If they have the STAFF to support them, then I say do it. If they have the money to get someone else to support it, then I say do it.
Just extending what you've said (I think), some OSS just comes through resellers anyway these days, even if OSS wasn't specifically requested or considered by the business that ends up using it. There's an entire business model for start-up companies to take a reasonably mature open source product (apache, plone, whatever), learn heaps about it, and then re-sell that product and the primary support for it to other businesses.
We've had this a few times now when we've put out a tender and we haven't specifically asked for something Open Source, but the winning tenders have come back to us with open source products that just happen to do exactly what we want after they've customised it, and as part of whatever contract gets dreamed up they'll continue to support it to the extent that we want them to.
That's true, although I'd personally give up GPL longevity for copyright term sanity. On the other side, it'd mean that people could make legal copies of old software, although DRM is likely to still be an issue.
All of that aside, copyright law has been mutated and extended so much that it's being used to enforce things for which it's not ideally suited to. Overhauling it (of which I'm skeptical will happen in the forseeable future) would at least encourage the re-thinking of much of this stuff.
Fix the stupid laws that make this kind of thing ever come up.
I agree. Strictly speaking I think copyright is a good idea. It gives the creator (directly or by proxy) an incentive to create by allowing them to treat their creations as if they're physical property. Part of this power should allow them to control how many copies of their creative work are available during the time that they hold their monopoly. It could be that it's more valuable to them if they restrict the available copies, such as by declaring that only 2000 will ever be made available, and selling them at a high price. By deciding to infringe the copyright and make additional copies illegally before the copyright term has expired, it diminishes the ability of the author to use copyright law to its full potential.
The problem here, though, is that copyright is supposed to expire so that everyone finally gets the benefit of newly created works, yet it effectively never does! "Temporary" monopolistic rights to information should not be something that grandchildren or great grandchildren get to inherit.
If copyright terms were pulled back to something sane, such as 10 or 15 years, and required the author to demonstrate an active interest in maintaining the copyright (rather than anonymously disappearing and being unable to be tracked down), there would be far less incentive to make illegal copies because everyone would know they could simply wait. Members of society who saw the work being created and who supported the law that provided the incentive for it to be created would actually stand a chance of being around to fully benefit from it when it finally entered the public domain. Obviously it would reduce the ability for a creator (or content owner) to make extra money, but at least the whole thing would be above board and clear from the start. I'm sure that pulling back copyright terms in this day and age would spark complaints from some creators and it might even cause a few publishers to go out of business, but we'd actually have an opportunity to see if less content was actually being created, and I don't personally think there would be much change. As with everything else, the industry would adapt to the new conditions, and people would still figure out ways to keep making money. Even works that are well out of copyright still make money for publishing companies today.
As copyright terms are stupidly long today and showing no signs of being prevented from being extended further, I don't personally have an ethical problem with infringing copyright on certain works. This is especially the case if the works are no longer in print, and have been out of print for a reasonable length of time (at least several years), and which the creator or owner is unavailable for giving or denying permission to make more. (In cases where publishers own rights to massive amounts of IP, I also don't have much respect for standard template "no you can't because we can't be bothered with the admin" answers, either.
However, I'd have to say that, no, people would not stop making things altogether. You'd have people producing as a hobby.
I agree. It's not as if people who like painting artisticly (for example) don't paint simply because most of them can't make a living off it. They'll probably do something else to supplement their income, but will paint because they want to, and they enjoy doing it. Some people who paint stuff are employed as commercial artists to create things for other people, but the activity wouldn't go away if they weren't.
Writing and (occasionally) music are artistic areas where people who enjoy it and who are skilled might be able to find some kind of paid employment more easily, because there's currently a publishing industry that will often employ them to make stuff the publishers can package up and sell. Especially if it's a day-job like journalism, it might even pay enough to make a nice living off it.
If the business models of those industries become obsolete, though, it shouldn't mean that the creative people in them will suddenly stop being creative or producing things. They might need to find something to supplement their income, but that's the way things happen if the stuff you like doing isn't something other people will pay for.
I don't think infringing copyright on music owned by publishing companies is the right thing to do. They have the copyright on it "for a limited time" (yeah right!) which legally lets them charge whatever they want. As long as they're trying to charge more than what I want to pay for the quality they're providing, though, I don't see why I should bother. The industry's changing and making it easier to publish good quality stuff for cheaper, often directly from the artists, so naturally there are other publishers and artists with more adaptive business models coming through which are making the big publishing companies less relevant, and I'd rather just deal with them because I can still get what I want for a price I'm willing to pay.
Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours.
