Heh. I got in some serious trouble with my mom if she found out I had been to the arcade (and I was the worst liar, so I always got busted), but not if I stayed at school and played in the computer lab. Besides the lab at school had a teletype that connected to a timeshare, so when it was time to go home, you got to take a printout of the session with you. Not that I wouldn't have traded that for some serious credits on a Defender machine, mind you.
Now if only I could tell my 10/11-year-old self to save some of that stuff... then I'd have written proof what a pathetic nerd I was even then.;)
That's interesting. At age 16 I couldn't afford a car, but somehow I managed to have one available to drive all the time... and I never said I had a Mac in 1984. I said that's when they came out. And I still don't get why Wiggam needed to be such a twerp about it (prompting my rant)... how is it possibly an insult that someone wasn't a nerd?
That article had more holes in it that MS Outlook! But given the way some OS zealots go on about RMS, I think it's easy to see how that sentence got in there.
Hey what? You sure you're a nerd yourself? The first Macintosh was released in 1984. Before that there was Commodore Pet, Vic-20, and C-64, TRS-80, Sinclairs, Apple II(e), Apple IIgs, and a host of other very general purpose home computers. Many of my friends had one, as did we. And before I had a computer at home I played with everything from a teletype to a card-based system to a Pet. In 5th grade I was changing the BASIC code to a little game called "Oregon Trails" so that I wouldn't lose. That would have been before I was 12 and before 1982 (considering I turned 12 in 1981).
I couldn't get a sense of two things from the articles: first, what actually constitutes an infringement of the patent? Building a DB with MS SQL Server 7? Writing code on top of it? Building "applications" with it? Doing this only as a 3rd party developer (i.e. contractors working on SQL Server apps)?
Second, if and when Timeline find users/developers/whoever that are infringing, won't those users be able to avoid penalties by simply ceasing and desisting when they are notified by Timeline of their infringing use? Won't damages and penalties still, ultimately, be the purview of a judge/jury and/or private settlements?
Those crippled menus go back to at least MS Windows 2000. I have had to turn them off at work several times (each time I get a new machine). That and that stupid fade-in/fade-out crap. How distracting.
But the menu items should not disappear, ever. Either they are useful in controlling the program or they aren't. I wouldn't mind having the ability to configure my own right-click menus, especially with some ability to control for context sensitivity.
That'd be a lot better than building customer toolbars, those are just hogging screen and usually the icons bears no decent relationship to the act. I like launch buttons for apps, and simple browser controls, but trying to remember which icons do what in an app like Excel is a pain in the kiester. At least in a program like Excel I can kludge up a quick keyboard shortcut by recording a macro.
So that's my vote for configurability in a GUI.. some sort of good user buildable menus and the ability to make macros. But then I think I'm a pretty severe power user, so what I want may not be a good general purpose solution.:)
Also, in #1 the guy in the mall is still breaking the law, whether you should have known it or not does not absolve him. So it stands to reason that in #2, whether or not you should have known your use of the software would violate a patent, that still doesn't exculpate Microsoft, which seems to have acted in bad faith (and appears to have tried to practice law without a license by giving customers legal advice related to patents). How much longer are people going to trust Microsoft? They are either stupid, reckless, or downright shifty.
Especially since it's the GNU GPL, i.e. "GNU General Public License"-- GPL isn't a recursive acronym.
obligatory_on_topic_material:
This is a pretty dull interview! Where were the good flamebait questions? Where was the one question where the interviewee could either look like a total idiot or a total genius? While this is all very nice and informative and stuff, it's not exactly riveting... even to a huge FSF fan like myself.
Is it any wonder lawyers make so much money? Law can be an incredibly mind-numbing activity. How would you like to spend your day worrying about this or that finer point of law, having to research 100 year old cases all the time, and actually having to read/write stuff like the average EULA. What I'd like to see is a Law & Order episode where some Linux company exec kills a programmer over some GPLed desktop theme to hush up the fact that they are ignoring developments on a different GPLed desktop. Now that would hold my attention.
