Can't happen in the USA? Already has. What the RIP Bill (soon to be the RIP Act, and in force shortly thereafter) does is make Carnivore legal and indeed mandatory in any ISP in the UK.
My own ISP (ClaraNet has threatened to relocate overseas if it comes into force rather than let anyone snoop on my email.
Quite a lot of those alleged CCTV cameras are dummies. I had a job installing them during one of my college vacations: the dummy cameras have all the effect of the real thing (driving crime somewhere else) with none of the hassle - (changing tapes, actually watching fourteen hours of boring footage etc.,) for a fraction of the cost - four coach bolts and the thing was done.
Not quite. The demand by the police to know who was driving the car at the time it was caught on camera *on pain of prosecution* was the offence, and it was a breach of the right to silence/ right to a fair trial.
Privacy doesn't come into it - whoever was driving the car was committing an illegal act in a public place and the public interest in detecting and preventing crime overrides the right to privacy in that case.
There are ways around the problem with speed cameras, but they don't involved monkeying with the right to privacy, which was never really affected in the first place.
Re:In which the facile is dismissed
on
Inside Echelon
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· Score: 2
It's illegal by domestic UK law without an appropriate warrant, for radio and telephone communications, and, with the passing of the RIP Bill into law, it'll be illegal for email too (one of the no doubt unintended good side effects of the soon-to-be-Act). It was this I was referring to as illegal.
As to other countries' transmissions, there's a treaty which required countries to respect the privacy of private communications - the article that provoked this item contains a reference. So it's illegal there as well.
As to monitoring diplomatic transmissions, that's covered by the Vienna Conventions or one of the Protocols thereto if memory serves: they're sort of "diplomatic bag".
Foreign military and espionage traffic is, quite rightly, fair game to one and all.
(The one interesting point the article makes is about Napster's corporate structure and equity positions. I was unaware that the investors were able to pry over 90% of the company away from the founder. Fanning is an excellent developer, but he must be a *lousy* businessman.)
He's lucky the Vulture Capitalists let him keep that much. US Venture Capital is highly interventionist, at least compared to their UK equivalent (who generally swipe about 60 per cent) and generall make damned sure that if the company founder doesn't dance to their business tune they can have him tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail toute de suite.
There's nothing in it that indicates Fanning was a lousy businessman: he was just getting the same smelly end of the drain-rod that capital hands anyone with something to contribute.
Not so. Anything you send to Mars from a space platform has first to be lifted from earth's surface to that platform - there is no real saving, and you add the complexity of on-orbit assembly and the engineering headaches of extra time in vacuum while you stop at the station.
Try Zubrin's The Case for Mars for some good arguments as to why the best way to Mars (for a first mission) is with a couple of 150-tonne loads from earth's surface.
The foregoing is not an argument against the ISS - it's a very useful piece of kit to have indeed - but to say it's useful for interplanetary exploration is simply wrong.
Now, for interplanetary commerce, you have a point. Ion-drive freighers serviced with surface-to-space-station lighters would be a very efficient method of handling that. The ISS would be more-or-less useless in that capacity, but the combined experience of Skylab, MIR and ISS will be critical to the Orbital Dockyard that does get built.
And, of course, the sooner we get the bugs worked out of the orbit cable the better.
In which the facile is dismissed
on
Inside Echelon
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· Score: 2
If it was based purely on whistleblower accounts, you'd have a point. They're rarely reliable.
The bibliography, however, includes a large number of more official sources, FOIA releases and congressional testimonies: the story is credible enough that political action (albeit in the European Parliament, a fairly weak institution) has been taken on the strength of the various reports that are cited.
As to the other stories you cite, there really is no point of comparison (except maybe the one about the CIA). Echelon is a story about a group of nations doing, by their intelligence services, something in their direct strategic interest using the best technology available and disregarding the law to do it. What's so lacking in credibility about that? The real surprise would be if they weren't up to something like it - and up to the point where they break the law and infringe my privacy without my having given them cause to suspect me, I approve of it.
Sorry, but no: thank you for playing. Where you are, John (England) code is covered by copyright law in exactly the same way as any other creative work. It should therefore follow that it's covered by other laws that deal with forms of expression in exactly the same way as those other forms of expression.
The error you're making (and most of the others posting this thread are making too) here is to confuse the general-usage conception of creativity with the legal usage of creativity.
General-usage creativity (let's call it "Creativity-1") is something we can argue about. For the benefit of the tape, I'm with the people who say that original coding is creative work - a lot of coding is just bolt-and-build from old stuff (a process familiar to me as a lawyer - if you want a confidentiality undertaking, what they call an NDA in the US, I give you a version of the standard one on the server across the hall, hacked about for your purposes with very little thought required, saving you about five hundred quid in the process. I really must learn to restrain my parentheses: this one has gone on far too long.) but even that requires some thought and creative input to match the solution to the problem. A fortiori, therefore, where the problem is being solved from a blank page.