Meanwhile I think I'll go straight to the artists and the more relevant publishers/studios who work with them, and have a better understanding of the current industry and which don't have huge overheads in place that make them slow to adapt.
It can't feel compassion after it's blown its enemiy's arm off. But it can't feel vengeance, either. It's a machine, just like any other weapon. And like an M-16, its use can either be ethical or unethical, moral or immoral, moral yet unethical or immoral yet ethical.
I went and read the article and the guy's basically trying to provoke discussion about ethics, from what I can tell, given that robots on the battlefield in the future are a certainty. I guess it's a fair enough point, but the longer I think about it, the more I wonder if it's even relevant. As you've just said, ethics is a professional code. I wonder what people in invaded and occupied places would prefer if they were given the option between having their country invaded or occupied by humans or by robots.
If your own ethical code happens to differ from the person you're killing or maiming or orphaning thanks to a flawed or badly thought out foreign policy, what difference does it really make? You'll still make people mad at you, and removing one avenue for revenge (eg. killing people in an occupying force) means people will probably look for another (like blowing up an plane or whatever). Personally I doubt that sending robots instead of humans to invade and occupy a foreign country is hardly going to improve your perception in the country being invaded.
I think the guy's main point is that robots are less likely to be provoked and he's probably right if a robot could be built perfectly (but then, what's perfect for an ethical killing machine?). Troops meanwhile get stressed and become easier to provoke into doing stupid things. This plays into the hands of people who don't want them there, sometimes for their own political reasons in an unstable country, and sometimes not. If there aren't human troops, though, those people will just find other ways to spread dissent against occupying forces.
Can we expect anyone who followed a warrantless wiretap from the Bush administration to also be fired then? I mean, they violated our privacy as well.
No, because that was a case of national security to find terrorists.
Even then, it depends on how the company is set up. It'd be unfair to expect regular employees to, by themselves, fend of requests or threats from a presidential administration or police threatening to throw them in jail, even if they felt uncomfortable doing it.
If Verizon was a company acting ethically, it would set a clear policy of not carrying out warrant-less wiretaps in the first place, and then informed all their staff that if they received any demand from authorities that didn't match the strict criteria, they should immediately be elevated to someone able to take proper responsibility for dealing with that kind of request on behalf of the company.
Personally I'd seriously consider if I wanted to work for a company that didn't have a policy and procedure like this, but for some people it's not that simple.
If it anything like our corporate mail server I would bet you the number one space filler is people making minor changes on documents then reattaching them and forwarding them back to the same 50 people who just got the previous version of the document, repeated over 100 iterations as the email soon becomes a 2GB mess.
In our organisation (government but non-US) we just give people a document management system and we educate people about why they should use it. If that doesn't work we point out it's policy and make them use it, because if they don't then it means that important records might go missing and we could end up in trouble if anyone officially requests the records we hold on any particular topic.
Nobody sends attached documents, they send links to documents in the DMS. After using it for a short time everyone seems to appreciate the benefits of only having a single master copy of documents.
Actually, we don't show graphic images from the war on the news. That's part of the problem. If we did, maybe people would be less inclined to support it.
I've also thought this for a while, too. If people were actually shown what really happens, they might have a different view about it. So much western media violence is presented in cleanly cut television and movies where things generally work out, someone's labelled "right" for an often arbitrary reason, and that person comes out on top. War coverage is generally presented from behind allied lines, partly (or entirely) because militaries like to make it difficult for journalists who might not report them favourably.
Back in September 2001, an interesting editorial difference I noticed when switching between CNN and BBC (the 2 international news channels I had access to at the time) was that the BBC was openly showing people jumping from the World Trade Centre buildings, and they were showing it over and over as part of their rotating coverage. CNN was reporting it, but wasn't showing it at all. Was this just CNN, or is all US media like that? Was it because CNN doesn't show that kind of thing as policy, or was it just because it was too close to home and they didn't want to upset people further?
I've been playing with InstallShield lately for work-related things, which is one of the (if not 'the') major product for creating Windows Installer MSI files.
One of InstallShield's currently promoted features (search down that page for "Value-added services") is the ability to set a flag which will cause the installer you create to install the Yahoo Toolbar with your program, reported so that your company can "generate new revenue streams".
I suppose that in this case, rather than try to go to all of the software vendors and try to convince them to include its product, Yahoo simply decided it'd be easier to go to the company with the product that makes installers for most of them. And now Acresso (the InstallShield company) suddenly has an interest in trying to make a piece of annoying nag-ware seem like an extra piece of commercialised junk (which pays them money) is as valuable addition for all the Windows software authors out there to include.
I've been saying someone needs to do this for years.
