You can't have android on the lumia because it doesn't exist that way. Is like saying, iPhone would be better with android on it.
It's more like saying that an iMac would be better if you could also run Linux on it -- which you can. There is no reason whatsoever for phones not to be the same way. And it seems unfathomable that Nokia could possibly be selling more phones by offering solely Microsoft products than they could by offering both, especially since the non-Microsoft alternative is what most of the customers are actually asking for.
To get to use the Xfinity service you need a tv cable subscription so you have to pay extra to Comcast. Presumably to pay the cost of the extra bandwidth consumption.
So let's eliminate the presumption then, and just have them do the accounting: Don't exempt Xfinity from the bandwidth cap. And if that means Comcast will give you a discount on TV service to compensate for the extra money you're paying for internet service, great. But it also makes them feel the pain they're causing to third parties with their ridiculously low caps, when customers start cancelling their TV service because it uses up too much overpriced data.
I'm sorry, what? We know exactly how to fix it. Abolish software patents. The fact that you describe this outcome as "hell on earth" provides the impression that you are both a liar and a patent lawyer.
If they don't use them to sue people, what would be the point of having them.
The nuclear weapons analogy is very appropriate: You're not supposed to have to use them. If you actually end up litigating a patent, something has gone terribly wrong.
The problem is this: If you have a valid patent and you want to use it for exclusion like patents are intended (like pharmaceutical companies do), you don't end up in court, because your competitors know you have a valid patent and don't bother infringing it, or stop when you tell them to.
But that isn't what happens in the tech industry. Instead, everyone has a huge pile of overly broad and obvious patents which everyone else is infringing (and only because none of them should ever have been issued), and the cost of litigating that many patents is almost always prohibitive. The consequence is that no one can use them for exclusion, because as soon as you file a lawsuit you get one back and it's mutually assured destruction. At the same time, you still have to have a huge patent arsenal in order to deter all the other companies from going to you for a shake down using a huge pile of questionable patents that would almost always cost more to litigate and invalidate than license. In this case the problem was that Oracle was vastly overvaluing the patents -- they were claiming $6B in damages at the start of all this. Now it looks like if they win it's going to end up being more like something less than $50M. Which is almost certainly less than the amount Oracle is having to spend in legal fees.
The sole purpose of buying sun seems to be to attack google with their IP... for what purpose I don't know.
I don't know if that's really it. I think part of it is that there are a very large number of old, conservative, high-spending Oracle customers who use Sun hardware, and if Sun dies then those customers are going to be looking for a new vendor, and in the process they could end up being sold an Oracle competitor's database. So Oracle staged a Sun bailout. They just happened to end up with Java in the process.
The thing is, Java means something different to Oracle than it ever did to Sun. The original point of Java was to stop people from writing apps in Visual Basic or against the Win32 API which then wouldn't run on Solaris and SPARC -- Java was "write once, run anywhere" so you could write your app for whatever you have now and then Sun could come in at some point and pitch some hardware to you and it would still run your software.
Oracle is instead looking at it as a licensing opportunity. Lots of people are using Java, Oracle wants money. The problem is that their patents are crap and claiming copyright on an API is ridiculous. It's like claiming a copyright on the bolt pattern in a piece of industrial equipment so that no competitors can make replacement parts. It's purely functional, and copyright only covers expression, not function. Functionality is the domain of patents.
He has nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain.
Nothing to lose... you mean other than having most of Oracle's Java patents invalidated and spending an obscene amount of legal fees against the prospect of not recovering anything?
1) The DOJ is saying they're fine if it gets destroyed. That makes any argument that you can't give it to the accused pretty flagrantly specious. 2) If the DOJ did actually want a clean copy as evidence, they can make themselves a copy and then put the original equipment back into service until the verdict comes down.
And when, exactly, is that? It happens about as often as (and is often simultaneous with when) you don't have electricity, which tends to brick just about everything after a few hours when the batteries run down, or immediately for anything without batteries. If you have cellular wireless service in addition to wifi, it happens approximately never, because the only place you don't have one or the other (if not both) is the middle of the woods where you, again, have no electricity (not to mention no corporate offices or employees).
What gives you the impression that "works without internet" is a common business requirement in a world where everyone has internet 99.9% of the time?
The problem is the whole net centrism of Chrome OS. By definition it can't offer anything that any other platform that can run Chrome the browser can't also run. So that means anything developed for Chrome OS also runs everywhere Chrome the browser runs. Which means Chrome the OS, by definition, runs a pure subset of what every other Chrome the browser platform can run. Every other platform gets 100% of Chrome OS's app pool + it's own.
You're ignoring how that can be a significant advantage. The alternative is what you want when you're Microsoft: You want your platform to run everything everyone else's can and then a lot more, because the more stuff runs on your platform and not others, the less people are able to switch. But that only works when you're already in the dominant market position -- adding some cool API or whatever is close to useless if the only way you can use it is if all your customers have ChromeOS and nobody does.
