Moving something out of the spec to hide it doesn't help.
What is THAT supposed to mean? If I implement P3P 1.0, Space Aliens are going to magically cause my credit card and Social Security Number to be uploaded? I DON'T THINK SO.
If MS moved the incompatibility part of their Kerberoes specification into a new spec called "Microsoft Kerberos Specifications" or something like that, you could now say, "Microsoft's Kerberos specification doesn't include any incompatibility," and saying that would be truthful on the surface but only because of its narrow focus.
Are you saying that browser developers are implementing or have implemented extended versions of P3P that include data uploading? IF SO, WHO???
Previous P3P specifications did include a protocol to transmit data
There have been NO previous P3P specifications, only draft working documents. This facility has been removed from the earlier draft versions of the specification. The fact of the matter is that you have been caught with your pants down. No matter how you try to wriggle out of the facts, P3P DOES NOT INCLUDE THE CAPABILITY TO TRANSMIT USER INFORMATION TO SERVERS.
If it did, I would be happy to condemn it. I run filtering proxy servers and cookie management software on my home systems. I also believe that government privacy regulation on the internet is a necessary evil in this case. But I do not think you should make up stories about something that are flat out untrue.
Your characterization of P3P is certainly NOT factual or accurate. The P3P 1.0 specification does NOT include a capability to send data to a server from a user agent.
P3P is a mechanism designed to get you to enter all your personal data into your web browser and have your browser give it out, behind the scenes, to any website that asks for it.
Contrary to statements asserting this on slashdot, P3P 1.0 does not include the capability to transfer user data to a server.
Why aren't mobile-phone makers implementing a simple text-oriented web broswer on their phones (or on palm-tops)?
A big reason is that html is way overkill for a pocket phone. Modern browsers have gotten to the point where they are correcting html tag errors on the fly, handling various types of scripting languages, etc. The cost for a phone to be html 4.0 compatable would be probitive. XHTML is supposed to fix this, but it is not ready yet.
If they do make an intel version. I really hope that thay also have the brains to make it possable to run it from within windows.
Don't hold your breath on this fantasy. Apple makes most of it's money selling hardware. For them to do what you suggest would be suicide.
The problem with SoftMac is that they are VASTLY overstating their software compatability. Almost all current versions of Mac programs are PowerMac only, which SoftMac doesn't support. This makes it useless except for use with software that any Mac user would consider long ago obsolete.
The claim of 80% of the speed of a 68040 on an Althon K7 is pretty poor, too. The 68040 topped out at 33 MHz! Given the architecture advantages of newer CPUs, this means the emulation is running at an effective 1/200th or so of the native CPU speed. This would CRAWL with anything like modern software. It would be like running Windows 98 on a 486-33 PC.
We have strong gun control everywhere in Europe, together with lower criminality rates than in the US (though the correlation between the two is, admittedly, not entirely clear).
In actuallity, there is a real dichotomy in the crime rates vis-a-vis violent crimes and petty crimes in the US and Europe. While it certainly true that Europe enjoys much lower murder rates than the US (in fact the murder rate in the US WITHOUT guns is higher than the total murder rate in Europe - making the argument that guns are the cause of our problem here rather dubious), the fact is also that non-violent crime rates in Europe (burglaries etc) are higher than in the US. These days any US citizen that travels to Europe gets all sorts of warnings about pickpockets, hotel security, car theft, etc.
In addition there is the interesting fact that suicide rates, at least in England and the US are essentially the same - while a very high percentage of suicides in the US are by gun, and very few in England are by gun. It is also interesting to note that something like 50% of all gun deaths in the US are suicides.
There is also the interesting fact that the gun ownership in Switzerland per capita is higher than the US, yet their murder rates are much lower, and more like Europe as a whole.
With all this evidence in hand it is very difficult for me to believe that gun ownership rates have much, if anything to do with the rates at which crimes are committed.
I am from Europe. Maybe that is the reason why I don't really understand the American obsession with guns.
I asume that you then know that there is at least one country in Europe where gun ownership per capita is higher that the US; that being Switzerland. Perhaps you should ask the Swiss why they are so obsessed with guns.
2 week old news. Actually it works with System 8.6 or later. There is a report with user experiences on Macintouch, including a lot of hardware compatability data.
It is very difficult to get out of breach of contract if the contract is worded correctly.
