Now there's a lovely thought - dehydrated Neutron Bombs, just add water.
I don't think your analogy quite holds up. What you're suggesting is roughly equivalent to saying that the score for Beethhoven's 5th *is* the symphony, rather than just a detailed set of instructions for reconstructing it using only a concert hall, a conductor and a 150-piece orchestra.
A positive step has to be taken once you've got the source for Beethhoven's 5th before it turns into an executable of the symphony on CD... (and yes, I know I'm driving this metaphor full-tilt over the Clifftop of incomprehension, but it's late and I don't care)
Seconded. Drawing a parallel from the world of negligence (UK edition), the question of whether the Defendant is in breach of his duty of care (where one has been established) is put in this way: Did he, having regard to all the circumstances, the chance of harm occurring, the extent of harm foreseeable and the cost of preventive measures relative to the foreseeable harm, take all reasonable preventive measures?
If Napster takes those measures and people are still spoofing them, that is not their fault. It's the difference between posting a sentry who happens to miss an intruder and leaving the door wide open.
Well, they'd have been watertight as to liability. Whether or not the product was actually banned would be a different question.
For example, in the days before I took to gardening organically, I bought a bottle of Malathion (a pesticide: nowadays my garden is visited by too many bees and butterflies for me to want to use that on the aphids). It's potent and unpleasant stuff, even after you dilute it, and there are warnings all over the bottle, the leaflet that came with it and the box that the bottle and leaflet came in.
Thus, if I do something stupid with it - drink it, inhale the vapour, shove it up my bum, etc. - I have no comeback against the manufacturer.
That's the position Big Tobacco would have been in if they'd come clean.
Your point is about regulation: perhaps the sale of smokes would have been outlawed. On the other hand, big-money business that doesn't do any obvious harm tends to be able to sail those legislative waters quite safely (lunacies like Prohibition notwithstanding). My insecticide example illustrates it thus: the stuff is dangerous, but lucrative and does no short-term harm. (DDT did: DDT got banned) Thus it remains on the market, provided it comes with all those warnings about safe use. Those warnings serve the related but nevertheless separate function fo protecting the manufacturer against civil liability.
You're right up to a point. However, up until the injunction, Napster was doing precisely jack about the illegal MP3s, and infringing files were being openly traded.
With a filter in place for the obvious filenames and some reasonable effort in place to keep up with at least the obvious workarounds, Napster will achieve two things:
They'll be making it difficult for the pirates to be obvious about it where they were previously able to trade without let or hindrance; and
Any infringing material that gets through after they install the filter (which need not be other than a very dim piece of software) is then getting traded by reason of the users' attempts to fool Napster, not because Napster doesn't do a thing about it.
They can then go back before the judge, hand on heart, and say that such copyright infringement as is now happening is beyond their control despite their taking all such measures as are reasonable in the circumstances.
Remember always that injunctions require you to take certain actions, not achieve results. This is at once their strength and their weakness.
Any contract-drafting bottom-feeding lawshark can present a retail site such that it's accessed "with a view to entering into a contract".
Hey! I resemble that remark!.
Seriously, folks. I think that the above analysis of the DPA is a little pessimistic. The Act does in fact define gross invasions of privacy in a roundabout way: there is a list of items of "Sensitive Personal Data" which are subject to much stronger regulation.
The Act provides for civil and criminal penalties for breach of the provisions as to fair processing; it is not toothless.
As to the "taking of steps" point, that provision is also governed by the requirement that the processing be proportional to the need and transparent to the data subject, and the Data Protection Commissioner has power to rule on what is and is not within that requirement of fairness. For example, she has stated that those "opt out of our spam list" checkboxes are not fair on the data subject: they should be "opt-in" boxes.
As to "presenting a retail site such that it's accessed 'with a view to entering into a contract'", that has to be done with an eye on the remainder of the Act, which limits what you can and cannot do, the various dicta of the Data Protection Commissioner, one's own liability if one colludes in the commission of a criminal offence or advises a client to commit one and, in the UK, the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, which is a prize pain in the backside for those in the business of ripping off consumers.
The whole point of the DPA, you see, is to make it easier and more cost-effective for the lawyer to advise the client to comply than to infringe. Being a naturally conservative crowd, that is exactly what we do.
Even with the unpleasant US laws on copyright and so on, I think salon are over-egging this one (and IAAL, but NAUSQL; mileage may vary from the US Bar). Look at a few examples:
Napster provided a centralised service - their search engine - and that's what is being shut down; the trading of MP3s through less formal channels isn't being touched.
The DeCSS action is about to founder on the First Amendment. The source code is very, very likely to be held to be protected speech.
PGP got around the export restriction by publishing the source as a book: the protected speech could then be exported without restriction and OCR'd, rebuilt and used.
In fine, the author of a piece of source code is OK. If he does something with it that is not protected, he's potentially in trouble. If he provides some other service that's an infringement of something or other, he's potentially in trouble.
That's what Napster ran aground on: the injunction (which won't get stayed by the Appeal, according to a US attorney friend of mine) was against the inclusion of copyrighted material in their searchable database of traded MP3s, not against the non-infringing uses of the software or in respect of anything the users did.
The injunction ordered Napster to do something they had previously declined to do: exercise some discrimination in the material they included in their list of tradeable MP3 files. Nothing to do with their authorship of any software.
The Oppenheimer defence is available only where you have no control over the end use of the product and there is a substantial lawful end use of same and the product is not dangerous in normal use if it is meant to be safe. (This is a statement of general principle, incidentally: for the specific application in your local jurisdiction consult a lawyer qualified to practise where you are).
Oppenheimer himself had no control over the end use, and that end use was (in the context of a major war) lawful. The product was dangerous in normal use, but then bombs are meant to be.
Big Tobacco is OK all the way up to the danger point. They've been insisting that the product was safe for decades, and now that is coming home to roost. (If they'd sold it, from when they first figured it out, on the basis that "this stuff will kill you: don't say you weren't warned that a little pleasure now will be paid for with a lot of pain later" they'd have been watertight)
DeCSS is perfectly safe to use, and there is a substantial lawful use (at least, lawful everywhere but the US) for a finished product (an executable). The source code itself doesn't do anything but communicate, so it's protected speech. The authors can't otherwise control what's done with it.
Napster, on the other hand, is used almost exclusively (on the evidence in that case, and on Napster's own business plan) for copyright infringement, and Napster run their marketplace as a centralised service so they've got a clear control over what's done with it. It is this last that caught them by the main zipper; it is this that's going to make their eyes water.
Anyone thinking of using this service in the UK (or anywhere in the EU for that matter) should think again. It's (potentially) a criminal offence to collect any data on a person without telling them you're doing it (Data Protection Act 1998, generally and Schedule 1 part I in particular). The fact that you're using a third party based abroad to dig the dirt on your site visitors will avail you nothing with the Data Protection Commissioner if she decides to land on you with both hobnailed boots.
