your write. Write, write, write!
As in the Constitution specifically grants Congress the power to pass laws to "promote science and the useful arts" (which is where patent and copyright law get their Consitutional authority) and that "fair use" and "first sale" have no Constitutional language at all. They are specific provisions of the enabling legislation of copyright, given by Congress, not the Constitution, and thus they may be modified or revoked by Congress at will.
The recent Eldred v. Ashcroft case (oral arguments concluded, Supremes deliberating) is tresting the other part of the Consitutional language: "for limited terms"
That's a challenge not to the DMCA, but to the Sonnoy Bono Copyright Extension Act, aka "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act." Still, another important case...
And, yes, I know the Johannsen case was under Norwegian law and the Berne convention and that the DMCA doesn't directly apply in that case.
Just to follow up: I was using "legal right" in a constitutional sense, pointing out that the privledge is one granted only in statute, which may be amedned by the legislature at any time. Many laws, including the Copyright Act of 1976, are the codification of the practical limits on enforcement. The DMCA is enabling legislation for a new set of technologies -- technologies that may be used to eliminate what was formerly meant by "first sale" and "fair use." Copyright law is complex, and the DMCA is itself pretty involved. A lot of its "goodness" or "badness" will depend on how it invoked and how its invocations proceed through the courts. The Elcomsoft and Johannsen cases give me some hope.
So, while I stand by my initial post, I will grant you that it was a bit shrill. Nonetheless, and recognizing that I am not a lawyer or legislator, the DMCA in the circumvention section appears to provide all the tools needed for a copyright holder to eliminate both second sale and fair use rights for any medium that has a copy protection technology. That will never happen with paper books, but it can with music, movies, and electronic books.
My argument is against complacency, and I don't think we can afford to be complacent if we beleieve that first sale and fair use are valuable priciples.
However, read the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to circumvent a copy protection device. Where is the principle of first sale then? It is NOT present. I was never saying the law didn't mention first sale, nor that fair use isn't mentioned in the law. But there is a new law in town. See HR2281, aka The Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which amends title 17. See the section starting on page 5 of the PDF file linked (Title 17, Chapter 12 [not in the Act of 1976, is it?] section 1201 - Circumvention of Copy Protection Systems, and 1203 - Civil remedies and 1204 - Criminal Offenses and Penalties).
The fact that the Act of 1976 codified some rights that came to exist through imperfect control does not grant those AS rights to the citizens. Read all of HR2281. It amends title 17 all over the place. I didn't just make this stuff up. Then go on and read the rest of it. Then come back and tell me you have those right enumerated in the Copyright Act of 1976.
This ability to transfer ownership of a DVD, book, CD, or VHS tape is because of the "principle of first sale." This is not a legal right, however, and only exists because it has been technologically impossible to prevent up to now, and because IP vendors were content with the revenue from the first sale.
The technology of perfect IP control is, however, either here now (in the case of software) or on the way (in the case of DVDs, CDs, and movies). It WILL be technologically possible to prevent recording, copying, or subsequent use. If you think you should be able to transfer without copying, then you had better get a bit more politically active. Consider joining/supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation and write your congressional deleagation in opposition to the DMCA (which is already law) and several other proposed but not-yet-passed pieces of legislation designed to control even your presently legal use of your purchases.
Copyright infringement is, and should be illegal, but the principle of first sale, the right to archive, fair use, and the other consumer "rights" that came only from imprefect control technologies are in grave danger. If you think these should be rights of yours, by thunder, say so!
This is just dead wrong. I sniffed my network during the install. It opens an https session to a server at Intuit. About 30k of data is exchanged (being encrypted 128-bit I don't know what data). I can guarantee that if the reg key is included, they can cripple the next install. If you don't hook the machine to the internet, they don't let you pint or file. Don't make pronouncements out of ignorance.
I understand and accept the position of people like yourself who do not like the GPL. What I do not understand is precisely how your arrive at the conclusion that anyone (like myself) who does agree with the motives, purpose, and philosophy of the GPL cannot be thinking clearly.
