I think you're oversimplifying. If patents were all as simple as writing a simple overview of what the "invention" was supposed to do and then waiting for others to implement that idea in any fixed form, then they'd be too vague as to be valid. A patent needs to be specific enough so that someone skilled in the art can use the patent as an instruction manual for constructing said device. Patent protection is then extended only to a device that could be reasonably considered to have been constructed using the patent. Of course, the way things have been going, who knows what it's possible to convince a judge/jury of these days.
My comment was directed at you (and today's other so-called libertarians who share your views) not the Founders (about whose behavior I am not going to engage in moral relativism just because they did it a long time ago). That you don't seem to think that slavery is the very antithesis of libertarianism, in your zeal to count slavers as your (assuming you consider yourself a libertarian) ideological precursors, says some things about you.
BTW, I'd assume you'd know more about what it's like to be an "arrogant 19 yo prick" than I do. It's been over a decade since I was 19.
A certain level of cooperation and coordination by a trade group is expected and legal and ethical. Above that it becomes illegal and unethical. I think this was the basis for the recent price-fixing lawsuit that several major members of the RIAA settled by offering large amounts of money rather than admit guilt or face a trial.
Their sole power is to offer a certain subset of music for sale, and to decide on the terms under which it will be sold. If they decided not to sell any of their music to anyone at any price, what would be the net effect? A lot of pissed off artists and consumers, sure, but everyone would live right through it.
The RIAA is a lobbying group, not a music company. If the RIAA actually coordinated things like terms for music sales they would probably be violating antitrust laws.
Also, given the rapid consolidation of a few large media corporations due to both economics, changes in copyright law, and increasingly corporate friendly rulemaking at the FCC, RIAA members have increasing power over our lives, whether we buy their products or not.
But more to the point: Gun talk is the new Nazi/Hitler (a la Godwin). Want to hijack a Slashdot thread? Just put the word "gun" in your post and suddenly the topic is now effectively over as zealots from both sides of the gun debate spew the same sound bites over and over.:)
If you think a bunch slave-owning, aristocratic men who denied women the right to vote (according to documentation some of them had wives who were quite upset about this) were "libertarians" (or even close), then, well, I think that says something.
Sigh. I've been moderated flamebait for my perfectly legitimate argument that DRM cannot possibly be "reasonable" because DRM is just machine logic and is entirely not "able" to "reason" (the very premise of the word reasonable). And AFAICT iTunes' DRM is so flimsy that all you do to circumvent is mix-burn-rip rather than rip-mix-burn. If the MS DRM is lame because it's been cracked, what does that say for DRM that's broken from the get go?
Just to keep things straight: this is the MPAA. That's the MOTION PICTURE folks. RIAA is a different lobbying group. Personally I prefer to avoid confusion and think of them both as the "media mafiAA" or "mafiAA" for short.
(and no. I didn't think this up. some slashgenius did. thanks slashboywonder!)
Well, good format maybe, but there's no such thing as "reasonable" DRM. "Reasonable" would require it to be "able" to "reason". DRM is just a machine following instructions. In the case of iTunes, I gather that one of those instructions allows the making of CDs. It also seems likely that the resulting CDs are easily "ripped" to a format which contains no DRM bits at all. Talk about cracked.
Maybe your lawyer is biased in favor of something called "intellectual property" and therefore would normally answer such questions from a perspective that assumes a copyright holder has greater rights in copyrighted works than they actually do. Obviously there are "intellectual property" lawyers out there who believe that EULAs are valid contracts and have advised software companies of same. Noted law professor Lawrence Lessig argued that the CTEA was at least partially invalid in front of the Supreme Court. Opinions on important legal issues differ... even among those we might consider "well versed".
Consequently our judicial system is oppositional. The best part is that both sides are represented by lawyers who both say they are right. It therefore follows that no matter what any one lawyer says, you can probably find another lawyer who will say the exact opposite. Some judges even make decisions that are entirely wrong, hence our appeals process and Supreme Court. Even the Supreme Court is often divided-- sometimes they are split as close as 45/55!
In this case, your lawyer has almost nothing to lose by saying to just delete the software. I mean, what's the upside to keeping a copy of WASTE (assuming that's what we're talking about)? I can't think of one. So in this case, no matter how low the risk, the reward is even less. So is he giving good legal advice or is he just pointing out the obvious?
