Would you also suggest that my 13-year old daughter should be allowed to date the 18-year-old boy who has started calling her? Should she learn about the "hot dish" of sexual predation first-hand? Should she get pregnant and have an abortion so that she can learn not to "do it twice"?
If you've told her what will happen, and she still does it, yes she should. If she knows what will happen and does it anyway, she's either accepting the consequences, or she's stupid. I don't believe in laws to protect stupid people from themselves. I guess I'm too much of a hardcore darwinist that way.
Plus, surely if this is used in a big way it's going to severely increase the load on akamai's servers?
Yes, that occurred to me too. It would be highly ironic if instead of the filter people suing Akamai for circumventing their filters, Akamai actually sued the filter people for dumping traffic on them.
These sound to me like, ah, technically ill-informed comments.
Well the technical methods, like firewalling people's ISPs and PCs, are probably out of line and incorrect, but his basic point is that corporations will protect their income. To that end, they will take whatever steps needed, as long as those steps don't cost more than the income preserved. Violating the law is often costly, so don't expect the corps to just blatantly ignore the law, but their real goal here is to stop piracy, which is against the law. If they really put their minds to it, I'm sure they can find several ways to help law-enforcement without breaking the law.
The problem with this, along with people out there who claim that Starbucks and McDonalds are evil, is that you have a misconception about the nature of the corporation.
You imagine these evil overlords, fueled by greed, who call minions to them and within weeks have a massive evil corporation ready to do their bidding and enslave the people.
It doesn't work that way at all. Most people who work in corporations (which is to say, pretty much eveyone, probably including you, reading this) are good people. Corporations aren't really entities, they are tendencies. They don't really behave like people, having good or bad intentions and acting on those intentions, but instead behave based on market tendencies. If something looks like it will profit the corporation (and breaking the law often doesn't profit the corporations, because getting sued hurts profits) then the corporation will tend to do that. Some corporations have founding principles, and those principles lead to their customers admiring them, and thus maybe purchasing more from them and recommending them to friends, others just rely on making good products at prices that people will pay.
Starbucks, McDonalds, Sony, Coca-Cola, all these giant corps started out with a couple of people who decided that they wanted to sell coffee, or food, or electronics, or drinks, and made such a good product at such reasonable prices that they became very successful. They expanded, and continued doing a good job, so eventually they became huge. How many small business owners out there would say "No, please stop buying my product. I don't want to be a big company."? How many would say "Go ahead, steal my product, I don't mind."?
Before you preach the evil of corporations, stop and think: Do I work for a corporation? Do I buy products from a corporation? Do I know the people who run those corporations? If I worked for that corporation, would I be happy to be fired because that company was losing profits and couldn't pay me anymore?
And before you preach the evil of greed and money, stop and think: Do I have money? Do I want more? Do I need it to get along in life? Do I get paid for what I do?
A lot of times the entities you think are evil empires are really just collectives of nice normal people who go to their jobs everyday and come home with paychecks to feed their children. Those paychecks don't make them evil, and if they don't want your Napster to keep them from getting paychecks, that doesn't make them evil either.
If you think Napster doesn't rip them off, then try to convince them of that. Don't just call them the bad guys and cry out how they're oppressing you.
I would like for them to shut down the internet, and just see what happens. It could lead to a great awakening to the fact that corporations are not your cuddly friend. It would be quite ironic, that shutting down a medium that inspires free thought would in its death inspire even more free thought in others who never had it.
I find it highly unlikely that corps will actually go so far as to shut down the 'net, but if they did, their problems wouldn't be the awakening of the masses, it would be the other angry corps who can't do their e-business anymore.
I would be very impressed if you managed this. Sony is so huge, and has so many sub-companies, that like Disney, you're probably buying lots of Sony products without even realizing it. And if they really did manage to achieve the miracle of blocking you from illegal mp3s, then you might have to actually pay them for their CDs in order to hear their music.
As to the many people expressing surprise that Sony still exists after doing things like this, let me point out two things.
1. One guy speaking to college students doesn't constitute enough to draw a worldwide boycott of a megacorp.
2. Sony didn't become a megacorp by being a lousy company. They happen to sell tons of phenominally good quality products. I'll mention the Playstation and PS 2 for the gamer geek crowd here, but they make way more than that. Most people when shopping for TVs look at two different brands: Sony, and notSony. They make virtually every major home electronic, and they make them well. "Discman," which is technically just a Sony product, has become recognized as the term referring to any portable CD player, just as Kleenex is to tissues and Coke is to any cola in some parts of the US.
The fact is that regardless of what you think of their policies, Sony provides a very appreciated service to millions of people, and they aren't going to be stopped or even slowed by the outrage of Slashdot posters and Napster users.
THis guy has no clue about how the internet works. So long as there are TCP/IP PORTS, there will be ways to transfer files.
But not neccessarily easy ways. Only people with decent computer skills can navigate FTP services and complicated networking applications. Any idiot can open up Napster and double-click on the songs he likes. If you've read the statistics recently on how many skilled computer users there are out there vs. how many people are on the 'net, then you'd understand why the industry focuses on specific clients like Napster.
Sony, and RIAA in general, has hordes of lawyers out there who actually do this for a living, instead of just posting it on Slashdot because they decide to take an hour out of their day to care about the laws.
Before they make decisions like this, they ask their lawyers if they'll get away with it.