The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that software releases under it and derived from such released software is in the commons and remains in the commons. The philosophy holds that any software license that permits software that was in the commons to be removed from the commons is not "Free." What is unclear about that?
One might argue that public domain or the Artisitic License is "more free" than the GPL, but I would argue that it is not, because works derived from such works may be released under a closed and proprietary license without consequence, thus removing them from the commons.
Where I do differ from Stallman is in my belief that it is okay for you to release your software under any old license you wish. He (based on some e-mail conversations I had with him following my receipt of a tirade purporting to be from him following release of my book -- an interesting story I would relate if anyone cares) seems to believe that one has that right, but that the choice is immoral. I certainly do not go that far. But support for the philosophy and the license terms of the GPL certainly does not automatically make me your mental inferior (I may be, but it is not because I support the GPL).
What any of this has to do with Kevin Mitnick, however, escapes me.
Aw, c'mon.
We do these things because they are conventional, and convention is how we know where we are in society and and how to behave. That people set themselves up to profit from social conventions should surprise no one.
The key is to live conciously. To know why you are doing something. To see the trappings and decide. Why do we marry? Why do we stop our cars when the red light is lit and not when the green one is lit? It is a sham, I tells ya! A sham!
Chaucer isn't old English. It is what some folks call Middle English. It's post-Norman. It has modern grammar (non-inflected). The vocabulary is pretty old and the spelling is totally "pre-standard." Old English is very much harder to read than Middle English. (It really must be learned like a foreign language, but Middle English you can fight through.)
I don't think "easy to read" in any way correlates with quality. By analogy, McDonald's would be gourmet food because it easy to eat.
I also do not feel a compulsive need to categorize literature into a single specific genre. For example, I think Heinlien's "Double Star" can be put in both the "SF" genre and the "adventure" genre along with its literary cousin, "The Prisoner of Zenda" by Anthony Hope.
I don't recall seeing a manual that dictated what constitutes each genre. A novel like "Frankenstein" crosses many genres. Its also a damned good book.
Another writer I love who is, I think, underappreciated is Kipling. He's the "Mark Twain" of British Imperialism.
Someone took me to task for mentioning Doyle. Read some Doyle besides Sherlock and The Lost World. Read Micah Clarke or even the Gerard books. No, they are not great literature, but they are great fiction. I'd put most of the good SF out there in the same category. There are only a few SF novels that I would call "great" in the "Huckleberry Finn/Cannery Row/The Sea Wolf/Heart of Darkness" kind of great. (Feel free to disagree with me, like I need to give you folks permission, but I would put "Dune," "Stranger in a Strange Land," and the original "Foundation" trilogy in that category -- Asimov can't write real human beings, but neither could Dickens and I still think he's great).
For those moderators who think this is offtopic, the subject of whether Star Trek: Nemesis is good or bad opens up the whole topic of what "good" versus "bad" means. This is all very much on-topic. So nyah! Digression is the soul of wit.
What is so difficult about Chaucer? Beowulf wasn't originally "in prose." It was an epic poem. And I didn't mention Beowulf, although, yes, it is something you should read, since it is a "pattern story" that is reused all the time. If you can read French (which I can), then by all means read Voltaire in the original French. A good translation will do just fine.
I don't know who "Heming Way" is, but when you get your Nobel Prize in literature, I'll take your criticism seriously. I'm not telling you to like all of this. I'm suggesting that it might be a good idea to crawl out of the genre closet and widen your horizons. You are free to like or dislike as you please, but the people who write good science fiction are generally well-read people and they are influenced by the body of world literature. You get more out of the stuff you like the more you know of what came before. The great works echo and reverberate through all writing that follows.
And you know what? You're right. Shakespeare is crap. What the hell made me think that writing Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and A Midsummer Night's Dream made him worthy of inclusion is a list of great writers? Boy, I won't make that mistake again.
Am I the only one who initially thought he meant the miniseries "V" with the nearly-talented Marc Singer?