Or maybe your lawyer knows the answer to my original question, which was about where in copyright law there are provisions for revoking ownership of works which were received in good faith but whose creation or distribution constituted an infringement. Or maybe he's aware of clear precedents in case law. Or maybe he's wrong. Did he cite any statute or case law during your discussion? Not to be rude, but without some documentation secondhand lawyer's advice isn't worth the price I paid for it.:)
Where in copyright law is there any requirement for people who have received infringing works to either destroy those works or compensate the rights holder for the infringement? I looked. I couldn't find anything that prohibited ownership or use of infringing works. Only reproduction, distribution, public display, and derivation are proscribed. (Note that if a patent is involved this is different. Patent rules clearly prohibit unlicensed usage.) This means that SCO is using the threat of baseless lawsuits against end users to extort money from those end users.
If they have a case, one wonders why they haven't sent actionable cease and desist notices to companies like Red Hat. And by actionable, I mean, detailing exactly what the infringements are in a way that Red Hat (or whoever) could actually be expected to believe and act on. A blanket statement like "Linux is infringing" is not actionable unless SCO is asserting that the entirety of Linux is a derived work and therefore infringing-- and that's not something I've seen them say, especially since they seem to be focusing on the idea that bits of code all over the kernel are infringing.
1) Disks die. But this is why we all make hot copies and/or use RAID and/or some other backup strategy. Right? They're still not very expensive.
2) 100 x 18 GB DVDs? Unless you really relish the idea of remastering your data into 18Gb chunks all the time, this is crazy talk. Plus, now you've got this whole big mechanical device to depend on (the disk changer) and unless that's 100 chained drives, you can only access your data in 1/100th total storage chunks. What if you suddenly need to start switching between disks at opposite ends/sides of the carousel because your data wasn't chunked appropriately? That's a lot of latency (or you have to rearrange the disks) which wastes even more of your time.
3) Waste of capacity? WTF is that? Waste of electricity maybe. But if you've got that much read-rarely data, put it on a separate drive and spin it down between accesses. Otherwise I don't see how this is a waste of anything except the time you're going to waste trying to make a DVD solution workable.
Hmmm. Maybe you're just a troll, maybe you really don't understand... just in case: DRM doesn't prevent 90% of piracy because it only takes one smart person to figure out how to crack it. Once that's done they can write a computer program that allows any idiot to replicate the feat. Also, strong encryption takes computing horsepower. Do you know what that would mean for devices like CD players? Yeah, they'd all be sporting a ton of processing power above and beyond their mission critical audio format decoders and digital to analog convertors. Back in 1986 or whenever they first started unleashing these devices that would've all seemed pretty silly since the only feasible way to copy CDs was to record them onto cassette tape.
Because all those optimizations don't mean squat when most computers are not maxing the CPU on a regular basis anyway. Also, portage is not a silver bullet. While it's got a very good system for handling a whole lot of things (especially cool stuff like being able to peg versions or inject versions if you want to roll something by hand), it's not nearly complete. Look at the lame way it handles config issues by just post-poning that to etc-update, which isn't remotely user friendly, imho.
Hmmm. I have the same complaint about Windows. A lot of applications function poorly as part of the unified whole, and many of them are non-standard in very disappointing ways. I've also found that some of the default behaviors are the stupidest things ever... only with Microsoft, if there is a way to change some of that stuff, it's far from obvious. I find that Linux GNOME and KDE are far more flexible and eye-catching in the main than Microsoft. And yes, sometimes there are discrepancies. You get what you pay for.
I think you missed his/her point. If the cost of the more energy-efficient processor exceeds the amount of the money saved on the power bills, the company or household is worse off for buying the more efficient model. In the example, the $37 was no match for the $500 extra expense of the system.
Imagine buying a G5 iMac desktop will save me $50/year in electricity bills, but the system costs $200 more than a comparable x86 machine. Then it takes four years for the energy savings to pay for the added equipment expense. Multiplied over 50 workstations, the effect is the same, only the numbers get bigger on both sides of the equation. Just because those 50 machines will save me $2500 annually, doesn't mean they're necessarily worth $10,000 more up front.
However, the energy assumption is a difficult one to make. Energy costs are volatile, generally only increase, and are not an insignificant variable expense for most businesses-- minimizing that expense is not a bad move.
