If I want pay-per-view movies I can just switch my digital satellite receiver to the appropriate channels. MPEG video equivalent to DVD-quality, for just a couple of bucks. I think Echostar's (Dish Network) latest receiver models include a TiVo-like disk system so you can pause/rewind the movie if you need to take a potty break or grab a snack.
Heck, in the time it takes to download even over a fast line, I can drive to Blockbuster to pick up the video and be back. (I don't recall who first made the comment about not underestimating the bandwidth of a stationwagon filled with magtape, but I do recall once calculating the bandwidth of the highway that ran between two university towns where I lived/worked.)
The 486dx2-66 beside me here is 33.18 bogoMIPS. It's running my webserver and a few other network services. (Heck, even X Windows isn't too bad on it anymore since I upgraded from 16M to 24M, but that's not usually running.)
Anyone remember Firesign Theatre's "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus"? Remember the backdoor Clem used - "Springhead, this is worker".
Heck, I used that same sentence as the backdoor into a system I wrote -- but the customers got source and new it was there. (Further and more, you had to be already logged in at a certain privilege level before it'd be recognized.)
There are some occasions where a system needs to provide some way for a "maintenance worker" (or sysadmin) to expose certain inner workings to manipulation -- that's what the root password is all about, right?
Mind, in this case it doesn't apply: you don't keep such a hook secret from the customer, you do give them the option of changing it (with suitable warnings), and Front Page is hardly anything mission critical enough as to require that sort of access to a running system. (Plenty of other ways to access it if so.)
Running 'strings' on that DLL (buried deep within the FrontPage directories) did indeed turn up "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN". I've found other interesting strings in MS software (eg, a copyright notice from the Regents at UCB in 'ftp.exe'). Might be interesting to run strings on all the W2K stuff, although perhaps they're more careful now about hiding such things (may they rot13'd it.)
Re:But is this really for the better?
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 2
MSFT stock could very likely be heading for a 2- or 3-1 split
Not bloody likely. MSFT share price seems to have stalled out at about $90, absent some spikes in the last couple of weeks in anticipation of a settlement and a brief surge at the end of last year for who knows why (everything seemed to surge briefly then, millenium madness perhaps).
Take a look at the moving average over the past year, (eg here which doesn't include today's drop), they've been on a downward slide for a while, and the stock bounced around 90 for most of last fall. Microsoft has never done more than a 2:1 split, and they split to bring the per share price back into the territory where it's trading now. If the slide continues, they may even do a merge (say, 2 for 3) to make the number look a bit nicer.
The NASDAQ drop is only partially related to MSFT, some of it is due to rationalization of dot-com prices in general. Heck, Linux-related companies went up in value today.
Re:This is not the point at all ...
on
More on LinDVD
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· Score: 2
While I don't disagree on the main point of your message, perhaps you're unaware that many of the current software DVD players (ie for Windows) do let you do things like stop frame, frame grabbing, and frame advance.
Indeed, there are other programs out there that will let you capture a video clip (sans audio) by repeatedly sending "grab frame" and "frame advance" messages to the software player.
But yes, I'd like a player (or better, access to the player source) that lets me do whatever I want with the data stream. For example, I'd like to see a player that gives me the option of doing a split-screen display to simultaneously view two (or more) different camera-angle tracks (current players limit you to displaying one or the other) if present.
This one wasn't censored, it's fiction. The only weapons prohibited from outer space by treaty are "weapons of mass destruction" (e.g. nuclear bombs). Lasers aren't. Further and more, nuclear power sources for satellites are not prohibited -- indeed have been used far more by Russia/USSR (whose space reactor technology is well ahead of the US's) to power e.g. radar reconaissance satellites. (Spectacular example of this was Cosmos 954 which didn't properly boost to a disposal orbit and reentered over northwest Canada in 1979. Operation Morning Light picked up most of the radioactive debris that didn't burn up on reentry.)
I didn't bother with the rest of the stories, it wouldn't surprise me to find a similar level of politically-inspired bogosity.