Yes, I can see that the PA authorities might not want to contribute to delinquency outside of PA, but that's not their jurisdiction, so using that as an excuse to keep the list secret doesn't make any sense to me. Within their jurisdiction, possession of the list should be completely useless, so where's the harm in publishing the list? Besides, if the PA authorities can find the sites, I'm sure people who actually like the material can find the sites. Or do we really think PA has some super-leet squad of ultra-surfers combing the web using special techniques or software to find the Bad Guys (tm)?
Look what the Feds are doing to Ed Rosenthal in Oakland over medical marijuana. If the Feds can bust him for essentially carrying out a CA state-sanctioned program to provide prescription medication, they can certainly bust the PA AG for a crime with actual victims! Will they go after him for violating Federal anti-child-exploitation laws, though? Of course not.
Right. But since the government of PA should properly only be concerned with pervs in PA...
Besides, what if my ISP is not doing it's job? Shouldn't I have access to the list so I know what to avoid on my own? Further, how will site owners and other free speech advocates know if *only* sites hosting illegal materials are on the list?
Wouldn't surprise me if this whole thing was the brainchild of a recent PA governor (Tom Ridge), the guy who suggests in all seriousness that plastic wrap and duct tape are suitable defenses against chemical and biological warfare.
So the Pennsylvania government will be keeping a secret list of sites to block? And they won't be publicizing it because it will help people find sites which are supposed to be blocked anyway? That sounds like a contradiction to me.
(And I'm not implying you said it made sense, but these are my thoughts based on the point you raise.)
No, Google is not doing the same thing you are. They are sharing their cache with the world as part of a commercial activity. What you are doing is Fair Use, what they are doing is distributing unauthorized duplications. Personally I think Google's cache service is very helpful in some cases, but I don't think they have a legal right to provide such a service. What I'd really like to see is that they are somehow contributing to changing copyright law, instead of just breaking it.
I mean, can you imagine how Disney would treat me if I were to create a "cache" of part of their site? Or Google themselves for that matter?
I think most of the Black Flag stuff is probably available here. I have to wonder how cost effective it would really be to set up a limited press label like this. Seems to me that the basic technology to do this is not that high a barrier to entry, especially if you forego the fancier packaging, but that aggregating and digitizing the material would be. Might be a fun business to be in though, if there were a way to convince the existing copyright holders to license the works at a reasonable rate (preferably some sort of royalty scheme rather than a flat fee... anything to limit the upfront expense).
It's not illegal to have a copy of something. It's illegal to distribute copies of something. Yes, there are Fair Use exceptions that make it legal, but you'd have to stretch pretty far to make Google's cache service a Fair Use.
So why aren't they being sued left and right for infringement? Because most of us are providing the material they cache for free anyway... and because generally those of us who own the copyrights to those works consider it exposure more than an infringement... and because it's not hard to get Google not to cache stuff (using the methods you point out)-- although Google accomplishes this by putting the onus on copyright owners, the legal system has the same problem. Putting a few HTML tags in is a lot easier than hiring a lawyer to send a cease and desist, then, if necessary, following the whole thing up with time in court. None of this means that what Google is doing is legal.
I think your ability to string together profanities is a lot more solid than your argument in this case (BTW, I think your caps lock key may be malfunctioning). You don't even know the difference between slander and libel and I'm supposed to give a rat's ass about your opinion of the legality of caching and the finer points of copyright law, especially those portions pertaining to Fair Use?
At the moment Google is offering at no charge-- via cache-- works of mine that you would have to pay me to access because I have removed them from the public portions of my web site. That is most certainly not a Fair Use. Google is a commercial concern, so they can't plead the type of Fair Use exception available to libraries and schools (and if "not charging for copies" was an affirmative defense, well, that's absurd so I'll let it go). They are reproducing my works in their entirety (obviating the need to obtain the work from a licensed distributor or the copyright holder himself). As such they are completely eradicating any market that might exist for my works (why would you pay me for the works when you can get them at no charge from Google). That's three out of the four Fair Use clauses right there.
Oh why do I bother? You're just a foul-mouthed hothead spewing venom on Slashdot. You probably wouldn't know Title 17 from the ingredients for a Twinkie(R).