I have yet to see any sort of performance guarantee in ANY contract for a technology product that covers consequential damages. If you are able to get such guarantees, I would surely like to know from whom.
Because there is simply no legal recourse for companies who use it.
What makes you think there is legal recourse for commercial software? The DMCA and recent court rulings (see yesterday's/. article on shrink wrap liability disclaimers being upheld by the WA supreme court) pretty much put an end to any recourse by software purchasers.
Why should I take away the greatest playwright? Surely his work is significant component of what I am talking about.
If you want more, there is a large body of drama from the Restoration, and you might want to investigate the York plays. The problem with English drama is that Shakespeare is taught amost to the exclusivity of everything else when in fact there is a lot more worthy of consideration.
Take Poetry. OK.
Yeah, there's Keats and Browning and perhaps a few others,
You mean like Chaucer, Blake, Yeats, Shelley, Dunne, Burns? Or the Gawain poet? The Morte Arthure? The list of great English poets is a lot longer than you give credit for.
Greek..while there are great works of art
That's the point, isn't it? Volume isn't the criterea by which art is judged, otherwise the bodice rippers would be a great body of literature. Greek literature is unparalleled in it's quality and influence.
Greek cannot compare to the literaric volume of any living language.
I assume you mean classical Greek. Greek is by no means a dead language, as those living in Greece will surely attest.
The good news is that it will be a "perverted" of English with plenty of foreign words.
Not will be, ARE foreign words. A large number of the words for food in the English language are already of French origin due to the Norman conquest. Beouf, etc. There are many other examples of non-English words in common use as well.
English has a HUGE vocabulary, more than any other language. Part of the reason for this is the long history it has of subsuming words from other languages.
English has some real positive attributes to recommend it over other languages as a lingua franca - the rich vocabulary, the great body of literature (rivaled only by Greek and Sanskrit), the fact that there is no central body that tries to control the vocabulary (like the notorious and highly xenophobic Academie Francaise) and keep out foriegn cultural influences.
Give me a break. Apple has spent many millions of dollars establishing the iMac look as a distinctive product identification. Predicatably we have dozens of companies looking to rip this off. What the hell is preventing these other companies from developing their own distinctive case design? Nothing, except they lack the talent to do so. Apple worked hard to establish this in the market, and deserves the rights to it. Do slashdotters go after Coca-Cola for defending their coke bottle shape from copiers? I don't think so.
Some users have pointed out that this design is not the same as the iMac in that it is not all in one. Well, get a clue - Apple sells other computers with the iMac look that are also not all in one. Ever see the Blue and White G3 with matching monitor?
And then there was the comment about the AMD Easy Now design. Give me a break! This design looks NOTHING like any of Apple's computers. Solid purple color with green trim? REAL close to an iMac, NOT!!!!
One benefit I haven't seen here is that a well done printed manual is a good inducemnt to get a customer to buy your software package. With these days of the low cost CD ROM burner, piracy is soooo easy, and with the docs online, the user is ready to go. A top notch 500 page printed manual available only when you buy the software really is a significant value-add.
I've messed with a digital camera from time to time, and I must say that they are OK for low resolution work. BUT if you want to blow up that image beyond a 4x6", stick with film. Kodak will scan your film to far higher resolution than that available on any digital camera. In addtion the cost of the camera is far lower, and you have far greater choice in accessories, especailly lenses.
If you become a serious amateur the advantages of film become even more important - the process of producing a great photograph is two step - capturing the image on film, and then printing it on paper. Serious photographers have long realized that the expression of art in photography comes not in the process of taking the picture, but during the process of turning the image on the negative to an unforgetable print.
Re:Not *no* middle-men -- NEW middle-men
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 1
Remarkable assertion there -- and completely wrong. You've never studied economics, have you?
Not only have I studied it, but I have also learned some of it.
The fact is that most of the productivity benefits of the internet arise through transaction cost reductions. Middlemen are the primary losers here as now it becomes much more attractive for the producers to serve their audiences directly. Thus Fatbrain.com is offering the ability to custom produce books to authors. This cuts the publisher (the primary middleman) out of the loop completely. Similar pressures exist in the music industry because of electronic distribution channels. Examples like Amazon are not valid for in fact these Internet middlemen have been completely unable to develop anything like a sustainable, profitable business model.
Car dealers are now facing direct competition from factory stores on the internet. Real Estate dealers are finding that the Internat is enabling competition to their MLS services - forcing the once unassailable 6% commission down to as low as 2% in many cases.