What exactly, though? Pay OEMs to start pre-installing something different that might also not be optimal for their end users' needs?
Personally I still trust Google more than Microsoft and I think it's good to promote diversity in the web browsers that are out there, which tends to lead to higher importance of standards. As a consumer, however, I still find it counter-productive in the long term that OEM deals should be happening at all.
OEM's should be installing software on their products because it makes their products better and more useful for the end user. They should be choosing it because it best matches the target consumer for their product, not because someone's paying them to help get their own product more in people's face.
This is exactly the same system that removed all the diversity and put 95% of the world on Windows and MSIE in the first place.
just as many people prefer to run the free Firefox browser even though Windows includes the proprietary Internet Explorer, so Moonlight could provide a free alternative for dynamic content.
I may sound cynical, but I think most people are likely to stick with the first plugin they get that works. This is likely to be one of:
The one that came with their OS/Browser (if any). It's possible they won't even realise they're using a plug-in.
The one they were told to download by the website with the Silverlight app they're unsuccessfully trying to run. ie "You need Moonlight to run this app, get it here!"
I'm free to think for myself, and I do so, religiously. I slam science geeks for not believing in God just because their peers don't when they haven't put any good thought into it themselves from the same angle I'd slam someone for not believing in evolution when they haven't put any good thought into it either.
I think it's fair to criticise people for believing something entirely because other people happen to believe it, but isn't this also exactly how organised religion works? Why do you believe in God if it's not simply because other people, family, preachers, society, a book, etc, have told you that God exists? Do you see this as different somehow from people who don't believe in God because those around them don't?
I can see how one might come to a conclusion that there's a lot we still don't know about the universe, but I have trouble seeing how that space can be filled with the views of any particular organised religion unless it's as a direct consequence of deciding to do so based on faith.
At least from what I've heard, advocates of religion and Christianity in particular tend among the first to agree that it's based on faith and on making assumptions about things. I accept people's right to make assumptions, but where possible I personally prefer to acknowledge what I don't know and leave it at that.
How about you give me your address and I'll help myself to anything in your house? You can just STFU, and I'll take anything I wish out of your house. Seems like a good analogy to me. Or, how about I siphon your gas tank every day. That's even better, since the cost of gas is somewhat higher than actually eating nowadays:).
But that's a fundamentally different thing from copyright.
Why is it a fundamental right of yours to control the use of information that you happened to create in the first place? It's not physical property and you don't lose anything if someone makes a copy of it. There certainly never used to be restrictions on making copies of things or using other people's ideas until relatively recently, and building on other people's ideas and extending other people's work tends to be how progress happens.
If I make a copy of something you did, you haven't lost anything at all because you still have your copy of it and you can do what you like with your copy. At best, there might be a lower possibility of you making money in the future by charging for access, but exactly how much you would have made if you applied yourself is uncertain anyway.
But this is why copyright law exists. It's an artificial legal construct to provide an incentive for people to create something in the first place, which it does by letting content creators have a monopoly on their work for a limited time and under certain conditions. (ie. Other people are still allowed to reproduce it in certain ways and for certain reasons.) It's supposed to be a balance for both sides, to allow the creator to benefit from what they've done, while at the same time letting everyone else have a reasonable use of it and (eventually) unrestricted use when it finally moves into the public domain.
The fact that copyright terms have become so ridiculously long just means that authors and publishers get mis-led into thinking that their IP is some kind of real property, and that it must be a crime if it's ever used in any way they don't authorise, even if it's completely legal under law. When authors and publishers start assuming people are criminals because they might be copying something (or even because they are copying something), it also means they're effectively re-writing the law on their own terms in a way that prevents legal copying, and this is what concerns me. If theatre owners don't want recording equipment on their property then whatever, but there needs to be a way to make sure that the avenues for using information legally aren't being cut off because a few publishers happen to be paranoid.
Copyright law is a good thing, and I think it's great to give people limited control over work they produce so they can make some money from it and have an incentive to do it in the first place... but copyright law only even exists so that there is an incentive to create new content in the first place.
The problem with content distributors putting physical restraints on the abilities of people to make copies and cryptigraphic constraints on the abilities of people to make
now get offended that their stuff comes out of copyright at all, or gets used by other people legally without their permission while it's still in copyright.
The only thing you might not have anymore is the ability to make money from people you might have sold it to.
He's not saying it's the same at all. He's making an analogy. Steal a loaf of bread to eat, they will go easy on you. Steal it to sell it they will not. Record a movie for your own use, they can't even charge you under this law. Record a movie and sell copies, they can!
Good point, I mis-read it and was hasty in assuming she was saying copyright infringement is the same thing as stealing. It still irks me though that she even used the stealing analogy given the topic of the case.
