Folks.. this is where the need for good privacy protection laws need to be. And it's not hard to do, either.
These laws are fairly straightforward, and simply say that, if you give personal information (name, phone number, address, etc) in the due course of business to a business, they are obliged to *ONLY* use that information in the due course of business. It does not become *their* information to give/sell to someone else. They can keep it on file, but only for themselves, only for the obvious purpose you knew of when you gave it to them. For instance.. radio shack. I buy something.. and the dude asks 'Can I have your name?' I say 'Why do you want it?' he says 'In order to cover the 3 year on-site guarantee on the laptop you just bought, we must record your name and date of purchase and contact info'. Okay.. fine. so I give it to him. Now.. does this not sound like an agreement? A verbal contract? He said what he was going to use this information for. If he uses it for *anything* else, I should be able to sue his ass.
Hey... if we make it a high crime to leak this customer information... perhaps they won't even keep it around, as it increases their liability!
I've always been the one to say people are too paranoid about cookies.. but I suppose that's mainly because of the way the media misrepresents them.
All legalities aside.. HTTP cookies were designed the way they were for several reasons, one being anonymity; granted, this wasn't a huge focus, and it's by no means a true security model.. but the spirit was there. IF used appropriately, cookies were very useful.
Now.. by tying sites together in this manner.. doubleclick has basically violated that spirit. So.. screw 'em.
You know... it would be nice if we had appropriate privacy laws in north america.
Something along the lines of:
1) A business may only require information from you that is directly necessary in order to complete the business in a fair manner. 2) This information can *ONLY* be used for the plain and obvious reasons it was given. It cannot be sold or transferred to another party, unless for continuing business reasons (ie: Collection agency so they can collect, lawyers, so they can file suits, but even then, it must remain the business at hand) The video store has your name & number *ONLY* so they know who has their property, so they can come get it when you don't bring it back. 3) The penalties for this information leaking must be *HARSH* 4) You cannot take information from someone to track their behavior/actions unless you state *explicitly and clearly* that this is what you will be doing with said information. (ie: 'points' cards, 'Air Miles', 'Club cards' at grocery store.)
5) Generation of demographics from customer information is fine, so long as those demographics are anonymous. (so it's fair to say that 300 college-age white kids from a 2 mile radius rented horror movies this week, or ate kraft dinner, or whatever.)
Folks.. it's not about cramping the freedom of people to keep records.. but those records have to have *some* kind of purpose. Your name and phone number should never be just a *commodity*, to be bought, sold, and traded.
In other words.. forming a business to 'track' things in this manner (consumer profiles) is basically like spying! Were you aware this company has a file on you, Mrs. Smith, a foot thick? they know everything about your shopping habits? This is spying, and the citizen deserves to be protected from it.
In the end.. don't give your name to people who don't need it. Don't give it just because some clerk *asked*. Don't feel awkward.. make *them* feel awkward. Those grocery store 'discount' or 'club' cards? Do they ID you? no.. *lie* on them. They aren't credit, they aren't monetary.. they just want to track you. web sites.. Guess it's time to remove the cookies permanently.
Making personal archival copies is considered *fair use* and is completely legal.
This is a completely separate issue from whether the produce of a media has to give you the technological means to archive it or not. It is not *their* problem. They simply cannot use copyright law against you if you *DO* figure out how to do it... as the 'copies' are legitimate.
To put it differently, them 'allowing' you to, meant 'allowing' you to legally, not technically. They cannot prosecute.
You have the right to make archival copies, and not be prosecuted. It's legal. This in no way implies that anyone has to provide you with a method for making said copies, it just means that if you DO make copies, you are within your rights.
In Canada, and the US, I believe.. stores have every right not to take *any* returns, so long as the product was sold legally, and not under false pretenses. If I you go to WalMart and buy a bicycle, try it out, and decide you would rather have purchased a TV Set.... They are under *NO* obligation to take it back. The sale was a legally binding act, and was final. (of course, wal-mart explicitly *states* that you may return it, under certain conditions.)