Those privacy statements, whose status in the US I cannot comment on (IAAL but NAUSQL) are binding in the UK and breach of them potentially sounds in damages (section 13 of the Act isn't in force yet, but soon, soon) as well as criminal liability and all manner of interesting and exciting regulatory action.
For the rights of data subjects generally, see Part II of the Act generally and the register of Data Controllers is maintaned at the Data Protection Commissioner's site and is fully searchable. Go on, look up your favourite corporation and dob them in if they aren't playing by the rules. (Non-UK readers may be amused to know that an assortment of pranksters make a point of doing this with political party membership lists when they use them for mailshotting purposes.)
OK, while IAAL, I have no significant competition law practice either on the UK or the EU law (although I know enough to say that if M$ is guilty by EU standards, they're also guilty by UK standards if the acts complained of at an EU-wide level were committed in the UK as well), so this is going to be fairly sketchy.
What's being alleged here is an offence or offences against Articles 85 and 85 of the Treaty of Rome, which binds everyone in the EU - it's a bit like the way Federal law in the US binds everyone in the individual States (and please, no pedantry from US conflict-of-laws experts, OK? This is a rough guide, not a detailed exposition).
Articles 85 and 86 provide that it's unlawful, in a manner which pretty much amounts to making it a criminal offence, to trade in such a way as to be anticompetitive or to abuse a dominant position in a market. Whether on the facts M$ have actually done either of these things is not something I can tell from any of the articles cited, though I would personally bet a reasonable sum that their ordinary way of doing business as revealed on discovery in the US DoJ prosecution will get the Commission fairly well exercised.
This is not the same as US antitrust legislation, even though it looks very similar indeed. The basic deal is that the European Commission (sort of the EU's Civil Service, only not quite - I told you this was going to be a rough guide) investigates and prosecutes offenders almost exactly the way a police force/prosecution service would for a national crime. The only remedies available are an order to terminate the infringement or, where it was committed "intentionally or negligently" a fine on turnover while the offending conduct continues - the EU can't do anything to M$ beyond that, whereas the US Courts can pretty much order Bill to commit HariKiri if they find him guilty.
There is virtually no political element to this. The Commission is not elected, and apart from the Commissioners themselves (one for each directorate-general, which is the name for the departments of the Commission, and a couple of head honchos like the President), there are no political appointees in the Commission. They're all career civil servants, accountable as to their budget to the European Court of Auditors and as to their actions in prosecution of governments and large corporations, to the European Court of Justice (not the European Court of Human Rights, which is a completely different institution, in a different building in a different city with different personnel and a different jurisdiction: it is vitally important not to confuse the two, particularly when filing an appeal.)
The amount of tax money that is going to be spent on this is, compared with the EU's budget as a whole, peanuts. (The EU's budget as a whole is peanuts compared with the national budgets of everywhere except Luxembourg and San Merino, but that's by the by).
M$ won't be able to drag it out, either. Commission prosecutions are usually fairly swift and fairly brutal. The Appeal from the Commission is to the European Court of Justice, a body that grinds exceeding small but does grind rather slow. And an appeal does not usually stay execution.
As to the fine, it's up to 10 per cent of turnover. M$ might be able to mitigate by immediately ceasing and desisting and generally playing nice from now on, but that's more or less it. While one per cent is the usual, this does mean fines of the order of £200-250 million get levied on a fairly regular basis, and appeals don't usually succeed (the Commission has a limited budget, and only acts when it is fairly sure it will win).
Basically, though, that 10 per cent is the maximum penalty, reserved for the real baby-eating satanists of the European Single Market's competition landscape. M$ might be bad, but I doubt they'll be found to be that bad.
Not so in this case. Breach of Articles 85 and 86 of the Treaty of Rome is a quasi-criminal matter anywhere in the European Union. The Commission can either root out the offenders on their own or act on information received - either way, it's a prosecution rather than an adversarial action.
Yes, IAAL, but no, I don't have a significant EU Competition Law practice. Don't ask me detailed questions.
It isn't the European Committee: the correct title in english is the European Commission. The body acting is the Directorate-General (the Commission is divided into a number (at least 20) of these Directorates-General, each with a specific brief) in charge of competition (I forget which number it is, or who the commissioner there is now).
The Commission is not elected. It is, in effect, the European Civil Service. Commission staff are career civil servants, either directly employed by the Commission or seconded from the national civil services. The Commissioners are political appointees, put in place by a complicated system of international horsetrading by the Council of Ministers.
The Commission is accountable to the European Parliament.
As for the popularity or otherwise of the EC's action, it doesn't matter. They're none of them elected officials and, in this regard, they no more have to worry about popularity than the police would if they were investigating a more ordinary crime.
From one non-combatant to another
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 2
"Arise, Samson! The Philistines are upon thee!"
Katz has used a book review - in which we learn precious little of the book under review - as a springboard for a thesis that hackers collectively are "a nation of sleepwalkers".
Alas, the thesis is not properly developed. Were we to take it seriously and follow it to its proper conclusion, it would fall under its own weight, as it ignores the one absolute in human biology: People Age and Die.
With respect, Mr Katz, not all the conspiracies of all the capitalists in the world will allow them or any of them to do a corner in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Why does this ruin Katz's thesis? Because, in so far as it is developed, it is this: that the young and well-educated ("techno-young", in Katz's desperate floundering for a word other than "geek") in IT and allied trades are naive, shiftless and poltically numb to the wider implications of what they do.
Fine as far as it goes, but what of the situation twenty years hence? What, Mr Katz, when the political neonates you sneer at are older, wiser and taking an interest in the big picture?
It's going to happen, no matter how hard you blow now. Will Katz then be sneering at the next generation, masters of whatever the technological wave du jour happens to be?
Probably not, but someone will. It seems to me to be an inescapable fact of life that in all times and places someone will be ranting about the indolence of the young and the pampered idleness of Modern Youth. Remember Monty Python's Yorkshiremen? "When I were a lad, we 'ad it tough. We'd to pay't mill owner fer't privilege of coming in to work". Katz is exactly what the Pythons were satirising.
The earliest reference I can find to this sort of thing is in Plato's Republic, written just less than two-and-a half millennia ago, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover that there was a stele at Abydos moaning about the worthlessness of the youth in these soft times of the 12th Dynasty.
We could laugh Katz off, if he weren't so pernicious. Pernicious? Yes, because he's a rabble-rouser who gets column inches, and the more dangerous because sometimes he's on the money (as with the Pinkertons or Voices from the Hellmouth).
Pernicious especially because he's giving people a salve for the nagging guilt that arises from taking part in modern life (other than in the flinty hearts of lawyers like me). Don't worry! he cries between the lines, It's not your fault! The system, the culture, the corporations are the ones doing the evil!
Let us digress for a word from honest Bill: The pusher can always be replaced. It is the junkie who is the base of the pyramid, and if the junkie is cured, the pusher will vanish.