The movie and recording industries would love people to believe the claim of copyright infringement being the same as stealing -- they spend enough time trying to tell me and everyone else. From what's supposed to be a respected legal position, she's giving them a heap of new quotations in connection with a copyright case for everyone to get confused with.
A person is doing something that a private company does not want him/her to do in their establishment. The company then has the right and obligation to insist that he leave the premises and/or call the police to have him removed (which also includes a trespass warrant against entering again).
I kind of agree as far as being allowed to have some say in what happens on your property, but in situations like this -- especially where the main use of the property is to publish copyrighted material under controlled conditions -- I think it's necessary to be very careful about how far property owners can go. Letting people impose certain restrictions simply because something occurs on their property opens the door to let businesses infringe on rights that people should fundamentally have. In this case, it's helping content creators re-write copyright laws to suit themselves.
If a movie is only ever published in controlled theatres, should the banning of recording equipment be allowed on it forever? Even if the copyright term expires? (Actually copyright expiry is a bad example, simply because copyright terms are so stupidly long these days.)
What if someone wants to criticise the movie and use an out-take under fair use, but the publisher doesn't give them any avenue to get it? To me it seems as if it's letting creators write their own copyright laws and set new terms on distribution of their work that suit themselves rather than everyone in the community who gave them a temporary monopoly in the first place, similar to DRM in some ways.
If content creators can control access to their published content simply by making people sign a EULA and agree not to take bits of it out before their allowed to see it, there needs to be some serious thought into how that can happen without infringing on the rights that people should already have.
Are they going to ban retinal implants [igargoyle.com] for the blind?
Based on this article I don't see why. The article (and even the Slashdot summary) makes it quite clear that under the new Canadian law, it's necessary to prove that there was intent to re-distribute the illegal recording before any charges can be laid.
What happened (if the article's correct) doesn't really bother me. It's a movie protected under copyright law that he was illegally recording in a movie theatre with the intent of re-selling it for his own profit, breaking copyright laws. I can remember stories about people using home video cameras in various places at least as far back as 1993 for selling crappy renditions of newly-released movies on the streets, and I bet it's been going longer than that. The sentence that he got for doing this sounds reasonable to me.
What irks me about this whole thing, which unfortunately still doesn't surprise me, is that the Judge has been quoted as comparing what he did with stealing a cart of meat! From the article ('Skene' is the judge in the case):
"Skene said if one compared Lissaman's crime to shoplifting, it was not like someone stealing a loaf of bread or litre or milk for personal use but like someone taking a cart of meat to be re-sold for profit."
Surely a judge would know the difference between stealing and copyright infringement, and perhaps she was just dumbing the whole thing down so a reporter could understand it, but it really doesn't help for the accurate portrayal of information to the masses. All it does is to publicise exactly the same mis-truth that the corporate copyright propagandists want everyone to believe, which is that copyright infringement is the same as stealing and that its damage can be measured in the same way.
But what most people seem to be missing is the sheer stupidity of the criminal. If a company I had hacked into, stolen source code from, and embarrassed publicly suddenly invited me to their corporate HQ in a foreign country, I would be a weee bit suspcious.
According to the article he was suspicious, he didn't actually show up in the USA and so they didn't catch him.
Perhaps you can't really trust this guy, but from reading the article it sounds as if he'd contacted them initially to claim that he'd hacked their network but hadn't leaked the source, and that someone else was responsible for it after he leaked the login info by accident. From there they struck up a conversation and invited him over, and he might have actually thought they were genuinely interested in employing him.
In hindsight it seems quite stupid to assume that, but if the guy's young and hasn't encountered many corporate dinosaurs. Some hackers just like breaking into things out of interest and think they're doing a service if they show people how to fix it later. He might have expected to be treated the same way that any of his friends would have treated him if he told them about security holes in their system.
After all, if it were illegal, why would it be illegal? Have I deprived anyone of life, liberty, or property? I have not. If people came and wasted their time, they did so voluntarily.
It's a blurry line as far as I'm concerned. If a company advertises a job and makes it appear as if they want to employ someone, invites people for interviews, and if those people fly half way around the world to attend the interviews (possibly at their own expense), I expect they'd be quite annoyed to find out the advertiser was just joking and never had any intention to employ anyone. If they couldn't find anyone suitable for the job then fair enough, but if they never actually intended to hire anyone and don't have a position to fill, it seems to me to be bordering on fraud. (I'm not a lawyer though, etc etc). Maybe it's legal in some places, and probably not in others.
