Indeed, defendant Corley (and other defense witnesses) established that: (1) the Content Scramble System ("CSS") is a technological measure that effectively controls access to, and copying of, plaintiffs' copyrighted works...
I would say "not so effectively controls..."
Anyway, I don't have any one specific point, just some thoughts.
My first impression is that the MPAA's looks like a professional legal brief, while the EFF's looks like a dull web-page.
They cite that they have been damaged by DeCSS, because it takes from them:
the assurance of protection that CSS gives to their valuable, copyrighted digital content released on DVDs.
That's pretty weak. Much like demanding that your neighbors go around handcuffed. Sure, it restricts them from doing some things, (like watching DVDs on Linux) but it affords you the assurance of protection from being punched.
They follow this by pointing out the threat, as they see it: That with increasing compression techniques (in particular DivX) and hard drive space, movies may find their way into rapid free circulation.
They have a bit of a point there, in a few years, compressed mpeg video may be tossed around like mp3s are now. I don't think that mp3s have eliminated the CD market, nor do I expect DivX to eliminate the DVD market. At the least, there's a bunch of people out there with CD players and DVD Players who don't have bitchin' computers hooked up to the net via broadband and equipped with a terabyte of drive space. Unfortunately, this is a practical argument, not a legal one. As a geek, I keep looking at it from a technological standpoint. As soon as they show you the information, (movie or song) it's yours. You can screen capture video and record audio. It's really that simple. Sure, DeCSS is much more convenient, but it's not going to make a difference as far as copying goes.
Yes, it's a lot like Amazon and a few other online retailers.
They fail to turn a profit, but people keep investing their millions, because they're sure that any day now those millions of viewers they've accumulated are going to start showering them with purchases.
The difference is that Amazon *might* just pull it off, because their "viewers" are there voluntarily looking for stuff to buy, and if Amazon could cut their costs down, they've got the income to turn a profit.
Spam on the other hand, seems to me to be all cost (albeit probably a small one) and no revenue. Personally, I have been known to follow an ad banner or two. I'm not sure if I've ever bought something off one. It's hard to really determine what is "spam" and what is just advertising. But I can say that pop-up windows in my web-browser get closed angrily instead of read, and unsolicited emails get deleted. It's one thing to pay for ad-banners, which support the page I'm visiting or service I'm using, but unsolicited email is quite another.
They offer 12:1 compression, and you don't get that kind of compression without being VERY lossy.
Yes, you do. The format used on CDs is overly simplistic, making it horribly inefficient. I'm no expert in compression algorithims, but I know that you can take a simple collection of data, and compress it, then decompress it and receive the exact same data you started with, without any loss at all. Now one of the things mp3 does to compress is remove sound that is considered "outside human hearing," and I'm skeptical of that term. I hear a slight difference between mp3 and CD, and I suspect that it comes from information that was dismissed as "outside my hearing range." But it's a tiny difference; I wouldn't describe it as "VERY lossy."
I think there are plenty of original games coming out. It's just harder to find them, because the market is so glutted with crappy games. Original is a relative term. It's like people who complain that all Hollywood's movies are unoriginal and stupid. What are you comparing to? Are you looking back at the first video games and noticing that the jump in originality from no video games to early video games was more significant than that from last year's games and this year's game? Well duh.
I also think that comparing Wolfenstein to say, Quake III on strength of the 3D graphics and finding them close is laughable. I guess I am one of those people who claim graphics have increased "soooo much." Download the latest trailer for the Final Fantasy movie and tell me we aren't advancing significantly in 3D graphics. Sure, that's not real-time gaming, but in a few years, maybe it will be. Quake III's quality would have been movie-special-effects quality a few years ago.
If you think the existing games suck so much, why don't you go make one, and we'll see if we like yours better. If we do, then you'll make lots of money and the gaming community will be happy. If not, maybe you'll stop complaining about the better games that are coming out.
"Hackers view advertising as damage, and route around it."
I like that, I think I'm gonna quote you on that one.