Then their lawyers tell them things like "yes, you can sue Napster" and all the geeks at Slashdot laugh and say "Silly RIAA, you can't get away with that! We have a legal right to pirate mp3s, and Napster has a legal right to make money while helping us!"
Next they win their lawsuit, and all the geeks, who are just sure that they know the law better than an army of lawyers, cry out "What? I can't believe this. That judge is stupid. This is unfair."
So maybe there's a reason why Sony is talking to their lawyers instead of reading Slashdot posts like "Go ahead, firewall me, I'll sue."
Well doing it is bad, but writeing how to do it is just fine.
But "doing it" consisted of writing something that could be used as a tool to request nonexistent funds from the bank, as well as distributing that tool to your friends. It was your friends who actually requested the funds, so it's their fault, right? The bad check was just the tool.
As well as I can tell, since AOL pulled the plug on the program shortly after it was posted (they should be able to prove this) then they should be in the clear.
But no, that's the truly hilarious thing, they aren't! The lawsuit should be (it doesn't list the specific Cause of Action in the news article, but this is the legitimate one) negligence. You can't show that AOL intended to aid music piracy, because I don't believe they did. What you can show is that they were grossly negligent in allowing it to happen.
Think about it. It's like you're a biochem lab researching different compounds and virii, and you authorize your researchers to take any new samples and just dump them into the general populace without your even checking them first. Then when you find out from all the deaths that they developed a disease instead of the cure for cancer, you tell them to stop.
AOL granted their programmers (Nullsoft) the access to publish on the web any new tool that was created, and didn't require that Nullsoft's tools be approved by AOL. When they found out what Nullsoft had done, they shut it down, but they should have known what it was before publishing it.
Now the other hand is that you can't hold ISP's responsible for the content they allow to be published, but AOL wasn't just Nullsoft's ISP, they were the employer. And if a security company hires a felon who was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and murder, then gives him weapons and leaves him in a building lobby, they take some of the legal responsibility when he goes on a killing spree. Sure, it wasn't their official corporate decision to kill people, but they were grossly negligent in allowing their employee to do so.
Disclaimer: I like Gnutella. I'm just pointing out that there is legal merit in the case.
First off, like a couple other posters I want to emphasize that this country is not a Democracy (where the laws and decisions are made by the people) but is instead a Republic (where the laws and decisions are made by officials elected by the people).
Some people see that as a problem, because it allows for tyranny. Bush and Gore agree on a lot of issues, some of which the majority of the voters might disagree with. Others see this as a blessing, because some of the population is outright stupid, and the majority doesn't know all the relevant facts about the law and politics.
I would be tempted to side with the former, and say that anyone who cares enough about something to vote for it should be allowed to, and those votes should rule this country. BUT: The people get their info from the media, which is even more corrupt than the politicians, and the info you get it what ultimately determines your decision. So true Democracy would put the media in charge. I don't claim that this is because stupid people believe the media they're fed. I believe most of the media I'm fed. Sure I have a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism, but I just don't have time to go find everything out for myself. I have to trust the media to some extent, or else find myself entirely cut off from society.
So I think that the only people who should be allowed to make laws and decisions for the government are people who have spent their lives learning about the law and the government, and who DO have the time to find out most of the relevant information themselves. Okay, I accept the Republic. Unfortunately this has gone too far, and it's devolved into two corrupt political parties. So what's the solution?
Well it's not so simple that the average citizen (okay, I may not be quite so average, but I'm not a lawyer or a politician) can come up with a flawless solution, but my suggestion would be something that enabled a large quantity of free advertising in print, radio, television, and even the net, for all candidates on the ballot. Next the elimination of the electoral voting system, followed by runoff elections between all ballot candidates except the one with the least number of votes. Yes, this means we would have to have like 9 presidential elections. But it's worth it. The alternatives are mob-rule, the acceptance of a corrupt two-party system, or a single election that goes to the highest number of votes, which is the system that elected Hitler. If you don't do runoffs, then all the "good" candidates split the votes and allow the election of a single "bad" candidate.
Hitler was elected into office by a majority of adult voters. Need I say more?
Actually, Hitler never had more than 33% support, but there were way more than 2 parties in the Weimar Republic, which divided the vote and caused his 33% to be enough.
Ironically, this country seems to be suffering from the opposite problem, which is that effectively we only have two political parties, and therefore have no real control over the government.
Representatives' voting records do not necessarily reflect the views of their constituents. They can say one thing (e.g. pro-life) to get elected and another (pro-baby-murder) once in office.
That's very true, but perhaps on this issue you're confusing people who are pro-life with people who are pro-making-up-terms-that-make-people-who-disagree- with-them-sound-bad. There's a rather significant difference between believing that abortion should be legal (aka pro-choice) and thinking it's a good idea to have lots of abortions(what you call pro-baby-murder). The term "pro-life" implies that the people who are "pro-choice" are somehow "anti-life," which they aren't.
Before you criticize me for being off-topic, keep in mind I'm not trying to start a war over the legality of abortion. I'm just trying to point out that if a politician says that abortion is a horrible abomination and nobody should ever get one, then votes to keep abortion legal, they aren't changing their stance. Many people believe that abortion is immoral, but that it's not the job of the government to legislate morality.
Ah, then that will probably be included in the request for appeal.
For those who don't know, you can't just appeal anytime you lose. Appeals have to be approved and granted by the court you are appealing to, and they are only granted if you can show that something in your first trial went very wrong. They aren't just do-overs in higher courts.