I've known at least a couple of people who've travelled a long way internationally to get to interviews for academic posts. It was implied they had a fair chance of actually getting the job if they could show they were qualified, but nobody even bothered to turn up to the seminars they were required to give as part of the interview process. The department heads already knew exactly who they wanted from their existing internal staff, and never had any intention of hiring anyone else. They'd only been invited to satisfy policy requirements of advertising jobs externally, to make it look as if there was actually fair competition for the job. Legal action against this sort of thing usually isn't worth it, especially if you're trying to take it against someone in another country.
I don't know how it works in the Valve case. The article says they'd offered to pay travel expenses, and maybe the FBI has special permission from the US government (or maybe court orders) to use these kinds of tactics to get people they want within US jurisdiction.
Given the extremely rudimentary functionality of Google Apps, I can't for the life of me figure out how there's even a discussion around it's potential use in business.
I don't use Google Apps much because I still prefer the whole local aspect of office apps. That said, it's only been very recently that things like Word Processors became bogged down in extra features.
Normally when I'm writing something, 99% of what I care about (or what I should care about) is the content, and formatting it comes later. If Google Apps makes the creation and management of content an easier process, I can see myself using it from time to time... and I have for a few things, especially when I've wanted to collaborate with others.
The main thing for me for anything serious, at least from an authoring perspective, is the ability to get the content out in a way that makes it easier for me to format and re-structure later on. I haven't properly looked at Google Apps to see how good it is for this kind of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Just extending what you've said (I think), some OSS just comes through resellers anyway these days, even if OSS wasn't specifically requested or considered by the business that ends up using it. There's an entire business model for start-up companies to take a reasonably mature open source product (apache, plone, whatever), learn heaps about it, and then re-sell that product and the primary support for it to other businesses.
We've had this a few times now when we've put out a tender and we haven't specifically asked for something Open Source, but the winning tenders have come back to us with open source products that just happen to do exactly what we want after they've customised it, and as part of whatever contract gets dreamed up they'll continue to support it to the extent that we want them to.
That's true, although I'd personally give up GPL longevity for copyright term sanity. On the other side, it'd mean that people could make legal copies of old software, although DRM is likely to still be an issue.
All of that aside, copyright law has been mutated and extended so much that it's being used to enforce things for which it's not ideally suited to. Overhauling it (of which I'm skeptical will happen in the forseeable future) would at least encourage the re-thinking of much of this stuff.
I agree. Strictly speaking I think copyright is a good idea. It gives the creator (directly or by proxy) an incentive to create by allowing them to treat their creations as if they're physical property. Part of this power should allow them to control how many copies of their creative work are available during the time that they hold their monopoly. It could be that it's more valuable to them if they restrict the available copies, such as by declaring that only 2000 will ever be made available, and selling them at a high price. By deciding to infringe the copyright and make additional copies illegally before the copyright term has expired, it diminishes the ability of the author to use copyright law to its full potential.
The problem here, though, is that copyright is supposed to expire so that everyone finally gets the benefit of newly created works, yet it effectively never does! "Temporary" monopolistic rights to information should not be something that grandchildren or great grandchildren get to inherit.
If copyright terms were pulled back to something sane, such as 10 or 15 years, and required the author to demonstrate an active interest in maintaining the copyright (rather than anonymously disappearing and being unable to be tracked down), there would be far less incentive to make illegal copies because everyone would know they could simply wait. Members of society who saw the work being created and who supported the law that provided the incentive for it to be created would actually stand a chance of being around to fully benefit from it when it finally entered the public domain. Obviously it would reduce the ability for a creator (or content owner) to make extra money, but at least the whole thing would be above board and clear from the start. I'm sure that pulling back copyright terms in this day and age would spark complaints from some creators and it might even cause a few publishers to go out of business, but we'd actually have an opportunity to see if less content was actually being created, and I don't personally think there would be much change. As with everything else, the industry would adapt to the new conditions, and people would still figure out ways to keep making money. Even works that are well out of copyright still make money for publishing companies today.
As copyright terms are stupidly long today and showing no signs of being prevented from being extended further, I don't personally have an ethical problem with infringing copyright on certain works. This is especially the case if the works are no longer in print, and have been out of print for a reasonable length of time (at least several years), and which the creator or owner is unavailable for giving or denying permission to make more. (In cases where publishers own rights to massive amounts of IP, I also don't have much respect for standard template "no you can't because we can't be bothered with the admin" answers, either.
I agree. It's not as if people who like painting artisticly (for example) don't paint simply because most of them can't make a living off it. They'll probably do something else to supplement their income, but will paint because they want to, and they enjoy doing it. Some people who paint stuff are employed as commercial artists to create things for other people, but the activity wouldn't go away if they weren't.