Um. There are scads of Perl web development books written by people who DO NOT know what they're doing. And thousands more actual web developers working in Perl who don't know what they're doing as a result. I know. I used to be one of them. Language wars are a waste of time. The original post was probably off-topic, since this is not a general "criticize Perl" thread. Indeed, the sigil change issue has been answered for Perl 6. The sigils will no longer change. However, there are many of us who find the character indicates type characteristic of Perl to be distracting. In a truly OO language, this can only lead to pain and suffering. If Perl OO is to be more than a hack, the sigils have got to go.
In any case, the concerns about context are completely baseless. So what? It's not like context is subjective in Perl. It's just a factor to deal with when programming. It makes the code more expressive with less effort. That's one of the stated goals of Perl: laziness. In this case, it's a great idea. Not one that is perfectly implemented in Perl, necessarily, but nonetheless a fantastic notion.
The section of the Constitution you quoted begins "The Congress shall have Power..." This is not a command that Congress has to follow any more than their power "To declare War" requires them to constantly find a war to declare. Other than that, the common person thinks patents and copyrights are necessary. Indeed, they take on faith the same anti-free-market attitude the Founders took when they included that clause-- that without government regulation nothing would get written, invented, or whatever.
But that's a postulation that hasn't been proven. And without the proper balance of the public's right against the right of authors and inventors, what we seem to be seeing is actually an environment in which authoring and inventing are risky behaviors because of the possibility of infringement.
Let's see. They are about to buy a computer. Therefore the place they should look for information on buying a computer is a place they need a computer to get to?
It's not entrapment. It's deceptive. It's pointless. And furthermore, if you downloaded a bogus file from the RIAA, you wouldn't have committed a crime, so you can't really be sued or prosecuted for anything.
Entrapment is when a law enforcement agency gets someone to commit a crime they would not have otherwise committed. Someone downloading a file from a random stranger over the internet is already predisposed to downloading files. And downloading files may not be a crime in the first place (it would be the uploading or offering the files that is clearly illegal).
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're oversimplifying. If patents were all as simple as writing a simple overview of what the "invention" was supposed to do and then waiting for others to implement that idea in any fixed form, then they'd be too vague as to be valid. A patent needs to be specific enough so that someone skilled in the art can use the patent as an instruction manual for constructing said device. Patent protection is then extended only to a device that could be reasonably considered to have been constructed using the patent. Of course, the way things have been going, who knows what it's possible to convince a judge/jury of these days.
My comment was directed at you (and today's other so-called libertarians who share your views) not the Founders (about whose behavior I am not going to engage in moral relativism just because they did it a long time ago). That you don't seem to think that slavery is the very antithesis of libertarianism, in your zeal to count slavers as your (assuming you consider yourself a libertarian) ideological precursors, says some things about you.
BTW, I'd assume you'd know more about what it's like to be an "arrogant 19 yo prick" than I do. It's been over a decade since I was 19.
A certain level of cooperation and coordination by a trade group is expected and legal and ethical. Above that it becomes illegal and unethical. I think this was the basis for the recent price-fixing lawsuit that several major members of the RIAA settled by offering large amounts of money rather than admit guilt or face a trial.
Their sole power is to offer a certain subset of music for sale, and to decide on the terms under which it will be sold. If they decided not to sell any of their music to anyone at any price, what would be the net effect? A lot of pissed off artists and consumers, sure, but everyone would live right through it.
The RIAA is a lobbying group, not a music company. If the RIAA actually coordinated things like terms for music sales they would probably be violating antitrust laws.
Also, given the rapid consolidation of a few large media corporations due to both economics, changes in copyright law, and increasingly corporate friendly rulemaking at the FCC, RIAA members have increasing power over our lives, whether we buy their products or not.
Neither do the words "well regulated militia".
:)
But more to the point: Gun talk is the new Nazi/Hitler (a la Godwin). Want to hijack a Slashdot thread? Just put the word "gun" in your post and suddenly the topic is now effectively over as zealots from both sides of the gun debate spew the same sound bites over and over.
If you think a bunch slave-owning, aristocratic men who denied women the right to vote (according to documentation some of them had wives who were quite upset about this) were "libertarians" (or even close), then, well, I think that says something.
