I could have bought it from the guy in a pub last night. Or I could have downloaded it. I decided instead to go to the cinema and watch it. I wanted to see it on the big screen.
Piracy didn't ruin it for me. Didn't ruin it for all the other people in the cinema. The film is going to make vast profits even with the ruthless copyright infringement. I find it hard to find a lot of sympthy for the alleged victims here. I'm not even totally convinced that they're losing ticket sales from people downloading it.
Please can the movie industry be sure that there is actually a problem before wasting time and money to solve it. Aristotelian logic isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Unconsciously, the word 'piracy' conjures up images of barbarians who murder and rape without remorse.
I agree with you when you say "theft" is an emotionally charged word, but "piracy" I've never agreed with. Piracy has been used so long to mean unauthorised duplicate that it has two distinct meanings. Suggesting that vicious brutal murderers are the same people as those who copy video tapes is so ludicrous that it can only possibly be used as a joke.
Aside from that, there are no longer negative connotations associated with being a pirate. The reason for this is Hollywood itself. The modern view of a pirate is Jack Sparrow, or the Dread Pirate Roberts. A romantic hero. Even the pirate villians like Captain hook are considered quite romantic and dashing.
We had a cool chase sequence at the beginning, a pod race, and a really cool battle at the end. Even the story wasn't too bad. It's just there are so many ways it could have been improved, that any fanboy could come up with.
Start with action rather than a rather dull background about Trade routes and blockades. ANH got this right. with two ships shooting at each other.
Make Anakin less annoying. Or make everyone else a bit irritated by him.
Introduce R2D2 and C3PO right at the start. Lucas created these characters but doesn't seem to remember why. They serve the traditional purpose of a narrator. If any exposition is needed, they're the ones to do it. Hence we have Luke explaining to Artoo that he's going to Dagobah, a Threpio saying "Imperial stormtroopers? Here?".
Jar Jar could at least have been made vaguely useful. How about if it turned out he was a competent general rather than a clown. The big land battle could have been cool rather than "funny". Ewoks were cute, funny and a bit stupid, but then they showed they were pretty handy in a battle against imperial stormtroopers.
So you see, Lucas should have just hired me as a script editor:)
Okay, the teacher was pressured by the director, and the director was pressured by the Dean.
Who was applying pressure to the Dean, and how? And why does giving a talk to 150 people justify this level of pressure?
It sounds more like a tinfoil hat conspiracy where the Dean had his own reasons for doing what he did, but I'm not convinced the media cartels had anything to do with it.
Non-commercial lending is probably permitted by the doctrine of fair use though. Even if it isn't, people want to be able to do this. If you tell people they can't do something they are quite likely to want to do then they aren't going to buy it.
Would it be so unreasonalbe for the companies to make the fine print a bit bigger? Or to make sure that the terms are so reasonable that there isn't anything that you wouldn't expect in the fine print?
So the companies involved are technically in the right. They still make a lot of profit from people who aren't fully aware of the terms, that they know are not fully aware of the terms.
If I treated people like this, then I'd rightfully be considered a complete bastard. Companies are alllowed tyo get away with it though.
I think this is touches on an important point. If the ci9vil court sees the need to punish the wrongdoer, why is the burden of proof not raised to the same level a criminal court? Seems somehow wrong.
"Certainly, sir. This computer costs AU$700 with Windows preinstalled. If you would prefer the version without Windos pre-installed, we can sell you that for AU$700."
It is wishful thinking. Vendors are entitled to choose their own prices and are not obligated to sell components for a reasonable price.
Said company will probably say, "Yes. We do record personal information. And we make it quite clear in clause 40397 of the EULA of the unrelated program we were installed with", or words to that effect.
And I release the idea to the public domain so that nobody can "steal" it.
The star sees a concept for a revolutionary computer interface. He hires the people responsible for it to improve it and enhance it, and make it into a real user friendly system. It becomes something fantastic and it looks like he's going to be really succesful. He hires dozens of companies to write software using this new user interface.
Then one of the companies he had hired for making the software backs out, and refuses to release its software unless he licences the enhancements he made to the user interface to the other company.
Can congress delegate powers explicitely granted to it by the constitution?
Essentially, this bill would have Congress abdicate its responsibility for copyright to the FCC. Any congressman who understands the need for balance in copyright legislation (I assume there is one) will see it as a bad idea to give this level of authority to a non-elected organisation.
Do be aware it's probably a lot more political than that. Orrin Hatch is sympathetic towards copyright anyway. The ??AA's know this which is why they invest a lot of money to get him elected. If they didn't give him a penny he probably still would see their side. He just wouldn't be a politician.
I say "probably" because for all I know, he is a sellout. But there will always be someone who will see their side of it. I'll bet it hasn't even occured to Orrin Hatch that consumers have any rights in this sort of matter.