I thought that reverse engineering was legal? Well i'm not exactly a lawyer, that's just the impression I had.
Yes and no. DMCA makes reverse engineering legal only in the specific case of research, which the judge decided was not the case with DeCSS.
Besides that, an encryption algorithm basically comes down to a mathematical formula. Why does the government allow the DVD-CCA to license a mathematical formula? I mean, can i get 2 + 2 = 4 licensed?
Well first of all, 2+2=4 isn't a formula, it's an equation. The example would be something more like x+2. This formula, when applied to the data "2" would result in an encoded result of "4". You can't get it licensed because it's so simple that it's already in use by the general public. Just like I couldn't get a trademark or copyright on the name "convenient store" because it's a simple descriptive term that I didn't invent and is already in public use. On the other hand, if I come up with a specific name on my own, I may be able to copyright it. Same with CSS. It's very specific and complicated (well, compared to x+2) and they developed it.
Ideas should just not be considered property -- and it shouldn't be illegal to disseminate them.
But they are, and it is. And I think it would destroy the software, research, and media markets if intellectual property and copyright were eliminated as a whole.
How exactly do you get to be a "legitimate" cryptography researcher with a ruling like this? 2600 hasn't committed any other crimes at all. As far as intent, their intent was to publish the information because they found it interesting.
Well for starters, you publish the workings of the encryption itself, not full source code for software that will decode it. A minor difference, I know, but it requires that someone specifically know how to write code to develop software, and that they apply that knowledge to the codec. Also, I believe that the reason that 2600 found it interesting is because they recognize that their readers would find it interesting, which is because it's a means for "circumventing anti-piracy measures" which is illegal, as is the distribution of tools for doing so.
The assertion that the purpose of developing DeCSS wan't for eventually making a Linux player is just silly.
I disagree, and no one has given evidence to suggest that it was.
Well, this law is wrong. IMO, legal is not always equal to moral. How can we have fair use if all content is behind encryption?
I agree, but it isn't the job of the courts to uphold morality. If it was, I would first shit my pants, then move to another country, because the idea of being legally subject to other people's ideas of morality scares the crap out of me. To some extent I already am, like anti-drug and anti-prostitution laws, but those are laws, and at least I know about them and I only have to worry about a judge punishing me because drugs and prositution are against the law, not because he finds them to be immoral.
So you're basically saying thatr WINE is violating Microsoft's "IP"?
I'm not sure, I leave that determination to the courts. It certainly seems borderline though. If it really works like it's supposed to, then it pretty much rips off the entire Windows OS and plugs it into Linux, minus a chunk of efficiency. That seems like the sort of business blow that we would all scream bloody murder at Microsoft for doing, but if the friendly Linux OpenSourcers do it, it's supposedly all good.
I'm sorry, it's people like you that seem to think that you can crush the human spirit along with the very idea of curosity.
That's a pretty low blow as well as a pretty empty statement. There's a difference between curiosity (reverse engineering CSS for research purposes, which is legal via the DMCA) and publishing a tool specifically designed to illegally circumvent current encryption. And would you be a bit more specific and explain where I was "crushing the human spirit?"
The DVDCCA licenses CSS out to people, because it's a (or was) a trade secret. It's no longer secret, so now people can do whatever the hell they want to/with CSS without a license.
Except they can't, you're wrong, the DMCA says it's illegal to "circumvent anti-piracy measures" (CSS) or to distribute a tool for doing so.
It's like saying I can't develop my own kind of tyre because I figured out how to put tyres on cars.
No, actually it's nothing like that. It's more like saying that if you discovered a way to steal tires, (note the i) it's illegal to develop and sell a tool for doing so. But that's actually not illegal, due to the principle I pointed out in the beginning of my post "punish the crime, not the tool." DMCA is an exception to this principle, and though I disagree with the DMCA, it's currently the law and it's the job of the judge to enfore that law.
You can make a nuclear bomb just nicely out of uranium. Sure, it takes more work, and it's possibly not as big or as good, but hey, it still goes bang.
Well that can be said of lots of things that are already legal and being sold online. The point is that this isn't going to result in lots of people making and deploying the things that people think of when they hear the scary phrase "nuclear bomb."
Well I repeated most of my argument, but here's the link anyway.
Why you think that all these people wanted to keep DeCSS for illegal purposes I am not understanding.
Because DeCSS is inherently illegal. The "illegal" in the case of DeCSS is that it "circumvents anti-piracy measures" by decoding CSS, not that it makes copies. You don't need DeCSS to make copies, you make all the pirate copies of a DVD that you want by copying it bit-for-bit and viewing the illegal copies in a licensed player. That's not what I was talking about. I was addressing the fact that most people feel that if they purchase a DVD movie, they have the right to view it on any player they want, because they own that movie. This isn't true; they're only allowed to view it under certain conditions, one of which happens to be that it's on a licensed player.
Another thing that bothers me about this encryption is the ignorance around it. Technically, someone with the cash and the resources could build a burner that copies everything bit-by-bit and encryption would be incapable of stopping it.
This is true, and I've pointed this out on previous threads. But what DeCSS lets you do is not only display the DVD, but grab the mpeg data, which allows you to convert it into a smaller mpeg, like say a 650 mB mpeg. Very few people have DVD-burners, and the expense of that makes using it for piracy self-defeating. But lots of people have CD-burners, and VCD quality isn't that bad.