Legal-definition creativity ("Creativity-2") is simply what is within a collection of bright-ish lines drawn around a subset of human endeavour. The value of Creativity-2 varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (I presume. While IAAL, IAOAUKQL, so I can't speak for anywhere outside England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and an assortment of post-colonial flyspecks here and there). The bare minimum is that it is a unique output of human cognition, arrived at by the taking of choices about various elements. A novelist decides to use particular characters, ideas, plotlines and, when sat at his desk to write, words. A director chooses lighting, camera angles, effects and so on to make a movie.
On the other tentacle, when assembling flat-pack furniture for the kids' bedroom, I exercise no creativity at all. I take the parts, I put them together according to the instructions - no decision-making at all (OK, I could depart from the instructions and exercise some creativity, and sometimes do, but just assembling it as directed isn't creative).
Some creativity, perhaps, in the piece of interior design that goes to make up the whole room from the choices of furniture, paint, wallpaper and so on, but the business of putting it together after it's done isn't creative (as, for instance, with the novelist - the battle scene he writes is the result of a creative process. The way he spells "bullet" usually isn't.)
I have gone on quite long enough: the essential point is that where something results from a series of (engineering, aesthetic) choices, creativity has been exercised as far as the law is concerned. To this end there's no legal difference between DeCSS, the Millennium Bridge and "Anthem for Doomed Youth" - the Norwegian kid, Ove Arup and Wilfred Owen variously selected code instructions, forms of steel and concrete and words to bring something into visible expression.
The relative merits of these various forms of expression as Creativity-1 is a discussion wholly orthogonal to - and largely irrelevant to - their content of Creativity-2 as a matter of law.
Just looking at the transaction on UK prices, assuming a hardback retailing at fifteen quid, that King, being a big boy, gets a twelve per cent royalty on all sales and keeping that 32,000 sales, King would get £57,600 on that book.
Paperback sales, assuming £7.00 sterling per unit and the usual 50 per cent split with the publisher, and he's getting £13,440 sterling.
If he's going to ask for money for the later parts of the work, he's going to improve his position some, but basically he's doing significantly worse than a hardback sale of 32,000 and a bit worse than the same paperback sale. I don't think he'll improve it by a coefficient equal to the number of instalments - I think he'll get more free riders on the later parts and his market for those later parts consists entirely of those who bought and liked the earlier stuff.
(Using a dollar fifty to the pound, he's getting $86,400 for the hardback and $20,160 for the paperback. These figures are, of course, purely approximate and I have not a notion what King's real sales of paper-and-board units are.)
Basically, on these figures a novelist would have to crank out two novels a year to score a decent amount on which to live in comfort and support a family. Not impossible, but quality would suffer after a while. And, of course, in the present market you get these figures by being Stephen King and being the only person selling this way.
I think we can rule out natural disaster or nuclear strike. Anything big enough to wipe the entire US off the map is big enough to make an unholy mess of the entire world: the fact that we're suddenly unable to get through to eBay will be the least of our problems.
As to political action, we're talking about something very, very extreme indeed. It so happens that submarine cables are very, very vulnerable indeed. One depth-charge in the right spot and the thing is done. The reason submarine cables get left alone these days is that no-one wants to start that kind of fight - a couple of thousand kilometres of cable is an impossible proposition to defend and about a week of tit-for-tat would put most of the world's comms out of action.
A carrier battle group has a power projection radius of somewhere over a thousand kilometres, which means you'd need two to defend a transatlantic link very, very badly indeed - that thousand kilometre radius is covered by a couple of hundred aircraft trying to detect an attacker that tactically need not come anywhere near the surface.
The dependence of the entire world on those links means that no-one has an interest in knocking them out, simply for fear of retaliation.
About the only thing that would take the US out without taking the rest of the world with it would be the Nehemiah Scudder situation - a mad theocratic coup that insisted on isolationism and total suppression of external communication. And at that, satellite links would allow some communication in and out for the brave.
And appeals are where Garbus really shines; bear in mind that the man has never lost a case before the Supreme Court.
Yet.
I have personally been in court on two occasions when trial lawyers with perfect records finally lost one. And, no doubt, when I am an old, old, lawyer, some smart-arse youngster with the ink barely dry on his law degree will say, behind me, "go for your Statement of Case, old-timer", and I'll know my time has come.
Fact is, fifty per cent of all hearings are lost by somebody, and where it's a tricky issue it could be either party. (Here, I think it'd be pretty much appeal-proof in the UK. How far up the court system do you US folks have to get before they're allowed to overrule statute, or is it something you can do right from the get-go?)
The trick, you see, is to settle the losing propositions early. Which is impossible where it's a political fight with money apparently no object on either side.