You'll see the relevance of that in a moment.
Because it's not the corporations, the lawyers, the courts, the legislators or Capital that screws life up. It's all of us: a democracy of guilt. The machine you're reading this on depended, for its construction, on a long, long chain of exploitation, gouging, double-dealing and other incidents of normal commerce which went to make sure that most of the cost of your hardware was paid in sweat and misery by thousands of people in far-off places that you'll never see or meet.
My solution? Don't do a damned thing - in the long run, all of us are dead and gone, and the sweated workers of the First Industrial Revolution begat the fat and happy consumers of modern times, just as the slaves of Rome begat the free(ish) peoples of Europe and the (less) free peoples of the Americas.
Indeed, Katz can only deliver his half-made thesis by the grace of the very corporate/government axis he rails at. This is why I chose the title of this piece - and why I'll close it with a quote from the poem whose title it is:
They even chuck you cash, as bears get buns, for crying Peace! behind a screen of guns.
It hadn't even occured to this judge to consider the free speech issues present.
Slightly wide of the mark. The judge has considered nothing until it comes time to give a reasoned decision in the case. He may have not understood that the source for DeCSS (and its derivative works, the binaries and t-shirts) was speech within the meaning of the First Amendment until Touretzky explained it to him, but that's what trials are for.
Basically, you don't have a decision until all the evidence and legal argument is in, and until you do, anything the judge might think about the issues in the case is potentially a GIGO error, because he hasn't heard the whole case yet.
On that basis, Touretzky's evidence was a very good move on the part of the Defence: they put up an expert witness who explained, in words of one syllable, that program code was not a widget (with no protection) but rather a form of communication (which is protected speech).
Of such manoeuvres is good forensic practice built
The only solution I ever found worked was to change the working environment. Your skills and talent are still there, but you've become bored or intimidated by the surroundings. I find that taking a scratch-pad and a pencil and going to work in a coffee-shop works. For serious cases, I go work in a bar - they're usually quiet during the day and a couple of stiffeners tends to loosen up the inhibitions that are causing the problem.
Something similar happens in the UK every few mopnths: essentially, if you insist on a jury trial for medical use of cannabis, chances are the jury won't convict. There've been a couple of those recently.
We also have the Licensing (Cannabis) Bill currently before parliament and pretty much doomed to die at the end of the session: this is a shame, as the proposal would give us a sensible regime for the stuff - legal but regulated.
Being Some Reflections Inspired by Mr Katz, Demagogue of This Parish
With Learned Comment And Precepts For The Wise
Grocery conglomerates have skillfully -- and at great cost -- distorted the purpose of contract law and are jumbling two very different issues: the rights of farmers, and the rights to exorbitant corporate profits. They aren't the same thing. Most farmers need more protection from grocery companies than from college kids harvesting fields under cover of darkness. How can the rights of farmers be protected out in the fields?
Lost in the legal brawling is the original purpose of contract law. The Common Law originally developed a theory of contracts not so that the means of production and distribution could be owned forever and licensed by big companies. These laws were enacted so that farmers and other producers would have an incentive to produce new goods and to encourage the free and rapid circulation of wealth.
Those judges in olden times reasoned that if anybody could steal anybody's produce at any time, farmers and manufacturers would have no motive to keep growing crops and making things. And since farms were small and local communities vigilant, those laws were easy to police. They aren't easy to police anymore. Big farms and rural isolation mean that anyone with a torch and a sickle can fill up his car with produce at harvest time, and modern home freezer technology means it can be kept in cold store for months.
Today, the purpose of contract laws seems to be earning even bigger profits for grocery conglomerates hiding behind the mantra of protecting farmers. But 18th-century notions of contract doesn't (sic) make sense in the year 2000. Nobody can argue that the sharing of food by "unofficial harvesting" necessarily deprives the food industry (or farmers) of any incentive to grow food. And the modern economy is the greatest medium yet for ensuring the rapid dissemination of goods and services, a boon that should be protected, not shut down.
There is more food making more money in more forms -- generating $15 billion in profit in l999 -- than at any time in world history. In fact, comestibles in many forms, from turnips to alfalfa sprouts to pork bellies, is (sic again) flourishing. It would be tragic to create a more restrictive environment around the modern economy before we even try and figure out how farmers can get the protection and compensation they deserve. A study released last week by Jupiter, a grocery commerce research firm, says that "unoffical harvesters" are 45 per cent more likely than non-harvesters to have increased their total grocert purchases over the last six months. How, exactly, do farmers benefit from reversing that trend?
The new purpose of contract may be the reasonable protection of the rights of farmers and other productive entities; namely to ensure that they be paid fairly for their work, although perhaps in new and different ways. (An equally important contract trial concluded this week in Manhattan, where grocery industry lawyers have filed suit challenging the right to own and drive a car at night, and to own a torch at all).
Contract laws also need to recognize that access to free food has become a tradition and right for tens of millions of people, mostly younger Americans who grew up filching produce from fields at night, and who are now routinely branded "thieves" and "pirates" by corporate publicists and their close friends (corporations are the biggest contributors to political campaigns), congressional lawmakers. Gourmets also need some sort of fair-use protection. It's absurd to give giant conglomerates and commodities brokers the right to speak for farmers. Commodities brokerages are to farmers what wolves are to sheep.
Et cetera. Further instalments must await the replenishment of my sarcasm reservoir.
You're thinking of Nikola Tesla, although he didn't invent the AC system that Westinghouse used: Alternating Current is simply a feature of one particular type of dynamo generation. What he did was invent brushless and induction motors - gadgets of which the modern varieties are simply refinements - which made AC far and away the most economic method of mass-producing and distributing power. (Edison, of course, invented the AC-powered electric chair to show how much more dangerous than his DC system it was).
Tesla got rich, and, in his day, famous. Alas, he blew the lot on futile research projects and went completely mad, for which he is more chiefly remembered. Tesla's name lives on, anyway - Tesla coils are used to this day.
Back to the point: without the incentive of property rights in a new idea, most people wouldn't do anything at all about their idea. And an idea undeveloped is meaningless. I mean, the steam turbine was invented 1800 years ago: it wasn't developed until a century's worth of patentees had made money on improvements in metallurgy, bearings, rotor design etc., so that Parsons could go grandstanding through the fleet in 1890.
Prior to the invention of intellectual property, there was very little incentive to invent: there was virtually no such thing as literature for entertainment before the press made copyright possible. (Chaucer only predated Caxton by seventy years, and at that he wrote the Tales as a political stroke). It took a couple of hundred years to run up to speed and *bang* - Newcomen begat Watt begat Parsons begat Benz/Diesel/Otto begat Whittle, and the bastard offspring of Whittle and the Wrights is nowadays able to get halfway around the world before the pilot starts seeing blue devils in the cockpit.