Writing and (occasionally) music are artistic areas where people who enjoy it and who are skilled might be able to find some kind of paid employment more easily, because there's currently a publishing industry that will often employ them to make stuff the publishers can package up and sell. Especially if it's a day-job like journalism, it might even pay enough to make a nice living off it.
If the business models of those industries become obsolete, though, it shouldn't mean that the creative people in them will suddenly stop being creative or producing things. They might need to find something to supplement their income, but that's the way things happen if the stuff you like doing isn't something other people will pay for.
I don't think infringing copyright on music owned by publishing companies is the right thing to do. They have the copyright on it "for a limited time" (yeah right!) which legally lets them charge whatever they want. As long as they're trying to charge more than what I want to pay for the quality they're providing, though, I don't see why I should bother. The industry's changing and making it easier to publish good quality stuff for cheaper, often directly from the artists, so naturally there are other publishers and artists with more adaptive business models coming through which are making the big publishing companies less relevant, and I'd rather just deal with them because I can still get what I want for a price I'm willing to pay.
Meanwhile I think I'll go straight to the artists and the more relevant publishers/studios who work with them, and have a better understanding of the current industry and which don't have huge overheads in place that make them slow to adapt.
I went and read the article and the guy's basically trying to provoke discussion about ethics, from what I can tell, given that robots on the battlefield in the future are a certainty. I guess it's a fair enough point, but the longer I think about it, the more I wonder if it's even relevant. As you've just said, ethics is a professional code. I wonder what people in invaded and occupied places would prefer if they were given the option between having their country invaded or occupied by humans or by robots.
If your own ethical code happens to differ from the person you're killing or maiming or orphaning thanks to a flawed or badly thought out foreign policy, what difference does it really make? You'll still make people mad at you, and removing one avenue for revenge (eg. killing people in an occupying force) means people will probably look for another (like blowing up an plane or whatever). Personally I doubt that sending robots instead of humans to invade and occupy a foreign country is hardly going to improve your perception in the country being invaded.
I think the guy's main point is that robots are less likely to be provoked and he's probably right if a robot could be built perfectly (but then, what's perfect for an ethical killing machine?). Troops meanwhile get stressed and become easier to provoke into doing stupid things. This plays into the hands of people who don't want them there, sometimes for their own political reasons in an unstable country, and sometimes not. If there aren't human troops, though, those people will just find other ways to spread dissent against occupying forces.
No, because that was a case of national security to find terrorists.
Even then, it depends on how the company is set up. It'd be unfair to expect regular employees to, by themselves, fend of requests or threats from a presidential administration or police threatening to throw them in jail, even if they felt uncomfortable doing it.
If Verizon was a company acting ethically, it would set a clear policy of not carrying out warrant-less wiretaps in the first place, and then informed all their staff that if they received any demand from authorities that didn't match the strict criteria, they should immediately be elevated to someone able to take proper responsibility for dealing with that kind of request on behalf of the company.
Personally I'd seriously consider if I wanted to work for a company that didn't have a policy and procedure like this, but for some people it's not that simple.
In our organisation (government but non-US) we just give people a document management system and we educate people about why they should use it. If that doesn't work we point out it's policy and make them use it, because if they don't then it means that important records might go missing and we could end up in trouble if anyone officially requests the records we hold on any particular topic.
Nobody sends attached documents, they send links to documents in the DMS. After using it for a short time everyone seems to appreciate the benefits of only having a single master copy of documents.
I've also thought this for a while, too. If people were actually shown what really happens, they might have a different view about it. So much western media violence is presented in cleanly cut television and movies where things generally work out, someone's labelled "right" for an often arbitrary reason, and that person comes out on top. War coverage is generally presented from behind allied lines, partly (or entirely) because militaries like to make it difficult for journalists who might not report them favourably.
Back in September 2001, an interesting editorial difference I noticed when switching between CNN and BBC (the 2 international news channels I had access to at the time) was that the BBC was openly showing people jumping from the World Trade Centre buildings, and they were showing it over and over as part of their rotating coverage. CNN was reporting it, but wasn't showing it at all. Was this just CNN, or is all US media like that? Was it because CNN doesn't show that kind of thing as policy, or was it just because it was too close to home and they didn't want to upset people further?
I've been playing with InstallShield lately for work-related things, which is one of the (if not 'the') major product for creating Windows Installer MSI files.
One of InstallShield's currently promoted features (search down that page for "Value-added services") is the ability to set a flag which will cause the installer you create to install the Yahoo Toolbar with your program, reported so that your company can "generate new revenue streams".