The "article" is one piece in a rumour column. It starts with the proposition that one firm has implemented a change to its acceptable use policy regarding MP3s. Fair enough - bandwidth costs money, and a certain amount can slip through in the margin a business needs over and above normal usage. 5mb chunks going out tends to cause the lights to dim (as does a lawyer stomping down there and ranting at the IT manager for wasting everyone's time with the effing GoodTimes or Wobbler or whatever it's called now virus hoax, but that's another story).
It then goes on to say that five employees got sacked without warning or reprimand or like that there.
That, frankly, I don't believe. Try that in the UK and you'd be paying four or five figure damages within a few months. Even in the US, firmly under the heel of capital, I misdoubt workers have that little right to a fair hearing.
That said, I work in a firm with the email kit set up so everyone can read everyone else's. Convenient if you need to know what client said what when to who when one of the whos is out at court, but a royal pain when you're after trading filthy limericks with said client.
Actually, it is in legalese. That is, it sets out one part of a scheme of obligations and considerations in clear terms. The fact that it's in colloquial legalese rather than the rather pompous version most of my learned colleagues use most of the time is neither here nor there.
Most of what you usually ID as "legalese" is in fact the result of re-using the contract wording from last time you wrote one of these. Which of course you re-used from the time before that, and you could probably trace the actual piece of white-page drafting back to 1842, or similar...
And yes, writing a contract is as much like writing a piece of code as it sounds. Most of it's bits of stuff you used before.
Can I ask the next person passing this way with moderation points about their person to give the above a boost? Thank you.
It's a message that frequently gets lost in the noise, but: it might be a poor excuse for a democracy more or less everywhere in the english-speaking world, but it's still a democracy. The reason the tabloids have so much power is that they can persuade voters. Cut out the middleman, lobby voters direct!
A small offer: anyone thinking of writing their local elected slime on any subject but not confident of their written communication skills should feel free to send me a draft in advance. I'm happy to do the odd 5 minutes pro bono adding my own skills of persuasion and deathless prose to your efforts to exercise some political muscle.
That the point about civil disobedience is that it's disobedience. That is, don't indulge in it unless and until you're prepared to take a few whacks in the cause of Right.
I say this not to discourage anyone, nor to suggest that the MPAA doesn't have its head shoved where the sun doesn't shine on this issue (on which matter I Express No Opinion) but to simply try and ensure that folk have thought about what they intend doing.
The big question is: what will it achieve, overall? I mean, sure, lots of people can bypass copy-protection and so on, but 99 per cent of the population won't bother. I feel sure that the corporate interests are fully aware that breaches of copyright by small-time hobbyists, by and large, don't cost them sales in that these people are taking copies of material they probably wouldn't have bought: the people who do buy legitimate copies aren't going to start searching for counterfeit stuff - the whole point of enforcement is to keep the commercial counterfeiters underground where they're too much trouble for the regular punter to find.
So you can download and use DeCSS if you want, but you aren't going to hurt the market any: all you'll do is provide them with more targets to sue in order to keep the commercial counterfeit operations out of the light.
I'd suggest that the real remedy against this sort of commercial exploitation is to stay away from their part of the market. Stick with live music, don't buy CDs, see films in the theatres only (far better than watching at home, and the more you go the more the price comes down) and generally steer clear of artists who've taken the corporate shilling.
Having set that out, I think it's abundantly clear why the epitaph for the corporate music and video industry need not be carved just yet.
It is if you're creaming the profits off to buy terrorist weapons, which is the other bit of agitprop they frequently add to the mix.
Since you're money is far more likely to be used to finance the killing of innocent bystanders if you invest it in one of the big four clearing banks (eg by way of the account your salary goes into), I find it difficult to be concerned.
It's actually an excellent notion, much though I misdoubt anyone involved in the administration of that courtroom is reading this.
I have a lot of time for LiveNote, where the size of the proceedings justifies the cost of using it: in our regular courts here in the UK, proceedings are tape-recorded and transcribed by one of the certified transcription services if someone asks for it (this arrangement is done on grounds of cost - most proceedings don't need a transcript). It's slow, unwieldy and a pain in the backside since all you get is a typed transcript.
LiveNote, where I've had it for arbitration hearings (usually at least as formal as courtroom work) has been a real boon, since it's quick and reasonably accurate. A direct link from the hearing room to the office has never really justified the cost (if something urgent comes up, someone ducks out of the hearing room to phone back for whatever document is needed.)
Perhaps when speech recognition gets good enough to distinguish between speakers, filter out coughs and generally behave to the point where a box in the courtroom will do it automatically, we can all spectate on trials in progress.