No, not everyone manages to avoid getting ripped off. Few indeed strike absolute gold. Most, as it happens, get a couple of thousand a year for the life of their patent: reasonable enough given how small an advance most patents represent.
And modern cheap-beer capitalism is impossible unless you've got labour, somewhere, making the goods for eightpence an hour. The system positively collapses if someone isn't getting shit on.
Incidentally, the reason I'm suddenly less coherent is that it's 0130 here and I'm in the middle of an insomnia fit.
The last figure I heard was 78 per cent of people who downloaded the text paid for it. You say you wouldn't pay for something you'd already had: the fact that buskers can make at least eating money seems to me to suggest that there are enough people who don't think like you to make "singing for your supper", as King does, a viable proposition.
After all, you've already heard the tune before you flip the coin into that guitar case, haven't you?
As I understand it, cybersquatting laws in the US are not applicable to individuals, only to companies. This is, AFAIK, technically the case in the UK too. However, I know one author won her name back recently in court.
No, Cybersquatting applies to anyone with a trading use of the name. The tort is called "passing-off" (it's called something different in the states) and the essence of it is using someone else's commercially-valuable name. If it would mislead a consumer other than "a moron in a hurry" (the actual test under UK law!) then it's passing off, and punishable by damages and an injunction to restrain further use.
At the moment, here in the UK, you can only get a remedy through the courts for.uk domains, until such time as we get WIPO recognition at our tld people, which should be soon.
Well, yes, but then why not just launch straight from the moon? What do you gain by stopping part-way out at a space station, other than the "freighter advantage" I mentioned in my earleir post?
No, it's an offence not to decrypt material obtained lawfully by the police or security services on being ordered to do so in the proper form. The offence is almost certainly not extraditable, so it only works on people in the UK at the time the warrant is served and unable to get the hell out before they have to comply. Citizenship doesn't matter: the fact that you're within their reach is all that counts for criminal jurisdiction. Where domicile (not citizenship) matters is in your right to bail. If you can readily abscond by going to your home outside the jurisdiction, they won't give you bail without you surrender your passport and post a whopping surety.
I didn't say the UK sucks. I'm just tired of all the +5 messages from Europeans generally about how shitty the US is and how Americans have no rights.
Here's the great part: the act is likely to come into force on 5th October this year. Three days after the Human Rights Act 1998 comes into force and renders it a dead letter in advance.
I will say this for HMG; when it takes it into its pointy little head to indulge in wholesale repression, it usually has the good grace to make an utter hash of it. (Which comment I make without reference to the technical failings of the Bill, on which I am less competent to comment than most others here)
And, of course, unlike the US, I can go and badger the minister responsible for the wretched thing in his constituency office without an appointment, wherein I have the advantage that said office is less than a hundred meters from my own.
Try getting that kind of access to most US politicians!
By way of counter-examples to your proposition that it has not now, and never has been possible to get rich by having ideas (which you acknowledge with your caveat that it's only true 99 per cent of the time, and I'd dispute that figure as it happens):
James Watt - 19th Century
James Dyson - 20th Century
Clive Sinclair - 20th Century (who also showed how easy it is to go flat stony broke with a good idea, too)
Bill Gates - 20th Century (OK, he stole the idea, but he invented a very effective business model)
And the list goes on. Your central thesis rather seems to support the point I was making, though, which is that the real argument here is with the middlemen, not the right of creators to be paid and to protect that right to be paid.
A significant number of creators (which term I use so as to take in artists and inventors) cut out the middleman and get seriously rich. Even some of the guys who used middlemen got rich - the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Stones - two per cent of billions is still a lot of money.
Let's frame it this way: the fact that the middleman is ripping off the creator is no reason to join in and rip off the creator even more. Even if only a pittance of the sale goes where it ought to, that is no reason to stop even that pittance at source.
Me, if I was inclined to listen to music at all, I'd download the MP3 and send the cost of the CD to the artist. There's a way to go, eh? Offer downloads for free, payment of some minimum sum on the honour system. Well done again, Mr King.
...my weaselometer needle has jammed in the little red wedge on the right hand side of the dial.
The point about copyright is that it, and the other intellectual property rights, made modern life possible.
Copyright started as a response to the printing press, that made large-scale copying (hundreds of accurate copies per worker in the time it took a monastic scribe to do one innacurate one) possible.
Suddenly, there was a reason why ideas had value over and above their intrinsic value, and a mechanism to make the authors and the printers rich sort of evolved from there. Suddenly it was possible to get rich by having and developing ideas; it was no coincidence that copyright and patents were developed at or around the start of the industrial revolution (which begat the technological infrastructure that you're reading this on, via a number of intermediary steps). The one makes the other possible - simple as that, and the whole thing is powered by the inexhaustibel resource of human greed. Would Watt have bothered if he and Boulton couldn't have got as rich as Croesus?
Katz tells us that "artists themselves have important rights", but it's a weasel qualifier. I suspect he's uncomfortable with the argument he's deploying, because he hasn't thought it through. The important right of the artist - of any creative individual - is to sell his or her work for a price he or she deems appropriate (zero in a lot of cases, but that's not mandatory).
That price, plus cost of sales and middleman's fees, gets paid by the people who get the benefit of the artist's work. And it should be paid: commercial work is not a gift, nor should it be.
The only justifiable objection to be raised to the RIAA/Metallica action is that the middlemen involved - RIAA's members, who Metallica chose to use in the ordinary course of their business - appear to overcharge mightily. There are two options here: cut out the middleman (for which Stephen King is to be applauded in showing a very plausible way forward) or use a cheaper middleman. Is that possible? It may be that the promotion and marketing that RIAA members supply justifies the high cost to the end-user, and their massive profits arise from a small take on each of billions of units. Maybe not, in which case there's room to undercut them. If there is, eventually the market will produce such an undercutter, but don't hold your breath. It's more profitable to join 'em than beat 'em, mostly.
Be all that as it may, no-one can, without hypocrisy, complain about the ordinary operation of capitalism unless and until they're prepared to stick up for the other possibilities. I ain't, simply because I enjoy the idea of living off the back of sweated third-world labour (we all are, or at least everyone with the technical and fiscal wherewithal to read slashdot is).
If Katz is sincere - and he may be - his argument is, roughly, equivalent to suggesting that you should have a right to go steal ripe crops from fields in protest at the mark-up applied by the commodities exchanges, wholesalers, distributors, bakeries and supermarkets on the price of bread.
Here, we have the Bill itself as it emerged from its report to face it's third reading (last stage in parliament before Royal Assent and passage onto the statute book: it comes into force on a date to be fixed thereafter)
Thi s is the complete list of amendments, and you'll notice that Lord Bassam and chums seem to be out with their castrating knives and good on 'em, ain't it handy to have legislators who aren't going to have to face re-election.