Now look at it from the other side: Suppose you make it so Chrome on Windows and OS X does everything Chrome OS can do. OK, now you convince some companies that it would be a good idea to write their custom business application against Chrome -- that way it will run on all major platforms, and for the few users who need only that application, you can buy them a Chrome OS computer which is cheaper and practically immune to viruses. Which provides the thin end of the wedge: Get people using Chrome OS in a limited capacity and the next custom business application that comes around for a refresh gets "works on our existing Chrome OS machines" as a requirement. Five or ten years later, everything businesses do works on Chrome OS and they start wondering what sense it makes paying money for Windows licenses.
Most likely, failure to challenge, protest, or send a counter-notice is deemed an admission of fault.
As the first reply points out, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense -- there are plenty of likely reasons for someone who is not an infringer to still not to submit a counter-notice, from fearing the expense of a trial to wanting to retain their anonymity for reasons unrelated to infringement to not knowing how to submit a counter notice to the alleged infringer not knowing whether they actually had a meritorious case for fair use, etc. But I would think more importantly, why isn't that exactly the sort of thing the service provider would be able to specify in the termination policy?
The DMCA safe harbor has a condition that the service provider "has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider’s system or network of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider’s system or network who are repeat infringers."
The thing is, it says "repeat infringers" not "repeatedly accused infringers." So I'm not a lawyer (and I would be interested in hearing the thoughts of anyone who is), but it seems like if you adopted a policy that says you'll terminate any user who is found liable of infringement in court on more than one occasion, that would seem to satisfy the statute. Which makes perfect sense really -- otherwise anyone could get anyone else's account terminated by making repeated fraudulent accusations. Can anyone think of a reason why that would be wrong?
You're doing the same thing. Copyright is not forcing people to not share, it just gives them the right to choose how they share.
I think it's pretty fair to say that copyright forces people other than the copyright holder to not share (without the copyright holder's permission). The key is in understanding what copyright does: An author can decide whether to share the work whether the copyright has expired or not. Even without a copyright, the author can post the manuscript on the internet and share it with whoever they like or stick in a safe and never share it with anyone. Copyright is not about what the copyright holder can do, it's about what other people can do. If there is no copyright, anyone with a copy of the work can share it with anyone. If there is copyright, those people can only do so with the copyright holder's authorization, i.e. they're forced not to share without authorization.
Obviously the would-be copyright holder has an interest in the latter outcome, because if everyone else is forced not to share then the copyright holder has a monopoly and can charge a monopoly rent for copies of the work. But saying that the former outcome is "forcing the copyright holder to share" has the same flavor as saying that not prohibiting Sonic.net from building a fiber network in an area already served by Comcast is "forcing Comcast to share" the market for internet service: It presupposes the existence of some legitimate right on the part of the would-be monopoly holder to exclude others from the market. Which makes it a frivolous argument in support of the creation or maintenance of such a right, because it's question begging. The argument takes the form "copyright holders should have a right to force others not to share copyrighted works because copyright holders should not be forced to allow others to share copyrighted works." The reasoning is entirely circular; it assumes the existence and legitimacy of the right it purports to justify the existence and legitimacy of.
I'm not so sure. There is a wide array of opinions but many seem to argue that copyright itself is unnatural and should be abolished. The GP seems to be responding, or assuming, that. This stance is more interesting to debate than "big lobby conglomerate behaves unethically".
I don't mean to suggest that no one has ever advocated the abolition of copyright, but those people are a small (if vocal) minority. Hardly anyone is going to support the proposition that creators should never be compensated even for the commercial exploitation of their works, and none of those people have the political power to actually accomplish it.
The real questions are what the contours of copyright should look like: How much copyright terms should be reduced, how best to realign penalties for entirely noncommercial use like P2P so as to be commensurate with the act rather than wildly disproportionate, how to mitigate the collateral damage and harm to innovation caused by overly aggressive copyright enforcement measures, etc.
The problem with the "anti-piracy" position is that most of the specific complaints people have about copyright enforcement are not in the nature of objecting to copyright enforcement whatsoever, but rather objecting to specific flaws: Lack of due process, presumption of guilt, prior restraints, excessively many false positives, outrageous penalties, harm to innovation, etc. I have never seen self-proclaimed anti-piracy crusaders actually address these issues. To the extent they even recognize the existence of a concern, the response is almost universally to downplay its significance rather than propose any effective method to actually address it.
Even to the extent that some are interested in arguing against the absolutist no-copyright-whatsoever position, it seems like the arguments they produce are not particularly productive. I mean what's with the one liners? If all you have to say is in the nature of "pirates can go to hell" or "authors
Trust is not binary. It has gradations. Moreover, this is a particular insidious failure of a sentiment:
If the choice is between "do good" and "increase shareholder value" they are obliged to follow the latter.