Now.. if the bike said 'aluminum frame, gold plated rims.. etc..' and you unpacked it and it was plastic.... then you could return it, and they would *have* to give you a full refund as the sale was fraudulent.
So.. if you go buy a CD, and it's marked as CDDA or whatever.. and it's *NOT*.. it is a fraudulent sale, they have *NOT* sold you what they led you to believe you were buying... so they *MUST* take it back, and refund your money.
I'm not sure of the exact year, but it was around 10 years ago that I saw Mr. Hoberman and his spheres on TV, and he had been working on them for some time before that. His stuff is used in Satellite deployment, among other things, due to it's expandability.
It's not simply the unfolding, but the underlying structure that remains strong and rigid underneath. Both a folded and unfolded hoberman sphere are both very strong.
I doubt it. No information is being extracted from the conversation. This is analogous to someone saying simply 'someone is on the phone on this line'. Does that constitute tapping?
As for the silly us 'wiretapping' laws.... What idiot decided that radio broadcasts on standard modulation were in any way 'private'?
I believe here in the Great Empire of Canada, any cel conversation can be intercepted legally, as there is *no* reasonable expectation of privacy, because it is wireless.
As I understand it.. analog phones emit a constant carrier/beacon/whatever. Digital phones only receive, except when they periodically send out signals to keep things working right, let the system know where they are, etc.. (one reason you get SOO Much more battery life out of a phone in digital mode)
Is the ability of the government/law enforcement/whoever to track where you are a good thing? Well.. the gut feeling is 'no.. that tramples on my righrs, right?'
Let me pose a different perspective.
First, regarding the cellular phone tracking stuff. Well.... You *are* using a phone that *broadcasts* over RF, which is an inherently *public* medium, and physics says there are ways to locate you if your signal can be isolated. So...scientifically speaking.. you do *NOT* have a reasonable expectation that your location is hidden. Now.. yes, the telco records that say what the signature of your phone is, your ESN, things like that.. should *ABSOLUTELY* be private. That's beteween you and your cel provider... but aside from that.... anyone with the right gear can know that a) someone is using a phone nearby and b) where they are. So.. should this information be in the hands of the government only? Traffic reporters only? No... it should be publicly available to anyone. ie: how many calls are going on I98? Hwy#4? How dense? Sure... as long as the database is *publicyly funded* and *publicly* available, and not monoploized.
Umm... if you want to progress your carreer in the sysadmin field, and you are in a company where management just 'decides' that everything should be W2k for no reason.. get out.
I understand what you are saying, and I agree, but what does this have to do with the fact that mp3.com made copies of 45,000 commercial titles without permission?
Re:Yes, the user really uploads their cd to mp3.co
on
RIAA Sues MP3.com
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· Score: 3
No. It's not how I look at it. It is very clear. If they don't have the album in their server already, there is no way for me to send it to them.
A 'signature' cannot be considered compression. You are NOT making a copy, and sending it to mp3.com for later retrieval. You are simply saying 'I have this CD and want to listen to it later'.
Yes. You own the album, and *you* can make all the copies you want to use personally. That does not mean that mp3.com has the right to distribute that same music to you. It's a subtle point, and I'm not sure how to state it more clearly. mp3.com does not have the right to transmit the entire Led Zeppelin collection to me, over the net. Why would they suddenly gain this right if I happen to own the album? They don't.. my owning the album has nothing to do with mp3.com's distribution rights, period.
As for public domain.. you are completely incorrect. A CD, once distributed, is most certainly *NOT* in the public domain. By definition, things in the Public Domain have *ABSOLUTELY NO* copyright protection, and anyone is free to do whatever they want with them.
All it sends is a few bytes, like a CDDB signature, to mp3.com, it does NOT send any audio data at all, period. And no, a representation of data is not enough. It will come down to some strange debates, I bet.
Had they said 'Our software WILL send up the entire copy.. but first our database will check to see if it already has it, to save time' they might be in better shape.