I suppose that in this case, rather than try to go to all of the software vendors and try to convince them to include its product, Yahoo simply decided it'd be easier to go to the company with the product that makes installers for most of them. And now Acresso (the InstallShield company) suddenly has an interest in trying to make a piece of annoying nag-ware seem like an extra piece of commercialised junk (which pays them money) is as valuable addition for all the Windows software authors out there to include.
What exactly, though? Pay OEMs to start pre-installing something different that might also not be optimal for their end users' needs?
Personally I still trust Google more than Microsoft and I think it's good to promote diversity in the web browsers that are out there, which tends to lead to higher importance of standards. As a consumer, however, I still find it counter-productive in the long term that OEM deals should be happening at all.
OEM's should be installing software on their products because it makes their products better and more useful for the end user. They should be choosing it because it best matches the target consumer for their product, not because someone's paying them to help get their own product more in people's face.
This is exactly the same system that removed all the diversity and put 95% of the world on Windows and MSIE in the first place.
Many people would claim that neither is IE, or Firefox for that matter.
I may sound cynical, but I think most people are likely to stick with the first plugin they get that works. This is likely to be one of:
I think it's fair to criticise people for believing something entirely because other people happen to believe it, but isn't this also exactly how organised religion works? Why do you believe in God if it's not simply because other people, family, preachers, society, a book, etc, have told you that God exists? Do you see this as different somehow from people who don't believe in God because those around them don't?
I can see how one might come to a conclusion that there's a lot we still don't know about the universe, but I have trouble seeing how that space can be filled with the views of any particular organised religion unless it's as a direct consequence of deciding to do so based on faith.
At least from what I've heard, advocates of religion and Christianity in particular tend among the first to agree that it's based on faith and on making assumptions about things. I accept people's right to make assumptions, but where possible I personally prefer to acknowledge what I don't know and leave it at that.
Yep, my fault. I completely mis-read that. Thanks for pointing it out.
Yep, that's correct. My mistake and thanks for pointing it out (along with everyone else). :)
Yep, you're completely right. My mistake.
But that's a fundamentally different thing from copyright.
Why is it a fundamental right of yours to control the use of information that you happened to create in the first place? It's not physical property and you don't lose anything if someone makes a copy of it. There certainly never used to be restrictions on making copies of things or using other people's ideas until relatively recently, and building on other people's ideas and extending other people's work tends to be how progress happens.
If I make a copy of something you did, you haven't lost anything at all because you still have your copy of it and you can do what you like with your copy. At best, there might be a lower possibility of you making money in the future by charging for access, but exactly how much you would have made if you applied yourself is uncertain anyway.
But this is why copyright law exists. It's an artificial legal construct to provide an incentive for people to create something in the first place, which it does by letting content creators have a monopoly on their work for a limited time and under certain conditions. (ie. Other people are still allowed to reproduce it in certain ways and for certain reasons.) It's supposed to be a balance for both sides, to allow the creator to benefit from what they've done, while at the same time letting everyone else have a reasonable use of it and (eventually) unrestricted use when it finally moves into the public domain.
The fact that copyright terms have become so ridiculously long just means that authors and publishers get mis-led into thinking that their IP is some kind of real property, and that it must be a crime if it's ever used in any way they don't authorise, even if it's completely legal under law. When authors and publishers start assuming people are criminals because they might be copying something (or even because they are copying something), it also means they're effectively re-writing the law on their own terms in a way that prevents legal copying, and this is what concerns me. If theatre owners don't want recording equipment on their property then whatever, but there needs to be a way to make sure that the avenues for using information legally aren't being cut off because a few publishers happen to be paranoid.
Copyright law is a good thing, and I think it's great to give people limited control over work they produce so they can make some money from it and have an incentive to do it in the first place... but copyright law only even exists so that there is an incentive to create new content in the first place. The problem with content distributors putting physical restraints on the abilities of people to make copies and cryptigraphic constraints on the abilities of people to make now get offended that their stuff comes out of copyright at all, or gets used by other people legally without their permission while it's still in copyright. The only thing you might not have anymore is the ability to make money from people you might have sold it to.
Oops, good point, I completely mis-read it. Thanks for pointing that out. This is disturbing.
Good point, I mis-read it and was hasty in assuming she was saying copyright infringement is the same thing as stealing. It still irks me though that she even used the stealing analogy given the topic of the case.
The movie and recording industries would love people to believe the claim of copyright infringement being the same as stealing -- they spend enough time trying to tell me and everyone else. From what's supposed to be a respected legal position, she's giving them a heap of new quotations in connection with a copyright case for everyone to get confused with.