I see this as a serial killer unleashed on the bootlegging community of Prohibition times. A large community of people breaking the law, but whose only real harm is that perhaps they're depriving companies of revenue. Now they aren't being arrested, but are instead being attacked by other citizens.
I'm not sure how the morality all works out in the end, but in the meantime, I think it's probably a bad idea to directly antagonize the hacker community. Sure, the majority of Gnutella's users are relatively ignorant mp3 and porn sharers, but it's a powerful Open Source networking tool, and has support from some skilled people. If flatplanet declares war on the Gnutella community, I'm betting on Gnutella in the long run.
Besides, how effective can the ads be? I know I would be less likely to buy from a company that was already antagonizing me and whose advertising was presented in the form of an attack.
Several people cry out that they use Napster as some sort of protest against the record companies for overcharging. That's bullshit, you're using it because it gives you for free something you would otherwise have had to pay for.
Some people cry out "boycott RIAA!" This is pointless. It's not going to convince them to let up on Napster, and even if you succeed in driving down sales of CDs, they'd probaly just raise prices to compensate.
Now the states are going to tear a big chunk out of their money. It feels good, doesn't it? When I first read it, I thought "Yeah! Take that you greedy bastards!"
But it won't help. Well, maybe the states will use the money for something good, but don't expect the record companies to improve. As it was, they would charge the stores $10 and demand that the stores charge $16 or so. Now, they'll just charge the stores $12. The stores will be forced to charge $16 or more in order to keep afloat, and the record companies will use that extra $2 to recoup their losses from the states' suit.
It's as if Napster looked at every song header and decided whether it was OK or not.
No, it's not. It's as if Napster picked out a few cool, non-copyrighted songs, and listed those songs when you start up, but without actually preventing any copyrighted songs from being traded.
AT&T isn't monitoring the pages and deciding if they're "OK or not." They're allowing all pages, just like Napster allows all file-transfers. The 100k cap keeps people from trading mp3s (or at least makes them work a little to do so) but there's more that's illegal than mp3s.
As for shutting them down, there's still a "head" somewhere. You pick a URL, and the DNS for that URL points somewhere, and that somewhere contains the information to go out to the myriad servers and fetch the page. All you have to do is shut down the "head." Or even one of the servers. If you chop out a chunk of it you probably corrupt the rest.
No, he's trying to say that mp3's are bad quality copies of CD audio. I disagree, I can just barely tell any difference, but if he sees such a difference that it makes him buy the CDs, I'm glad.
and yet you still didn't "grow it from scratch," you still didn't "break your back plowing the soil," you still didn't "worry about pests and soil pH levels," and he still did.
Hopefully, some third party will make a search engine that indexes the URLs, or the existing search engines will index them. It's really only about giving people a place to host their free speech. Once you've posted, you should have your own URL, and you're free to plug that wherever you want. (Be it Slashdot or Yahoo or television commercials, whatever.)
In order to reach a file, a Publius surfer must have access to the file's complicated URL. The Publius project will provide a list of files it considers interesting, but this will not include music, pornography or anything else deemed "uninteresting."
"We don't view this as censorship," Rubin said. "We view what we're doing as a directory for things we think are interesting. For now, people publishing content on the system will have to email URLs and descriptions of their files to be included, although a search feature might be added in a later version, Rubin added.
It sounds like you'll be technically allowed to access any of it, but you'll only be provided with useful information about the ones that they consider "interesting." Hopefully, some outside group will start a directory/search engine that indexes them.
As for the deletion, I don't think that really helps. It just puts them in Napster's position:
Judge: Remove the illegal content from your service.
AT&T But we can't, we specifically designed the service so that it couldn't be censored. In order to remove the illegal content, we'd have to shut the whole service down!
Judge: Hey, there's an idea. Shut the whole service down. Now.
Yes, it's the intellectual-property equivalent of buying stolen property. Even though you didn't steal it yourself, you're still not allowed to have it.
Okay, my first thought is about censorship.