The reason that it's insidious is that it's technically true. But the circumstances where it actually comes into play are such as when a CEO's wife dies of cancer and he decides to donate all of the corporation's assets to the American Cancer Society. That isn't allowed; it goes too far.
But corporations are perfectly well permitted to make donations to charity, or plot a course that goes out of the way to avoid screwing over customers and employees, etc. And some of them do. And some of them don't. Your argument is that we should ignore that distinction and treat them all the same, not trust any of them. That line of reasoning is pernicious for at least two huge reasons.
The first is that you want companies to do the right thing regardless why they do it. I mean let's even ignore the fact that corporate executives are human and humans are capable of acting altruistically (or not) regardless of their legal obligations. Suppose they're all perfect automatons who only refrain from screwing everybody over in those instances where it will maximize shareholder value, and never because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy or because they have any kind of a moral compass. Think about the signal it sends to companies when you say "don't trust them, even when they do good" -- it makes it so that doing good no longer maximizes shareholder value because they stop getting credit for it. Which makes them stop doing it. It reduces the market demand for reasonable and considerate corporate behavior, which inevitably causes a reduction in supply. Your philosophy causes more evil to exist in the world.
In addition to that, for the corporations that actually do the right thing more times than not, or do so in predictable ways, it actually as a factual and game theoretical matter makes it so that you can trust them, at least in certain circumstances -- because after they spend a sufficient amount of resources building a good reputation for themselves, the cost of violating the trust they built exceeds the value they can attain through the violation. They can violate your trust, but only once -- that's how trust works, for corporations as well as people. After that they lose your business, and you can't make any money with no customers. Which makes it so that they -- the companies with a history of scrupulous behavior -- won't do it, because it isn't in their interest to lose your business over it.
So they claim. But it seems to me more that they're on the back foot and therefore incapable of acting too overtly malicious without causing excessively many customer defections. I mean they're still doing this, and patent trolling, and pushing automatic updates to Internet Explorer that default to making Bing your search engine even though nobody likes it, etc.
They've still got a ways to go before anyone ever trusts them again. Like years. That's what happens when you ruin your own reputation.
OK, this is a great example of this so let's go through it and I'll explain:
We already share ideas. We publish them in these things called scientific journals. You can even purchase books which explain these ideas in a clear and lucid style. But even otherwise forcing someone to share something is also what a sane society does not do.
Copyright is a prohibition on sharing. You are now claiming that its absence would be to force people to share. This is obviously a lie; something is not mandatory just because it isn't prohibited.
Trying to spin downloading an episode of The Office as "sharing ideas" is ridiculous. Though entitled people such as yourself already assume that you are free to enjoy other peoples hard work by breaking copyright law. I don't get why people are opposed to enforcing laws.
An unsupported conclusory statement, then an ad hominem attack followed by appeal to authority and a non-sequitur. You're really racking up the points there -- and the first three are pretty obvious, so let me just point out the last one in case anyone is wondering: There is a difference between "knowingly and willfully distributing The Office should be copyright infringement" and "all websites that host user generated content should be shut down, including the ones that process DMCA take downs, because users post a lot of infringing material."
The thing people object to is not "enforcing the laws" it is "enforcing the laws in a way that causes massive collateral damage to innocent third parties and reinforces the RIAA and MPAA distribution cartels by destroying new distribution channels that allow independent artists to get free exposure." Find an enforcement method with a sufficiently low false positive rate that it doesn't significantly impede fair use or innocent people and you won't hear the same objections.
If you don't like the laws get them changed. Ah.. but that is too hard, because that would actually require some amount of self-sacrifice. I suppose you want others to do that for you too.
Condescension combined with incompetence. A new low!
Hint: The way laws get changed starts with people communicating the problems with existing laws to other people, until enough of them understand and are vocal about the issue that Congress feels enough pressure to actually do something about it. That does eventually require people to put in some effort, but your sarcastic bloviating has provided no evidence that people are unwilling to actually do that.
So stick it to the man, and get the makup woman or the spot boy or the lighting technician fired. We already know who gets fired when the revenue stops. It ain't the CEO.
This is so flagrantly incorrect that it makes me suspect that I'm being trolled. You can't make a movie without a support crew, and the CEO has no job if he isn't making movies. Moreover, they're more likely to fire the CEO for missing earnings estimates than they are likely to stop making movies -- and let's not forget for a second that Hollywood continues to set revenue records almost every year.
Which isn't at all to say that the lighting tech doesn't have his job on the chopping block -- it's just not at all due to piracy. Rather, it's due to the studios being so consolidated that it's more profitable to make fewer movies that each have a higher gross than it is to make more movies which compete with the studio's own competing films for the same entertainment dollars. You want more lighting tech jobs, break out the antitrust laws and bust up the studios so that you have more studios to make more movies.