Although Wired says that 205e requires a "paper and pen and a signature" for a prior nonexclusive license to prevail over a copyright transfer, the actual wording is "if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed".
The code itself containing the "released under the GPL" comment is a written instrument, so it comes down to whether a handwritten signature is necessary, or if the fact that the instrument itself is the thing copyrighted (or vice versa) makes the signature implicit. The signed instrument merely serves as proof that the license has been assigned, but that seems redundant if the copyrighted work includes the authorizing language.
Ultimately it'll depend on how literally a given judge interprets the law.
For a nightmare scenario, if decided in Mattel's favor it would allow something like Microsoft paying, say, Linus Torvalds whatever it takes to obtain the Linux copyrights and then them shutting down everybody else (who doesn't have a paper signed by Linus explictly licensing the code to them).
Signing over all the rights to FSF is one solution, but then the author has lost control. It might be satisfactory to sign a copy of the GPL (tweaked as necessary) granting FSF nonexclusive GPL rights (which includes redistribution). If digital signatures are acceptable then digitally signing the released code (which includes the necessary comments about GPL) should be all that's needed.
Every cash register running Linux instead of Win98 is $89 (or whatever) less that Microsoft has available to spend on FUD, embracing and extending, or creating new and uglier proprietary formats.
Sounds like a benefit to me.
And as someone else pointed out, it encourages hardware manufacturers to make sure Linux drivers are available.
AMD's processers can do multiprocessing (or could, I vaguely recall a rumor they dropped this with Athlon). The problem is that all the MP motherboards use Intel chipsets which support Intel's style of MP. AMD (and Cyrix et al?) don't have licenses to the Intel MP technology, and came up with their own -- which requires a different mobo chipset, which nobody makes because the boards would be incompatible with Intel CPUs.
With AMD's recent growth and giving Intel a run for its money on releasing faster CPUs, we may see that change.
Oh, and a Beowulf is clustered, so doesn't care what manufacturer makes the CPUs, it can even mix them. It's tightly coupled SMP machines that care.
no planets have been found under 8 Jupiter masses. It may indicate that there is a limit to how small these free-floating planets can be
Or more likely, it may indicate that smaller planets have already cooled off to the point where they're not easily picked up by this survey. If the planets all formed about the same time (not unreasonable, if they're in the same cloud), smaller ones would be a lot cooler than larger ones for two reasons: they never got as hot in the first place (less infalling mass means less conversion of gravitational potential energy), and they cool off faster due to their greater surface area to volume ratio (square/cube law).
Region 0 is "any", so yeah, players play their own region plus zero. IIRC, the region encoding is a single byte of data, with a bit for each region (1 to 8, so zero would be no bits). In theory it's possible to encode a disc to more than one region by setting multiple bits.
DVD video playback is controlled by a kind of virtual machine (this is what allows for branching, multiple angles, etc), and certain player settings are readable as registers in this VM. Its possible to put code on the DVD disc to read the region setting and refuse to play if not set correctly. Apparently there are a couple of discs out there that will refuse to play in the Apex (or other hacked players) if the region code is set to "bypass", but will play if the region code is set to what the disc wants.
(My guess is that VM implementation bugs are what causes some problems with some combinations of DVD movies and players, for those discs that really exercise the VM.)
Dang, I haven't even installed 6.3 yet.
on
SuSE 6.4 Announced
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· Score: 2
Geez. I'm running 6.2, I've had the 6.3 box sitting around for a few weeks waiting for me to get a chance to reorganize my disks a bit before installing it (I've got bits and pieces of an old Caldera install and some other odds and ends - probably about 3 different root partitions, yuck), and here's 6.4 out already.
But I'll probably hold off, if I can wait for a 2.4 kernel and a mature XFree86 4.0.
Heh. You haven't really hacked until you've used low-temperature solder and a screwdriver heated over a candle to fix a circuit...:-)
Then there was the time I assembled an Apple-II-clone motherboard and wondered why the heck it didn't work until I noticed (the scope helped) that all the discrete transistors had been placed according to the silk-screen shapes, but that that was the opposite of how they were supposed to go in (ie emitter and collector reversed), the silk screen was wrong. Amazingly it actually worked after I desoldered them and turned them around.