We are at the point where 'midddlemen' on the internet can be totally virtual - just in time inventory shipped directly from the manufacturer, fulfilment and warehousing contracted out to companies specializing in these functions.
The only real value that Amazon brings to consumers is their catalog - and in fact catalogs of this nature can be created independently - as Books in Print has for years. If I were running Books In Print I would be busting my butt to get my catalog online, along with a referral service to publishers, a database for customer reviews, and all kinds of a banner ad tie ins.
As manufacturers fully realize the ease of performing these middlemen services on a virtual basis, there will be no need or economically viable basis for operations like Amazon.
The difficulty I find with Text::Template and it's ilk is handling includes. Many designers (rightly) use server side includes to handle incorporation of form elements that are used reptitively into their documnents. The template modules that I have looked at do not parse the SSI include directives resulting in an incomplete output file. If anyone knows of a template module that correctly handles SSI virtual and file, I'd be quite interested.
I am an experienced investor who has been in the stock market for over 30 years. The current correction that has much of the newsmedia running around shouting 'the sky is falling' is in fact about as big a surprise as any other market fluctuation - be it the price of oil, wheat or DRAMs. The fact is that the current price correction was inevitable. Last year the NASDAQ index increased in value by over 80%. Did the US economy grow at that rate? Of course not. Nor did the US economy shrink by 30% in the past week.
People who invest money in markets without being aware of market dynamics are likely to be shocked when exposed to these realities. Some may even panic and sell during market downturns, and thus lose some of their investment. Others may have invested on margin accounts, and be forced out, losing their entire investment. These actions exacerbate the depth of the market decline, which is fine by me because I am the one that is waiting for these fluctuations to do my buying.
Look at the market today - look at the prices of Microsoft, Lucent, and other great corporations. These are not the skanky dot coms that have no income or potential for profits - these are the companies that are growing at 30% per year with excellent profits. I am licking my chops thinking about the opportunity that the current market dip is offering. It may be years, IF EVER that you will see prices like this again.
Slashdot readers - go buy your Yupi's ($180,000 revenue and $18 million in losses) and similar tulips please. When they crash the panic will drag down the likes of Cisco, Sun and Oracle with them. And I will be waiting.
I agree with CmdrTaco. Stocks should be offtopic for slashdot. Very few slashdot readers have clue one as to economics and the workings of markets. Instead of posting market related stories here that lead to all sorts of misinformation posted in response, he should encourage readers to go to sites that offer useful common sense information on the markets.
RMS should stick to coding
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 4
RMS is a terrific programmer; I use his work every day, and am grateful for it.
THAT DOES NOT MAKE HIS OPINIONS REGARDING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WORTH SQUAT.
In this article RMS proposes that the Copyright laws should be abandoned because they interfere with his ability to copy the works of any author he pleases; he also proposes a sort of intellectual property shareware where the author is paid directly by the reader. How wonderfully naive.
The fact of the matter is that copyrights are essential - for without them there would be no ownership of any creative works by the author. RMS's own GPL depends on the existance of copyright law.
Digital media makes publishing (i.e. reproduction) of works easier - it puts the tools of the publisher in the hands of everyone. The legal reasons to protect the author from unlicensed reproduction are no different today than they were 100 years ago; the only difference is now that the tools to rip off the authors are more widely available.
Publishers are afraid of the these tools and are working to develop ways to preserve their current business model. FOOLS. The fact of the matter is that the prime economic of the internet is the elimination of middle-men. Be it car dealers, real estate agents, travel agents or book publishers - their economic model is doomed no matter how they try to preserve it. What will rise in it's place are new far more efficient models of direct contact between the creator and the end user. Without copyright laws to protect the authors these newer and more efficient distribution channels will never arise, and authors will lose all incentive to create new works.
Slashdot Mirror
Moving something out of the spec to hide it doesn't help.
What is THAT supposed to mean? If I implement P3P 1.0, Space Aliens are going to magically cause my credit card and Social Security Number to be uploaded? I DON'T THINK SO.
If MS moved the incompatibility part of their Kerberoes specification into a new spec called "Microsoft Kerberos Specifications" or something like that, you could now say, "Microsoft's Kerberos specification doesn't include any incompatibility," and saying that would be truthful on the surface but only because of its narrow focus.
Are you saying that browser developers are implementing or have implemented extended versions of P3P that include data uploading? IF SO, WHO???