It's already been beaten back once. The really offensive stuff started out in the Electronic Communications Bill (now the Act, minus all the nasty parts and as such totally useless and unlikely ever to be brought into force)
On and from 2nd October 2000, when the Human Rights Act 1998 comes into force, it will be more or less impossible to get convictions under clause 53 (it may not retain that section number in the Act-as-it-passes) since the threat of a penalty for non-disclosure amounts to a violation of the privilege against self-incrimination. This particular legal device - questioning under compulsion, a rather genteel and bloodless form of torture - resulted in the defendants in l'affaire Guinness getting judgments in their favour in the EHCR. Because compelled answers to a (non-criminal) DTI inquiry were used as evidence in their eventual (criminal) trial, they were found to have had their human rights violated.
The Encryption stuff isn't the big deal. It's the government's automatic right to install whatever variant of the carnivore system they want into any ISP, telecom provider, whatever so that they can monitor whenever they like without prior judicial restraint. The warrants are to be signed by the Secretary of State. And how much scrutiny is he going to give them?
There's a Commission going to be appointed to hear complaints. Sure, right. Fact fans, listen carefully: this is what they did last time around, when they passed the old Interception of Telecommunications Act fifteen years ago. In those fifteen years, the Commissioner has heard four (4) complaints. And rejected all of them. Can you say "dead letter?"
I could, and at very small provocation will, go on.
Slashdot Mirror
Now there's a lovely thought - dehydrated Neutron Bombs, just add water.
I don't think your analogy quite holds up. What you're suggesting is roughly equivalent to saying that the score for Beethhoven's 5th *is* the symphony, rather than just a detailed set of instructions for reconstructing it using only a concert hall, a conductor and a 150-piece orchestra.
A positive step has to be taken once you've got the source for Beethhoven's 5th before it turns into an executable of the symphony on CD... (and yes, I know I'm driving this metaphor full-tilt over the Clifftop of incomprehension, but it's late and I don't care)
Seconded. Drawing a parallel from the world of negligence (UK edition), the question of whether the Defendant is in breach of his duty of care (where one has been established) is put in this way: Did he, having regard to all the circumstances, the chance of harm occurring, the extent of harm foreseeable and the cost of preventive measures relative to the foreseeable harm, take all reasonable preventive measures?
If Napster takes those measures and people are still spoofing them, that is not their fault. It's the difference between posting a sentry who happens to miss an intruder and leaving the door wide open.
Well, they'd have been watertight as to liability. Whether or not the product was actually banned would be a different question.
For example, in the days before I took to gardening organically, I bought a bottle of Malathion (a pesticide: nowadays my garden is visited by too many bees and butterflies for me to want to use that on the aphids). It's potent and unpleasant stuff, even after you dilute it, and there are warnings all over the bottle, the leaflet that came with it and the box that the bottle and leaflet came in.
Thus, if I do something stupid with it - drink it, inhale the vapour, shove it up my bum, etc. - I have no comeback against the manufacturer.
That's the position Big Tobacco would have been in if they'd come clean.
Your point is about regulation: perhaps the sale of smokes would have been outlawed. On the other hand, big-money business that doesn't do any obvious harm tends to be able to sail those legislative waters quite safely (lunacies like Prohibition notwithstanding). My insecticide example illustrates it thus: the stuff is dangerous, but lucrative and does no short-term harm. (DDT did: DDT got banned) Thus it remains on the market, provided it comes with all those warnings about safe use. Those warnings serve the related but nevertheless separate function fo protecting the manufacturer against civil liability.
You're right up to a point. However, up until the injunction, Napster was doing precisely jack about the illegal MP3s, and infringing files were being openly traded.
With a filter in place for the obvious filenames and some reasonable effort in place to keep up with at least the obvious workarounds, Napster will achieve two things:
They can then go back before the judge, hand on heart, and say that such copyright infringement as is now happening is beyond their control despite their taking all such measures as are reasonable in the circumstances.
Remember always that injunctions require you to take certain actions, not achieve results. This is at once their strength and their weakness.
Hey! I resemble that remark!.
Seriously, folks. I think that the above analysis of the DPA is a little pessimistic. The Act does in fact define gross invasions of privacy in a roundabout way: there is a list of items of "Sensitive Personal Data" which are subject to much stronger regulation.
The Act provides for civil and criminal penalties for breach of the provisions as to fair processing; it is not toothless.
As to the "taking of steps" point, that provision is also governed by the requirement that the processing be proportional to the need and transparent to the data subject, and the Data Protection Commissioner has power to rule on what is and is not within that requirement of fairness. For example, she has stated that those "opt out of our spam list" checkboxes are not fair on the data subject: they should be "opt-in" boxes.
As to "presenting a retail site such that it's accessed 'with a view to entering into a contract'", that has to be done with an eye on the remainder of the Act, which limits what you can and cannot do, the various dicta of the Data Protection Commissioner, one's own liability if one colludes in the commission of a criminal offence or advises a client to commit one and, in the UK, the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, which is a prize pain in the backside for those in the business of ripping off consumers.
The whole point of the DPA, you see, is to make it easier and more cost-effective for the lawyer to advise the client to comply than to infringe. Being a naturally conservative crowd, that is exactly what we do.
Even with the unpleasant US laws on copyright and so on, I think salon are over-egging this one (and IAAL, but NAUSQL; mileage may vary from the US Bar). Look at a few examples:
In fine, the author of a piece of source code is OK. If he does something with it that is not protected, he's potentially in trouble. If he provides some other service that's an infringement of something or other, he's potentially in trouble.
That's what Napster ran aground on: the injunction (which won't get stayed by the Appeal, according to a US attorney friend of mine) was against the inclusion of copyrighted material in their searchable database of traded MP3s, not against the non-infringing uses of the software or in respect of anything the users did.
The injunction ordered Napster to do something they had previously declined to do: exercise some discrimination in the material they included in their list of tradeable MP3 files. Nothing to do with their authorship of any software.
The Oppenheimer defence is available only where you have no control over the end use of the product and there is a substantial lawful end use of same and the product is not dangerous in normal use if it is meant to be safe. (This is a statement of general principle, incidentally: for the specific application in your local jurisdiction consult a lawyer qualified to practise where you are).
Oppenheimer himself had no control over the end use, and that end use was (in the context of a major war) lawful. The product was dangerous in normal use, but then bombs are meant to be.
Big Tobacco is OK all the way up to the danger point. They've been insisting that the product was safe for decades, and now that is coming home to roost. (If they'd sold it, from when they first figured it out, on the basis that "this stuff will kill you: don't say you weren't warned that a little pleasure now will be paid for with a lot of pain later" they'd have been watertight)
DeCSS is perfectly safe to use, and there is a substantial lawful use (at least, lawful everywhere but the US) for a finished product (an executable). The source code itself doesn't do anything but communicate, so it's protected speech. The authors can't otherwise control what's done with it.
Napster, on the other hand, is used almost exclusively (on the evidence in that case, and on Napster's own business plan) for copyright infringement, and Napster run their marketplace as a centralised service so they've got a clear control over what's done with it. It is this last that caught them by the main zipper; it is this that's going to make their eyes water.