Actually it has been made to work. Ever hear or read the text of the speech (from the floor, as a stockholder) that Charleton Heston made at a Time-Warner (I think) shareholders' meeting?
He was objecting to the content of some rap music that they were publishing (and promoting). Most of his speech simply consisted of reading the lyrics -- making audience and board members alike quite uncomfortable. I seem to recall that Warner very soon thereafter dropped their contracts with that rap group.
Now, I'm not sure what we could come up with that's quite that dramatic and to the point, but the point is that it can work.
completely redo the kernel as OO once HURD starts gaining marketshare and usablility.
No way. I mean, I've liked OO as much (or more) as the next guy ever since I discovered Simula back in the late 70s, but you really don't want or need heavy OO in an OS kernel. Too much unneeded overhead.
Besides, we've had OO OS's (sort of) before -- MacOS, for example -- and while they've been popular in certain domains, they're hardly "killers".
Given the level that that the hardware is at these days, the "Linux killer" is likely to be some sort of advanced AI interface that recognizes natural language (spoken or written) and learns about the user well enough to anticipate most requests. Of course, the PC as we know it will be considered old-fashioned; we'll have wearables, pocketables and smart appliances that all talk to each other behind our backs. (And yes, some of that software may well be OO.)
Yes, which is why there are things like invention patents, design patents, and copyrights. (For example, circuit board layouts can by copyrighted).
Intellectual property infringement by direct copying or patent infringement is still actionable, but coming up with a different way of accomplishing the same thing by reverse engineering should be allowed -- it helps advance the state of the art, which is why (in the US at least) patents and copyrights exist anyway.
The DMCA allows reverse engineering of a playback device. It doesn't allow making something which decrypts non-programs without the approval of the copyright owner.
Ah, but decrypting DVD video files in order to play themis with the approval of the copyright owner.
The fine print on the back of DVD movie packages typically has license verbage like "Licensed for private home viewing only". Doesn't say "on authorized equipment" or anything like that, so a reverse-engineered CSS decryption system as part of a player is clearly legal.
The trick in this case is showing that DeCSS, especially the Windows version, is part of a playback system. (IMHO, sites which have the DeCSS code only without the other viewing code (nist, mpeg2dec, ac3dec, or etc.) may have a tougher time of proving that.)
Two other factors in why video looks "better" on a TV than on a monitor: TVs have a slightly different gamma than monitors, so video images tend to look duller on computer monitors unless this is compensated for; and the biggy: TV's sloppy analog signal processing effectively gives you antialiasing for free, smoothing out image imperfections that are glaringly obvious on a computer monitor. (Mind, the difference in bandwidths of the chroma and luma signals can give you weird color-crawl effects in closely striped areas on a TV screen.)
It's unfortunate that some of these corporations are releasing software under the GPL. [Rather than BSD]
It's necessary -- unless you want them to come up with their own Yet Another Open Source License. Releasing under the GPL may disallow the *BSD's to directly incorporate the code (actually it doesn't, but it would mean that subsequent *BSD's wouldn't be BSD-licensed), but it also disallows (same deal) folks like Sun, Microsoft, Apple etc from incorporating it into their proprietary OS's. The BSD license does not prevent this -- which is why BSD code shows up in proprietary OS's from those companies.
IBM shareholders would (rightly) take a dim view of IBM releasing source under a license that allowed IBM competitors to include that code in their own products without granting something in return.
Software can be considered speech, but it can also be considered an invention of some sort.
You need to distinguish between source and executable. (And yes, I know with interpreted languages that's a bit more subtle.) The, say, C language source code of some piece of software is no more an actual invention than is the text and figures describing a patented invention. Both are just descriptions of how to implement the invention (or in patentese, "reduce it to practise").