This is a problem irrelevant to the license of what you are using.
How many people are going to get upset if they think I've stolen a company's source code? the company might. But that's not a problem since we can deal with their licence validation guys quite easily. It's a known problem. Both parties usually want to solve it amicably.
Who do we talk to to resolve a GPL dispute? Perhaps the FSF. But while we're dealing with that, we have to deal with dozens of open source fans demanding the source - sometimes even if we have no obligation to provide it. These people are not legal experts and some of them are mistaken about the scope of the GPL.
Well if you have a license conflict you have to solve it no matter what the license is.
The GPL is about the only licence I know of that effectively bars its use with other licences. But this is not about conflicts. It's about proving we're playing legitimately. It may not be possible to prove it in a satisfactory manner to the community.
These are not GPL problems, they're just typical legal issues that you have to deal with.
It's actually a potential PR problem we're worrried about.
Everything I have read from yuor posts screams this. You guys were intending to do something with GPL code that might be construed as not legit.
YES! Exactly! That's precicely the problem. We wanted to do something with GPL code that might be construed as non legit.
Whether it's legit or not isn't the point. The point is that people may believe it isn't.
If your intention was to take GPL code, make it work with your product and release that code and YOUR CODE to your customers and the world then there would have been nothing to fear what-so-ever. not even the frothing at the mouth lunatics could even do anything.
We have code that we can't release to the public. Some of it is silmilar in functionality to GPL code. Here's what we would have;
1. Applications that we wrote with third party code. These are closed source and contain certain features.
2. Applications that are open source with some GPL code thrown in. These are open source, and we would supply all source code.
3. GPL applications, either as is or modified. These would supply all source code with these.
Now, the worry was that someone would come along. See that some of the applications of category 1 were similar to those of category 2. They'd post a bitchy sotry about us, it would get picked up by various forums, and then we have to deal with thousands of hostile emails from some over zealous open source enthusiasts.
Alternatively, we scrap category 2, and there will be no similarity.
Possibly too paranoid, but the cost of doing nothing is nothing. The cost of dealing with countless hostile open source enthusiasts and loss of face amongst the tech community - I suspect that 99% of our customers read slashdot - is an unknown quantity. Bean counters really don't like those.
Even by mentioning it, dozens of people have immediately assumed that we wanted to steal the code. My explanation that that is not the case and would be pointless was dismissed. I've explained this. People are still accusing us of foul intentions.
This is simple enough to prove. Allow members of the free software projects in question to review the source under a reasonable NDA.
And if they refuse, or if they breach the terms of the NDA? We'll be held liable. Besides, if we avoid this sort of problem, then we don't have to bother with this. And to be honest, none of us are all that happy about sending our source off site.
he Open source idea was not expected to be a big money spinner. We saw that there were a few tools that could be combined with our exisitng tools, or otherwise modified and we could reduce our overheads. It was decided that it wasn't worth the hassle.
That's not even the point. GPL code can't be included in a !GPL binary, regardless of whether or not source is made available.
Do you have a copy of the binary? Can you be sure that it's not GPL?
I think they just don't like giving free support to a competitor. I think they have the right.
I don't know if this is their reasoning, but my view of it is that they consider the dlls are something that Windows users purchased with their copy of Windows, and that people who didn't buy it have no right to them.
We could do. Or we can simply not touch GPL code with a 10 foot barge pole, and not have to bother to do any of that to satisfy a community 99% of whom have no actual stake in the code in the first place.
And what if they had investigated and found no violations? Would the community have approved and apologised for the false accusation?
I have seen no evidence that Maui X-Stream is being distributed without source. People are just assuming it is. Any suggestion that it is could therefore be actionable if it turns out to be false.
First it's because you boss was trying to STEAL the GPL code. Every single time I hear of these stories or hear it from an executive, after talking you discover that they were going to try and pass off the program as their creation and as traditional closed source app.
That's a serious allegation. Also false. Also it would be pointless. We make no money from software sales.
Only support and occasionally hardware.
Your boss was obviousally wanting to run wild and loose with the GPL and that is why he canned it. If he were to make sure that the code was released ans easily found on the website (big farking button that says download sourcecode here is too difficult to make?) he would have had zero worries or cares about it.
Yes, because the only people who could possibly have reservations about the GPL want to breach it.
We had no intention of doing this. We were simply concerned that people would accuse us of breaching the GPL when we hadn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I could have bought it from the guy in a pub last night. Or I could have downloaded it. I decided instead to go to the cinema and watch it. I wanted to see it on the big screen.
Piracy didn't ruin it for me. Didn't ruin it for all the other people in the cinema. The film is going to make vast profits even with the ruthless copyright infringement. I find it hard to find a lot of sympthy for the alleged victims here. I'm not even totally convinced that they're losing ticket sales from people downloading it.