I kind of agree as far as being allowed to have some say in what happens on your property, but in situations like this -- especially where the main use of the property is to publish copyrighted material under controlled conditions -- I think it's necessary to be very careful about how far property owners can go. Letting people impose certain restrictions simply because something occurs on their property opens the door to let businesses infringe on rights that people should fundamentally have. In this case, it's helping content creators re-write copyright laws to suit themselves.
If a movie is only ever published in controlled theatres, should the banning of recording equipment be allowed on it forever? Even if the copyright term expires? (Actually copyright expiry is a bad example, simply because copyright terms are so stupidly long these days.)
What if someone wants to criticise the movie and use an out-take under fair use, but the publisher doesn't give them any avenue to get it? To me it seems as if it's letting creators write their own copyright laws and set new terms on distribution of their work that suit themselves rather than everyone in the community who gave them a temporary monopoly in the first place, similar to DRM in some ways.
If content creators can control access to their published content simply by making people sign a EULA and agree not to take bits of it out before their allowed to see it, there needs to be some serious thought into how that can happen without infringing on the rights that people should already have.
Based on this article I don't see why. The article (and even the Slashdot summary) makes it quite clear that under the new Canadian law, it's necessary to prove that there was intent to re-distribute the illegal recording before any charges can be laid.
What happened (if the article's correct) doesn't really bother me. It's a movie protected under copyright law that he was illegally recording in a movie theatre with the intent of re-selling it for his own profit, breaking copyright laws. I can remember stories about people using home video cameras in various places at least as far back as 1993 for selling crappy renditions of newly-released movies on the streets, and I bet it's been going longer than that. The sentence that he got for doing this sounds reasonable to me.
What irks me about this whole thing, which unfortunately still doesn't surprise me, is that the Judge has been quoted as comparing what he did with stealing a cart of meat! From the article ('Skene' is the judge in the case):
Surely a judge would know the difference between stealing and copyright infringement, and perhaps she was just dumbing the whole thing down so a reporter could understand it, but it really doesn't help for the accurate portrayal of information to the masses. All it does is to publicise exactly the same mis-truth that the corporate copyright propagandists want everyone to believe, which is that copyright infringement is the same as stealing and that its damage can be measured in the same way.
According to the article he was suspicious, he didn't actually show up in the USA and so they didn't catch him.
Perhaps you can't really trust this guy, but from reading the article it sounds as if he'd contacted them initially to claim that he'd hacked their network but hadn't leaked the source, and that someone else was responsible for it after he leaked the login info by accident. From there they struck up a conversation and invited him over, and he might have actually thought they were genuinely interested in employing him.
In hindsight it seems quite stupid to assume that, but if the guy's young and hasn't encountered many corporate dinosaurs. Some hackers just like breaking into things out of interest and think they're doing a service if they show people how to fix it later. He might have expected to be treated the same way that any of his friends would have treated him if he told them about security holes in their system.
It's a blurry line as far as I'm concerned. If a company advertises a job and makes it appear as if they want to employ someone, invites people for interviews, and if those people fly half way around the world to attend the interviews (possibly at their own expense), I expect they'd be quite annoyed to find out the advertiser was just joking and never had any intention to employ anyone. If they couldn't find anyone suitable for the job then fair enough, but if they never actually intended to hire anyone and don't have a position to fill, it seems to me to be bordering on fraud. (I'm not a lawyer though, etc etc). Maybe it's legal in some places, and probably not in others.
I've known at least a couple of people who've travelled a long way internationally to get to interviews for academic posts. It was implied they had a fair chance of actually getting the job if they could show they were qualified, but nobody even bothered to turn up to the seminars they were required to give as part of the interview process. The department heads already knew exactly who they wanted from their existing internal staff, and never had any intention of hiring anyone else. They'd only been invited to satisfy policy requirements of advertising jobs externally, to make it look as if there was actually fair competition for the job. Legal action against this sort of thing usually isn't worth it, especially if you're trying to take it against someone in another country.
I don't know how it works in the Valve case. The article says they'd offered to pay travel expenses, and maybe the FBI has special permission from the US government (or maybe court orders) to use these kinds of tactics to get people they want within US jurisdiction.
I don't use Google Apps much because I still prefer the whole local aspect of office apps. That said, it's only been very recently that things like Word Processors became bogged down in extra features.
Normally when I'm writing something, 99% of what I care about (or what I should care about) is the content, and formatting it comes later. If Google Apps makes the creation and management of content an easier process, I can see myself using it from time to time... and I have for a few things, especially when I've wanted to collaborate with others.
The main thing for me for anything serious, at least from an authoring perspective, is the ability to get the content out in a way that makes it easier for me to format and re-structure later on. I haven't properly looked at Google Apps to see how good it is for this kind of thing.