As someone said the other day... Hacker logic does not work in Law. Yes, I believe if I actually sent them the data and they stored it for me, and streamed it later, they would have a better case. I also see that, why should they store my data, when they already HAVE That same data.. shouldn't they just call it 'caching' or some other kind of efficiency-improving technology? And I support what they are doing.. I *hope* they win. (as long as they don't start saying 'this is OUR technology, and nobody can imitate us, or do stupid patents, or anything..). But I digress. The problem is, the law says, (though IANAL) that they, as a commercial entity, do *not* have the right to make copies of 45,000 commercial titles without permission, and to stream those to people. Pretend for a moment that the end user does not have to prove they own the CD, and that they were broadcasting to everyone. This would clearly be illegal, a blatant violation of copyright. So how, by the end user simply saying 'look, I have the CD' does it give them the right to do what they do?
As for mp3.com's stance on it.. they say they are providing a service to the consumer.. and I for one think that copyright has become TOO powerful, and that it should not give someone absolute control over copies of their work, only the right to fairly make money off it. Especially if they are massively distributing it and making it part of the popular culture anyway.
Umm.. actually, we have a *VERY* good idea of what the components of smell are. The iSmell *WORKS*, and is based on very sound science. Yes, it has to do with shapes of molecules, and the various receptors those molecules trigger... and if you can produce molecules that trigger single receptors, they can be combined to produce any odor imaginable. And iSmell has *already* dont his and it works.
iSmell was covered in Wired sometime in the middle of 1999, I believe, and it was very interesting! Basically... and I'm doing this from memory....
The receptors in your nose that pick up smell can be broken into a finite number of 'base' receptors (lots, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, I forget). Each molecule that triggers a smell sets of different combinations of these, as different edges of the molecule bind to different receptors. Now... what iSmell figured out (or at least makes use of), well, instead of finding the actual individual proteins that bind to these receptors, and figuring out exactly what each one should be... they just look to nature and by trial-and-error, found *similar* shaped ones, and then tried some more, and came up with a device that contains many tiny 'wells' of different 'base scents'. They can then combine these in different combinations to produce different smells.
From the Wired article, it sounded very promising.
The accusations are fairly clear... all should read the official document.
They claim that a) mp3.com made copies of 45,000 commercial titles and placed them in their servers. This could be read several ways, but as a commercial venture, they may not have the rights to do this. They also do not have the rights to 'perform' these titles for anyone else, regardless of whether that someone else owns the music already or not.
No. I can tell mp3.com what CD's I bought.. and they are free to ask. But my having a CD does *not* give mp3 the right to broadcast it to me. Yes, it gives *me* the right to make copies, etc... for my own personal use, but in this case,copies are not sent to mp3.com, I believe.... they only check to see what you have and then send out of their archive.
Somethign needs clarifying here. With Beam-It, does the end user actually encode their CD's and UPLOAD them to mp3.com, for later streaming... or does mp3.com simply say 'okay.. they have this CD according to our software.. so we have license to send the music back to them'.
If the data is actually being set up BY The users....mp3.com has a good case. they are providing data warehousing and retrieval.
If mp3.com is doing the latter, they have a problem. You see.. although you, personally, are allowed to make copies of titles you own for your own use.. this does not grant everyone in the world license to send that same information to you. mp3.com probably does *not* have the right to stream all of Thriller to you, simply because you happen to own the album.
Of course it has an 'NTish options'.. it *IS* NT. It's NT 5.0, they just renamed it to Windows 2000. Remember.. it was *going* to be their new OS.. they were going to scrap the 9x line... but that's not gonna happen either...
As a Minister of the ULC, I am authorized to, among other things, take confession and forgive your sins. I will do this for free, via E-mail, though donations will be greatly appreciated.
I haven't heard anything. To tell the truth, I suspected fraud... that it was a bogus claim. Now.. it would be nice if it wasn't.. but they didn't give *any* technical specs... just made some bold claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Folks.. this is where the need for good privacy protection laws need to be. And it's not hard to do, either.