Please can the movie industry be sure that there is actually a problem before wasting time and money to solve it. Aristotelian logic isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Unconsciously, the word 'piracy' conjures up images of barbarians who murder and rape without remorse.
I agree with you when you say "theft" is an emotionally charged word, but "piracy" I've never agreed with. Piracy has been used so long to mean unauthorised duplicate that it has two distinct meanings. Suggesting that vicious brutal murderers are the same people as those who copy video tapes is so ludicrous that it can only possibly be used as a joke.
Aside from that, there are no longer negative connotations associated with being a pirate. The reason for this is Hollywood itself. The modern view of a pirate is Jack Sparrow, or the Dread Pirate Roberts. A romantic hero. Even the pirate villians like Captain hook are considered quite romantic and dashing.
The thing is, TPM culd have been really good.
:)
We had a cool chase sequence at the beginning, a pod race, and a really cool battle at the end. Even the story wasn't too bad. It's just there are so many ways it could have been improved, that any fanboy could come up with.
Start with action rather than a rather dull background about Trade routes and blockades. ANH got this right. with two ships shooting at each other.
Make Anakin less annoying. Or make everyone else a bit irritated by him.
Introduce R2D2 and C3PO right at the start. Lucas created these characters but doesn't seem to remember why. They serve the traditional purpose of a narrator. If any exposition is needed, they're the ones to do it. Hence we have Luke explaining to Artoo that he's going to Dagobah, a Threpio saying "Imperial stormtroopers? Here?".
Jar Jar could at least have been made vaguely useful. How about if it turned out he was a competent general rather than a clown. The big land battle could have been cool rather than "funny". Ewoks were cute, funny and a bit stupid, but then they showed they were pretty handy in a battle against imperial stormtroopers.
So you see, Lucas should have just hired me as a script editor
Sounds more like the guy was constructively dismissed.
Okay, the teacher was pressured by the director, and the director was pressured by the Dean.
Who was applying pressure to the Dean, and how? And why does giving a talk to 150 people justify this level of pressure?
It sounds more like a tinfoil hat conspiracy where the Dean had his own reasons for doing what he did, but I'm not convinced the media cartels had anything to do with it.
Banks tend to be pretty good with encryption. When negligence could easily cost you several billion, security is worth it.
Not really. There's no reason a player shouldn't reamian authorised for disc that have already been authorised.
Non-commercial lending is probably permitted by the doctrine of fair use though. Even if it isn't, people want to be able to do this. If you tell people they can't do something they are quite likely to want to do then they aren't going to buy it.
I dunno.
Would it be so unreasonalbe for the companies to make the fine print a bit bigger? Or to make sure that the terms are so reasonable that there isn't anything that you wouldn't expect in the fine print?
So the companies involved are technically in the right. They still make a lot of profit from people who aren't fully aware of the terms, that they know are not fully aware of the terms.
If I treated people like this, then I'd rightfully be considered a complete bastard. Companies are alllowed tyo get away with it though.
I think this is touches on an important point. If the ci9vil court sees the need to punish the wrongdoer, why is the burden of proof not raised to the same level a criminal court? Seems somehow wrong.
"Certainly, sir. This computer costs AU$700 with Windows preinstalled. If you would prefer the version without Windos pre-installed, we can sell you that for AU$700."
It is wishful thinking. Vendors are entitled to choose their own prices and are not obligated to sell components for a reasonable price.
Said company will probably say, "Yes. We do record personal information. And we make it quite clear in clause 40397 of the EULA of the unrelated program we were installed with", or words to that effect.
Nobody loses out.
And I don't see anything really wrong ith doing this. However, as far as I understand, this is still illegal.
And I release the idea to the public domain so that nobody can "steal" it.
The star sees a concept for a revolutionary computer interface. He hires the people responsible for it to improve it and enhance it, and make it into a real user friendly system. It becomes something fantastic and it looks like he's going to be really succesful. He hires dozens of companies to write software using this new user interface.
Then one of the companies he had hired for making the software backs out, and refuses to release its software unless he licences the enhancements he made to the user interface to the other company.
I think it has promise.
Can congress delegate powers explicitely granted to it by the constitution?
Essentially, this bill would have Congress abdicate its responsibility for copyright to the FCC. Any congressman who understands the need for balance in copyright legislation (I assume there is one) will see it as a bad idea to give this level of authority to a non-elected organisation.
Do be aware it's probably a lot more political than that. Orrin Hatch is sympathetic towards copyright anyway. The ??AA's know this which is why they invest a lot of money to get him elected. If they didn't give him a penny he probably still would see their side. He just wouldn't be a politician.