How is the Google engine supposed to know? Because almost everything on the web has been created since 1923, which means that any work on the net is very likely automatically covered by copyright. A different status (i.e. lapsed copyright or released into the public domain) would be an exception. If they intend to redistribute works, their ignorance of the copyright status of those works is not an excuse. They should be actively securing redistribution rights to those works before they go distributing them.
While I can take advantage of the methods you indicate to limit this sort of thing, those tools were originally to signal browsers and the like that what they had was out of date or should not be saved for some other reason (such as it was likely to go out of date quickly). The idea that I should be required to use those tags to prevent un-Fair use (i.e. a commercial concern distributing my work to 3rd parties) is just silly. There is a law prohibiting unauthorized duplication of copyrighted works. I shouldn't have to help Google not break the law-- that's their watch, not mine.
Wow. You need to relax. And you need to get over your sense of entitlement. Also, while you sound pretty angry yourself, don't put that on me. I'm not all that upset about Google's cache. Not nearly as upset as you seem to be that I pointed out that technically they are breaking the law.
If I post something to the net, that may constitute an implicit license to copy it for personal or Fair Use. It does not constitute a license for a large money-making concern to redistribute the material without my permission or knowledge.
Are you kidding me with this? "Pushing the envelope"? "Real punks" with "morals and ideals"?
The envelope was burnt to a crisp a long time ago. And don't get me started on this whole "real punks" thing... that argument is older than Avril herself, but not nearly as fun to listen to. The poor girl grew up in some one-horse town and just likes to sing and play guitar. Finally she gets her first real album. Cut her some slack and see where she goes from here. At least she's nothing like those overgrown Mouseketeers and hoodrats that seem to otherwise dominate the pop scene.
Google is currently providing unauthorized duplications of material for which I hold the copyright (via their "cache" service). That's illegal in the United States. They have never asked me for permission to do this, nor have they informed me that they are doing it without my permission. If I had never heard of Google they would still be providing these copies of my works. That's hidden, malicious, and surprising. And while it may be avoidable, why should I have to avoid it? There's already an established law against it.
Other than WRT caching, I'd agree with you. Don't like that stuff? Don't use their service.
1) No. They aren't. People who circumvent are breaking copyright law. They are not stealing. Therefore they are not thieves. I'd ask you to consider that unauthorized copying may prevent a content "owner" from leveraging their government mandated monopoly, but copying their stuff does not deprive them of the use of it. Laws regarding property rights are only useful as regards scarce resources. Ideas are not a scarce resource. A person who shoplifts a CD is a thief. A person who makes a copy of one may be a criminal but he is not a thief.
At this point our discussion is ended. Until you are able to distinguish between copying and stealing we are not going to be able to have a meaningful debate.
Pay attention. This was posted to the Slashdot front page on the 10th. Article links to even more examples. (now with magical quotation mark in anchor tag).
Ah, but it only takes one of us to go through the effort of making a high quality, DRM-free copy that could then be shared with millions of people who are unable or unwilling to do the same (or I share it with two people who share it with two people, etc). The biggest problem with d-a-d techniques is that they must be done in realtime and a lot of meta-information is lost and must be manually re-attached after processing. This is the same reason I have bins full of LPs I haven't digitized, but I've managed to rip over 300 CDs in my collection. Ripping digital media is easy because the tracks are delimited and annotated.
Also, how many people on Kazaa can encode an mp3? I'd guess it's closer to 95%. The tools to rip and encode an mp3 are freely available and easier to use than the average email client (or Kazaa itself, for that matter). You open the application, put in a CD, wait for the CD info to download from an online database, select all the tracks and click the "rip" button. Along this same line of thinking, any loopback technique that can be implemented in software or via simple (legal) technology (i.e. a simple line-out-to-line-in wire) is going to be just as popular as stuff like Kazaa is now.
The problem isn't Palladium per se. The problem is the widespread view that people who are familiar with techniques for circumventing such use-restriction technologies are thieves. Further, the problem is that there are actual laws (the DMCA for instance) that make this more than an ethical judgement, but a legal fact. If it weren't for the potential civil liabilities and the criminal sanctions for circumventing use-restrictive technologies this would just be a game of technical one-upmanship.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. I got in some serious trouble with my mom if she found out I had been to the arcade (and I was the worst liar, so I always got busted), but not if I stayed at school and played in the computer lab. Besides the lab at school had a teletype that connected to a timeshare, so when it was time to go home, you got to take a printout of the session with you. Not that I wouldn't have traded that for some serious credits on a Defender machine, mind you.