On the other hand, the embuggerment to the orderly progress of justice that TV cameras in the courtroom represent (grandstanding witnesses and lawyers, for example) might come in through the back door. Here in England we've resisted cameras in court for precisely this reason and so haven't had OJ/Kennedy-Smith shenanigans yet (our miscarriages of justice tend to be less showy). Whether the court service and the judges will regard real-time verbatim reporting as an extension of the same thing is an interesting question.
Ordinary copyright in the UK doesn't attract the attention of criminal law enforcement agencies. Counterfeiting of goods, being a rip-off of the consumer (apparently people who pay good money for a designer label/perfume/what-have-you want a real sense of smug self-satisfaction, not a fake one) does get the Trading Standards people (not police, although they work with police support) all antsy.
Providing acknowledged knock-offs of software doesn't attract criminal enforcement though, breach of copyright being a civil matter over here.
What they do do, though, is run a fairly low-key ad campaign to point out that the profits of bootlegging get used to finance drug dealing and the sodomising of kittens and other family pets - I exaggerate only slightly - and as such responsible people shouldn't get involved.
... is a humorous exploit of the banks' (and I mean all of them) policy regarding the relative cost of policing cheque signatures as against the cost of processing and paying claims.
A cheque without a valid signature ought not to be paid, and the bank is liable if it does pay it. On the other hand, most cheques are properly drawn - the vast majority of their customers are honest and careful with their cheques.
So they don't trouble to check signatures. That means the operator only needs to read off and type the amount on the cheque, and can do forty cheques a minute. Anything more, and the rate would drop and more people would have to be employed and paid for.
So try this next time you're collecting your poker debts: offer a double or nothing bet that a cheque signed "D. Duck" or similar will clear. Easy enough to do - the mark writes the cheque for double the amount and you agree that if it's queried you won't quibble. The odds are thousands to one against you losing - the bank reckons that a few claims each year are going to be cheaper than hiring four or five times the number of people to clear cheques.
Yes, this would be a crime. Taking funds with no intention of providing anything in return and hoping to exploit embarrassment so as to keep the funds is definitely an offence of deception.
No, it wouldn't work. It's perfectly simple to present a cheque for payment without having to meet someone in person: in the UK, we have automated deposit boxes that are quite anonymous. Since the poor sods who process the cheques haven't time to read much more than the amount written on them, they aren't going to even notice that the cheque is drawn on an embarrassingly-named account.
And even if they did, they're processing a cheque every second and a half or similar, so they don't even have time to snigger even if they do notice - and anyway, they don't know the poor sap who's presenting the cheque for payment anyway.
... is the fact that conspiracy theory is a lot more satisfying than admission of impotence, failure or procrastination.
It was, for example, a lot nicer for an unemployed german in 1932 to believe that nice Mr Hitler who told him that the reason he was unemployed was that the International Jewish Conspiracy had stitched him up, than to believe that the world happened to be in poor shape at that time.
Functionally, no difference - if there really was a secret world government of money (and anyway, if there was, it'd be the scots running it, not the jews) - you'd not stand a chance, people's willingness to do anything for money being what it is. Similarly with being out of work when world capital is depressed (as in the early thirties) is not something you can do anything about.
But how much better you feel! Here is the bogeyman - hate him, rise and revile him! Makes you just want to get out there and vote for the guy who drew your attention to this demon incarnate.
How the foregoing principle applies to the situations and organisations mentioned in the above article I leave as an exercise for the interested student.
Odd that you should mention that: landlords can get in trouble over their tenants' crimes.
There's a piece of legislation here in the UK (and not all the tea in Burnley would induce me to remember an actual citation) to the effect that any landlord who permits premises to be used for the purpose of the consumption of any of a short list of illegal substances is liable to some smallish penalty.
Given the current state of play in the War on Some Drugs, I would be very surprised to the point of actual amazement if there wasn't something comparable in every single US jurisdiction, Oz, Canada and indeed just about everywhere you can get away with refusing service to people lacking shirt or shoes.
Back to the subject under discussion: the logic is that where the landlord has control over his tenants' use of the premises (and most leases contain clauses that provide at least some restrictions on use) he is in a position to either throw the tenant out or at least inform on the druggies.
The logic of this action is that as Scour has at least some control (or the means to exercise control, whether or not they do exercise it) over what happens on their site, they can be held accountable for what they fail to prevent.
Your mileage may vary as to whether that's a good thing in these particular circumstances.
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, but it's 0025 here and frankly I want to go to bed.
It's not a violation of a basic right of free speech. It's a violation of the principles of prior judicial scrutiny, of the presumption of innocence, of the right to be secure in one's correspondence and communications and of the right not to be forced to incriminate oneself.
The US most assuredly will not pressurise the UK into withdrawing the legislation. It's the US that's been responsible for this wretched Bill from start to finish. Basically, what it does is place Echelon (or insert current code-word-of-choice for monitoring kit) on a sound legal footing.