It works a bit like Slashdot commenting, except the Publius people do the modding, not the users. They get this giant collection of anonymous pages, and they pick out a few and label them "interesting." Somebody posted in the C-Net article that this doesn't remove censorship, it merely transfers it to the Publius staff, allowing them to censor something by labeling it "uninteresting." Is this really true? Can you only reach the "interesting" sites? Or are "uninteresting" sites reachable but not advertised? Because the latter doesn't seem to be censorship to me, but the former clearly is.
My other thought is Filtering. They claim that this technology prevents censorship. Does the prevention lie in the fact that you can't filter these sites, or in the fact that you can't delete them, or what? Because they can easily be filtered, you just have to have a filtering program that interprets what it reads, like your browser does, then filters the end result, rather than the inital scripting. As for deletion, if the US wants it deleted, they can order AT&T to delete it just as they could if it was hosted normally. So what is it that they are actually accomplishing? I'm missing something.
Napster has definitely violated the letter of the law, [All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication, hiring, lending public performance, and broadcasting is a violation of applicable laws.]
But Napster hasn't duplicated, hired, lent public performance, or broadcast anything. All Napster has done is taken information created by users, (file indexes and connection information) stored that information in a large database, and made that database available for queries by users.
There is apparently some law that forbids contributing to copyright infringement. I don't like that, but it kind of makes sense. It's illegal to be an accomplice in a murder, why not make it illegal to be an accomplice in a copyright violation?
There is also apparently another law (fair use) that says that in certain circumstances, you can make copies of copyrighted material without it being infringement. This, it seems, is the key to Napster's legal defense. The problem is that fair use is a very complex and somewhat subjective law. I would like to see this law, preferrably condensed into some simple for that I could understand, since I suspect the full text of it contains much legal terminology I would be unfamiliar with. But what I am clear on, is that intent is important in fair use, so intent is relevant to Napster's defense.
Unfortunately, it sounds like their intent was pretty bad. The impression I get is that several internal documents were submitted as evidence in which Napster founders talk about how they expect it to be used chiefly as a piracy tool. This brings me back to wondering about whether the manufacturers of radar-detectors expect them to be used cheifly to avoid cops while speeding, but perhaps they actually are illegal, and the government has simply chosen not to prosecute.
Before I read this article, I was completely convinced that the courts should find in Napster's favor. But the judge made some excellent points, and I was unaware of the internal letters. Now, I think I have changed my mind a bit. If Napster was founded in any spirit other than to profit from piracy, then I would side with them. As it is, I think they should have come up with some research to show that they have actually helped RIAA, and convinced RIAA not to sue in light of this research, or convinced the judge that they have not caused RIAA any damages. It appears they attempted the latter, and were unsuccessful. Either their research was flawed, or the judge was in error. I must say I don't have all the facts needed to decide which.
If their research really was invalid, then Napster really is essentially intent on stealing from the RIAA (albeit in a very roundabout way) and they should pay damages and cease their illegal activity. If their research was valid, then I feel this, not fair use, should be their key argument (that no damages gives no cause for lawsuit) both in the current suit and the appeal, and I hope the judge finds in their favor.
The problem with your comment is that you seem to confuse law with ethics. Whats legal may be unethical and whats illegal may be ethical.
No, this is not a problem with the previous comment. It's not the job of the courts to enforce ethics, and I would be terrified if it was. Imagine you're a woman who has an unwanted pregnancy. You go to a clinic and get an abortion, which is completely legal. Next thing you know you're in court being sentenced by a judge and jury who believe what you did was unethical.
The question of ethics came into play before Napster opened their service. They had to decide whether the Napster service was ethical. It came into play when the RIAA decided to sue them. The RIAA had to decide if Napster was ethical. If they found Napster to be ethical, they had to decide if it was ethical to sue them for doing something ethical. Once RIAA decided to sue, ethics became irrelevant. It's now a question of law, and law alone.