MPAA may be full of shit, but at the same time it's annoying how anti-piracy comments always get robotically modded down in Slashdot. I just think it's good to look objectively at both sides of the coin.
To reiterate what the previous response has already pointed out, the comments that get modded down are not flagged as trolls because they're anti-piracy, it's because they are actually trolls. The arguments they put forth almost invariably consist entirely of some combination of rhetorical exaggeration, false analogies, tautological question begging and unjustified moral indignation. They provide no reasoning, they're just pure flame bait.
The main problem with the "anti-piracy" position is that there is almost nothing legitimate they can ask for that they do not already have. The existing laws go so far above and beyond what is reasonable to "fight piracy" that anyone arguing in favor of further extensions is inherently a dangerous extremist seemingly incapable of articulating a justifiable position. They advance an unsustainable framework of debate over which the only possible subject of compromise is the magnitude and timing of further increases in enforcement powers, rather than facilitating necessary and productive efforts to mitigate the outrageous damage already being caused by the legislation that their previous efforts have pushed through against all reason and justice.
Keeping details of shipping products as secret as possible is cheap insurance. It makes it harder for competitors to determine whether they'd be successful in launching an attack. The less certain they are, the less likely they'll fire the opening shots.
That seems like faulty logic. Nobody starts a nuclear war just because they think they can cause more damage to the other guy. They do it because they're being irrational and acting based on emotion (e.g. Steve Jobs) or because they've already failed in the market and are doing it out of desperation (e.g. SCO). In either case the facts don't actually matter, the decision gets made on other grounds and then someone is assigned to find ways to attack. Making that person's job slightly easier or harder seems very unlikely to change the ultimate result. And as we saw with SCO, you don't actually need anything even resembling a legitimate claim to drag things out until the end of time.
I have a hard time believing that the trivial, speculative advantage of forcing would-be aggressors to decompile your code is worth the trouble of having to maintain the Linux drivers yourself rather than allowing a willing community to do much of the work for you.
This is IF Google permanently closed the source and if you wanted to completely fork the platform and carry it forward.
Your comment gave the impression that you were concerned with the delays seen with ICS, not that they would permanently discontinue releases. The latter is just unfounded speculation and could just as easily occur with any open source project that requires copyright assignment. It has nothing to do with the development model.
And since I last looked, all development happens internally to Google and between their partners. AOSP is a one-way dumping ground for the sources.
The latest version is developed behind closed doors, ostensibly so that Apple and other competitors can't just copy all their new ideas before they even release the next version, and so that Chinese manufacturers don't sell millions of devices with pre-test code on them just to have the latest version.
Once a major revision is published, smaller updates are released to the public and you can submit your own patches upstream. If you add something worthwhile to the latest public release, I have a hard time imagining that it won't get ported to the next version.
You're trolling. Anyone can take the latest published version and build anything they like around it. The only disadvantage is that you don't get to see the latest code until it's ready for release, which means your products are built around version N-1 instead of version N -- but once the codebase matures that won't even matter most of the time, and where it does you can still join OHA to get earlier access.
There is no reason that someone would have to maintain their own (e.g.) windowing system rather than just using the latest published version, unless they need to make changes to it that Google is disinclined to incorporate upstream, in which case you've got yourself a fork you have to maintain yourself regardless of the frequency Google releases updates.
The problem is a lot of hardware is heavily patented, and the patents cover the hardware-software combination.
This argument is totally wrong because it ignores the fact that patents exist in part to promote disclosure, not secrecy. If something is patented, it isn't a secret. How do you imagine publishing the driver source code going to make the patents disappear?
Are you on crack? None of that stuff has anything whatsoever to do with having a single connection. If you were so inclined, you could do any of it entirely with existing technology.
The purpose of a single connection is purely performance. It allows you to have SSL on everything without doing a thousand handshakes. It allows the server to provide data it knows you're about to request ahead of time rather than waiting for a round trip to your browser.
People who think SSL is any good for DRM are deluded. Anyone can MITM their own SSL connections trivially by adding their own CA to their browser and then signing certificates for whatever site you want to impersonate.
Think again. Today's server CPUs all already have hardware AES support. There is no reason why the next generation's can't support RSA/DH for the handshake too. And if you make SSL mandatory, they will. Which makes the overhead disappear into a tiny fraction of the number of transistors on each core, while making everything more secure.
"There is going to be a transition period" is no excuse for not doing something which has long-term benefits.
Preventing China from dominating the solar panel market in China is pretty well impossible and was never going to happen in the first place. And China can't very well impose a tariff on US products being sold to the US market.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't have android on the lumia because it doesn't exist that way. Is like saying, iPhone would be better with android on it.