;)
Now if only I could tell my 10/11-year-old self to save some of that stuff... then I'd have written proof what a pathetic nerd I was even then.
That's interesting. At age 16 I couldn't afford a car, but somehow I managed to have one available to drive all the time... and I never said I had a Mac in 1984. I said that's when they came out. And I still don't get why Wiggam needed to be such a twerp about it (prompting my rant)... how is it possibly an insult that someone wasn't a nerd?
That article had more holes in it that MS Outlook! But given the way some OS zealots go on about RMS, I think it's easy to see how that sentence got in there.
Hey what? You sure you're a nerd yourself? The first Macintosh was released in 1984. Before that there was Commodore Pet, Vic-20, and C-64, TRS-80, Sinclairs, Apple II(e), Apple IIgs, and a host of other very general purpose home computers. Many of my friends had one, as did we. And before I had a computer at home I played with everything from a teletype to a card-based system to a Pet. In 5th grade I was changing the BASIC code to a little game called "Oregon Trails" so that I wouldn't lose. That would have been before I was 12 and before 1982 (considering I turned 12 in 1981).
At age 12 you didn't know what a computer was? Are you sure you're on the right site? This is "News for Nerds". :)
I couldn't get a sense of two things from the articles: first, what actually constitutes an infringement of the patent? Building a DB with MS SQL Server 7? Writing code on top of it? Building "applications" with it? Doing this only as a 3rd party developer (i.e. contractors working on SQL Server apps)?
Second, if and when Timeline find users/developers/whoever that are infringing, won't those users be able to avoid penalties by simply ceasing and desisting when they are notified by Timeline of their infringing use? Won't damages and penalties still, ultimately, be the purview of a judge/jury and/or private settlements?
Those crippled menus go back to at least MS Windows 2000. I have had to turn them off at work several times (each time I get a new machine). That and that stupid fade-in/fade-out crap. How distracting.
:)
But the menu items should not disappear, ever. Either they are useful in controlling the program or they aren't. I wouldn't mind having the ability to configure my own right-click menus, especially with some ability to control for context sensitivity.
That'd be a lot better than building customer toolbars, those are just hogging screen and usually the icons bears no decent relationship to the act. I like launch buttons for apps, and simple browser controls, but trying to remember which icons do what in an app like Excel is a pain in the kiester. At least in a program like Excel I can kludge up a quick keyboard shortcut by recording a macro.
So that's my vote for configurability in a GUI.. some sort of good user buildable menus and the ability to make macros. But then I think I'm a pretty severe power user, so what I want may not be a good general purpose solution.
Also, in #1 the guy in the mall is still breaking the law, whether you should have known it or not does not absolve him. So it stands to reason that in #2, whether or not you should have known your use of the software would violate a patent, that still doesn't exculpate Microsoft, which seems to have acted in bad faith (and appears to have tried to practice law without a license by giving customers legal advice related to patents). How much longer are people going to trust Microsoft? They are either stupid, reckless, or downright shifty.
Especially since it's the GNU GPL, i.e. "GNU General Public License"-- GPL isn't a recursive acronym.
obligatory_on_topic_material:
This is a pretty dull interview! Where were the good flamebait questions? Where was the one question where the interviewee could either look like a total idiot or a total genius? While this is all very nice and informative and stuff, it's not exactly riveting... even to a huge FSF fan like myself.
Is it any wonder lawyers make so much money? Law can be an incredibly mind-numbing activity. How would you like to spend your day worrying about this or that finer point of law, having to research 100 year old cases all the time, and actually having to read/write stuff like the average EULA. What I'd like to see is a Law & Order episode where some Linux company exec kills a programmer over some GPLed desktop theme to hush up the fact that they are ignoring developments on a different GPLed desktop. Now that would hold my attention.