That's what the courts are there for. Ethics vary from person to person, and the courts are not there to ensure you are treated ethically. They are there to ensure you are treated fairly. To ensure that you are treated exactly the same as anyone else in your position would be, and in a manner that is set in writing so there should be no doubt of what will happen to you. If you feel they have failed in this, point out their failures in terms of places where they failed to comply with the law, not places where you feel they acted unethically.
Runs on AAA batteries rather than rechargeable ones
But you can always get rechargeable AAA's, they just don't come with it.
Certain units have a memory problem. Handspring has released a patch.
This problem also occured in some of the 8 MB Palms.
I have a regular Visor, and so far I like it muchly. I like the fast USB synch, the nice screen, the expansion slot, and the price. The one thing that bugs me is the cover. It doesn't have a nice flipping cover like the Palm's, but instead has a detachable faceplate.
The government is legally obligated to do what WE, the PEOPLE want.
And have you checked the statistics on "we the people" recently? There's an assload of people out there who want to restrict what children are allowed to see.
And yes, it IS about porn. It shouldn't be, but it is. The government isn't trying to censor opinions and social or political information with this software. They're trying to censor the stuff that their constituents are complaining about. Porn, violence (to some extent), drugs, etc...
I have posted here before that I hate the trend of passing laws that are popular and seem like a good idea, regardless of whether they are in the spirit of the Constitution, so I would tend to agree with you.
But this case is different. I expect this law to pass, because it isn't censorship. It doesn't prevent anybody from accessing any sites in their own home with their own computer on their own 'net connection. All it says is the government isn't gonna pay taxdollars to provide libraries and schools with computers that will allow children to access explicit material. This is perfectly reasonable, and as I have already pointed out, it's nothing new. Libraries don't currently spend government funds to buy Hustler and Playboy, do you call that Censorship?
You, and most of the other posters here, don't seem to understand the fundamental difference between censoring something, and not showing it to you.
The government can't censor sites, meaning they can't prohibit you from viewing sites on your own computer with your own Internet connection, alone in your home.
They CAN however, within full right of law and Constitution, decide not to present it to you in the libraries and schools. If you can say "Keep religion out of the schools!" why can't they say "Keep porn sites out of the schools!" ?
The government is not obligated to provide you with media, it's only obligated not to prevent you from accessing it on your own (provided that you're over 18 of course)
This is no great conspiracy. If they meant to censor opinions they didn't like, or even anti-government preachings, they would have to censor them from the net itself, and prevent them from reaching homes, not libraries and schools.
This sounds like a great idea in the same way that putting a Republic and free speech together sounded like a great idea.
The problem is that the majority of the population doesn't want free speech, they want censorship. So those of us in the minority who really want free speech can yell about the First Amendment all we want, but as long as the majority and the elected officials representing them think censoring something is a good idea, it gets cesored.
An Internet-moderated list would be even more Democratic. Soon, churches would be submitting their votes to censor sites that encourage atheism or satanism or paganism, what have you.
Even that is the good case. The bad case is a bunch of 133t h4X0r5 get together and start getting sites like Yahoo and AltaVista blocked, just because it would be funny.
I love the ideal you propose, but I think in reality it would be a disaster.
I hate puritanism as much as (probably more than) the next guy, but I want to point out that the difference is that libraries don't carry every book in existence. Somebody decides which books to buy. If somebody decides that the library is making obscene content, in the form of books, available to children, they can blame the person who decided to get those books. You can't do that with the 'net. If you have Internet access, you've decided to get every webpage there is.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. I think sex is a wonderful thing and I think nudity is nothing filthy or obscene. But I also recognize that something like 95% of the US, if not more, doesn't want their children having access to pornography, and most of them are willing to vote in support of anything that achieves that end. So I want to find a solution that allows these people to "protect" their children, while having the least possible impact on other adults and legitimate material.
Slashdot Mirror
From the MPAA's brief:
Indeed, defendant Corley (and other defense witnesses) established that: (1) the Content Scramble System ("CSS") is a technological measure that effectively controls access to, and copying of, plaintiffs' copyrighted works...
I would say "not so effectively controls..."