It's more like saying that an iMac would be better if you could also run Linux on it -- which you can. There is no reason whatsoever for phones not to be the same way. And it seems unfathomable that Nokia could possibly be selling more phones by offering solely Microsoft products than they could by offering both, especially since the non-Microsoft alternative is what most of the customers are actually asking for.
To get to use the Xfinity service you need a tv cable subscription so you have to pay extra to Comcast. Presumably to pay the cost of the extra bandwidth consumption.
So let's eliminate the presumption then, and just have them do the accounting: Don't exempt Xfinity from the bandwidth cap. And if that means Comcast will give you a discount on TV service to compensate for the extra money you're paying for internet service, great. But it also makes them feel the pain they're causing to third parties with their ridiculously low caps, when customers start cancelling their TV service because it uses up too much overpriced data.
I'm sorry, what? We know exactly how to fix it. Abolish software patents. The fact that you describe this outcome as "hell on earth" provides the impression that you are both a liar and a patent lawyer.
If they don't use them to sue people, what would be the point of having them.
The nuclear weapons analogy is very appropriate: You're not supposed to have to use them. If you actually end up litigating a patent, something has gone terribly wrong.
The problem is this: If you have a valid patent and you want to use it for exclusion like patents are intended (like pharmaceutical companies do), you don't end up in court, because your competitors know you have a valid patent and don't bother infringing it, or stop when you tell them to.
But that isn't what happens in the tech industry. Instead, everyone has a huge pile of overly broad and obvious patents which everyone else is infringing (and only because none of them should ever have been issued), and the cost of litigating that many patents is almost always prohibitive. The consequence is that no one can use them for exclusion, because as soon as you file a lawsuit you get one back and it's mutually assured destruction. At the same time, you still have to have a huge patent arsenal in order to deter all the other companies from going to you for a shake down using a huge pile of questionable patents that would almost always cost more to litigate and invalidate than license. In this case the problem was that Oracle was vastly overvaluing the patents -- they were claiming $6B in damages at the start of all this. Now it looks like if they win it's going to end up being more like something less than $50M. Which is almost certainly less than the amount Oracle is having to spend in legal fees.
The sole purpose of buying sun seems to be to attack google with their IP... for what purpose I don't know.
I don't know if that's really it. I think part of it is that there are a very large number of old, conservative, high-spending Oracle customers who use Sun hardware, and if Sun dies then those customers are going to be looking for a new vendor, and in the process they could end up being sold an Oracle competitor's database. So Oracle staged a Sun bailout. They just happened to end up with Java in the process.
The thing is, Java means something different to Oracle than it ever did to Sun. The original point of Java was to stop people from writing apps in Visual Basic or against the Win32 API which then wouldn't run on Solaris and SPARC -- Java was "write once, run anywhere" so you could write your app for whatever you have now and then Sun could come in at some point and pitch some hardware to you and it would still run your software.
Oracle is instead looking at it as a licensing opportunity. Lots of people are using Java, Oracle wants money. The problem is that their patents are crap and claiming copyright on an API is ridiculous. It's like claiming a copyright on the bolt pattern in a piece of industrial equipment so that no competitors can make replacement parts. It's purely functional, and copyright only covers expression, not function. Functionality is the domain of patents.
He has nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain.
Nothing to lose... you mean other than having most of Oracle's Java patents invalidated and spending an obscene amount of legal fees against the prospect of not recovering anything?
That is a surprisingly good explanation of software patents.
1) The DOJ is saying they're fine if it gets destroyed. That makes any argument that you can't give it to the accused pretty flagrantly specious.
2) If the DOJ did actually want a clean copy as evidence, they can make themselves a copy and then put the original equipment back into service until the verdict comes down.
when you don't have Internet
And when, exactly, is that? It happens about as often as (and is often simultaneous with when) you don't have electricity, which tends to brick just about everything after a few hours when the batteries run down, or immediately for anything without batteries. If you have cellular wireless service in addition to wifi, it happens approximately never, because the only place you don't have one or the other (if not both) is the middle of the woods where you, again, have no electricity (not to mention no corporate offices or employees).
What gives you the impression that "works without internet" is a common business requirement in a world where everyone has internet 99.9% of the time?
The problem is the whole net centrism of Chrome OS. By definition it can't offer anything that any other platform that can run Chrome the browser can't also run. So that means anything developed for Chrome OS also runs everywhere Chrome the browser runs. Which means Chrome the OS, by definition, runs a pure subset of what every other Chrome the browser platform can run. Every other platform gets 100% of Chrome OS's app pool + it's own.
You're ignoring how that can be a significant advantage. The alternative is what you want when you're Microsoft: You want your platform to run everything everyone else's can and then a lot more, because the more stuff runs on your platform and not others, the less people are able to switch. But that only works when you're already in the dominant market position -- adding some cool API or whatever is close to useless if the only way you can use it is if all your customers have ChromeOS and nobody does.