Can I just endorse that? The only criticism I ever had of the First Amendment was that a truly civilised country wouldn't need to write it into the law. But then neither the US nor the UK were civilised when the First Amendment passed.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't happen in the USA? Already has. What the RIP Bill (soon to be the RIP Act, and in force shortly thereafter) does is make Carnivore legal and indeed mandatory in any ISP in the UK.
My own ISP (ClaraNet has threatened to relocate overseas if it comes into force rather than let anyone snoop on my email.
Quite a lot of those alleged CCTV cameras are dummies. I had a job installing them during one of my college vacations: the dummy cameras have all the effect of the real thing (driving crime somewhere else) with none of the hassle - (changing tapes, actually watching fourteen hours of boring footage etc.,) for a fraction of the cost - four coach bolts and the thing was done.
Not quite. The demand by the police to know who was driving the car at the time it was caught on camera *on pain of prosecution* was the offence, and it was a breach of the right to silence/ right to a fair trial.
Privacy doesn't come into it - whoever was driving the car was committing an illegal act in a public place and the public interest in detecting and preventing crime overrides the right to privacy in that case.
There are ways around the problem with speed cameras, but they don't involved monkeying with the right to privacy, which was never really affected in the first place.
It's illegal by domestic UK law without an appropriate warrant, for radio and telephone communications, and, with the passing of the RIP Bill into law, it'll be illegal for email too (one of the no doubt unintended good side effects of the soon-to-be-Act). It was this I was referring to as illegal.
As to other countries' transmissions, there's a treaty which required countries to respect the privacy of private communications - the article that provoked this item contains a reference. So it's illegal there as well.
As to monitoring diplomatic transmissions, that's covered by the Vienna Conventions or one of the Protocols thereto if memory serves: they're sort of "diplomatic bag".
Foreign military and espionage traffic is, quite rightly, fair game to one and all.
He's lucky the Vulture Capitalists let him keep that much. US Venture Capital is highly interventionist, at least compared to their UK equivalent (who generally swipe about 60 per cent) and generall make damned sure that if the company founder doesn't dance to their business tune they can have him tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail toute de suite.
There's nothing in it that indicates Fanning was a lousy businessman: he was just getting the same smelly end of the drain-rod that capital hands anyone with something to contribute.
Not so. Anything you send to Mars from a space platform has first to be lifted from earth's surface to that platform - there is no real saving, and you add the complexity of on-orbit assembly and the engineering headaches of extra time in vacuum while you stop at the station.
Try Zubrin's The Case for Mars for some good arguments as to why the best way to Mars (for a first mission) is with a couple of 150-tonne loads from earth's surface.
The foregoing is not an argument against the ISS - it's a very useful piece of kit to have indeed - but to say it's useful for interplanetary exploration is simply wrong.
Now, for interplanetary commerce, you have a point. Ion-drive freighers serviced with surface-to-space-station lighters would be a very efficient method of handling that. The ISS would be more-or-less useless in that capacity, but the combined experience of Skylab, MIR and ISS will be critical to the Orbital Dockyard that does get built.
And, of course, the sooner we get the bugs worked out of the orbit cable the better.
If it was based purely on whistleblower accounts, you'd have a point. They're rarely reliable.
The bibliography, however, includes a large number of more official sources, FOIA releases and congressional testimonies: the story is credible enough that political action (albeit in the European Parliament, a fairly weak institution) has been taken on the strength of the various reports that are cited.
As to the other stories you cite, there really is no point of comparison (except maybe the one about the CIA). Echelon is a story about a group of nations doing, by their intelligence services, something in their direct strategic interest using the best technology available and disregarding the law to do it. What's so lacking in credibility about that? The real surprise would be if they weren't up to something like it - and up to the point where they break the law and infringe my privacy without my having given them cause to suspect me, I approve of it.
Sorry, but no: thank you for playing. Where you are, John (England) code is covered by copyright law in exactly the same way as any other creative work. It should therefore follow that it's covered by other laws that deal with forms of expression in exactly the same way as those other forms of expression.
The error you're making (and most of the others posting this thread are making too) here is to confuse the general-usage conception of creativity with the legal usage of creativity.
General-usage creativity (let's call it "Creativity-1") is something we can argue about. For the benefit of the tape, I'm with the people who say that original coding is creative work - a lot of coding is just bolt-and-build from old stuff (a process familiar to me as a lawyer - if you want a confidentiality undertaking, what they call an NDA in the US, I give you a version of the standard one on the server across the hall, hacked about for your purposes with very little thought required, saving you about five hundred quid in the process. I really must learn to restrain my parentheses: this one has gone on far too long.) but even that requires some thought and creative input to match the solution to the problem. A fortiori, therefore, where the problem is being solved from a blank page.