Previous P3P specifications did include a protocol to transmit data
There have been NO previous P3P specifications, only draft working documents. This facility has been removed from the earlier draft versions of the specification. The fact of the matter is that you have been caught with your pants down. No matter how you try to wriggle out of the facts, P3P DOES NOT INCLUDE THE CAPABILITY TO TRANSMIT USER INFORMATION TO SERVERS.
If it did, I would be happy to condemn it. I run filtering proxy servers and cookie management software on my home systems. I also believe that government privacy regulation on the internet is a necessary evil in this case. But I do not think you should make up stories about something that are flat out untrue.
every bit of what I said is factual and accurate.
Your characterization of P3P is certainly NOT factual or accurate. The P3P 1.0 specification does NOT include a capability to send data to a server from a user agent.
P3P is a mechanism designed to get you to enter all your personal data into your web browser and have your browser give it out, behind the scenes, to any website that asks for it.
Contrary to statements asserting this on slashdot, P3P 1.0 does not include the capability to transfer user data to a server.
http://www.cdt.org/privacy/pet/p3pprivacy.shtml
http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/#goals_and_capabs
what is wrong with storing an anonymous cookie on your computer?
What is wrong is that DoubleClick seems to want to make these cookies non-anonymous.
I wonder how Apple will solve the adminsitration issue? IMHO any UN*X box needs some admin work now-and-then.
Between NeXT and AU/X Apple has had more experience prettify-ing Unix than anyone else. Expect to see a Unix with real ease of admin.
Apple has stated that the Terminal won't ship with the OS, and you won't be finding very many Unixisms.
Latest I have heard is that Terminal won't be part of the standard install, but it will ship on the System software CD as an optional component.
rumor has it that they've also standardized all the config files into XML, which you can also edit by hand.
I don't think this is a rumor - I have seen this mentioned in Apple developer docs.
XML has got to be the best config file format; other text formats have problems with being parsed after you hand edit them; this should not.
Why aren't mobile-phone makers implementing a simple text-oriented web broswer on their phones (or on palm-tops)?
A big reason is that html is way overkill for a pocket phone. Modern browsers have gotten to the point where they are correcting html tag errors on the fly, handling various types of scripting languages, etc. The cost for a phone to be html 4.0 compatable would be probitive. XHTML is supposed to fix this, but it is not ready yet.
If they do make an intel version. I really hope that thay also have the brains to make it possable to run it from within windows.
Don't hold your breath on this fantasy. Apple makes most of it's money selling hardware. For them to do what you suggest would be suicide.
The problem with SoftMac is that they are VASTLY overstating their software compatability. Almost all current versions of Mac programs are PowerMac only, which SoftMac doesn't support. This makes it useless except for use with software that any Mac user would consider long ago obsolete.
The claim of 80% of the speed of a 68040 on an Althon K7 is pretty poor, too. The 68040 topped out at 33 MHz! Given the architecture advantages of newer CPUs, this means the emulation is running at an effective 1/200th or so of the native CPU speed. This would CRAWL with anything like modern software. It would be like running Windows 98 on a 486-33 PC.
We have strong gun control everywhere in Europe, together with lower criminality rates than in the US (though the correlation between the two is, admittedly, not entirely clear).
In actuallity, there is a real dichotomy in the crime rates vis-a-vis violent crimes and petty crimes in the US and Europe. While it certainly true that Europe enjoys much lower murder rates than the US (in fact the murder rate in the US WITHOUT guns is higher than the total murder rate in Europe - making the argument that guns are the cause of our problem here rather dubious), the fact is also that non-violent crime rates in Europe (burglaries etc) are higher than in the US. These days any US citizen that travels to Europe gets all sorts of warnings about pickpockets, hotel security, car theft, etc.
In addition there is the interesting fact that suicide rates, at least in England and the US are essentially the same - while a very high percentage of suicides in the US are by gun, and very few in England are by gun. It is also interesting to note that something like 50% of all gun deaths in the US are suicides.
There is also the interesting fact that the gun ownership in Switzerland per capita is higher than the US, yet their murder rates are much lower, and more like Europe as a whole.
With all this evidence in hand it is very difficult for me to believe that gun ownership rates have much, if anything to do with the rates at which crimes are committed.
I am from Europe. Maybe that is the reason why I don't really understand the American obsession with guns.