But my counter-argument to that is the same one I make against "secure" digital music. No matter what kinda of protection you put on media, it has to be outputted in plain, pure media at some level, and you can always copy it on that level. In the case of DVDs, someone with a legit player could just set their resolution to 800x600 16-bit and screen capture the DVD while it plays. Sure, it's more expensive and complicated than just DeCSSing it, but it's not all that hard.
If the people who hacked CSS did so because they wanted a linux player (and not the illegal purposes you speak of), and there was already one for linux, I doubt they would bother.
First of all, creating a linux player is one of the illegal purposes of which I spoke. Secondly, the legit Linux players were (and still are) under development, not finished.
I think it is unfair of the MPAA to have a legal windows compatible player, but make it illegal to make one for linux.
I completely agree. Very unfair. But not illegal.
Lastly though, I'm impressed that you left your email address (albeit at hotmail) and not one of the obnoxious spam-proofer codes that most posters here use.
I beleive "fair use" applies here. It's commonly accepted that it's within an author's rights to prevent redistribution. But the author can't make arbitrary restrictions (except maybe under DMCA).
It might. That determination would be up to the judge in the event that you actually got taken to court for watching a DVD on your unlicensed player.
For instance, what if a DVD EULA said that people of color can't watch the movie?
I don't know. I'm not sure where anti-discrimination laws come into play and how they stack up against copyright laws. I would say that such a EULA would be almost impossible to define, because "people of color" isn't a legally recognized term. But I tend to believe that anti-discrimination laws are stupid, and if such a EULA didn't explicitly violate Fair Use, then I would tend to say they have the right to use such a EULA. I would think they were stupid racists for excersizing that right, but I would grant it to them nonetheless. After all, there's already laws saying people under 17 can't watch certain movies; that seems pretty blatantly discriminatory to me.
Except one can't buy an SNES from Nintendo anymore. Sure, they can be bought on the used market, but what happens when all used "copies" are gone.
Several things. First of all, the copyright probably goes out of date, so it's legal to do whatever you want with them. If it has been renewed or hasn't lapsed yet, then the person who wants to make an emulator should contact the company and ask for permission. If they really have no plans to continue selling the console, they should be reasonable and allow the emulator. But maybe they aren't, maybe they're unreasonable. If so, then it's up to copyright law to sort it out.
I would be very wary of assuming you have the right to do anything. The right to play SNES games on emulators isn't specifically listed in the Constitution, so if I were you I would be a bit more specific as to why that qualifies as "fair use." But in this case you're correct, because as a fellow poster pointed out, courts ruled in favor of the PSX emu.
And where were you when the courts ruled in favor of Connectix regarding their PSX emulator? Just read the quote from the story: "both copyright and trademark law favor broad consumer choice." DeCSS is just another consumer choice for decrypting DVDs, and thus should be protected.
Except the difference between Consoles and DVD Players is that the SNES and PSX architecture isn't "an anti-piracy measure" and therefore isn't protected from circumvention under DMCA. CSS is an "anti-piracy measure" and therefore is protected from circumvention. I don't claim that it's reasonable, only that it's the law.
Wrong. U.S. law does not apply to the citizens of the Netherlands.
Ah, now that is a good point, and one that is central to most of the legal and moral issues that come up with the Internet.
But:
1. Technically it doesn't apply to people in the Netherlands. If you're a citizen of the Netherlands visiting the US, then US laws still apply to you.
2. Emmanuel and his buddies at 2600 aren't in the Netherlands.
3. Many countries, I don't know about the Netherlands specifically, have agreements with the US about copyright and other laws, and via these agreements they will either punish violators of US or international copyrights, or they will take criminals who have fled the US and send them back.
Okay, I suck at chemistry, so feel free to step in and correct me, but isn't "smell by color" a pretty obvious method? The fact is that "smell" isn't really a sense, in the way that seeing and hearing are senses. Your body actually takes in some particles, and your brain looks them up in and determines what they are, then feeds you a sensation based on the response. (I know I've probably over-computer-metaphored this, but the point I'm trying to make is that all of this is abstract and methaphoric, since senses are just electro-chemical responses in your brain, and the computer doesn't have a chemical brain)
So the computer has to identify the chemical, then the process of recognizing it is the actual "smelling." The only two ways I can think of to identify a chemical are by physically contacting it with chemical receptors (this is the way noses do it, I believe, but this is far from practical with computers) or by looking at the molecules. Once you're looking at the molecules, the wavelength/frequency of light emitted (color) is the best way to recognize what molecules you're looking at.
So smell by color isn't nearly as odd as it sounds.
The fact is also that the MPAA is simply targeting a patsy with a bad reputation so they can get legislation in their favor.
Now this is an excellent point. I think you're probably dead on. This is why MPAA isn't trying to stop all the billion other sites that have/had DeCSS, but instead is picking on 2600. Because ironically, it may not be 2600 that causes MPAA's nightmare future where everyone pirates movies, but instead 2600 may prevent it just by being such a perfect scofflaw-asshole-target for MPAA's arguments to bolster DMCA. Their own personal strawman.
Seems pretty tame, as far as conflicts of interest go, since most of his "subjective" statements in the case seem directed at the defendants, not their lawyers, and since his previous firm doesn't really leave any concrete reason for him to act in their favor. If anything it just says he has experience dealing with movie copyright law, so he knows a bit about it. But this is certainly interesting.
Who was that motion filed to? I assume it was rejected. Anybody got the rejection statement?