Thanks for the correction. Spelling? What's that? ;-)
Yeah, I was trying to come up with a list of great writing that included some writers outside of the pure, stuffy, "Masterpiece Theater" crowd. If I were being a bit more middle-brow, I'd have included Anthony Hope, Alexandre Dumas, and Raphael Sabatini. Great stuff...
Actually, Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. Nothing about equal power...
While we're at it, there's a lot of other good writing out there. Have you read Voltaire, Dickens, Bronte, Shelly, Twain, Crane, Poe, Swift, Doyle, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Morrison, Moliere, Angelou, Morrow, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Perleman, Woodhouse, Dahl, and thousands of others writing every kind fiction, illuminating every corner of human experience. Sure, there are some great writers of science fiction, there are even some great works of science fiction that stand up well alongside the whole body of world literature, but skip around a few genres. You'll be surprised by what you get out of it, including a deeper appreciation for some of your favorite genre fiction which was written by people who read things besides science fiction.
Aw, baloney. Gene Roddenberry was the author all that was hokum in Star Trek. He was the force that winnowed the soul out several stories. He was the gloryhog who constantly took credit for the work of others. He had no control over any of the movies except for the dismal first one. I would say that the quality of TNG leapt forward upon his death. That it is spirialing down now is more a measure of idea exhaustion than the lack of the "Great Bird of the Galaxy."
Gene loved being benevolent head of a benign cult and would tell lie upon lie to maintain that position. See Harlan Ellison's book version of his script "The City on the Edge of Forever" for an unvarnished look at Trek Trough.
Believe what you will, but tell the truth you know.
You know something? I am sick and tired of people claiming that they actually know something about masses of people in other countries. You don't. You don't have the slightest idea how many Americans can locate Iraq on a map. You don't have the slightest idea how many residents of Airstrip One know that Iraq, err, Oceania hasn't always been our enemy, nor do you have the slightest idea how many residents of the United States are polyglots. You know what? Neither do I. People hear a statistic about how many people in this population are ignorant of a fact the poll-taker believes everyone should know, and from this people draw absurd conclusions about the overall ignorance of an entire population!
The irresponsible parroting of statistics is a far more pervasive and detrimental social phenomenon than American ignorance or arrogance.
American's look ignorant overseas because of a simple phenomenon that is certainly not confined to the USA: Ignorant people are loudmouths. Ignorant people believe their prejudices are facts, and they give voice to every damnfool idea that comes into their heads because they do not know that they do not know anything
It would be best if you took a good look at your own attitudes and inflammatory statements before you accuse Americans as a class, as if there were a monolithic "American" opinion or personality.
I'm not proud of of my country's present administration. My overall impression is that George W. Bush may be one of the least intelligent people to hold the Presidency in many years. I understand that the world is nervous about a "cowboy" President backed by an angry population, and so am I. But remember that while this man appears popular in our polls, this is more a result of our collective outrage than an endorsement of the policies of this administration. Remember he was barely elected, and some still dispute that he was elected. In two years there will be another election, and even if he wins, in four more years he will be out.
Will we start another war? Personally, I doubt it. But let me ask you this: Would there be UN inspectors in Iraq right now if the threat had not been built to a very real level? Diplomacy sometimes has a gunboat component. So even here, while I do not personally know what our government intends, an intelligent person may draw a very different conclusion from the facts than you appear to do.
Ignorance and arrogance are clearly not confined to the United States. The fact that America weilds vast military power does, I grant you, make American ignorance and arrogance of greater import. But even here, consider that North Korea is flexing its nuclear muscles again because Pyongyang (Wow! He knows a foreign capital!) has made the reasonable calculation that we cannot build up the interational tolerance nor perhaps the military capability for two engagements a continent apart. Perhaps America is under greater constraints than you realize.
So this jejune attitude of superiority requires some additional reflection, perhaps, on both sides of the ocean.
Uh, I was the guy pointing out the Linux kernel is NOT inferior remember? I was asking the person calling the NT kernel "superior" to give me one objective criterion whereby it was. I already believe the Linux kernel to be superior in features and performance, although "traditional" in architecture. I was arguing that having a newer and "more sophisticated" design doesn't make it superior. A sledgehammer with a fibreglass handle has a "more sophisticated" design than one with a hickory handle, but I don't think it can be said to be superior. So, thanks for violently agreeing with me!