If the judge holds that source code is not speech (contrary to an earlier legal decision in a different district, as I recall), then it raises the question of where the line is drawn. Are detailed specifications for software speech? What if they're suficiently detailed and in some standard specification language that could be mechanically translated into a programming language (and thence compiled into machine language, which if loaded into the memory of an appropriate computer would constitute "reducing the invention to practise").
It probably wouldn't be hard to write a program that translated C (or whatever) code to unambiguous English text, and conversely translate such text back in to C code. (Even beyond just the obvious of spelling out the punctuation and numerics.) Would that English text qualify as speech?
This is shaping up to be something the Supremes will have a field day with.
Here's a quote from the injunction: (c) "DeCSS" means any computer program, file or device that may be used to decrypt or unscramble the contents of DVDs that are protected, or otherwise to circumvent the protection afforded, by CSS and that permits the copying of the contents or any portion thereof.
This could be argued to cover anyDVD drive and software, and indeed anyDVD player that has a video-out jack (you can plug it into your VCR to make a copy -- Macrovision may screw it up some, but some portion would be copied).
Now, the injunction applies not just to 2600, but to anyone with contact with them -- so here's what they do: go visit as many retailers as possible selling DVD players (especially those that also sell VCRs, i.e. all of them) or DVD viewing software and talk to the sales folks. That's the contact. The stores thus fall under the injunction. 2600 obligingly reports all this.
Now, I doubt that the judge is gonna throw all those folks in jail, or tell them that they can't sell DVD players anymore. It might (mind, there's no telling about the intelligence of judges, especially in New York) get him to better realize the implications, though.
This language (the word "access") was probably put in there primarily with (unauthorized) descramblers of satellite or cable signals in mind, not people wanting to play media that they've already paid for. But the courts could choose to interpret it either way.
OTOH, the phrase is "that effectively controls access", and we could argue that CSS wasn't very effective now, was it? (grin)
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If I want pay-per-view movies I can just switch my digital satellite receiver to the appropriate channels. MPEG video equivalent to DVD-quality, for just a couple of bucks. I think Echostar's (Dish Network) latest receiver models include a TiVo-like disk system so you can pause/rewind the movie if you need to take a potty break or grab a snack.
Heck, in the time it takes to download even over a fast line, I can drive to Blockbuster to pick up the video and be back. (I don't recall who first made the comment about not underestimating the bandwidth of a stationwagon filled with magtape, but I do recall once calculating the bandwidth of the highway that ran between two university towns where I lived/worked.)
The 486dx2-66 beside me here is 33.18 bogoMIPS. It's running my webserver and a few other network services. (Heck, even X Windows isn't too bad on it anymore since I upgraded from 16M to 24M, but that's not usually running.)
Anyone remember Firesign Theatre's "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus"? Remember the backdoor Clem used - "Springhead, this is worker".
Heck, I used that same sentence as the backdoor into a system I wrote -- but the customers got source and new it was there. (Further and more, you had to be already logged in at a certain privilege level before it'd be recognized.)
There are some occasions where a system needs to provide some way for a "maintenance worker" (or sysadmin) to expose certain inner workings to manipulation -- that's what the root password is all about, right?
Mind, in this case it doesn't apply: you don't keep such a hook secret from the customer, you do give them the option of changing it (with suitable warnings), and Front Page is hardly anything mission critical enough as to require that sort of access to a running system. (Plenty of other ways to access it if so.)
Running 'strings' on that DLL (buried deep within the FrontPage directories) did indeed turn up "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN". I've found other interesting strings in MS software (eg, a copyright notice from the Regents at UCB in 'ftp.exe'). Might be interesting to run strings on all the W2K stuff, although perhaps they're more careful now about hiding such things (may they rot13'd it.)
MSFT stock could very likely be heading for a 2- or 3-1 split
Not bloody likely. MSFT share price seems to have stalled out at about $90, absent some spikes in the last couple of weeks in anticipation of a settlement and a brief surge at the end of last year for who knows why (everything seemed to surge briefly then, millenium madness perhaps).