I say "probably" because for all I know, he is a sellout. But there will always be someone who will see their side of it. I'll bet it hasn't even occured to Orrin Hatch that consumers have any rights in this sort of matter.
According the the federal court, the FCC does not have the jurisdiction to regulate what people do with TV shows after they've received them.
It applied to the broadcast flag, so I suspect it applies to Tivo as well.
This is a problem irrelevant to the license of what you are using.
How many people are going to get upset if they think I've stolen a company's source code? the company might. But that's not a problem since we can deal with their licence validation guys quite easily. It's a known problem. Both parties usually want to solve it amicably.
Who do we talk to to resolve a GPL dispute? Perhaps the FSF. But while we're dealing with that, we have to deal with dozens of open source fans demanding the source - sometimes even if we have no obligation to provide it. These people are not legal experts and some of them are mistaken about the scope of the GPL.
Well if you have a license conflict you have to solve it no matter what the license is.
The GPL is about the only licence I know of that effectively bars its use with other licences. But this is not about conflicts. It's about proving we're playing legitimately. It may not be possible to prove it in a satisfactory manner to the community.
These are not GPL problems, they're just typical legal issues that you have to deal with.
It's actually a potential PR problem we're worrried about.
Everything I have read from yuor posts screams this. You guys were intending to do something with GPL code that might be construed as not legit.
YES! Exactly! That's precicely the problem. We wanted to do something with GPL code that might be construed as non legit.
Whether it's legit or not isn't the point. The point is that people may believe it isn't.
If your intention was to take GPL code, make it work with your product and release that code and YOUR CODE to your customers and the world then there would have been nothing to fear what-so-ever. not even the frothing at the mouth lunatics could even do anything.
We have code that we can't release to the public. Some of it is silmilar in functionality to GPL code. Here's what we would have;
1. Applications that we wrote with third party code. These are closed source and contain certain features.
2. Applications that are open source with some GPL code thrown in. These are open source, and we would supply all source code.
3. GPL applications, either as is or modified. These would supply all source code with these.
Now, the worry was that someone would come along. See that some of the applications of category 1 were similar to those of category 2. They'd post a bitchy sotry about us, it would get picked up by various forums, and then we have to deal with thousands of hostile emails from some over zealous open source enthusiasts.
Alternatively, we scrap category 2, and there will be no similarity.
Possibly too paranoid, but the cost of doing nothing is nothing. The cost of dealing with countless hostile open source enthusiasts and loss of face amongst the tech community - I suspect that 99% of our customers read slashdot - is an unknown quantity. Bean counters really don't like those.
Even by mentioning it, dozens of people have immediately assumed that we wanted to steal the code. My explanation that that is not the case and would be pointless was dismissed. I've explained this. People are still accusing us of foul intentions.
This is simple enough to prove. Allow members of the free software projects in question to review the source under a reasonable NDA.
And if they refuse, or if they breach the terms of the NDA? We'll be held liable. Besides, if we avoid this sort of problem, then we don't have to bother with this. And to be honest, none of us are all that happy about sending our source off site.
he Open source idea was not expected to be a big money spinner. We saw that there were a few tools that could be combined with our exisitng tools, or otherwise modified and we could reduce our overheads. It was decided that it wasn't worth the hassle.
That's not even the point. GPL code can't be included in a !GPL binary, regardless of whether or not source is made available.
Do you have a copy of the binary? Can you be sure that it's not GPL?
Some people seem to disagree. there are sections of the community that would like everyone to use the GPL.
I think they just don't like giving free support to a competitor. I think they have the right.
I don't know if this is their reasoning, but my view of it is that they consider the dlls are something that Windows users purchased with their copy of Windows, and that people who didn't buy it have no right to them.
We could do. Or we can simply not touch GPL code with a 10 foot barge pole, and not have to bother to do any of that to satisfy a community 99% of whom have no actual stake in the code in the first place.
And what if they had investigated and found no violations? Would the community have approved and apologised for the false accusation?
I have seen no evidence that Maui X-Stream is being distributed without source. People are just assuming it is. Any suggestion that it is could therefore be actionable if it turns out to be false.
First it's because you boss was trying to STEAL the GPL code. Every single time I hear of these stories or hear it from an executive, after talking you discover that they were going to try and pass off the program as their creation and as traditional closed source app.
That's a serious allegation. Also false. Also it would be pointless. We make no money from software sales.
Only support and occasionally hardware.
Your boss was obviousally wanting to run wild and loose with the GPL and that is why he canned it. If he were to make sure that the code was released ans easily found on the website (big farking button that says download sourcecode here is too difficult to make?) he would have had zero worries or cares about it.
Yes, because the only people who could possibly have reservations about the GPL want to breach it.
We had no intention of doing this. We were simply concerned that people would accuse us of breaching the GPL when we hadn't.
You know.
A bit like what you're doing.