(Oh, just to prove that I'm fair to the opposition, "pluggable modules" and "kernel services" are similar in purpose, so, yes NT does have that. NTFS is a journaling filesystem. And if FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS can be said to be "multiple filesystems," then, yes, NT has that too. Zerocopy was one of the things NT folks used to beat up on Linux about. Yes, in many places they have zerocopy for slamming on benchmarks, mostly on the protocol stack and IIS. Linux zerocopy was in direct response. Yes, you can run encrypted filesystems on NT, if you BUY some software to do it. Personally, I think the Linux kernel is in most respects superior to the NT kernel, most notably in being Free Software, a value people tend to overlook when the start "feature flaming." When it comes down to non-MS kernel people talking about the merits of the NT kernel, we are a) guessing, b) parroting, c) reverse engineering d) any combination of the above. The fact that I can't know ANYTHING about the NT kernel but what MS tells me is the largest way in which Linux is superior to NT/2000/XP/MP/UP/KP whatever.)
"Inferior/superior" are such loaded words. Let's try to be a bit more objective. The design of NT is more "advanced" (incorporates more recent design concepts) than the Linux kernel (which holds to older and more "traditional" systems software designs). It is more "sophisticated" than the Linux kernel (again, a microkernel design where the "monolithic" part of the kernel handles only processes and interprocess communications) and thus permits a more modular OS that can be transformed, expanded, changed, with theoretically much greater speed and much smaller chance of unwanted side effects from those changes.
All of these advantages are theoretical. They also carry some disadvantages, notably in performance.
People have argued for years that traditional monolithic kernels must reach the point where network effects in the code make every change too expensive to make (too much chance of side-effects). So far, this hasn't happened with the Linux kernel. I'm only an amateur kernel hacker (working on reverse engineering an old framebuffer video card so I can make a kernel driver for it) and I don't claim to know much of the Linux kernel code (apart from the framebuffer), but it sure looks to me like the Linux kernel has managed to acheive a similar level of code independence by using good structure programming practice.
As for the superior "security" of the microkernel model, this comes from that same separation of service processes. Compromise a microkernel service and you cannot (in theory) leverage that into a compromise of other services. At the service level, this is true. A Mach or NT microkernel has this feature. The problem is that the Windows kernel isn't the Windows OS. The Windows OS is the gigantic flabby shared APIs written as DLLs. These are the things that are attacked and compromised. These sit on top of all of the sophisticated kernel plumbing and they provide a path to blithely leap between unprivlidged and privledged user space in the stuff that matters: network, file, and directory services. You don't need to compromise any kernel service to own a Windows box because it the is the Win32 APIs that have the holes, not the kernel services (Yes, I know I'm making rather broad generalizations, but the point is still true). Much of "Windows" privledge/authentication/authorization is in "user land" code. Microsoft emphasizes the sophistication of their underlying microkernel architecture. And I agree. The trouble is they have carried over the top much of the cruft from the design of the win16 and pre-NT win32 APIs in the name of backward compatibility and this has carried forward fundmental design weaknesses from those systems.
To be fair to Microsoft, these weakenesses weren't particularly problematic when they were introduced. At the time, each machine was an isolated, single-user device. Little or no networking was done with them. Also to be fair, Microsoft really didn't have a choice but to be backward compatible. They never would have got any users for NT if it didn't run all or nearly all existing software. I'll go further: they never would have got ISVs to switch to win32 if they hadn't done Windows95, marketed it like the second coming, and required ISVs to use win32 if they wanted the "Works with Windows95" logo. The much-maligned Windows 95 was the only reason every major piece of Windows software came to run well on NT.
So feel free to bandy the words "inferior" and "superior" but I defy you to provide and objective criterion by which you may fairly apply those words to the two kernels. "More advanced" v. "Less advanced", yes. "Sophisticated" v. "Simple", yes. I don't buy "superior" v. "inferior," unless you believe that newer necessarily means "better," which, obviously I do not accept.