Sigh. I've been moderated flamebait for my perfectly legitimate argument that DRM cannot possibly be "reasonable" because DRM is just machine logic and is entirely not "able" to "reason" (the very premise of the word reasonable). And AFAICT iTunes' DRM is so flimsy that all you do to circumvent is mix-burn-rip rather than rip-mix-burn. If the MS DRM is lame because it's been cracked, what does that say for DRM that's broken from the get go?
Just to keep things straight: this is the MPAA. That's the MOTION PICTURE folks. RIAA is a different lobbying group. Personally I prefer to avoid confusion and think of them both as the "media mafiAA" or "mafiAA" for short.
(and no. I didn't think this up. some slashgenius did. thanks slashboywonder!)
Well, good format maybe, but there's no such thing as "reasonable" DRM. "Reasonable" would require it to be "able" to "reason". DRM is just a machine following instructions. In the case of iTunes, I gather that one of those instructions allows the making of CDs. It also seems likely that the resulting CDs are easily "ripped" to a format which contains no DRM bits at all. Talk about cracked.
Maybe your lawyer is biased in favor of something called "intellectual property" and therefore would normally answer such questions from a perspective that assumes a copyright holder has greater rights in copyrighted works than they actually do. Obviously there are "intellectual property" lawyers out there who believe that EULAs are valid contracts and have advised software companies of same. Noted law professor Lawrence Lessig argued that the CTEA was at least partially invalid in front of the Supreme Court. Opinions on important legal issues differ... even among those we might consider "well versed".
:)
Consequently our judicial system is oppositional. The best part is that both sides are represented by lawyers who both say they are right. It therefore follows that no matter what any one lawyer says, you can probably find another lawyer who will say the exact opposite. Some judges even make decisions that are entirely wrong, hence our appeals process and Supreme Court. Even the Supreme Court is often divided-- sometimes they are split as close as 45/55!
In this case, your lawyer has almost nothing to lose by saying to just delete the software. I mean, what's the upside to keeping a copy of WASTE (assuming that's what we're talking about)? I can't think of one. So in this case, no matter how low the risk, the reward is even less. So is he giving good legal advice or is he just pointing out the obvious?
Or maybe your lawyer knows the answer to my original question, which was about where in copyright law there are provisions for revoking ownership of works which were received in good faith but whose creation or distribution constituted an infringement. Or maybe he's aware of clear precedents in case law. Or maybe he's wrong. Did he cite any statute or case law during your discussion? Not to be rude, but without some documentation secondhand lawyer's advice isn't worth the price I paid for it.
Where in copyright law is there any requirement for people who have received infringing works to either destroy those works or compensate the rights holder for the infringement? I looked. I couldn't find anything that prohibited ownership or use of infringing works. Only reproduction, distribution, public display, and derivation are proscribed. (Note that if a patent is involved this is different. Patent rules clearly prohibit unlicensed usage.) This means that SCO is using the threat of baseless lawsuits against end users to extort money from those end users.
If they have a case, one wonders why they haven't sent actionable cease and desist notices to companies like Red Hat. And by actionable, I mean, detailing exactly what the infringements are in a way that Red Hat (or whoever) could actually be expected to believe and act on. A blanket statement like "Linux is infringing" is not actionable unless SCO is asserting that the entirety of Linux is a derived work and therefore infringing-- and that's not something I've seen them say, especially since they seem to be focusing on the idea that bits of code all over the kernel are infringing.
1) Disks die. But this is why we all make hot copies and/or use RAID and/or some other backup strategy. Right? They're still not very expensive.
2) 100 x 18 GB DVDs? Unless you really relish the idea of remastering your data into 18Gb chunks all the time, this is crazy talk. Plus, now you've got this whole big mechanical device to depend on (the disk changer) and unless that's 100 chained drives, you can only access your data in 1/100th total storage chunks. What if you suddenly need to start switching between disks at opposite ends/sides of the carousel because your data wasn't chunked appropriately? That's a lot of latency (or you have to rearrange the disks) which wastes even more of your time.
3) Waste of capacity? WTF is that? Waste of electricity maybe. But if you've got that much read-rarely data, put it on a separate drive and spin it down between accesses. Otherwise I don't see how this is a waste of anything except the time you're going to waste trying to make a DVD solution workable.