Anyone thinking of using this service in the UK (or anywhere in the EU for that matter) should think again. It's (potentially) a criminal offence to collect any data on a person without telling them you're doing it (Data Protection Act 1998, generally and Schedule 1 part I in particular). The fact that you're using a third party based abroad to dig the dirt on your site visitors will avail you nothing with the Data Protection Commissioner if she decides to land on you with both hobnailed boots.
Those privacy statements, whose status in the US I cannot comment on (IAAL but NAUSQL) are binding in the UK and breach of them potentially sounds in damages (section 13 of the Act isn't in force yet, but soon, soon) as well as criminal liability and all manner of interesting and exciting regulatory action.
For the rights of data subjects generally, see Part II of the Act generally and the register of Data Controllers is maintaned at the Data Protection Commissioner's site and is fully searchable. Go on, look up your favourite corporation and dob them in if they aren't playing by the rules. (Non-UK readers may be amused to know that an assortment of pranksters make a point of doing this with political party membership lists when they use them for mailshotting purposes.)
OK, while IAAL, I have no significant competition law practice either on the UK or the EU law (although I know enough to say that if M$ is guilty by EU standards, they're also guilty by UK standards if the acts complained of at an EU-wide level were committed in the UK as well), so this is going to be fairly sketchy.
What's being alleged here is an offence or offences against Articles 85 and 85 of the Treaty of Rome, which binds everyone in the EU - it's a bit like the way Federal law in the US binds everyone in the individual States (and please, no pedantry from US conflict-of-laws experts, OK? This is a rough guide, not a detailed exposition).
Articles 85 and 86 provide that it's unlawful, in a manner which pretty much amounts to making it a criminal offence, to trade in such a way as to be anticompetitive or to abuse a dominant position in a market. Whether on the facts M$ have actually done either of these things is not something I can tell from any of the articles cited, though I would personally bet a reasonable sum that their ordinary way of doing business as revealed on discovery in the US DoJ prosecution will get the Commission fairly well exercised.
This is not the same as US antitrust legislation, even though it looks very similar indeed. The basic deal is that the European Commission (sort of the EU's Civil Service, only not quite - I told you this was going to be a rough guide) investigates and prosecutes offenders almost exactly the way a police force/prosecution service would for a national crime. The only remedies available are an order to terminate the infringement or, where it was committed "intentionally or negligently" a fine on turnover while the offending conduct continues - the EU can't do anything to M$ beyond that, whereas the US Courts can pretty much order Bill to commit HariKiri if they find him guilty.
There is virtually no political element to this. The Commission is not elected, and apart from the Commissioners themselves (one for each directorate-general, which is the name for the departments of the Commission, and a couple of head honchos like the President), there are no political appointees in the Commission. They're all career civil servants, accountable as to their budget to the European Court of Auditors and as to their actions in prosecution of governments and large corporations, to the European Court of Justice (not the European Court of Human Rights, which is a completely different institution, in a different building in a different city with different personnel and a different jurisdiction: it is vitally important not to confuse the two, particularly when filing an appeal.)
The amount of tax money that is going to be spent on this is, compared with the EU's budget as a whole, peanuts. (The EU's budget as a whole is peanuts compared with the national budgets of everywhere except Luxembourg and San Merino, but that's by the by).
M$ won't be able to drag it out, either. Commission prosecutions are usually fairly swift and fairly brutal. The Appeal from the Commission is to the European Court of Justice, a body that grinds exceeding small but does grind rather slow. And an appeal does not usually stay execution.
As to the fine, it's up to 10 per cent of turnover. M$ might be able to mitigate by immediately ceasing and desisting and generally playing nice from now on, but that's more or less it. While one per cent is the usual, this does mean fines of the order of £200-250 million get levied on a fairly regular basis, and appeals don't usually succeed (the Commission has a limited budget, and only acts when it is fairly sure it will win).
Basically, though, that 10 per cent is the maximum penalty, reserved for the real baby-eating satanists of the European Single Market's competition landscape. M$ might be bad, but I doubt they'll be found to be that bad.
Not so in this case. Breach of Articles 85 and 86 of the Treaty of Rome is a quasi-criminal matter anywhere in the European Union. The Commission can either root out the offenders on their own or act on information received - either way, it's a prosecution rather than an adversarial action.
Yes, IAAL, but no, I don't have a significant EU Competition Law practice. Don't ask me detailed questions.
It isn't the European Committee: the correct title in english is the European Commission. The body acting is the Directorate-General (the Commission is divided into a number (at least 20) of these Directorates-General, each with a specific brief) in charge of competition (I forget which number it is, or who the commissioner there is now).
The Commission is not elected. It is, in effect, the European Civil Service. Commission staff are career civil servants, either directly employed by the Commission or seconded from the national civil services. The Commissioners are political appointees, put in place by a complicated system of international horsetrading by the Council of Ministers.
The Commission is accountable to the European Parliament.
As for the popularity or otherwise of the EC's action, it doesn't matter. They're none of them elected officials and, in this regard, they no more have to worry about popularity than the police would if they were investigating a more ordinary crime.
Katz has used a book review - in which we learn precious little of the book under review - as a springboard for a thesis that hackers collectively are "a nation of sleepwalkers".
Alas, the thesis is not properly developed. Were we to take it seriously and follow it to its proper conclusion, it would fall under its own weight, as it ignores the one absolute in human biology: People Age and Die.
With respect, Mr Katz, not all the conspiracies of all the capitalists in the world will allow them or any of them to do a corner in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Why does this ruin Katz's thesis? Because, in so far as it is developed, it is this: that the young and well-educated ("techno-young", in Katz's desperate floundering for a word other than "geek") in IT and allied trades are naive, shiftless and poltically numb to the wider implications of what they do.
Fine as far as it goes, but what of the situation twenty years hence? What, Mr Katz, when the political neonates you sneer at are older, wiser and taking an interest in the big picture?
It's going to happen, no matter how hard you blow now. Will Katz then be sneering at the next generation, masters of whatever the technological wave du jour happens to be?
Probably not, but someone will. It seems to me to be an inescapable fact of life that in all times and places someone will be ranting about the indolence of the young and the pampered idleness of Modern Youth. Remember Monty Python's Yorkshiremen? "When I were a lad, we 'ad it tough. We'd to pay't mill owner fer't privilege of coming in to work". Katz is exactly what the Pythons were satirising.
The earliest reference I can find to this sort of thing is in Plato's Republic, written just less than two-and-a half millennia ago, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover that there was a stele at Abydos moaning about the worthlessness of the youth in these soft times of the 12th Dynasty.
We could laugh Katz off, if he weren't so pernicious. Pernicious? Yes, because he's a rabble-rouser who gets column inches, and the more dangerous because sometimes he's on the money (as with the Pinkertons or Voices from the Hellmouth).