Now look at it from the other side: Suppose you make it so Chrome on Windows and OS X does everything Chrome OS can do. OK, now you convince some companies that it would be a good idea to write their custom business application against Chrome -- that way it will run on all major platforms, and for the few users who need only that application, you can buy them a Chrome OS computer which is cheaper and practically immune to viruses. Which provides the thin end of the wedge: Get people using Chrome OS in a limited capacity and the next custom business application that comes around for a refresh gets "works on our existing Chrome OS machines" as a requirement. Five or ten years later, everything businesses do works on Chrome OS and they start wondering what sense it makes paying money for Windows licenses.
Most likely, failure to challenge, protest, or send a counter-notice is deemed an admission of fault.
As the first reply points out, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense -- there are plenty of likely reasons for someone who is not an infringer to still not to submit a counter-notice, from fearing the expense of a trial to wanting to retain their anonymity for reasons unrelated to infringement to not knowing how to submit a counter notice to the alleged infringer not knowing whether they actually had a meritorious case for fair use, etc. But I would think more importantly, why isn't that exactly the sort of thing the service provider would be able to specify in the termination policy?
The DMCA safe harbor has a condition that the service provider "has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider’s system or network of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider’s system or network who are repeat infringers."
The thing is, it says "repeat infringers" not "repeatedly accused infringers." So I'm not a lawyer (and I would be interested in hearing the thoughts of anyone who is), but it seems like if you adopted a policy that says you'll terminate any user who is found liable of infringement in court on more than one occasion, that would seem to satisfy the statute. Which makes perfect sense really -- otherwise anyone could get anyone else's account terminated by making repeated fraudulent accusations. Can anyone think of a reason why that would be wrong?
You're doing the same thing. Copyright is not forcing people to not share, it just gives them the right to choose how they share.
I think it's pretty fair to say that copyright forces people other than the copyright holder to not share (without the copyright holder's permission). The key is in understanding what copyright does: An author can decide whether to share the work whether the copyright has expired or not. Even without a copyright, the author can post the manuscript on the internet and share it with whoever they like or stick in a safe and never share it with anyone. Copyright is not about what the copyright holder can do, it's about what other people can do. If there is no copyright, anyone with a copy of the work can share it with anyone. If there is copyright, those people can only do so with the copyright holder's authorization, i.e. they're forced not to share without authorization.
Obviously the would-be copyright holder has an interest in the latter outcome, because if everyone else is forced not to share then the copyright holder has a monopoly and can charge a monopoly rent for copies of the work. But saying that the former outcome is "forcing the copyright holder to share" has the same flavor as saying that not prohibiting Sonic.net from building a fiber network in an area already served by Comcast is "forcing Comcast to share" the market for internet service: It presupposes the existence of some legitimate right on the part of the would-be monopoly holder to exclude others from the market. Which makes it a frivolous argument in support of the creation or maintenance of such a right, because it's question begging. The argument takes the form "copyright holders should have a right to force others not to share copyrighted works because copyright holders should not be forced to allow others to share copyrighted works." The reasoning is entirely circular; it assumes the existence and legitimacy of the right it purports to justify the existence and legitimacy of.
I'm not so sure. There is a wide array of opinions but many seem to argue that copyright itself is unnatural and should be abolished. The GP seems to be responding, or assuming, that. This stance is more interesting to debate than "big lobby conglomerate behaves unethically".
I don't mean to suggest that no one has ever advocated the abolition of copyright, but those people are a small (if vocal) minority. Hardly anyone is going to support the proposition that creators should never be compensated even for the commercial exploitation of their works, and none of those people have the political power to actually accomplish it.
The real questions are what the contours of copyright should look like: How much copyright terms should be reduced, how best to realign penalties for entirely noncommercial use like P2P so as to be commensurate with the act rather than wildly disproportionate, how to mitigate the collateral damage and harm to innovation caused by overly aggressive copyright enforcement measures, etc.
The problem with the "anti-piracy" position is that most of the specific complaints people have about copyright enforcement are not in the nature of objecting to copyright enforcement whatsoever, but rather objecting to specific flaws: Lack of due process, presumption of guilt, prior restraints, excessively many false positives, outrageous penalties, harm to innovation, etc. I have never seen self-proclaimed anti-piracy crusaders actually address these issues. To the extent they even recognize the existence of a concern, the response is almost universally to downplay its significance rather than propose any effective method to actually address it.
Even to the extent that some are interested in arguing against the absolutist no-copyright-whatsoever position, it seems like the arguments they produce are not particularly productive. I mean what's with the one liners? If all you have to say is in the nature of "pirates can go to hell" or "authors
Trust is not binary. It has gradations. Moreover, this is a particular insidious failure of a sentiment:
If the choice is between "do good" and "increase shareholder value" they are obliged to follow the latter.