Hmmm. Maybe you're just a troll, maybe you really don't understand... just in case: DRM doesn't prevent 90% of piracy because it only takes one smart person to figure out how to crack it. Once that's done they can write a computer program that allows any idiot to replicate the feat. Also, strong encryption takes computing horsepower. Do you know what that would mean for devices like CD players? Yeah, they'd all be sporting a ton of processing power above and beyond their mission critical audio format decoders and digital to analog convertors. Back in 1986 or whenever they first started unleashing these devices that would've all seemed pretty silly since the only feasible way to copy CDs was to record them onto cassette tape.
Because all those optimizations don't mean squat when most computers are not maxing the CPU on a regular basis anyway. Also, portage is not a silver bullet. While it's got a very good system for handling a whole lot of things (especially cool stuff like being able to peg versions or inject versions if you want to roll something by hand), it's not nearly complete. Look at the lame way it handles config issues by just post-poning that to etc-update, which isn't remotely user friendly, imho.
Hmmm. I have the same complaint about Windows. A lot of applications function poorly as part of the unified whole, and many of them are non-standard in very disappointing ways. I've also found that some of the default behaviors are the stupidest things ever... only with Microsoft, if there is a way to change some of that stuff, it's far from obvious. I find that Linux GNOME and KDE are far more flexible and eye-catching in the main than Microsoft. And yes, sometimes there are discrepancies. You get what you pay for.
I think you missed his/her point. If the cost of the more energy-efficient processor exceeds the amount of the money saved on the power bills, the company or household is worse off for buying the more efficient model. In the example, the $37 was no match for the $500 extra expense of the system.
Imagine buying a G5 iMac desktop will save me $50/year in electricity bills, but the system costs $200 more than a comparable x86 machine. Then it takes four years for the energy savings to pay for the added equipment expense. Multiplied over 50 workstations, the effect is the same, only the numbers get bigger on both sides of the equation. Just because those 50 machines will save me $2500 annually, doesn't mean they're necessarily worth $10,000 more up front.
However, the energy assumption is a difficult one to make. Energy costs are volatile, generally only increase, and are not an insignificant variable expense for most businesses-- minimizing that expense is not a bad move.
Um. There are scads of Perl web development books written by people who DO NOT know what they're doing. And thousands more actual web developers working in Perl who don't know what they're doing as a result. I know. I used to be one of them. Language wars are a waste of time. The original post was probably off-topic, since this is not a general "criticize Perl" thread. Indeed, the sigil change issue has been answered for Perl 6. The sigils will no longer change. However, there are many of us who find the character indicates type characteristic of Perl to be distracting. In a truly OO language, this can only lead to pain and suffering. If Perl OO is to be more than a hack, the sigils have got to go.
In any case, the concerns about context are completely baseless. So what? It's not like context is subjective in Perl. It's just a factor to deal with when programming. It makes the code more expressive with less effort. That's one of the stated goals of Perl: laziness. In this case, it's a great idea. Not one that is perfectly implemented in Perl, necessarily, but nonetheless a fantastic notion.
The section of the Constitution you quoted begins "The Congress shall have Power..." This is not a command that Congress has to follow any more than their power "To declare War" requires them to constantly find a war to declare. Other than that, the common person thinks patents and copyrights are necessary. Indeed, they take on faith the same anti-free-market attitude the Founders took when they included that clause-- that without government regulation nothing would get written, invented, or whatever.
But that's a postulation that hasn't been proven. And without the proper balance of the public's right against the right of authors and inventors, what we seem to be seeing is actually an environment in which authoring and inventing are risky behaviors because of the possibility of infringement.
They have considered and rejected this idea. Read the FAQ.
McNealy? I think you mean McBride.
Let's see. They are about to buy a computer. Therefore the place they should look for information on buying a computer is a place they need a computer to get to?
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106
You will have to decide for yourself, since I am not a lawyer: check section 110 part 5.
It's not entrapment. It's deceptive. It's pointless. And furthermore, if you downloaded a bogus file from the RIAA, you wouldn't have committed a crime, so you can't really be sued or prosecuted for anything.
Entrapment is when a law enforcement agency gets someone to commit a crime they would not have otherwise committed. Someone downloading a file from a random stranger over the internet is already predisposed to downloading files. And downloading files may not be a crime in the first place (it would be the uploading or offering the files that is clearly illegal).
Well, if it's truly private, how would they even know who to sue?
Just a note: it may not be "every song ever produced" as I stated. Circular 73 has more information.