Pernicious especially because he's giving people a salve for the nagging guilt that arises from taking part in modern life (other than in the flinty hearts of lawyers like me). Don't worry! he cries between the lines, It's not your fault! The system, the culture, the corporations are the ones doing the evil!
Let us digress for a word from honest Bill: The pusher can always be replaced. It is the junkie who is the base of the pyramid, and if the junkie is cured, the pusher will vanish.
You'll see the relevance of that in a moment.
Because it's not the corporations, the lawyers, the courts, the legislators or Capital that screws life up. It's all of us: a democracy of guilt. The machine you're reading this on depended, for its construction, on a long, long chain of exploitation, gouging, double-dealing and other incidents of normal commerce which went to make sure that most of the cost of your hardware was paid in sweat and misery by thousands of people in far-off places that you'll never see or meet.
My solution? Don't do a damned thing - in the long run, all of us are dead and gone, and the sweated workers of the First Industrial Revolution begat the fat and happy consumers of modern times, just as the slaves of Rome begat the free(ish) peoples of Europe and the (less) free peoples of the Americas.
Indeed, Katz can only deliver his half-made thesis by the grace of the very corporate/government axis he rails at. This is why I chose the title of this piece - and why I'll close it with a quote from the poem whose title it is:
Slightly wide of the mark. The judge has considered nothing until it comes time to give a reasoned decision in the case. He may have not understood that the source for DeCSS (and its derivative works, the binaries and t-shirts) was speech within the meaning of the First Amendment until Touretzky explained it to him, but that's what trials are for.
Basically, you don't have a decision until all the evidence and legal argument is in, and until you do, anything the judge might think about the issues in the case is potentially a GIGO error, because he hasn't heard the whole case yet.
On that basis, Touretzky's evidence was a very good move on the part of the Defence: they put up an expert witness who explained, in words of one syllable, that program code was not a widget (with no protection) but rather a form of communication (which is protected speech).
Of such manoeuvres is good forensic practice built
The only solution I ever found worked was to change the working environment. Your skills and talent are still there, but you've become bored or intimidated by the surroundings. I find that taking a scratch-pad and a pencil and going to work in a coffee-shop works. For serious cases, I go work in a bar - they're usually quiet during the day and a couple of stiffeners tends to loosen up the inhibitions that are causing the problem.
Something similar happens in the UK every few mopnths: essentially, if you insist on a jury trial for medical use of cannabis, chances are the jury won't convict. There've been a couple of those recently.
We also have the Licensing (Cannabis) Bill currently before parliament and pretty much doomed to die at the end of the session: this is a shame, as the proposal would give us a sensible regime for the stuff - legal but regulated.
Being Some Reflections Inspired by Mr Katz, Demagogue of This Parish
With Learned Comment And Precepts For The Wise
Grocery conglomerates have skillfully -- and at great cost -- distorted the purpose of contract law and are jumbling two very different issues: the rights of farmers, and the rights to exorbitant corporate profits. They aren't the same thing. Most farmers need more protection from grocery companies than from college kids harvesting fields under cover of darkness. How can the rights of farmers be protected out in the fields?
Lost in the legal brawling is the original purpose of contract law. The Common Law originally developed a theory of contracts not so that the means of production and distribution could be owned forever and licensed by big companies. These laws were enacted so that farmers and other producers would have an incentive to produce new goods and to encourage the free and rapid circulation of wealth.
Those judges in olden times reasoned that if anybody could steal anybody's produce at any time, farmers and manufacturers would have no motive to keep growing crops and making things. And since farms were small and local communities vigilant, those laws were easy to police. They aren't easy to police anymore. Big farms and rural isolation mean that anyone with a torch and a sickle can fill up his car with produce at harvest time, and modern home freezer technology means it can be kept in cold store for months.
Today, the purpose of contract laws seems to be earning even bigger profits for grocery conglomerates hiding behind the mantra of protecting farmers. But 18th-century notions of contract doesn't (sic) make sense in the year 2000. Nobody can argue that the sharing of food by "unofficial harvesting" necessarily deprives the food industry (or farmers) of any incentive to grow food. And the modern economy is the greatest medium yet for ensuring the rapid dissemination of goods and services, a boon that should be protected, not shut down.
There is more food making more money in more forms -- generating $15 billion in profit in l999 -- than at any time in world history. In fact, comestibles in many forms, from turnips to alfalfa sprouts to pork bellies, is (sic again) flourishing. It would be tragic to create a more restrictive environment around the modern economy before we even try and figure out how farmers can get the protection and compensation they deserve. A study released last week by Jupiter, a grocery commerce research firm, says that "unoffical harvesters" are 45 per cent more likely than non-harvesters to have increased their total grocert purchases over the last six months. How, exactly, do farmers benefit from reversing that trend?
The new purpose of contract may be the reasonable protection of the rights of farmers and other productive entities; namely to ensure that they be paid fairly for their work, although perhaps in new and different ways. (An equally important contract trial concluded this week in Manhattan, where grocery industry lawyers have filed suit challenging the right to own and drive a car at night, and to own a torch at all).
Contract laws also need to recognize that access to free food has become a tradition and right for tens of millions of people, mostly younger Americans who grew up filching produce from fields at night, and who are now routinely branded "thieves" and "pirates" by corporate publicists and their close friends (corporations are the biggest contributors to political campaigns), congressional lawmakers. Gourmets also need some sort of fair-use protection. It's absurd to give giant conglomerates and commodities brokers the right to speak for farmers. Commodities brokerages are to farmers what wolves are to sheep.
Et cetera. Further instalments must await the replenishment of my sarcasm reservoir.
You're thinking of Nikola Tesla, although he didn't invent the AC system that Westinghouse used: Alternating Current is simply a feature of one particular type of dynamo generation. What he did was invent brushless and induction motors - gadgets of which the modern varieties are simply refinements - which made AC far and away the most economic method of mass-producing and distributing power. (Edison, of course, invented the AC-powered electric chair to show how much more dangerous than his DC system it was).
Tesla got rich, and, in his day, famous. Alas, he blew the lot on futile research projects and went completely mad, for which he is more chiefly remembered. Tesla's name lives on, anyway - Tesla coils are used to this day.
Back to the point: without the incentive of property rights in a new idea, most people wouldn't do anything at all about their idea. And an idea undeveloped is meaningless. I mean, the steam turbine was invented 1800 years ago: it wasn't developed until a century's worth of patentees had made money on improvements in metallurgy, bearings, rotor design etc., so that Parsons could go grandstanding through the fleet in 1890.
Prior to the invention of intellectual property, there was very little incentive to invent: there was virtually no such thing as literature for entertainment before the press made copyright possible. (Chaucer only predated Caxton by seventy years, and at that he wrote the Tales as a political stroke). It took a couple of hundred years to run up to speed and *bang* - Newcomen begat Watt begat Parsons begat Benz/Diesel/Otto begat Whittle, and the bastard offspring of Whittle and the Wrights is nowadays able to get halfway around the world before the pilot starts seeing blue devils in the cockpit.