I asume that you then know that there is at least one country in Europe where gun ownership per capita is higher that the US; that being Switzerland. Perhaps you should ask the Swiss why they are so obsessed with guns.
2 week old news. Actually it works with System 8.6 or later. There is a report with user experiences on Macintouch, including a lot of hardware compatability data.
It is very difficult to get out of breach of contract if the contract is worded correctly.
I have yet to see any sort of performance guarantee in ANY contract for a technology product that covers consequential damages. If you are able to get such guarantees, I would surely like to know from whom.
Because there is simply no legal recourse for companies who use it.
/. article on shrink wrap liability disclaimers being upheld by the WA supreme court) pretty much put an end to any recourse by software purchasers.
What makes you think there is legal recourse for commercial software? The DMCA and recent court rulings (see yesterday's
Take Shakespeare away
Why should I take away the greatest playwright? Surely his work is significant component of what I am talking about.
If you want more, there is a large body of drama from the Restoration, and you might want to investigate the York plays. The problem with English drama is that Shakespeare is taught amost to the exclusivity of everything else when in fact there is a lot more worthy of consideration.
Take Poetry. OK.
Yeah, there's Keats and Browning and perhaps a few others,
You mean like Chaucer, Blake, Yeats, Shelley, Dunne, Burns? Or the Gawain poet? The Morte Arthure? The list of great English poets is a lot longer than you give credit for.
Greek..while there are great works of art
That's the point, isn't it? Volume isn't the criterea by which art is judged, otherwise the bodice rippers would be a great body of literature. Greek literature is unparalleled in it's quality and influence.
Greek cannot compare to the literaric volume of any living language.
I assume you mean classical Greek. Greek is by no means a dead language, as those living in Greece will surely attest.
The good news is that it will be a "perverted" of English with plenty of foreign words.
Not will be, ARE foreign words. A large number of the words for food in the English language are already of French origin due to the Norman conquest. Beouf, etc. There are many other examples of non-English words in common use as well.
English has a HUGE vocabulary, more than any other language. Part of the reason for this is the long history it has of subsuming words from other languages.
English has some real positive attributes to recommend it over other languages as a lingua franca - the rich vocabulary, the great body of literature (rivaled only by Greek and Sanskrit), the fact that there is no central body that tries to control the vocabulary (like the notorious and highly xenophobic Academie Francaise) and keep out foriegn cultural influences.
Give me a break. Apple has spent many millions of dollars establishing the iMac look as a distinctive product identification. Predicatably we have dozens of companies looking to rip this off. What the hell is preventing these other companies from developing their own distinctive case design? Nothing, except they lack the talent to do so. Apple worked hard to establish this in the market, and deserves the rights to it. Do slashdotters go after Coca-Cola for defending their coke bottle shape from copiers? I don't think so.
Some users have pointed out that this design is not the same as the iMac in that it is not all in one. Well, get a clue - Apple sells other computers with the iMac look that are also not all in one. Ever see the Blue and White G3 with matching monitor?
And then there was the comment about the AMD Easy Now design. Give me a break! This design looks NOTHING like any of Apple's computers. Solid purple color with green trim? REAL close to an iMac, NOT!!!!
One benefit I haven't seen here is that a well done printed manual is a good inducemnt to get a customer to buy your software package. With these days of the low cost CD ROM burner, piracy is soooo easy, and with the docs online, the user is ready to go. A top notch 500 page printed manual available only when you buy the software really is a significant value-add.
Isn't module's own include feature enough for that purpose?
No, because the designers are not going to be editing or creating pages using tools that understand the module's include feature.
I've messed with a digital camera from time to time, and I must say that they are OK for low resolution work. BUT if you want to blow up that image beyond a 4x6", stick with film. Kodak will scan your film to far higher resolution than that available on any digital camera. In addtion the cost of the camera is far lower, and you have far greater choice in accessories, especailly lenses.
If you become a serious amateur the advantages of film become even more important - the process of producing a great photograph is two step - capturing the image on film, and then printing it on paper. Serious photographers have long realized that the expression of art in photography comes not in the process of taking the picture, but during the process of turning the image on the negative to an unforgetable print.
Remarkable assertion there -- and completely wrong. You've never studied economics, have you?
Not only have I studied it, but I have also learned some of it.