The reason that it's insidious is that it's technically true. But the circumstances where it actually comes into play are such as when a CEO's wife dies of cancer and he decides to donate all of the corporation's assets to the American Cancer Society. That isn't allowed; it goes too far.
But corporations are perfectly well permitted to make donations to charity, or plot a course that goes out of the way to avoid screwing over customers and employees, etc. And some of them do. And some of them don't. Your argument is that we should ignore that distinction and treat them all the same, not trust any of them. That line of reasoning is pernicious for at least two huge reasons.
The first is that you want companies to do the right thing regardless why they do it. I mean let's even ignore the fact that corporate executives are human and humans are capable of acting altruistically (or not) regardless of their legal obligations. Suppose they're all perfect automatons who only refrain from screwing everybody over in those instances where it will maximize shareholder value, and never because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy or because they have any kind of a moral compass. Think about the signal it sends to companies when you say "don't trust them, even when they do good" -- it makes it so that doing good no longer maximizes shareholder value because they stop getting credit for it. Which makes them stop doing it. It reduces the market demand for reasonable and considerate corporate behavior, which inevitably causes a reduction in supply. Your philosophy causes more evil to exist in the world.
In addition to that, for the corporations that actually do the right thing more times than not, or do so in predictable ways, it actually as a factual and game theoretical matter makes it so that you can trust them, at least in certain circumstances -- because after they spend a sufficient amount of resources building a good reputation for themselves, the cost of violating the trust they built exceeds the value they can attain through the violation. They can violate your trust, but only once -- that's how trust works, for corporations as well as people. After that they lose your business, and you can't make any money with no customers. Which makes it so that they -- the companies with a history of scrupulous behavior -- won't do it, because it isn't in their interest to lose your business over it.
Lately, MS has been one of the good guys
So they claim. But it seems to me more that they're on the back foot and therefore incapable of acting too overtly malicious without causing excessively many customer defections. I mean they're still doing this, and patent trolling, and pushing automatic updates to Internet Explorer that default to making Bing your search engine even though nobody likes it, etc.
They've still got a ways to go before anyone ever trusts them again. Like years. That's what happens when you ruin your own reputation.
OK, this is a great example of this so let's go through it and I'll explain:
We already share ideas. We publish them in these things called scientific journals. You can even purchase books which explain these ideas in a clear and lucid style. But even otherwise forcing someone to share something is also what a sane society does not do.
Copyright is a prohibition on sharing. You are now claiming that its absence would be to force people to share. This is obviously a lie; something is not mandatory just because it isn't prohibited.
Trying to spin downloading an episode of The Office as "sharing ideas" is ridiculous. Though entitled people such as yourself already assume that you are free to enjoy other peoples hard work by breaking copyright law. I don't get why people are opposed to enforcing laws.
An unsupported conclusory statement, then an ad hominem attack followed by appeal to authority and a non-sequitur. You're really racking up the points there -- and the first three are pretty obvious, so let me just point out the last one in case anyone is wondering: There is a difference between "knowingly and willfully distributing The Office should be copyright infringement" and "all websites that host user generated content should be shut down, including the ones that process DMCA take downs, because users post a lot of infringing material."
The thing people object to is not "enforcing the laws" it is "enforcing the laws in a way that causes massive collateral damage to innocent third parties and reinforces the RIAA and MPAA distribution cartels by destroying new distribution channels that allow independent artists to get free exposure." Find an enforcement method with a sufficiently low false positive rate that it doesn't significantly impede fair use or innocent people and you won't hear the same objections.
If you don't like the laws get them changed. Ah.. but that is too hard, because that would actually require some amount of self-sacrifice. I suppose you want others to do that for you too.
Condescension combined with incompetence. A new low!
Hint: The way laws get changed starts with people communicating the problems with existing laws to other people, until enough of them understand and are vocal about the issue that Congress feels enough pressure to actually do something about it. That does eventually require people to put in some effort, but your sarcastic bloviating has provided no evidence that people are unwilling to actually do that.
So stick it to the man, and get the makup woman or the spot boy or the lighting technician fired. We already know who gets fired when the revenue stops. It ain't the CEO.
This is so flagrantly incorrect that it makes me suspect that I'm being trolled. You can't make a movie without a support crew, and the CEO has no job if he isn't making movies. Moreover, they're more likely to fire the CEO for missing earnings estimates than they are likely to stop making movies -- and let's not forget for a second that Hollywood continues to set revenue records almost every year.
Which isn't at all to say that the lighting tech doesn't have his job on the chopping block -- it's just not at all due to piracy. Rather, it's due to the studios being so consolidated that it's more profitable to make fewer movies that each have a higher gross than it is to make more movies which compete with the studio's own competing films for the same entertainment dollars. You want more lighting tech jobs, break out the antitrust laws and bust up the studios so that you have more studios to make more movies.