Legal-definition creativity ("Creativity-2") is simply what is within a collection of bright-ish lines drawn around a subset of human endeavour. The value of Creativity-2 varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (I presume. While IAAL, IAOAUKQL, so I can't speak for anywhere outside England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and an assortment of post-colonial flyspecks here and there). The bare minimum is that it is a unique output of human cognition, arrived at by the taking of choices about various elements. A novelist decides to use particular characters, ideas, plotlines and, when sat at his desk to write, words. A director chooses lighting, camera angles, effects and so on to make a movie.
On the other tentacle, when assembling flat-pack furniture for the kids' bedroom, I exercise no creativity at all. I take the parts, I put them together according to the instructions - no decision-making at all (OK, I could depart from the instructions and exercise some creativity, and sometimes do, but just assembling it as directed isn't creative).
Some creativity, perhaps, in the piece of interior design that goes to make up the whole room from the choices of furniture, paint, wallpaper and so on, but the business of putting it together after it's done isn't creative (as, for instance, with the novelist - the battle scene he writes is the result of a creative process. The way he spells "bullet" usually isn't.)
I have gone on quite long enough: the essential point is that where something results from a series of (engineering, aesthetic) choices, creativity has been exercised as far as the law is concerned. To this end there's no legal difference between DeCSS, the Millennium Bridge and "Anthem for Doomed Youth" - the Norwegian kid, Ove Arup and Wilfred Owen variously selected code instructions, forms of steel and concrete and words to bring something into visible expression.
The relative merits of these various forms of expression as Creativity-1 is a discussion wholly orthogonal to - and largely irrelevant to - their content of Creativity-2 as a matter of law.
Just looking at the transaction on UK prices, assuming a hardback retailing at fifteen quid, that King, being a big boy, gets a twelve per cent royalty on all sales and keeping that 32,000 sales, King would get £57,600 on that book.
Paperback sales, assuming £7.00 sterling per unit and the usual 50 per cent split with the publisher, and he's getting £13,440 sterling.
If he's going to ask for money for the later parts of the work, he's going to improve his position some, but basically he's doing significantly worse than a hardback sale of 32,000 and a bit worse than the same paperback sale. I don't think he'll improve it by a coefficient equal to the number of instalments - I think he'll get more free riders on the later parts and his market for those later parts consists entirely of those who bought and liked the earlier stuff.
(Using a dollar fifty to the pound, he's getting $86,400 for the hardback and $20,160 for the paperback. These figures are, of course, purely approximate and I have not a notion what King's real sales of paper-and-board units are.)
Basically, on these figures a novelist would have to crank out two novels a year to score a decent amount on which to live in comfort and support a family. Not impossible, but quality would suffer after a while. And, of course, in the present market you get these figures by being Stephen King and being the only person selling this way.
I think we can rule out natural disaster or nuclear strike. Anything big enough to wipe the entire US off the map is big enough to make an unholy mess of the entire world: the fact that we're suddenly unable to get through to eBay will be the least of our problems.
As to political action, we're talking about something very, very extreme indeed. It so happens that submarine cables are very, very vulnerable indeed. One depth-charge in the right spot and the thing is done. The reason submarine cables get left alone these days is that no-one wants to start that kind of fight - a couple of thousand kilometres of cable is an impossible proposition to defend and about a week of tit-for-tat would put most of the world's comms out of action.
A carrier battle group has a power projection radius of somewhere over a thousand kilometres, which means you'd need two to defend a transatlantic link very, very badly indeed - that thousand kilometre radius is covered by a couple of hundred aircraft trying to detect an attacker that tactically need not come anywhere near the surface.The dependence of the entire world on those links means that no-one has an interest in knocking them out, simply for fear of retaliation.
About the only thing that would take the US out without taking the rest of the world with it would be the Nehemiah Scudder situation - a mad theocratic coup that insisted on isolationism and total suppression of external communication. And at that, satellite links would allow some communication in and out for the brave.
Yet.
I have personally been in court on two occasions when trial lawyers with perfect records finally lost one. And, no doubt, when I am an old, old, lawyer, some smart-arse youngster with the ink barely dry on his law degree will say, behind me, "go for your Statement of Case, old-timer", and I'll know my time has come.
Fact is, fifty per cent of all hearings are lost by somebody, and where it's a tricky issue it could be either party. (Here, I think it'd be pretty much appeal-proof in the UK. How far up the court system do you US folks have to get before they're allowed to overrule statute, or is it something you can do right from the get-go?)
The trick, you see, is to settle the losing propositions early. Which is impossible where it's a political fight with money apparently no object on either side.