Take a look at the moving average over the past year, (eg here which doesn't include today's drop), they've been on a downward slide for a while, and the stock bounced around 90 for most of last fall.
Microsoft has never done more than a 2:1 split, and they split to bring the per share price back into the territory where it's trading now. If the slide continues, they may even do a merge (say, 2 for 3) to make the number look a bit nicer.
The NASDAQ drop is only partially related to MSFT, some of it is due to rationalization of dot-com prices in general. Heck, Linux-related companies went up in value today.
While I don't disagree on the main point of your message, perhaps you're unaware that many of the current software DVD players (ie for Windows) do let you do things like stop frame, frame grabbing, and frame advance.
Indeed, there are other programs out there that will let you capture a video clip (sans audio) by repeatedly sending "grab frame" and "frame advance" messages to the software player.
But yes, I'd like a player (or better, access to the player source) that lets me do whatever I want with the data stream. For example, I'd like to see a player that gives me the option of doing a split-screen display to simultaneously view two (or more) different camera-angle tracks (current players limit you to displaying one or the other) if present.
This one wasn't censored, it's fiction. The only weapons prohibited from outer space by treaty are "weapons of mass destruction" (e.g. nuclear bombs). Lasers aren't. Further and more, nuclear power sources for satellites are not prohibited -- indeed have been used far more by Russia/USSR (whose space reactor technology is well ahead of the US's) to power e.g. radar reconaissance satellites. (Spectacular example of this was Cosmos 954 which didn't properly boost to a disposal orbit and reentered over northwest Canada in 1979. Operation Morning Light picked up most of the radioactive debris that didn't burn up on reentry.)
I didn't bother with the rest of the stories, it wouldn't surprise me to find a similar level of politically-inspired bogosity.
Although Wired says that 205e requires a "paper and pen and a signature" for a prior nonexclusive license to prevail over a copyright transfer, the actual wording is "if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed".
The code itself containing the "released under the GPL" comment is a written instrument, so it comes down to whether a handwritten signature is necessary, or if the fact that the instrument itself is the thing copyrighted (or vice versa) makes the signature implicit. The signed instrument merely serves as proof that the license has been assigned, but that seems redundant if the copyrighted work includes the authorizing language.
Ultimately it'll depend on how literally a given judge interprets the law.
For a nightmare scenario, if decided in Mattel's favor it would allow something like Microsoft paying, say, Linus Torvalds whatever it takes to obtain the Linux copyrights and then them shutting down everybody else (who doesn't have a paper signed by Linus explictly licensing the code to them).
Signing over all the rights to FSF is one solution, but then the author has lost control. It might be satisfactory to sign a copy of the GPL (tweaked as necessary) granting FSF nonexclusive GPL rights (which includes redistribution). If digital signatures are acceptable then digitally signing the released code (which includes the necessary comments about GPL) should be all that's needed.
Every cash register running Linux instead of Win98 is $89 (or whatever) less that Microsoft has available to spend on FUD, embracing and extending, or creating new and uglier proprietary formats.
Sounds like a benefit to me.
And as someone else pointed out, it encourages hardware manufacturers to make sure Linux drivers are available.
Do the words "X terminal" ring any bells?
No, not xterms, but those otherwise dumb terminals that have just enough smarts to do a network boot and run an X server. Been around for years.
AMD's processers can do multiprocessing (or could, I vaguely recall a rumor they dropped this with Athlon). The problem is that all the MP motherboards use Intel chipsets which support Intel's style of MP. AMD (and Cyrix et al?) don't have licenses to the Intel MP technology, and came up with their own -- which requires a different mobo chipset, which nobody makes because the boards would be incompatible with Intel CPUs.
With AMD's recent growth and giving Intel a run for its money on releasing faster CPUs, we may see that change.