Slashdot Mirror
Would you also suggest that my 13-year old daughter should be allowed to date the 18-year-old boy who has started calling her? Should she learn about the "hot dish" of sexual predation first-hand? Should she get pregnant and have an abortion so that she can learn not to "do it twice"?
If you've told her what will happen, and she still does it, yes she should. If she knows what will happen and does it anyway, she's either accepting the consequences, or she's stupid. I don't believe in laws to protect stupid people from themselves. I guess I'm too much of a hardcore darwinist that way.
Plus, surely if this is used in a big way it's going to severely increase the load on akamai's servers?
Yes, that occurred to me too. It would be highly ironic if instead of the filter people suing Akamai for circumventing their filters, Akamai actually sued the filter people for dumping traffic on them.
These sound to me like, ah, technically ill-informed comments.
Well the technical methods, like firewalling people's ISPs and PCs, are probably out of line and incorrect, but his basic point is that corporations will protect their income. To that end, they will take whatever steps needed, as long as those steps don't cost more than the income preserved. Violating the law is often costly, so don't expect the corps to just blatantly ignore the law, but their real goal here is to stop piracy, which is against the law. If they really put their minds to it, I'm sure they can find several ways to help law-enforcement without breaking the law.
The problem with this, along with people out there who claim that Starbucks and McDonalds are evil, is that you have a misconception about the nature of the corporation.
You imagine these evil overlords, fueled by greed, who call minions to them and within weeks have a massive evil corporation ready to do their bidding and enslave the people.
It doesn't work that way at all. Most people who work in corporations (which is to say, pretty much eveyone, probably including you, reading this) are good people. Corporations aren't really entities, they are tendencies. They don't really behave like people, having good or bad intentions and acting on those intentions, but instead behave based on market tendencies. If something looks like it will profit the corporation (and breaking the law often doesn't profit the corporations, because getting sued hurts profits) then the corporation will tend to do that. Some corporations have founding principles, and those principles lead to their customers admiring them, and thus maybe purchasing more from them and recommending them to friends, others just rely on making good products at prices that people will pay.
Starbucks, McDonalds, Sony, Coca-Cola, all these giant corps started out with a couple of people who decided that they wanted to sell coffee, or food, or electronics, or drinks, and made such a good product at such reasonable prices that they became very successful. They expanded, and continued doing a good job, so eventually they became huge. How many small business owners out there would say "No, please stop buying my product. I don't want to be a big company."? How many would say "Go ahead, steal my product, I don't mind."?
Before you preach the evil of corporations, stop and think: Do I work for a corporation? Do I buy products from a corporation? Do I know the people who run those corporations? If I worked for that corporation, would I be happy to be fired because that company was losing profits and couldn't pay me anymore?
And before you preach the evil of greed and money, stop and think: Do I have money? Do I want more? Do I need it to get along in life? Do I get paid for what I do?
A lot of times the entities you think are evil empires are really just collectives of nice normal people who go to their jobs everyday and come home with paychecks to feed their children. Those paychecks don't make them evil, and if they don't want your Napster to keep them from getting paychecks, that doesn't make them evil either.
If you think Napster doesn't rip them off, then try to convince them of that. Don't just call them the bad guys and cry out how they're oppressing you.
I would like for them to shut down the internet, and just see what happens. It could lead to a great awakening to the fact that corporations are not your cuddly friend. It would be quite ironic, that shutting down a medium that inspires free thought would in its death inspire even more free thought in others who never had it.
I find it highly unlikely that corps will actually go so far as to shut down the 'net, but if they did, their problems wouldn't be the awakening of the masses, it would be the other angry corps who can't do their e-business anymore.
And I will firewall Sony at my wallet.
I would be very impressed if you managed this. Sony is so huge, and has so many sub-companies, that like Disney, you're probably buying lots of Sony products without even realizing it. And if they really did manage to achieve the miracle of blocking you from illegal mp3s, then you might have to actually pay them for their CDs in order to hear their music.
As to the many people expressing surprise that Sony still exists after doing things like this, let me point out two things.
1. One guy speaking to college students doesn't constitute enough to draw a worldwide boycott of a megacorp.
2. Sony didn't become a megacorp by being a lousy company. They happen to sell tons of phenominally good quality products. I'll mention the Playstation and PS 2 for the gamer geek crowd here, but they make way more than that. Most people when shopping for TVs look at two different brands: Sony, and notSony. They make virtually every major home electronic, and they make them well. "Discman," which is technically just a Sony product, has become recognized as the term referring to any portable CD player, just as Kleenex is to tissues and Coke is to any cola in some parts of the US.
The fact is that regardless of what you think of their policies, Sony provides a very appreciated service to millions of people, and they aren't going to be stopped or even slowed by the outrage of Slashdot posters and Napster users.
THis guy has no clue about how the internet works. So long as there are TCP/IP PORTS, there will be ways to transfer files.
But not neccessarily easy ways. Only people with decent computer skills can navigate FTP services and complicated networking applications. Any idiot can open up Napster and double-click on the songs he likes. If you've read the statistics recently on how many skilled computer users there are out there vs. how many people are on the 'net, then you'd understand why the industry focuses on specific clients like Napster.
You can call it flamebait, but he has a point.
Sony, and RIAA in general, has hordes of lawyers out there who actually do this for a living, instead of just posting it on Slashdot because they decide to take an hour out of their day to care about the laws.
Before they make decisions like this, they ask their lawyers if they'll get away with it.