I also do not buy the statement that these weaknesses "are a thing of the past." They have done a great job of cleaning up many of the holes, but the DLL hosted APIs are still a bridge that just circumvents the good kernel design. They have plugged thousands of holes, but the system design is still subject to them, just as the Linux kernel is.
I do agree that 2000 and XP are vastly more stable than any previous versions of Windows, but this is a product of API cleanup, not the inherent "superiority" of the NT kernel. The "NT" kernel has had these "superior" features from day one and it conferred no magic "superiority" or stability on early versions of NT.
Have you priced Citrix? Yeah. That's a savings over this. (Although it is a big savings over fat Windows clients all over the place).
It never ceases to amaze me. The human capacity for hipocrisy and our inability to learn from history.
The same people who scream about keeping big government out of our business scream that we need new laws and regulations to protect our business. But that is mere political hipocrisy and we all suffer from that (I've caught myself holding the odd inconsistent belief).
No, in this case we're talking about price. Sure, there are a handful of people who are totally opposed to any form intellectual property. I think that is a small minority, however.
Basically the 'net has moved the cost of media distribution to nearly zero and the time delay nearly to zero. People want to get music they want and they want it now. CDs cost so much that people are willing to steal the music because the convenience is worth the very small risk that they will be caught and prosecuted. But people would rather be honest, or at least legal, if they could. I think most people would be willing to pay a small subscription or a small fee to download music, so long as they had their traditional "fair use" rights once they have it. To support this argument, I would point at the VCR. The industry fought it tooth and nail. They lost. My old man was an "early adopter." We had a VHS VCR the size of a small electric piano with big clunking mechanical keys and only SP and LP speeds. We used to trade movies taped off of HBO with friends because you couldn't yet buy or rent movies. When you could first buy movies, they were priced too high. By the early 1980's, however, the price had dropped to a reasonable level and I never traded another video. I bought 'em all. Hollywood began to make money on movies both at the initial release and again on video. They forget that they didn't used to get that double payoff. But the VCR was going to DESTROY THE WORLD!
Sure, there is video piracy. But most of us, I think, became legal consumers when the price got reasonable.
They claim digital technology by allowing perfect copies will DESTROY THE WORLD, but all it really means is that people will be slightly more willing to copy things if the price is too high. And it is. I guarantee you that the marginal cost of a DVD is a tiny fraction of the marginal cost of VHS videocassette, and yet DVDs cost more and VHS tapes are selling at half the price they used to. What does that tell you about the profitability of DVDs? It is huge.
The efforts to suppress copying and peer-to-peer and even PVRs is the effort to maintain a price structure that technology has undermined. They want to replace economics with regulation. Protectionism, but not nation to nation: instead producer to consumer.
They don't want to let the market set the price.
How anti-capitalist can you get?
The "theft" of their product would drop to a trivial level if they let market forces set the price. Instead, they build elaborate Rube Goldberg technologies (like the supressed synch copy protection on many DVDs and videotapes -- what's the brand name of that again? -- and CSS, which isn't even copy protection. It is a way to artificially create and maintain separate price markets and to prevent free trade between those markets) to keep the price where they think it needs to be.
The music industry is hurting badly. They say it is the fault of those people copying songs. It is not. It is the fault of the companies that have failed to realize that the market has changed fundamentally. Instead of adapting, they are attempting to get government to put the genie back in the bottle. Not even this liberal Democrat can love this extension of government (and you thought we loved every intrusive government program!) authority.
Consumers need to take action. Consider supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation with your tax deductible contribution. No, I don't work for them, but I sent them what I could.
We need advocates for consumer rights in digital media. Without it, the common culture will become real estate, and culture will be nothing but a commodity. If I may also suggest, take a look at Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig's Web Site and read his books, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas, The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.
There is a cultural, political, and economic battle going on in our republic, and the media side has vast resources. The consumer side could use some. That means you.