The "article" is one piece in a rumour column. It starts with the proposition that one firm has implemented a change to its acceptable use policy regarding MP3s. Fair enough - bandwidth costs money, and a certain amount can slip through in the margin a business needs over and above normal usage. 5mb chunks going out tends to cause the lights to dim (as does a lawyer stomping down there and ranting at the IT manager for wasting everyone's time with the effing GoodTimes or Wobbler or whatever it's called now virus hoax, but that's another story).
It then goes on to say that five employees got sacked without warning or reprimand or like that there.
That, frankly, I don't believe. Try that in the UK and you'd be paying four or five figure damages within a few months. Even in the US, firmly under the heel of capital, I misdoubt workers have that little right to a fair hearing.
That said, I work in a firm with the email kit set up so everyone can read everyone else's. Convenient if you need to know what client said what when to who when one of the whos is out at court, but a royal pain when you're after trading filthy limericks with said client.
Actually, it is in legalese. That is, it sets out one part of a scheme of obligations and considerations in clear terms. The fact that it's in colloquial legalese rather than the rather pompous version most of my learned colleagues use most of the time is neither here nor there.
Most of what you usually ID as "legalese" is in fact the result of re-using the contract wording from last time you wrote one of these. Which of course you re-used from the time before that, and you could probably trace the actual piece of white-page drafting back to 1842, or similar...
And yes, writing a contract is as much like writing a piece of code as it sounds. Most of it's bits of stuff you used before.
Hear hear!
Can I ask the next person passing this way with moderation points about their person to give the above a boost? Thank you.
It's a message that frequently gets lost in the noise, but: it might be a poor excuse for a democracy more or less everywhere in the english-speaking world, but it's still a democracy. The reason the tabloids have so much power is that they can persuade voters. Cut out the middleman, lobby voters direct!
A small offer: anyone thinking of writing their local elected slime on any subject but not confident of their written communication skills should feel free to send me a draft in advance. I'm happy to do the odd 5 minutes pro bono adding my own skills of persuasion and deathless prose to your efforts to exercise some political muscle.
That the point about civil disobedience is that it's disobedience. That is, don't indulge in it unless and until you're prepared to take a few whacks in the cause of Right.
I say this not to discourage anyone, nor to suggest that the MPAA doesn't have its head shoved where the sun doesn't shine on this issue (on which matter I Express No Opinion) but to simply try and ensure that folk have thought about what they intend doing.
The big question is: what will it achieve, overall? I mean, sure, lots of people can bypass copy-protection and so on, but 99 per cent of the population won't bother. I feel sure that the corporate interests are fully aware that breaches of copyright by small-time hobbyists, by and large, don't cost them sales in that these people are taking copies of material they probably wouldn't have bought: the people who do buy legitimate copies aren't going to start searching for counterfeit stuff - the whole point of enforcement is to keep the commercial counterfeiters underground where they're too much trouble for the regular punter to find.
So you can download and use DeCSS if you want, but you aren't going to hurt the market any: all you'll do is provide them with more targets to sue in order to keep the commercial counterfeit operations out of the light.
I'd suggest that the real remedy against this sort of commercial exploitation is to stay away from their part of the market. Stick with live music, don't buy CDs, see films in the theatres only (far better than watching at home, and the more you go the more the price comes down) and generally steer clear of artists who've taken the corporate shilling.
Having set that out, I think it's abundantly clear why the epitaph for the corporate music and video industry need not be carved just yet.
It is if you're creaming the profits off to buy terrorist weapons, which is the other bit of agitprop they frequently add to the mix.
Since you're money is far more likely to be used to finance the killing of innocent bystanders if you invest it in one of the big four clearing banks (eg by way of the account your salary goes into), I find it difficult to be concerned.
It's actually an excellent notion, much though I misdoubt anyone involved in the administration of that courtroom is reading this.
I have a lot of time for LiveNote, where the size of the proceedings justifies the cost of using it: in our regular courts here in the UK, proceedings are tape-recorded and transcribed by one of the certified transcription services if someone asks for it (this arrangement is done on grounds of cost - most proceedings don't need a transcript). It's slow, unwieldy and a pain in the backside since all you get is a typed transcript.
LiveNote, where I've had it for arbitration hearings (usually at least as formal as courtroom work) has been a real boon, since it's quick and reasonably accurate. A direct link from the hearing room to the office has never really justified the cost (if something urgent comes up, someone ducks out of the hearing room to phone back for whatever document is needed.)
Perhaps when speech recognition gets good enough to distinguish between speakers, filter out coughs and generally behave to the point where a box in the courtroom will do it automatically, we can all spectate on trials in progress.
On the other hand, the embuggerment to the orderly progress of justice that TV cameras in the courtroom represent (grandstanding witnesses and lawyers, for example) might come in through the back door. Here in England we've resisted cameras in court for precisely this reason and so haven't had OJ/Kennedy-Smith shenanigans yet (our miscarriages of justice tend to be less showy). Whether the court service and the judges will regard real-time verbatim reporting as an extension of the same thing is an interesting question.