Anyway, I don't have any one specific point, just some thoughts.
My first impression is that the MPAA's looks like a professional legal brief, while the EFF's looks like a dull web-page.
They cite that they have been damaged by DeCSS, because it takes from them: the assurance of protection that CSS gives to their valuable, copyrighted digital content released on DVDs.
That's pretty weak. Much like demanding that your neighbors go around handcuffed. Sure, it restricts them from doing some things, (like watching DVDs on Linux) but it affords you the assurance of protection from being punched.
They follow this by pointing out the threat, as they see it: That with increasing compression techniques (in particular DivX) and hard drive space, movies may find their way into rapid free circulation.
They have a bit of a point there, in a few years, compressed mpeg video may be tossed around like mp3s are now. I don't think that mp3s have eliminated the CD market, nor do I expect DivX to eliminate the DVD market. At the least, there's a bunch of people out there with CD players and DVD Players who don't have bitchin' computers hooked up to the net via broadband and equipped with a terabyte of drive space. Unfortunately, this is a practical argument, not a legal one. As a geek, I keep looking at it from a technological standpoint. As soon as they show you the information, (movie or song) it's yours. You can screen capture video and record audio. It's really that simple. Sure, DeCSS is much more convenient, but it's not going to make a difference as far as copying goes.
Yes, it's a lot like Amazon and a few other online retailers.
They fail to turn a profit, but people keep investing their millions, because they're sure that any day now those millions of viewers they've accumulated are going to start showering them with purchases.
The difference is that Amazon *might* just pull it off, because their "viewers" are there voluntarily looking for stuff to buy, and if Amazon could cut their costs down, they've got the income to turn a profit.
Spam on the other hand, seems to me to be all cost (albeit probably a small one) and no revenue. Personally, I have been known to follow an ad banner or two. I'm not sure if I've ever bought something off one. It's hard to really determine what is "spam" and what is just advertising. But I can say that pop-up windows in my web-browser get closed angrily instead of read, and unsolicited emails get deleted. It's one thing to pay for ad-banners, which support the page I'm visiting or service I'm using, but unsolicited email is quite another.
They offer 12:1 compression, and you don't get that kind of compression without being VERY lossy.
Yes, you do.
The format used on CDs is overly simplistic, making it horribly inefficient. I'm no expert in compression algorithims, but I know that you can take a simple collection of data, and compress it, then decompress it and receive the exact same data you started with, without any loss at all. Now one of the things mp3 does to compress is remove sound that is considered "outside human hearing," and I'm skeptical of that term. I hear a slight difference between mp3 and CD, and I suspect that it comes from information that was dismissed as "outside my hearing range." But it's a tiny difference; I wouldn't describe it as "VERY lossy."
I disagree.
I think there are plenty of original games coming out. It's just harder to find them, because the market is so glutted with crappy games. Original is a relative term. It's like people who complain that all Hollywood's movies are unoriginal and stupid. What are you comparing to? Are you looking back at the first video games and noticing that the jump in originality from no video games to early video games was more significant than that from last year's games and this year's game? Well duh.
I also think that comparing Wolfenstein to say, Quake III on strength of the 3D graphics and finding them close is laughable. I guess I am one of those people who claim graphics have increased "soooo much." Download the latest trailer for the Final Fantasy movie and tell me we aren't advancing significantly in 3D graphics. Sure, that's not real-time gaming, but in a few years, maybe it will be. Quake III's quality would have been movie-special-effects quality a few years ago.
If you think the existing games suck so much, why don't you go make one, and we'll see if we like yours better. If we do, then you'll make lots of money and the gaming community will be happy. If not, maybe you'll stop complaining about the better games that are coming out.
"Hackers view advertising as damage, and route around it."
I like that, I think I'm gonna quote you on that one.
I see this as a serial killer unleashed on the bootlegging community of Prohibition times. A large community of people breaking the law, but whose only real harm is that perhaps they're depriving companies of revenue. Now they aren't being arrested, but are instead being attacked by other citizens.