No, not everyone manages to avoid getting ripped off. Few indeed strike absolute gold. Most, as it happens, get a couple of thousand a year for the life of their patent: reasonable enough given how small an advance most patents represent.
And modern cheap-beer capitalism is impossible unless you've got labour, somewhere, making the goods for eightpence an hour. The system positively collapses if someone isn't getting shit on.
Incidentally, the reason I'm suddenly less coherent is that it's 0130 here and I'm in the middle of an insomnia fit.
The last figure I heard was 78 per cent of people who downloaded the text paid for it. You say you wouldn't pay for something you'd already had: the fact that buskers can make at least eating money seems to me to suggest that there are enough people who don't think like you to make "singing for your supper", as King does, a viable proposition.
After all, you've already heard the tune before you flip the coin into that guitar case, haven't you?
As I understand it, cybersquatting laws in the US are not applicable to individuals, only to companies. This is, AFAIK, technically the case in the UK too. However, I know one author won her name back recently in court.
No, Cybersquatting applies to anyone with a trading use of the name. The tort is called "passing-off" (it's called something different in the states) and the essence of it is using someone else's commercially-valuable name. If it would mislead a consumer other than "a moron in a hurry" (the actual test under UK law!) then it's passing off, and punishable by damages and an injunction to restrain further use.
At the moment, here in the UK, you can only get a remedy through the courts for .uk domains, until such time as we get WIPO recognition at our tld people, which should be soon.
Well, yes, but then why not just launch straight from the moon? What do you gain by stopping part-way out at a space station, other than the "freighter advantage" I mentioned in my earleir post?
No, it's an offence not to decrypt material obtained lawfully by the police or security services on being ordered to do so in the proper form. The offence is almost certainly not extraditable, so it only works on people in the UK at the time the warrant is served and unable to get the hell out before they have to comply. Citizenship doesn't matter: the fact that you're within their reach is all that counts for criminal jurisdiction. Where domicile (not citizenship) matters is in your right to bail. If you can readily abscond by going to your home outside the jurisdiction, they won't give you bail without you surrender your passport and post a whopping surety.
Here's the great part: the act is likely to come into force on 5th October this year. Three days after the Human Rights Act 1998 comes into force and renders it a dead letter in advance.
I will say this for HMG; when it takes it into its pointy little head to indulge in wholesale repression, it usually has the good grace to make an utter hash of it. (Which comment I make without reference to the technical failings of the Bill, on which I am less competent to comment than most others here)
And, of course, unlike the US, I can go and badger the minister responsible for the wretched thing in his constituency office without an appointment, wherein I have the advantage that said office is less than a hundred meters from my own.
Try getting that kind of access to most US politicians!
Yes, it's still there.
Although given the usual stance on these things at the Department of Timidity and Inaction, our foreign competitors are safe for a while yet.
By way of counter-examples to your proposition that it has not now, and never has been possible to get rich by having ideas (which you acknowledge with your caveat that it's only true 99 per cent of the time, and I'd dispute that figure as it happens):
And the list goes on. Your central thesis rather seems to support the point I was making, though, which is that the real argument here is with the middlemen, not the right of creators to be paid and to protect that right to be paid.
A significant number of creators (which term I use so as to take in artists and inventors) cut out the middleman and get seriously rich. Even some of the guys who used middlemen got rich - the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Stones - two per cent of billions is still a lot of money.
Let's frame it this way: the fact that the middleman is ripping off the creator is no reason to join in and rip off the creator even more. Even if only a pittance of the sale goes where it ought to, that is no reason to stop even that pittance at source.
Me, if I was inclined to listen to music at all, I'd download the MP3 and send the cost of the CD to the artist. There's a way to go, eh? Offer downloads for free, payment of some minimum sum on the honour system. Well done again, Mr King.
...my weaselometer needle has jammed in the little red wedge on the right hand side of the dial.
The point about copyright is that it, and the other intellectual property rights, made modern life possible.
Copyright started as a response to the printing press, that made large-scale copying (hundreds of accurate copies per worker in the time it took a monastic scribe to do one innacurate one) possible.
Suddenly, there was a reason why ideas had value over and above their intrinsic value, and a mechanism to make the authors and the printers rich sort of evolved from there. Suddenly it was possible to get rich by having and developing ideas; it was no coincidence that copyright and patents were developed at or around the start of the industrial revolution (which begat the technological infrastructure that you're reading this on, via a number of intermediary steps). The one makes the other possible - simple as that, and the whole thing is powered by the inexhaustibel resource of human greed. Would Watt have bothered if he and Boulton couldn't have got as rich as Croesus?
Katz tells us that "artists themselves have important rights", but it's a weasel qualifier. I suspect he's uncomfortable with the argument he's deploying, because he hasn't thought it through. The important right of the artist - of any creative individual - is to sell his or her work for a price he or she deems appropriate (zero in a lot of cases, but that's not mandatory).
That price, plus cost of sales and middleman's fees, gets paid by the people who get the benefit of the artist's work. And it should be paid: commercial work is not a gift, nor should it be.
The only justifiable objection to be raised to the RIAA/Metallica action is that the middlemen involved - RIAA's members, who Metallica chose to use in the ordinary course of their business - appear to overcharge mightily. There are two options here: cut out the middleman (for which Stephen King is to be applauded in showing a very plausible way forward) or use a cheaper middleman. Is that possible? It may be that the promotion and marketing that RIAA members supply justifies the high cost to the end-user, and their massive profits arise from a small take on each of billions of units. Maybe not, in which case there's room to undercut them. If there is, eventually the market will produce such an undercutter, but don't hold your breath. It's more profitable to join 'em than beat 'em, mostly.
Be all that as it may, no-one can, without hypocrisy, complain about the ordinary operation of capitalism unless and until they're prepared to stick up for the other possibilities. I ain't, simply because I enjoy the idea of living off the back of sweated third-world labour (we all are, or at least everyone with the technical and fiscal wherewithal to read slashdot is).
If Katz is sincere - and he may be - his argument is, roughly, equivalent to suggesting that you should have a right to go steal ripe crops from fields in protest at the mark-up applied by the commodities exchanges, wholesalers, distributors, bakeries and supermarkets on the price of bread.
OK, here's the basics:
Here, we have the Bill itself as it emerged from its report to face it's third reading (last stage in parliament before Royal Assent and passage onto the statute book: it comes into force on a date to be fixed thereafter)
Thi s is the complete list of amendments, and you'll notice that Lord Bassam and chums seem to be out with their castrating knives and good on 'em, ain't it handy to have legislators who aren't going to have to face re-election.
This schweinerei is the really offensive part.
Things you ought to know about this Bill:
I could, and at very small provocation will, go on.