Then their lawyers tell them things like "yes, you can sue Napster" and all the geeks at Slashdot laugh and say "Silly RIAA, you can't get away with that! We have a legal right to pirate mp3s, and Napster has a legal right to make money while helping us!"
Next they win their lawsuit, and all the geeks, who are just sure that they know the law better than an army of lawyers, cry out "What? I can't believe this. That judge is stupid. This is unfair."
So maybe there's a reason why Sony is talking to their lawyers instead of reading Slashdot posts like "Go ahead, firewall me, I'll sue."
Well doing it is bad, but writeing how to do it is just fine.
But "doing it" consisted of writing something that could be used as a tool to request nonexistent funds from the bank, as well as distributing that tool to your friends. It was your friends who actually requested the funds, so it's their fault, right? The bad check was just the tool.
As well as I can tell, since AOL pulled the plug on the program shortly after it was posted (they should be able to prove this) then they should be in the clear.
But no, that's the truly hilarious thing, they aren't! The lawsuit should be (it doesn't list the specific Cause of Action in the news article, but this is the legitimate one) negligence. You can't show that AOL intended to aid music piracy, because I don't believe they did. What you can show is that they were grossly negligent in allowing it to happen.
Think about it. It's like you're a biochem lab researching different compounds and virii, and you authorize your researchers to take any new samples and just dump them into the general populace without your even checking them first. Then when you find out from all the deaths that they developed a disease instead of the cure for cancer, you tell them to stop.
AOL granted their programmers (Nullsoft) the access to publish on the web any new tool that was created, and didn't require that Nullsoft's tools be approved by AOL. When they found out what Nullsoft had done, they shut it down, but they should have known what it was before publishing it.
Now the other hand is that you can't hold ISP's responsible for the content they allow to be published, but AOL wasn't just Nullsoft's ISP, they were the employer. And if a security company hires a felon who was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and murder, then gives him weapons and leaves him in a building lobby, they take some of the legal responsibility when he goes on a killing spree. Sure, it wasn't their official corporate decision to kill people, but they were grossly negligent in allowing their employee to do so.
Disclaimer: I like Gnutella. I'm just pointing out that there is legal merit in the case.
First off, like a couple other posters I want to emphasize that this country is not a Democracy (where the laws and decisions are made by the people) but is instead a Republic (where the laws and decisions are made by officials elected by the people).
Some people see that as a problem, because it allows for tyranny. Bush and Gore agree on a lot of issues, some of which the majority of the voters might disagree with. Others see this as a blessing, because some of the population is outright stupid, and the majority doesn't know all the relevant facts about the law and politics.
I would be tempted to side with the former, and say that anyone who cares enough about something to vote for it should be allowed to, and those votes should rule this country. BUT: The people get their info from the media, which is even more corrupt than the politicians, and the info you get it what ultimately determines your decision. So true Democracy would put the media in charge. I don't claim that this is because stupid people believe the media they're fed. I believe most of the media I'm fed. Sure I have a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism, but I just don't have time to go find everything out for myself. I have to trust the media to some extent, or else find myself entirely cut off from society.
So I think that the only people who should be allowed to make laws and decisions for the government are people who have spent their lives learning about the law and the government, and who DO have the time to find out most of the relevant information themselves. Okay, I accept the Republic. Unfortunately this has gone too far, and it's devolved into two corrupt political parties. So what's the solution?
Well it's not so simple that the average citizen (okay, I may not be quite so average, but I'm not a lawyer or a politician) can come up with a flawless solution, but my suggestion would be something that enabled a large quantity of free advertising in print, radio, television, and even the net, for all candidates on the ballot. Next the elimination of the electoral voting system, followed by runoff elections between all ballot candidates except the one with the least number of votes. Yes, this means we would have to have like 9 presidential elections. But it's worth it. The alternatives are mob-rule, the acceptance of a corrupt two-party system, or a single election that goes to the highest number of votes, which is the system that elected Hitler. If you don't do runoffs, then all the "good" candidates split the votes and allow the election of a single "bad" candidate.
Hitler was elected into office by a majority of adult voters. Need I say more?
Actually, Hitler never had more than 33% support, but there were way more than 2 parties in the Weimar Republic, which divided the vote and caused his 33% to be enough.
Ironically, this country seems to be suffering from the opposite problem, which is that effectively we only have two political parties, and therefore have no real control over the government.
Representatives' voting records do not necessarily reflect the views of their constituents. They can say one thing (e.g. pro-life) to get elected and another (pro-baby-murder) once in office.
- with-them-sound-bad. There's a rather significant difference between believing that abortion should be legal (aka pro-choice) and thinking it's a good idea to have lots of abortions(what you call pro-baby-murder). The term "pro-life" implies that the people who are "pro-choice" are somehow "anti-life," which they aren't.
That's very true, but perhaps on this issue you're confusing people who are pro-life with people who are pro-making-up-terms-that-make-people-who-disagree
Before you criticize me for being off-topic, keep in mind I'm not trying to start a war over the legality of abortion. I'm just trying to point out that if a politician says that abortion is a horrible abomination and nobody should ever get one, then votes to keep abortion legal, they aren't changing their stance. Many people believe that abortion is immoral, but that it's not the job of the government to legislate morality.
Ah, then that will probably be included in the request for appeal. For those who don't know, you can't just appeal anytime you lose. Appeals have to be approved and granted by the court you are appealing to, and they are only granted if you can show that something in your first trial went very wrong. They aren't just do-overs in higher courts.