Yes, I can see that the PA authorities might not want to contribute to delinquency outside of PA, but that's not their jurisdiction, so using that as an excuse to keep the list secret doesn't make any sense to me. Within their jurisdiction, possession of the list should be completely useless, so where's the harm in publishing the list? Besides, if the PA authorities can find the sites, I'm sure people who actually like the material can find the sites. Or do we really think PA has some super-leet squad of ultra-surfers combing the web using special techniques or software to find the Bad Guys (tm)?
Look what the Feds are doing to Ed Rosenthal in Oakland over medical marijuana. If the Feds can bust him for essentially carrying out a CA state-sanctioned program to provide prescription medication, they can certainly bust the PA AG for a crime with actual victims! Will they go after him for violating Federal anti-child-exploitation laws, though? Of course not.
Right. But since the government of PA should properly only be concerned with pervs in PA...
Besides, what if my ISP is not doing it's job? Shouldn't I have access to the list so I know what to avoid on my own? Further, how will site owners and other free speech advocates know if *only* sites hosting illegal materials are on the list?
Wouldn't surprise me if this whole thing was the brainchild of a recent PA governor (Tom Ridge), the guy who suggests in all seriousness that plastic wrap and duct tape are suitable defenses against chemical and biological warfare.
So the Pennsylvania government will be keeping a secret list of sites to block? And they won't be publicizing it because it will help people find sites which are supposed to be blocked anyway? That sounds like a contradiction to me.
(And I'm not implying you said it made sense, but these are my thoughts based on the point you raise.)
No, Google is not doing the same thing you are. They are sharing their cache with the world as part of a commercial activity. What you are doing is Fair Use, what they are doing is distributing unauthorized duplications. Personally I think Google's cache service is very helpful in some cases, but I don't think they have a legal right to provide such a service. What I'd really like to see is that they are somehow contributing to changing copyright law, instead of just breaking it.
I mean, can you imagine how Disney would treat me if I were to create a "cache" of part of their site? Or Google themselves for that matter?
I think most of the Black Flag stuff is probably available here. I have to wonder how cost effective it would really be to set up a limited press label like this. Seems to me that the basic technology to do this is not that high a barrier to entry, especially if you forego the fancier packaging, but that aggregating and digitizing the material would be. Might be a fun business to be in though, if there were a way to convince the existing copyright holders to license the works at a reasonable rate (preferably some sort of royalty scheme rather than a flat fee... anything to limit the upfront expense).
It's not illegal to have a copy of something. It's illegal to distribute copies of something. Yes, there are Fair Use exceptions that make it legal, but you'd have to stretch pretty far to make Google's cache service a Fair Use.
So why aren't they being sued left and right for infringement? Because most of us are providing the material they cache for free anyway... and because generally those of us who own the copyrights to those works consider it exposure more than an infringement... and because it's not hard to get Google not to cache stuff (using the methods you point out)-- although Google accomplishes this by putting the onus on copyright owners, the legal system has the same problem. Putting a few HTML tags in is a lot easier than hiring a lawyer to send a cease and desist, then, if necessary, following the whole thing up with time in court. None of this means that what Google is doing is legal.
I think your ability to string together profanities is a lot more solid than your argument in this case (BTW, I think your caps lock key may be malfunctioning). You don't even know the difference between slander and libel and I'm supposed to give a rat's ass about your opinion of the legality of caching and the finer points of copyright law, especially those portions pertaining to Fair Use?
At the moment Google is offering at no charge-- via cache-- works of mine that you would have to pay me to access because I have removed them from the public portions of my web site. That is most certainly not a Fair Use. Google is a commercial concern, so they can't plead the type of Fair Use exception available to libraries and schools (and if "not charging for copies" was an affirmative defense, well, that's absurd so I'll let it go). They are reproducing my works in their entirety (obviating the need to obtain the work from a licensed distributor or the copyright holder himself). As such they are completely eradicating any market that might exist for my works (why would you pay me for the works when you can get them at no charge from Google). That's three out of the four Fair Use clauses right there.
Oh why do I bother? You're just a foul-mouthed hothead spewing venom on Slashdot. You probably wouldn't know Title 17 from the ingredients for a Twinkie(R).