Oh, and a Beowulf is clustered, so doesn't care what manufacturer makes the CPUs, it can even mix them. It's tightly coupled SMP machines that care.
no planets have been found under 8 Jupiter masses. It may indicate that there is a limit to how small these free-floating planets can be
Or more likely, it may indicate that smaller planets have already cooled off to the point where they're not easily picked up by this survey. If the planets all formed about the same time (not unreasonable, if they're in the same cloud), smaller ones would be a lot cooler than larger ones for two reasons: they never got as hot in the first place (less infalling mass means less conversion of gravitational potential energy), and they cool off faster due to their greater surface area to volume ratio (square/cube law).
Region 0 is "any", so yeah, players play their own region plus zero. IIRC, the region encoding is a single byte of data, with a bit for each region (1 to 8, so zero would be no bits). In theory it's possible to encode a disc to more than one region by setting multiple bits.
DVD video playback is controlled by a kind of virtual machine (this is what allows for branching, multiple angles, etc), and certain player settings are readable as registers in this VM. Its possible to put code on the DVD disc to read the region setting and refuse to play if not set correctly. Apparently there are a couple of discs out there that will refuse to play in the Apex (or other hacked players) if the region code is set to "bypass", but will play if the region code is set to what the disc wants.
(My guess is that VM implementation bugs are what causes some problems with some combinations of DVD movies and players, for those discs that really exercise the VM.)
Geez. I'm running 6.2, I've had the 6.3 box sitting around for a few weeks waiting for me to get a chance to reorganize my disks a bit before installing it (I've got bits and pieces of an old Caldera install and some other odds and ends - probably about 3 different root partitions, yuck), and here's 6.4 out already.
But I'll probably hold off, if I can wait for a 2.4 kernel and a mature XFree86 4.0.
The most recently passed law would win. It would be assumed to amend/alter/revoke the earlier law even if it didn't explicitly say so.
Of course, there's no telling what any given judge would rule in any particular case.
Heh. You haven't really hacked until you've used low-temperature solder and a screwdriver heated over a candle to fix a circuit... :-)
Then there was the time I assembled an Apple-II-clone motherboard and wondered why the heck it didn't work until I noticed (the scope helped) that all the discrete transistors had been placed according to the silk-screen shapes, but that that was the opposite of how they were supposed to go in (ie emitter and collector reversed), the silk screen was wrong. Amazingly it actually worked after I desoldered them and turned them around.
Actually it has been made to work. Ever hear or read the text of the speech (from the floor, as a stockholder) that Charleton Heston made at a Time-Warner (I think) shareholders' meeting?
He was objecting to the content of some rap music that they were publishing (and promoting). Most of his speech simply consisted of reading the lyrics -- making audience and board members alike quite uncomfortable. I seem to recall that Warner very soon thereafter dropped their contracts with that rap group.
Now, I'm not sure what we could come up with that's quite that dramatic and to the point, but the point is that it can work.
completely redo the kernel as OO once HURD starts gaining marketshare and usablility.
No way. I mean, I've liked OO as much (or more) as the next guy ever since I discovered Simula back in the late 70s, but you really don't want or need heavy OO in an OS kernel. Too much unneeded overhead.
Besides, we've had OO OS's (sort of) before -- MacOS, for example -- and while they've been popular in certain domains, they're hardly "killers".
Given the level that that the hardware is at these days, the "Linux killer" is likely to be some sort of advanced AI interface that recognizes natural language (spoken or written) and learns about the user well enough to anticipate most requests. Of course, the PC as we know it will be considered old-fashioned; we'll have wearables, pocketables and smart appliances that all talk to each other behind our backs. (And yes, some of that software may well be OO.)
Yes, which is why there are things like invention patents, design patents, and copyrights. (For example, circuit board layouts can by copyrighted).
Intellectual property infringement by direct copying or patent infringement is still actionable, but coming up with a different way of accomplishing the same thing by reverse engineering should be allowed -- it helps advance the state of the art, which is why (in the US at least) patents and copyrights exist anyway.
The DMCA allows reverse engineering of a playback device. It doesn't allow making something which decrypts non-programs without the approval of the copyright owner.
Ah, but decrypting DVD video files in order to play them is with the approval of the copyright owner.