MPAA may be full of shit, but at the same time it's annoying how anti-piracy comments always get robotically modded down in Slashdot. I just think it's good to look objectively at both sides of the coin.
To reiterate what the previous response has already pointed out, the comments that get modded down are not flagged as trolls because they're anti-piracy, it's because they are actually trolls. The arguments they put forth almost invariably consist entirely of some combination of rhetorical exaggeration, false analogies, tautological question begging and unjustified moral indignation. They provide no reasoning, they're just pure flame bait.
The main problem with the "anti-piracy" position is that there is almost nothing legitimate they can ask for that they do not already have. The existing laws go so far above and beyond what is reasonable to "fight piracy" that anyone arguing in favor of further extensions is inherently a dangerous extremist seemingly incapable of articulating a justifiable position. They advance an unsustainable framework of debate over which the only possible subject of compromise is the magnitude and timing of further increases in enforcement powers, rather than facilitating necessary and productive efforts to mitigate the outrageous damage already being caused by the legislation that their previous efforts have pushed through against all reason and justice.
Keeping details of shipping products as secret as possible is cheap insurance. It makes it harder for competitors to determine whether they'd be successful in launching an attack. The less certain they are, the less likely they'll fire the opening shots.
That seems like faulty logic. Nobody starts a nuclear war just because they think they can cause more damage to the other guy. They do it because they're being irrational and acting based on emotion (e.g. Steve Jobs) or because they've already failed in the market and are doing it out of desperation (e.g. SCO). In either case the facts don't actually matter, the decision gets made on other grounds and then someone is assigned to find ways to attack. Making that person's job slightly easier or harder seems very unlikely to change the ultimate result. And as we saw with SCO, you don't actually need anything even resembling a legitimate claim to drag things out until the end of time.
I have a hard time believing that the trivial, speculative advantage of forcing would-be aggressors to decompile your code is worth the trouble of having to maintain the Linux drivers yourself rather than allowing a willing community to do much of the work for you.
This is IF Google permanently closed the source and if you wanted to completely fork the platform and carry it forward.
Your comment gave the impression that you were concerned with the delays seen with ICS, not that they would permanently discontinue releases. The latter is just unfounded speculation and could just as easily occur with any open source project that requires copyright assignment. It has nothing to do with the development model.
And since I last looked, all development happens internally to Google and between their partners. AOSP is a one-way dumping ground for the sources.
The latest version is developed behind closed doors, ostensibly so that Apple and other competitors can't just copy all their new ideas before they even release the next version, and so that Chinese manufacturers don't sell millions of devices with pre-test code on them just to have the latest version.
Once a major revision is published, smaller updates are released to the public and you can submit your own patches upstream. If you add something worthwhile to the latest public release, I have a hard time imagining that it won't get ported to the next version.
You're trolling. Anyone can take the latest published version and build anything they like around it. The only disadvantage is that you don't get to see the latest code until it's ready for release, which means your products are built around version N-1 instead of version N -- but once the codebase matures that won't even matter most of the time, and where it does you can still join OHA to get earlier access.
There is no reason that someone would have to maintain their own (e.g.) windowing system rather than just using the latest published version, unless they need to make changes to it that Google is disinclined to incorporate upstream, in which case you've got yourself a fork you have to maintain yourself regardless of the frequency Google releases updates.
The problem is a lot of hardware is heavily patented, and the patents cover the hardware-software combination.
This argument is totally wrong because it ignores the fact that patents exist in part to promote disclosure, not secrecy. If something is patented, it isn't a secret. How do you imagine publishing the driver source code going to make the patents disappear?
Only if they want to start a trade war they can't win.
Are you on crack? None of that stuff has anything whatsoever to do with having a single connection. If you were so inclined, you could do any of it entirely with existing technology.
The purpose of a single connection is purely performance. It allows you to have SSL on everything without doing a thousand handshakes. It allows the server to provide data it knows you're about to request ahead of time rather than waiting for a round trip to your browser.
People who think SSL is any good for DRM are deluded. Anyone can MITM their own SSL connections trivially by adding their own CA to their browser and then signing certificates for whatever site you want to impersonate.
SSL already exists. There is nothing stopping malware distributors from using it whether it is mandatory or not.
Think again. Today's server CPUs all already have hardware AES support. There is no reason why the next generation's can't support RSA/DH for the handshake too. And if you make SSL mandatory, they will. Which makes the overhead disappear into a tiny fraction of the number of transistors on each core, while making everything more secure.
"There is going to be a transition period" is no excuse for not doing something which has long-term benefits.
Preventing China from dominating the solar panel market in China is pretty well impossible and was never going to happen in the first place. And China can't very well impose a tariff on US products being sold to the US market.