I'm not sure how the morality all works out in the end, but in the meantime, I think it's probably a bad idea to directly antagonize the hacker community. Sure, the majority of Gnutella's users are relatively ignorant mp3 and porn sharers, but it's a powerful Open Source networking tool, and has support from some skilled people. If flatplanet declares war on the Gnutella community, I'm betting on Gnutella in the long run.
Besides, how effective can the ads be? I know I would be less likely to buy from a company that was already antagonizing me and whose advertising was presented in the form of an attack.
Does anyone else feel a MasterCard commercial coming on?
Yes. I would have said:
1 Computer, fully loaded: $1,500
2 Months of electricity for computer: $40
2 Month subscription to ISP: $45
Curing Cancer: Priceless
Several people cry out that they use Napster as some sort of protest against the record companies for overcharging. That's bullshit, you're using it because it gives you for free something you would otherwise have had to pay for.
Some people cry out "boycott RIAA!" This is pointless. It's not going to convince them to let up on Napster, and even if you succeed in driving down sales of CDs, they'd probaly just raise prices to compensate.
Now the states are going to tear a big chunk out of their money. It feels good, doesn't it? When I first read it, I thought "Yeah! Take that you greedy bastards!"
But it won't help. Well, maybe the states will use the money for something good, but don't expect the record companies to improve. As it was, they would charge the stores $10 and demand that the stores charge $16 or so. Now, they'll just charge the stores $12. The stores will be forced to charge $16 or more in order to keep afloat, and the record companies will use that extra $2 to recoup their losses from the states' suit.
At least, that's the way I see it...
It's as if Napster looked at every song header and decided whether it was OK or not.
No, it's not. It's as if Napster picked out a few cool, non-copyrighted songs, and listed those songs when you start up, but without actually preventing any copyrighted songs from being traded.
AT&T isn't monitoring the pages and deciding if they're "OK or not." They're allowing all pages, just like Napster allows all file-transfers. The 100k cap keeps people from trading mp3s (or at least makes them work a little to do so) but there's more that's illegal than mp3s.
As for shutting them down, there's still a "head" somewhere. You pick a URL, and the DNS for that URL points somewhere, and that somewhere contains the information to go out to the myriad servers and fetch the page. All you have to do is shut down the "head." Or even one of the servers. If you chop out a chunk of it you probably corrupt the rest.
I am, of course, nit-picking, but I would call electricity a "discovery", not an "invention".
No, he's trying to say that mp3's are bad quality copies of CD audio. I disagree, I can just barely tell any difference, but if he sees such a difference that it makes him buy the CDs, I'm glad.
and yet you still didn't "grow it from scratch," you still didn't "break your back plowing the soil," you still didn't "worry about pests and soil pH levels," and he still did.
Hopefully, some third party will make a search engine that indexes the URLs, or the existing search engines will index them. It's really only about giving people a place to host their free speech. Once you've posted, you should have your own URL, and you're free to plug that wherever you want. (Be it Slashdot or Yahoo or television commercials, whatever.)
This is from the C-Net article:
In order to reach a file, a Publius surfer must have access to the file's complicated URL. The Publius project will provide a list of files it considers interesting, but this will not include music, pornography or anything else deemed "uninteresting."
"We don't view this as censorship," Rubin said. "We view what we're doing as a directory for things we think are interesting. For now, people publishing content on the system will have to email URLs and descriptions of their files to be included, although a search feature might be added in a later version, Rubin added.
It sounds like you'll be technically allowed to access any of it, but you'll only be provided with useful information about the ones that they consider "interesting." Hopefully, some outside group will start a directory/search engine that indexes them.
As for the deletion, I don't think that really helps. It just puts them in Napster's position:
Judge: Remove the illegal content from your service.
AT&T But we can't, we specifically designed the service so that it couldn't be censored. In order to remove the illegal content, we'd have to shut the whole service down!
Judge: Hey, there's an idea. Shut the whole service down. Now.
Yes, it's the intellectual-property equivalent of buying stolen property. Even though you didn't steal it yourself, you're still not allowed to have it.