The fine print on the back of DVD movie packages typically has license verbage like "Licensed for private home viewing only". Doesn't say "on authorized equipment" or anything like that, so a reverse-engineered CSS decryption system as part of a player is clearly legal.
The trick in this case is showing that DeCSS, especially the Windows version, is part of a playback system. (IMHO, sites which have the DeCSS code only without the other viewing code (nist, mpeg2dec, ac3dec, or etc.) may have a tougher time of proving that.)
Two other factors in why video looks "better" on a TV than on a monitor: TVs have a slightly different gamma than monitors, so video images tend to look duller on computer monitors unless this is compensated for; and the biggy: TV's sloppy analog signal processing effectively gives you antialiasing for free, smoothing out image imperfections that are glaringly obvious on a computer monitor. (Mind, the difference in bandwidths of the chroma and luma signals can give you weird color-crawl effects in closely striped areas on a TV screen.)
It's unfortunate that some of these corporations are releasing software under the GPL. [Rather than BSD]
It's necessary -- unless you want them to come up with their own Yet Another Open Source License. Releasing under the GPL may disallow the *BSD's to directly incorporate the code (actually it doesn't, but it would mean that subsequent *BSD's wouldn't be BSD-licensed), but it also disallows (same deal) folks like Sun, Microsoft, Apple etc from incorporating it into their proprietary OS's. The BSD license does not prevent this -- which is why BSD code shows up in proprietary OS's from those companies.
IBM shareholders would (rightly) take a dim view of IBM releasing source under a license that allowed IBM competitors to include that code in their own products without granting something in return.
Software can be considered speech, but it can also be considered an invention of some sort.
You need to distinguish between source and executable. (And yes, I know with interpreted languages that's a bit more subtle.) The, say, C language source code of some piece of software is no more an actual invention than is the text and figures describing a patented invention. Both are just descriptions of how to implement the invention (or in patentese, "reduce it to practise").
If the judge holds that source code is not speech (contrary to an earlier legal decision in a different district, as I recall), then it raises the question of where the line is drawn. Are detailed specifications for software speech? What if they're suficiently detailed and in some standard specification language that could be mechanically translated into a programming language (and thence compiled into machine language, which if loaded into the memory of an appropriate computer would constitute "reducing the invention to practise").
It probably wouldn't be hard to write a program that translated C (or whatever) code to unambiguous English text, and conversely translate such text back in to C code. (Even beyond just the obvious of spelling out the punctuation and numerics.) Would that English text qualify as speech?
This is shaping up to be something the Supremes will have a field day with.
(Insert usual IANAL disclaimer here.)
Here's a quote from the injunction:
(c) "DeCSS" means any computer program, file or device that may be used to decrypt or unscramble the contents of DVDs that are protected, or otherwise to circumvent the protection afforded, by CSS and that permits the copying of the contents or any portion thereof.
This could be argued to cover anyDVD drive and software, and indeed anyDVD player that has a video-out jack (you can plug it into your VCR to make a copy -- Macrovision may screw it up some, but some portion would be copied).
Now, the injunction applies not just to 2600, but to anyone with contact with them -- so here's what they do: go visit as many retailers as possible selling DVD players (especially those that also sell VCRs, i.e. all of them) or DVD viewing software and talk to the sales folks. That's the contact. The stores thus fall under the injunction. 2600 obligingly reports all this.
Now, I doubt that the judge is gonna throw all those folks in jail, or tell them that they can't sell DVD players anymore. It might (mind, there's no telling about the intelligence of judges, especially in New York) get him to better realize the implications, though.
Well, maybe your version has better lyrics, but (IMHO) they don't scan quite as my version from a couple of weeks ago.
This language (the word "access") was probably put in there primarily with (unauthorized) descramblers of satellite or cable signals in mind, not people wanting to play media that they've already paid for. But the courts could choose to interpret it either way.
OTOH, the phrase is "that effectively controls access", and we could argue that CSS wasn't very effective now, was it? (grin)