I thought that reverse engineering was legal? Well i'm not exactly a lawyer, that's just the impression I had.
Yes and no. DMCA makes reverse engineering legal only in the specific case of research, which the judge decided was not the case with DeCSS.
Besides that, an encryption algorithm basically comes down to a mathematical formula. Why does the government allow the DVD-CCA to license a mathematical formula? I mean, can i get 2 + 2 = 4 licensed?
Well first of all, 2+2=4 isn't a formula, it's an equation. The example would be something more like x+2. This formula, when applied to the data "2" would result in an encoded result of "4". You can't get it licensed because it's so simple that it's already in use by the general public. Just like I couldn't get a trademark or copyright on the name "convenient store" because it's a simple descriptive term that I didn't invent and is already in public use. On the other hand, if I come up with a specific name on my own, I may be able to copyright it. Same with CSS. It's very specific and complicated (well, compared to x+2) and they developed it.
Ideas should just not be considered property -- and it shouldn't be illegal to disseminate them.
But they are, and it is. And I think it would destroy the software, research, and media markets if intellectual property and copyright were eliminated as a whole.
How exactly do you get to be a "legitimate" cryptography researcher with a ruling like this? 2600 hasn't committed any other crimes at all. As far as intent, their intent was to publish the information because they found it interesting.
Well for starters, you publish the workings of the encryption itself, not full source code for software that will decode it. A minor difference, I know, but it requires that someone specifically know how to write code to develop software, and that they apply that knowledge to the codec. Also, I believe that the reason that 2600 found it interesting is because they recognize that their readers would find it interesting, which is because it's a means for "circumventing anti-piracy measures" which is illegal, as is the distribution of tools for doing so.
The assertion that the purpose of developing DeCSS wan't for eventually making a Linux player is just silly.
I disagree, and no one has given evidence to suggest that it was.
Well, this law is wrong. IMO, legal is not always equal to moral. How can we have fair use if all content is behind encryption?
I agree, but it isn't the job of the courts to uphold morality. If it was, I would first shit my pants, then move to another country, because the idea of being legally subject to other people's ideas of morality scares the crap out of me. To some extent I already am, like anti-drug and anti-prostitution laws, but those are laws, and at least I know about them and I only have to worry about a judge punishing me because drugs and prositution are against the law, not because he finds them to be immoral.
So you're basically saying thatr WINE is violating Microsoft's "IP"?
I'm not sure, I leave that determination to the courts. It certainly seems borderline though. If it really works like it's supposed to, then it pretty much rips off the entire Windows OS and plugs it into Linux, minus a chunk of efficiency. That seems like the sort of business blow that we would all scream bloody murder at Microsoft for doing, but if the friendly Linux OpenSourcers do it, it's supposedly all good.
I'm sorry, it's people like you that seem to think that you can crush the human spirit along with the very idea of curosity.
That's a pretty low blow as well as a pretty empty statement. There's a difference between curiosity (reverse engineering CSS for research purposes, which is legal via the DMCA) and publishing a tool specifically designed to illegally circumvent current encryption. And would you be a bit more specific and explain where I was "crushing the human spirit?" The DVDCCA licenses CSS out to people, because it's a (or was) a trade secret. It's no longer secret, so now people can do whatever the hell they want to/with CSS without a license.
Except they can't, you're wrong, the DMCA says it's illegal to "circumvent anti-piracy measures" (CSS) or to distribute a tool for doing so.
It's like saying I can't develop my own kind of tyre because I figured out how to put tyres on cars.
No, actually it's nothing like that. It's more like saying that if you discovered a way to steal tires, (note the i) it's illegal to develop and sell a tool for doing so. But that's actually not illegal, due to the principle I pointed out in the beginning of my post "punish the crime, not the tool." DMCA is an exception to this principle, and though I disagree with the DMCA, it's currently the law and it's the job of the judge to enfore that law.
You can make a nuclear bomb just nicely out of uranium. Sure, it takes more work, and it's possibly not as big or as good, but hey, it still goes bang.
Well that can be said of lots of things that are already legal and being sold online. The point is that this isn't going to result in lots of people making and deploying the things that people think of when they hear the scary phrase "nuclear bomb."
IIRC, most of the good ones use Plutonium anyway.
I would like a link to the other thread, alright?
Well I repeated most of my argument, but here's the link anyway.
Why you think that all these people wanted to keep DeCSS for illegal purposes I am not understanding.
Because DeCSS is inherently illegal. The "illegal" in the case of DeCSS is that it "circumvents anti-piracy measures" by decoding CSS, not that it makes copies. You don't need DeCSS to make copies, you make all the pirate copies of a DVD that you want by copying it bit-for-bit and viewing the illegal copies in a licensed player. That's not what I was talking about. I was addressing the fact that most people feel that if they purchase a DVD movie, they have the right to view it on any player they want, because they own that movie. This isn't true; they're only allowed to view it under certain conditions, one of which happens to be that it's on a licensed player.
Another thing that bothers me about this encryption is the ignorance around it. Technically, someone with the cash and the resources could build a burner that copies everything bit-by-bit and encryption would be incapable of stopping it.
This is true, and I've pointed this out on previous threads. But what DeCSS lets you do is not only display the DVD, but grab the mpeg data, which allows you to convert it into a smaller mpeg, like say a 650 mB mpeg. Very few people have DVD-burners, and the expense of that makes using it for piracy self-defeating. But lots of people have CD-burners, and VCD quality isn't that bad.