These laws are fairly straightforward, and simply say that, if you give personal information (name, phone number, address, etc) in the due course of business to a business, they are obliged to *ONLY* use that information in the due course of business. It does not become *their* information to give/sell to someone else. They can keep it on file, but only for themselves, only for the obvious purpose you knew of when you gave it to them.
For instance.. radio shack. I buy something.. and the dude asks 'Can I have your name?' I say 'Why do you want it?' he says 'In order to cover the 3 year on-site guarantee on the laptop you just bought, we must record your name and date of purchase and contact info'. Okay.. fine. so I give it to him.
Now.. does this not sound like an agreement? A verbal contract? He said what he was going to use this information for. If he uses it for *anything* else, I should be able to sue his ass.
Hey... if we make it a high crime to leak this customer information... perhaps they won't even keep it around, as it increases their liability!
I've always been the one to say people are too paranoid about cookies.. but I suppose that's mainly because of the way the media misrepresents them.
All legalities aside.. HTTP cookies were designed the way they were for several reasons, one being anonymity; granted, this wasn't a huge focus, and it's by no means a true security model.. but the spirit was there. IF used appropriately, cookies were very useful.
Now.. by tying sites together in this manner.. doubleclick has basically violated that spirit. So.. screw 'em.
You know... it would be nice if we had appropriate privacy laws in north america.
Something along the lines of:
1) A business may only require information from you that is directly necessary in order to complete the business in a fair manner.
2) This information can *ONLY* be used for the plain and obvious reasons it was given. It cannot be sold or transferred to another party, unless for continuing business reasons (ie: Collection agency so they can collect, lawyers, so they can file suits, but even then, it must remain the business at hand) The video store has your name & number *ONLY* so they know who has their property, so they can come get it when you don't bring it back.
3) The penalties for this information leaking must be *HARSH*
4) You cannot take information from someone to track their behavior/actions unless you state *explicitly and clearly* that this is what you will be doing with said information. (ie: 'points' cards, 'Air Miles', 'Club cards' at grocery store.)
5) Generation of demographics from customer information is fine, so long as those demographics are anonymous. (so it's fair to say that 300 college-age white kids from a 2 mile radius rented horror movies this week, or ate kraft dinner, or whatever.)
Folks.. it's not about cramping the freedom of people to keep records.. but those records have to have *some* kind of purpose. Your name and phone number should never be just a *commodity*, to be bought, sold, and traded.
In other words.. forming a business to 'track' things in this manner (consumer profiles) is basically like spying! Were you aware this company has a file on you, Mrs. Smith, a foot thick? they know everything about your shopping habits? This is spying, and the citizen deserves to be protected from it.
In the end.. don't give your name to people who don't need it. Don't give it just because some clerk *asked*. Don't feel awkward.. make *them* feel awkward.
Those grocery store 'discount' or 'club' cards? Do they ID you? no.. *lie* on them. They aren't credit, they aren't monetary.. they just want to track you.
web sites..
Guess it's time to remove the cookies permanently.
Making personal archival copies is considered *fair use* and is completely legal.
This is a completely separate issue from whether the produce of a media has to give you the technological means to archive it or not. It is not *their* problem. They simply cannot use copyright law against you if you *DO* figure out how to do it... as the 'copies' are legitimate.
To put it differently, them 'allowing' you to, meant 'allowing' you to legally, not technically. They cannot prosecute.
You have the right to make archival copies, and not be prosecuted. It's legal.
This in no way implies that anyone has to provide you with a method for making said copies, it just means that if you DO make copies, you are within your rights.
IANAL, but this is fairly obvious.
In Canada, and the US, I believe.. stores have every right not to take *any* returns, so long as the product was sold legally, and not under false pretenses.
If I you go to WalMart and buy a bicycle, try it out, and decide you would rather have purchased a TV Set.... They are under *NO* obligation to take it back. The sale was a legally binding act, and was final. (of course, wal-mart explicitly *states* that you may return it, under certain conditions.)