How is the Google engine supposed to know? Because almost everything on the web has been created since 1923, which means that any work on the net is very likely automatically covered by copyright. A different status (i.e. lapsed copyright or released into the public domain) would be an exception. If they intend to redistribute works, their ignorance of the copyright status of those works is not an excuse. They should be actively securing redistribution rights to those works before they go distributing them.
While I can take advantage of the methods you indicate to limit this sort of thing, those tools were originally to signal browsers and the like that what they had was out of date or should not be saved for some other reason (such as it was likely to go out of date quickly). The idea that I should be required to use those tags to prevent un-Fair use (i.e. a commercial concern distributing my work to 3rd parties) is just silly. There is a law prohibiting unauthorized duplication of copyrighted works. I shouldn't have to help Google not break the law-- that's their watch, not mine.
Wow. You need to relax. And you need to get over your sense of entitlement. Also, while you sound pretty angry yourself, don't put that on me. I'm not all that upset about Google's cache. Not nearly as upset as you seem to be that I pointed out that technically they are breaking the law.
If I post something to the net, that may constitute an implicit license to copy it for personal or Fair Use. It does not constitute a license for a large money-making concern to redistribute the material without my permission or knowledge.
Are you kidding me with this? "Pushing the envelope"? "Real punks" with "morals and ideals"?
The envelope was burnt to a crisp a long time ago. And don't get me started on this whole "real punks" thing... that argument is older than Avril herself, but not nearly as fun to listen to. The poor girl grew up in some one-horse town and just likes to sing and play guitar. Finally she gets her first real album. Cut her some slack and see where she goes from here. At least she's nothing like those overgrown Mouseketeers and hoodrats that seem to otherwise dominate the pop scene.
Google is currently providing unauthorized duplications of material for which I hold the copyright (via their "cache" service). That's illegal in the United States. They have never asked me for permission to do this, nor have they informed me that they are doing it without my permission. If I had never heard of Google they would still be providing these copies of my works. That's hidden, malicious, and surprising. And while it may be avoidable, why should I have to avoid it? There's already an established law against it.
Other than WRT caching, I'd agree with you. Don't like that stuff? Don't use their service.
1) No. They aren't. People who circumvent are breaking copyright law. They are not stealing. Therefore they are not thieves. I'd ask you to consider that unauthorized copying may prevent a content "owner" from leveraging their government mandated monopoly, but copying their stuff does not deprive them of the use of it. Laws regarding property rights are only useful as regards scarce resources. Ideas are not a scarce resource. A person who shoplifts a CD is a thief. A person who makes a copy of one may be a criminal but he is not a thief.
At this point our discussion is ended. Until you are able to distinguish between copying and stealing we are not going to be able to have a meaningful debate.
Pay attention. This was posted to the Slashdot front page on the 10th. Article links to even more examples. (now with magical quotation mark in anchor tag).
Slow down cowboy!
Pay attention. This was posted to the Slashdot front page on the 10th. Article links to even more examples.
Ah, but it only takes one of us to go through the effort of making a high quality, DRM-free copy that could then be shared with millions of people who are unable or unwilling to do the same (or I share it with two people who share it with two people, etc). The biggest problem with d-a-d techniques is that they must be done in realtime and a lot of meta-information is lost and must be manually re-attached after processing. This is the same reason I have bins full of LPs I haven't digitized, but I've managed to rip over 300 CDs in my collection. Ripping digital media is easy because the tracks are delimited and annotated.
Also, how many people on Kazaa can encode an mp3? I'd guess it's closer to 95%. The tools to rip and encode an mp3 are freely available and easier to use than the average email client (or Kazaa itself, for that matter). You open the application, put in a CD, wait for the CD info to download from an online database, select all the tracks and click the "rip" button. Along this same line of thinking, any loopback technique that can be implemented in software or via simple (legal) technology (i.e. a simple line-out-to-line-in wire) is going to be just as popular as stuff like Kazaa is now.
The problem isn't Palladium per se. The problem is the widespread view that people who are familiar with techniques for circumventing such use-restriction technologies are thieves. Further, the problem is that there are actual laws (the DMCA for instance) that make this more than an ethical judgement, but a legal fact. If it weren't for the potential civil liabilities and the criminal sanctions for circumventing use-restrictive technologies this would just be a game of technical one-upmanship.