Did you even read the question?
It's not "why did Apple want to sue?"
It's about "what legal right do they have to sue?"
So save your ranting about Jobs for another time and place.
Okay, my first thought is about censorship.
It works a bit like Slashdot commenting, except the Publius people do the modding, not the users. They get this giant collection of anonymous pages, and they pick out a few and label them "interesting." Somebody posted in the C-Net article that this doesn't remove censorship, it merely transfers it to the Publius staff, allowing them to censor something by labeling it "uninteresting." Is this really true? Can you only reach the "interesting" sites? Or are "uninteresting" sites reachable but not advertised? Because the latter doesn't seem to be censorship to me, but the former clearly is.
My other thought is Filtering. They claim that this technology prevents censorship. Does the prevention lie in the fact that you can't filter these sites, or in the fact that you can't delete them, or what? Because they can easily be filtered, you just have to have a filtering program that interprets what it reads, like your browser does, then filters the end result, rather than the inital scripting. As for deletion, if the US wants it deleted, they can order AT&T to delete it just as they could if it was hosted normally. So what is it that they are actually accomplishing? I'm missing something.
Napster has definitely violated the letter of the law, [All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication, hiring, lending public performance, and broadcasting is a violation of applicable laws.]
But Napster hasn't duplicated, hired, lent public performance, or broadcast anything. All Napster has done is taken information created by users, (file indexes and connection information) stored that information in a large database, and made that database available for queries by users.
There is apparently some law that forbids contributing to copyright infringement. I don't like that, but it kind of makes sense. It's illegal to be an accomplice in a murder, why not make it illegal to be an accomplice in a copyright violation?
There is also apparently another law (fair use) that says that in certain circumstances, you can make copies of copyrighted material without it being infringement. This, it seems, is the key to Napster's legal defense. The problem is that fair use is a very complex and somewhat subjective law. I would like to see this law, preferrably condensed into some simple for that I could understand, since I suspect the full text of it contains much legal terminology I would be unfamiliar with. But what I am clear on, is that intent is important in fair use, so intent is relevant to Napster's defense.
Unfortunately, it sounds like their intent was pretty bad. The impression I get is that several internal documents were submitted as evidence in which Napster founders talk about how they expect it to be used chiefly as a piracy tool. This brings me back to wondering about whether the manufacturers of radar-detectors expect them to be used cheifly to avoid cops while speeding, but perhaps they actually are illegal, and the government has simply chosen not to prosecute.
Before I read this article, I was completely convinced that the courts should find in Napster's favor. But the judge made some excellent points, and I was unaware of the internal letters. Now, I think I have changed my mind a bit. If Napster was founded in any spirit other than to profit from piracy, then I would side with them. As it is, I think they should have come up with some research to show that they have actually helped RIAA, and convinced RIAA not to sue in light of this research, or convinced the judge that they have not caused RIAA any damages. It appears they attempted the latter, and were unsuccessful. Either their research was flawed, or the judge was in error. I must say I don't have all the facts needed to decide which.
If their research really was invalid, then Napster really is essentially intent on stealing from the RIAA (albeit in a very roundabout way) and they should pay damages and cease their illegal activity. If their research was valid, then I feel this, not fair use, should be their key argument (that no damages gives no cause for lawsuit) both in the current suit and the appeal, and I hope the judge finds in their favor.
The problem with your comment is that you seem to confuse law with ethics. Whats legal may be unethical and whats illegal may be ethical.
No, this is not a problem with the previous comment. It's not the job of the courts to enforce ethics, and I would be terrified if it was. Imagine you're a woman who has an unwanted pregnancy. You go to a clinic and get an abortion, which is completely legal. Next thing you know you're in court being sentenced by a judge and jury who believe what you did was unethical.
The question of ethics came into play before Napster opened their service. They had to decide whether the Napster service was ethical. It came into play when the RIAA decided to sue them. The RIAA had to decide if Napster was ethical. If they found Napster to be ethical, they had to decide if it was ethical to sue them for doing something ethical. Once RIAA decided to sue, ethics became irrelevant. It's now a question of law, and law alone.