Now.. if the bike said 'aluminum frame, gold plated rims.. etc..' and you unpacked it and it was plastic.... then you could return it, and they would *have* to give you a full refund as the sale was fraudulent.
So.. if you go buy a CD, and it's marked as CDDA or whatever.. and it's *NOT*.. it is a fraudulent sale, they have *NOT* sold you what they led you to believe you were buying... so they *MUST* take it back, and refund your money.
I'm not sure of the exact year, but it was around 10 years ago that I saw Mr. Hoberman and his spheres on TV, and he had been working on them for some time before that. His stuff is used in Satellite deployment, among other things, due to it's expandability.
It's not simply the unfolding, but the underlying structure that remains strong and rigid underneath. Both a folded and unfolded hoberman sphere are both very strong.
I doubt it. No information is being extracted from the conversation.
This is analogous to someone saying simply 'someone is on the phone on this line'. Does that constitute tapping?
As for the silly us 'wiretapping' laws....
What idiot decided that radio broadcasts on standard modulation were in any way 'private'?
I believe here in the Great Empire of Canada, any cel conversation can be intercepted legally, as there is *no* reasonable expectation of privacy, because it is wireless.
As I understand it.. analog phones emit a constant carrier/beacon/whatever.
Digital phones only receive, except when they periodically send out signals to keep things working right, let the system know where they are, etc.. (one reason you get SOO Much more battery life out of a phone in digital mode)
Is the ability of the government/law enforcement/whoever to track where you are a good thing? Well.. the gut feeling is 'no.. that tramples on my righrs, right?'
Let me pose a different perspective.
First, regarding the cellular phone tracking stuff. Well.... You *are* using a phone that *broadcasts* over RF, which is an inherently *public* medium, and physics says there are ways to locate you if your signal can be isolated. So...scientifically speaking.. you do *NOT* have a reasonable expectation that your location is hidden. Now.. yes, the telco records that say what the signature of your phone is, your ESN, things like that.. should *ABSOLUTELY* be private. That's beteween you and your cel provider... but aside from that.... anyone with the right gear can know that a) someone is using a phone nearby and b) where they are.
So.. should this information be in the hands of the government only? Traffic reporters only? No...
it should be publicly available to anyone. ie: how many calls are going on I98? Hwy#4? How dense? Sure... as long as the database is *publicyly funded* and *publicly* available, and not monoploized.
Umm... if you want to progress your carreer in the sysadmin field, and you are in a company where management just 'decides' that everything should be W2k for no reason.. get out.
Perhaps broadcasting is the wrong word. How about 'performing'? They are not allowed to perform that music for you.
I understand what you are saying, and I agree, but what does this have to do with the fact that mp3.com made copies of 45,000 commercial titles without permission?
No. It's not how I look at it. It is very clear.
If they don't have the album in their server already, there is no way for me to send it to them.
A 'signature' cannot be considered compression.
You are NOT making a copy, and sending it to mp3.com for later retrieval. You are simply saying 'I have this CD and want to listen to it later'.
Yes. You own the album, and *you* can make all the copies you want to use personally. That does not mean that mp3.com has the right to distribute that same music to you. It's a subtle point, and I'm not sure how to state it more clearly.
mp3.com does not have the right to transmit the entire Led Zeppelin collection to me, over the net. Why would they suddenly gain this right if I happen to own the album? They don't.. my owning the album has nothing to do with mp3.com's distribution rights, period.
As for public domain.. you are completely incorrect. A CD, once distributed, is most certainly *NOT* in the public domain. By definition, things in the Public Domain have *ABSOLUTELY NO* copyright protection, and anyone is free to do whatever they want with them.
All it sends is a few bytes, like a CDDB signature, to mp3.com, it does NOT send any audio data at all, period. And no, a representation of data is not enough.
It will come down to some strange debates, I bet.
Had they said 'Our software WILL send up the entire copy.. but first our database will check to see if it already has it, to save time' they might be in better shape.
As someone said the other day... Hacker logic does not work in Law.