Ordinary copyright in the UK doesn't attract the attention of criminal law enforcement agencies. Counterfeiting of goods, being a rip-off of the consumer (apparently people who pay good money for a designer label/perfume/what-have-you want a real sense of smug self-satisfaction, not a fake one) does get the Trading Standards people (not police, although they work with police support) all antsy.
Providing acknowledged knock-offs of software doesn't attract criminal enforcement though, breach of copyright being a civil matter over here.
What they do do, though, is run a fairly low-key ad campaign to point out that the profits of bootlegging get used to finance drug dealing and the sodomising of kittens and other family pets - I exaggerate only slightly - and as such responsible people shouldn't get involved.
... is a humorous exploit of the banks' (and I mean all of them) policy regarding the relative cost of policing cheque signatures as against the cost of processing and paying claims.
A cheque without a valid signature ought not to be paid, and the bank is liable if it does pay it. On the other hand, most cheques are properly drawn - the vast majority of their customers are honest and careful with their cheques.
So they don't trouble to check signatures. That means the operator only needs to read off and type the amount on the cheque, and can do forty cheques a minute. Anything more, and the rate would drop and more people would have to be employed and paid for.
So try this next time you're collecting your poker debts: offer a double or nothing bet that a cheque signed "D. Duck" or similar will clear. Easy enough to do - the mark writes the cheque for double the amount and you agree that if it's queried you won't quibble. The odds are thousands to one against you losing - the bank reckons that a few claims each year are going to be cheaper than hiring four or five times the number of people to clear cheques.
Yes, this would be a crime. Taking funds with no intention of providing anything in return and hoping to exploit embarrassment so as to keep the funds is definitely an offence of deception.
No, it wouldn't work. It's perfectly simple to present a cheque for payment without having to meet someone in person: in the UK, we have automated deposit boxes that are quite anonymous. Since the poor sods who process the cheques haven't time to read much more than the amount written on them, they aren't going to even notice that the cheque is drawn on an embarrassingly-named account.
And even if they did, they're processing a cheque every second and a half or similar, so they don't even have time to snigger even if they do notice - and anyway, they don't know the poor sap who's presenting the cheque for payment anyway.
... is the fact that conspiracy theory is a lot more satisfying than admission of impotence, failure or procrastination.
It was, for example, a lot nicer for an unemployed german in 1932 to believe that nice Mr Hitler who told him that the reason he was unemployed was that the International Jewish Conspiracy had stitched him up, than to believe that the world happened to be in poor shape at that time.
Functionally, no difference - if there really was a secret world government of money (and anyway, if there was, it'd be the scots running it, not the jews) - you'd not stand a chance, people's willingness to do anything for money being what it is. Similarly with being out of work when world capital is depressed (as in the early thirties) is not something you can do anything about.
But how much better you feel! Here is the bogeyman - hate him, rise and revile him! Makes you just want to get out there and vote for the guy who drew your attention to this demon incarnate.
How the foregoing principle applies to the situations and organisations mentioned in the above article I leave as an exercise for the interested student.
Odd that you should mention that: landlords can get in trouble over their tenants' crimes.
There's a piece of legislation here in the UK (and not all the tea in Burnley would induce me to remember an actual citation) to the effect that any landlord who permits premises to be used for the purpose of the consumption of any of a short list of illegal substances is liable to some smallish penalty.
Given the current state of play in the War on Some Drugs, I would be very surprised to the point of actual amazement if there wasn't something comparable in every single US jurisdiction, Oz, Canada and indeed just about everywhere you can get away with refusing service to people lacking shirt or shoes.
Back to the subject under discussion: the logic is that where the landlord has control over his tenants' use of the premises (and most leases contain clauses that provide at least some restrictions on use) he is in a position to either throw the tenant out or at least inform on the druggies.
The logic of this action is that as Scour has at least some control (or the means to exercise control, whether or not they do exercise it) over what happens on their site, they can be held accountable for what they fail to prevent.
Your mileage may vary as to whether that's a good thing in these particular circumstances.
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, but it's 0025 here and frankly I want to go to bed.
It's not a violation of a basic right of free speech. It's a violation of the principles of prior judicial scrutiny, of the presumption of innocence, of the right to be secure in one's correspondence and communications and of the right not to be forced to incriminate oneself.
The US most assuredly will not pressurise the UK into withdrawing the legislation. It's the US that's been responsible for this wretched Bill from start to finish. Basically, what it does is place Echelon (or insert current code-word-of-choice for monitoring kit) on a sound legal footing.
Can I just endorse that? The only criticism I ever had of the First Amendment was that a truly civilised country wouldn't need to write it into the law. But then neither the US nor the UK were civilised when the First Amendment passed.