That's what the courts are there for. Ethics vary from person to person, and the courts are not there to ensure you are treated ethically. They are there to ensure you are treated fairly. To ensure that you are treated exactly the same as anyone else in your position would be, and in a manner that is set in writing so there should be no doubt of what will happen to you. If you feel they have failed in this, point out their failures in terms of places where they failed to comply with the law, not places where you feel they acted unethically.
Runs on AAA batteries rather than rechargeable ones
But you can always get rechargeable AAA's, they just don't come with it.
Certain units have a memory problem. Handspring has released a patch.
This problem also occured in some of the 8 MB Palms.
I have a regular Visor, and so far I like it muchly. I like the fast USB synch, the nice screen, the expansion slot, and the price. The one thing that bugs me is the cover. It doesn't have a nice flipping cover like the Palm's, but instead has a detachable faceplate.
The government is legally obligated to do what WE, the PEOPLE want.
And have you checked the statistics on "we the people" recently? There's an assload of people out there who want to restrict what children are allowed to see.
And yes, it IS about porn. It shouldn't be, but it is. The government isn't trying to censor opinions and social or political information with this software. They're trying to censor the stuff that their constituents are complaining about. Porn, violence (to some extent), drugs, etc...
I have posted here before that I hate the trend of passing laws that are popular and seem like a good idea, regardless of whether they are in the spirit of the Constitution, so I would tend to agree with you.
But this case is different. I expect this law to pass, because it isn't censorship. It doesn't prevent anybody from accessing any sites in their own home with their own computer on their own 'net connection. All it says is the government isn't gonna pay taxdollars to provide libraries and schools with computers that will allow children to access explicit material. This is perfectly reasonable, and as I have already pointed out, it's nothing new. Libraries don't currently spend government funds to buy Hustler and Playboy, do you call that Censorship?
You, and most of the other posters here, don't seem to understand the fundamental difference between censoring something, and not showing it to you.
The government can't censor sites, meaning they can't prohibit you from viewing sites on your own computer with your own Internet connection, alone in your home.
They CAN however, within full right of law and Constitution, decide not to present it to you in the libraries and schools. If you can say "Keep religion out of the schools!" why can't they say "Keep porn sites out of the schools!" ?
The government is not obligated to provide you with media, it's only obligated not to prevent you from accessing it on your own (provided that you're over 18 of course)
This is no great conspiracy. If they meant to censor opinions they didn't like, or even anti-government preachings, they would have to censor them from the net itself, and prevent them from reaching homes, not libraries and schools.
This sounds like a great idea in the same way that putting a Republic and free speech together sounded like a great idea.
The problem is that the majority of the population doesn't want free speech, they want censorship. So those of us in the minority who really want free speech can yell about the First Amendment all we want, but as long as the majority and the elected officials representing them think censoring something is a good idea, it gets cesored.
An Internet-moderated list would be even more Democratic. Soon, churches would be submitting their votes to censor sites that encourage atheism or satanism or paganism, what have you.
Even that is the good case. The bad case is a bunch of 133t h4X0r5 get together and start getting sites like Yahoo and AltaVista blocked, just because it would be funny.
I love the ideal you propose, but I think in reality it would be a disaster.
I hate puritanism as much as (probably more than) the next guy, but I want to point out that the difference is that libraries don't carry every book in existence. Somebody decides which books to buy. If somebody decides that the library is making obscene content, in the form of books, available to children, they can blame the person who decided to get those books. You can't do that with the 'net. If you have Internet access, you've decided to get every webpage there is.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. I think sex is a wonderful thing and I think nudity is nothing filthy or obscene. But I also recognize that something like 95% of the US, if not more, doesn't want their children having access to pornography, and most of them are willing to vote in support of anything that achieves that end. So I want to find a solution that allows these people to "protect" their children, while having the least possible impact on other adults and legitimate material.