Yes, I believe if I actually sent them the data and they stored it for me, and streamed it later, they would have a better case.
I also see that, why should they store my data, when they already HAVE That same data.. shouldn't they just call it 'caching' or some other kind of efficiency-improving technology?
And I support what they are doing.. I *hope* they win. (as long as they don't start saying 'this is OUR technology, and nobody can imitate us, or do stupid patents, or anything..). But I digress.
The problem is, the law says, (though IANAL) that they, as a commercial entity, do *not* have the right to make copies of 45,000 commercial titles without permission, and to stream those to people. Pretend for a moment that the end user does not have to prove they own the CD, and that they were broadcasting to everyone. This would clearly be illegal, a blatant violation of copyright.
So how, by the end user simply saying 'look, I have the CD' does it give them the right to do what they do?
As for mp3.com's stance on it.. they say they are providing a service to the consumer.. and I for one think that copyright has become TOO powerful, and that it should not give someone absolute control over copies of their work, only the right to fairly make money off it. Especially if they are massively distributing it and making it part of the popular culture anyway.
Umm.. actually, we have a *VERY* good idea of what the components of smell are. The iSmell *WORKS*, and is based on very sound science.
Yes, it has to do with shapes of molecules, and the various receptors those molecules trigger... and if you can produce molecules that trigger single receptors, they can be combined to produce any odor imaginable.
And iSmell has *already* dont his and it works.
It's not a hoax, and they have demonstrated prototypes already. It was in a Wired magazine last year (was the cover story even... )
iSmell was covered in Wired sometime in the middle of 1999, I believe, and it was very interesting!
Basically... and I'm doing this from memory....
The receptors in your nose that pick up smell can be broken into a finite number of 'base' receptors (lots, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, I forget). Each molecule that triggers a smell sets of different combinations of these, as different edges of the molecule bind to different receptors. Now... what iSmell figured out (or at least makes use of), well, instead of finding the actual individual proteins that bind to these receptors, and figuring out exactly what each one should be... they just look to nature and by trial-and-error, found *similar* shaped ones, and then tried some more, and came up with a device that contains many tiny 'wells' of different 'base scents'. They can then combine these in different combinations to produce different smells.
From the Wired article, it sounded very promising.
The accusations are fairly clear... all should read the official document.
They claim that
a) mp3.com made copies of 45,000 commercial titles and placed them in their servers. This could be read several ways, but as a commercial venture, they may not have the rights to do this. They also do not have the rights to 'perform' these titles for anyone else, regardless of whether that someone else owns the music already or not.
No. I can tell mp3.com what CD's I bought.. and they are free to ask. ,copies are not sent to mp3.com, I believe.... they only check to see what you have and then send out of their archive.
But my having a CD does *not* give mp3 the right to broadcast it to me. Yes, it gives *me* the right to make copies, etc... for my own personal use, but in this case
Somethign needs clarifying here.
With Beam-It, does the end user actually encode their CD's and UPLOAD them to mp3.com, for later streaming... or does mp3.com simply say 'okay.. they have this CD according to our software.. so we have license to send the music back to them'.
If the data is actually being set up BY The users....mp3.com has a good case. they are providing data warehousing and retrieval.
If mp3.com is doing the latter, they have a problem.
You see.. although you, personally, are allowed to make copies of titles you own for your own use.. this does not grant everyone in the world license to send that same information to you.
mp3.com probably does *not* have the right to stream all of Thriller to you, simply because you happen to own the album.
Of course it has an 'NTish options'.. it *IS* NT.
It's NT 5.0, they just renamed it to Windows 2000. Remember.. it was *going* to be their new OS.. they were going to scrap the 9x line... but that's not gonna happen either...
As a Minister of the ULC, I am authorized to, among other things, take confession and forgive your sins.
I will do this for free, via E-mail, though donations will be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely.
Rev. Mind.
I haven't heard anything. To tell the truth, I suspected fraud... that it was a bogus claim. Now.. it would be nice if it wasn't.. but they didn't give *any* technical specs... just made some bold claims.