But my counter-argument to that is the same one I make against "secure" digital music. No matter what kinda of protection you put on media, it has to be outputted in plain, pure media at some level, and you can always copy it on that level. In the case of DVDs, someone with a legit player could just set their resolution to 800x600 16-bit and screen capture the DVD while it plays. Sure, it's more expensive and complicated than just DeCSSing it, but it's not all that hard.
If the people who hacked CSS did so because they wanted a linux player (and not the illegal purposes you speak of), and there was already one for linux, I doubt they would bother.
First of all, creating a linux player is one of the illegal purposes of which I spoke. Secondly, the legit Linux players were (and still are) under development, not finished.
I think it is unfair of the MPAA to have a legal windows compatible player, but make it illegal to make one for linux.
I completely agree. Very unfair. But not illegal.
Lastly though, I'm impressed that you left your email address (albeit at hotmail) and not one of the obnoxious spam-proofer codes that most posters here use.
I beleive "fair use" applies here. It's commonly accepted that it's within an author's rights to prevent redistribution. But the author can't make arbitrary restrictions (except maybe under DMCA).
It might. That determination would be up to the judge in the event that you actually got taken to court for watching a DVD on your unlicensed player.
For instance, what if a DVD EULA said that people of color can't watch the movie?
I don't know. I'm not sure where anti-discrimination laws come into play and how they stack up against copyright laws. I would say that such a EULA would be almost impossible to define, because "people of color" isn't a legally recognized term. But I tend to believe that anti-discrimination laws are stupid, and if such a EULA didn't explicitly violate Fair Use, then I would tend to say they have the right to use such a EULA. I would think they were stupid racists for excersizing that right, but I would grant it to them nonetheless. After all, there's already laws saying people under 17 can't watch certain movies; that seems pretty blatantly discriminatory to me.
Except one can't buy an SNES from Nintendo anymore. Sure, they can be bought on the used market, but what happens when all used "copies" are gone.
Several things. First of all, the copyright probably goes out of date, so it's legal to do whatever you want with them. If it has been renewed or hasn't lapsed yet, then the person who wants to make an emulator should contact the company and ask for permission. If they really have no plans to continue selling the console, they should be reasonable and allow the emulator. But maybe they aren't, maybe they're unreasonable. If so, then it's up to copyright law to sort it out.
I would be very wary of assuming you have the right to do anything. The right to play SNES games on emulators isn't specifically listed in the Constitution, so if I were you I would be a bit more specific as to why that qualifies as "fair use." But in this case you're correct, because as a fellow poster pointed out, courts ruled in favor of the PSX emu.
And where were you when the courts ruled in favor of Connectix regarding their PSX emulator? Just read the quote from the story: "both copyright and trademark law favor broad consumer choice." DeCSS is just another consumer choice for decrypting DVDs, and thus should be protected.
Except the difference between Consoles and DVD Players is that the SNES and PSX architecture isn't "an anti-piracy measure" and therefore isn't protected from circumvention under DMCA. CSS is an "anti-piracy measure" and therefore is protected from circumvention. I don't claim that it's reasonable, only that it's the law.
Wrong. U.S. law does not apply to the citizens of the Netherlands.
Ah, now that is a good point, and one that is central to most of the legal and moral issues that come up with the Internet.
But:
1. Technically it doesn't apply to people in the Netherlands. If you're a citizen of the Netherlands visiting the US, then US laws still apply to you.
2. Emmanuel and his buddies at 2600 aren't in the Netherlands.
3. Many countries, I don't know about the Netherlands specifically, have agreements with the US about copyright and other laws, and via these agreements they will either punish violators of US or international copyrights, or they will take criminals who have fled the US and send them back.
Okay, I suck at chemistry, so feel free to step in and correct me, but isn't "smell by color" a pretty obvious method? The fact is that "smell" isn't really a sense, in the way that seeing and hearing are senses. Your body actually takes in some particles, and your brain looks them up in and determines what they are, then feeds you a sensation based on the response. (I know I've probably over-computer-metaphored this, but the point I'm trying to make is that all of this is abstract and methaphoric, since senses are just electro-chemical responses in your brain, and the computer doesn't have a chemical brain)
So the computer has to identify the chemical, then the process of recognizing it is the actual "smelling." The only two ways I can think of to identify a chemical are by physically contacting it with chemical receptors (this is the way noses do it, I believe, but this is far from practical with computers) or by looking at the molecules. Once you're looking at the molecules, the wavelength/frequency of light emitted (color) is the best way to recognize what molecules you're looking at.
So smell by color isn't nearly as odd as it sounds.
The fact is also that the MPAA is simply targeting a patsy with a bad reputation so they can get legislation in their favor.
Now this is an excellent point. I think you're probably dead on. This is why MPAA isn't trying to stop all the billion other sites that have/had DeCSS, but instead is picking on 2600. Because ironically, it may not be 2600 that causes MPAA's nightmare future where everyone pirates movies, but instead 2600 may prevent it just by being such a perfect scofflaw-asshole-target for MPAA's arguments to bolster DMCA. Their own personal strawman.
Seems pretty tame, as far as conflicts of interest go, since most of his "subjective" statements in the case seem directed at the defendants, not their lawyers, and since his previous firm doesn't really leave any concrete reason for him to act in their favor. If anything it just says he has experience dealing with movie copyright law, so he knows a bit about it. But this is certainly interesting.
Who was that motion filed to? I assume it was rejected. Anybody got the rejection statement?