The fact is that most of the productivity benefits of the internet arise through transaction cost reductions. Middlemen are the primary losers here as now it becomes much more attractive for the producers to serve their audiences directly. Thus Fatbrain.com is offering the ability to custom produce books to authors. This cuts the publisher (the primary middleman) out of the loop completely. Similar pressures exist in the music industry because of electronic distribution channels. Examples like Amazon are not valid for in fact these Internet middlemen have been completely unable to develop anything like a sustainable, profitable business model.
Car dealers are now facing direct competition from factory stores on the internet. Real Estate dealers are finding that the Internat is enabling competition to their MLS services - forcing the once unassailable 6% commission down to as low as 2% in many cases.
We are at the point where 'midddlemen' on the internet can be totally virtual - just in time inventory shipped directly from the manufacturer, fulfilment and warehousing contracted out to companies specializing in these functions.
The only real value that Amazon brings to consumers is their catalog - and in fact catalogs of this nature can be created independently - as Books in Print has for years. If I were running Books In Print I would be busting my butt to get my catalog online, along with a referral service to publishers, a database for customer reviews, and all kinds of a banner ad tie ins.
As manufacturers fully realize the ease of performing these middlemen services on a virtual basis, there will be no need or economically viable basis for operations like Amazon.
The difficulty I find with Text::Template and it's ilk is handling includes. Many designers (rightly) use server side includes to handle incorporation of form elements that are used reptitively into their documnents. The template modules that I have looked at do not parse the SSI include directives resulting in an incomplete output file. If anyone knows of a template module that correctly handles SSI virtual and file, I'd be quite interested.
On the other hand, it is easily argued that most laws are unethical (for instance, laws about drug use and prostitution).
I can easily argue anything that I damn want to. That doesn't mean that my arguments will be regarded as having validity.
I am an experienced investor who has been in the stock market for over 30 years. The current correction that has much of the newsmedia running around shouting 'the sky is falling' is in fact about as big a surprise as any other market fluctuation - be it the price of oil, wheat or DRAMs. The fact is that the current price correction was inevitable. Last year the NASDAQ index increased in value by over 80%. Did the US economy grow at that rate? Of course not. Nor did the US economy shrink by 30% in the past week.
People who invest money in markets without being aware of market dynamics are likely to be shocked when exposed to these realities. Some may even panic and sell during market downturns, and thus lose some of their investment. Others may have invested on margin accounts, and be forced out, losing their entire investment. These actions exacerbate the depth of the market decline, which is fine by me because I am the one that is waiting for these fluctuations to do my buying.
Look at the market today - look at the prices of Microsoft, Lucent, and other great corporations. These are not the skanky dot coms that have no income or potential for profits - these are the companies that are growing at 30% per year with excellent profits. I am licking my chops thinking about the opportunity that the current market dip is offering. It may be years, IF EVER that you will see prices like this again.
Slashdot readers - go buy your Yupi's ($180,000 revenue and $18 million in losses) and similar tulips please. When they crash the panic will drag down the likes of Cisco, Sun and Oracle with them. And I will be waiting.
I agree with CmdrTaco. Stocks should be offtopic for slashdot. Very few slashdot readers have clue one as to economics and the workings of markets. Instead of posting market related stories here that lead to all sorts of misinformation posted in response, he should encourage readers to go to sites that offer useful common sense information on the markets.
RMS is a terrific programmer; I use his work every day, and am grateful for it.
THAT DOES NOT MAKE HIS OPINIONS REGARDING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WORTH SQUAT.
In this article RMS proposes that the Copyright laws should be abandoned because they interfere with his ability to copy the works of any author he pleases; he also proposes a sort of intellectual property shareware where the author is paid directly by the reader. How wonderfully naive.
The fact of the matter is that copyrights are essential - for without them there would be no ownership of any creative works by the author. RMS's own GPL depends on the existance of copyright law.
Digital media makes publishing (i.e. reproduction) of works easier - it puts the tools of the publisher in the hands of everyone. The legal reasons to protect the author from unlicensed reproduction are no different today than they were 100 years ago; the only difference is now that the tools to rip off the authors are more widely available.
Publishers are afraid of the these tools and are working to develop ways to preserve their current business model. FOOLS. The fact of the matter is that the prime economic of the internet is the elimination of middle-men. Be it car dealers, real estate agents, travel agents or book publishers - their economic model is doomed no matter how they try to preserve it. What will rise in it's place are new far more efficient models of direct contact between the creator and the end user. Without copyright laws to protect the authors these newer and more efficient distribution channels will never arise, and authors will lose all incentive to create new works.