However, you guys... you CAN be put in jail for antitrust, it just never happens. But that's because it always is like, "ooops, slipped up and broke the antitrust laws... sorry" and the company pays.
First of all, I don't think any of Slashdot readers is in danger of being put in jail for antitrust law violations. Maybe after my first billion... but not yet, not yet.
Second, a corporation is an independent legal entity (the name 'corporation' comes from Latin 'corpus': a body), it is legally a person. Bill Gates did not violate antitrust laws -- Microsoft did. Regardless of the fact that Bill is MS's majority shareholder and until recently used to be its CEO (or the president, or whatever), Bill and MS are two separate persons.
There could, conceivably, be a case where our friend Bill would be accused of knowingly directing Microsoft to do illegal acts. However that would require showing that Bill knew for sure that these actions are illegal. Showing intent is hard in the best of cases, and in antitrust... this is just not going to fly.
Is it possible, under any circumstances, for Mr. Gates to be charged criminally? Is there any crime which he has committed for which he could go to jail?
And why, pray tell me, you are so interested in sending Mr.Gates to jail? He may be very successful and very obnoxious, but these are hardly reasons to incarcerate him. You may think he harmed software development, but that again is a personal opinion of yours and hardly a crime. Besides, there are plenty less successful but just as obnoxious people -- should they all go to jail, too?
Could someone please explain why seemingly impossible things that are the domain of Captain Picard and the boys are getting attention from science when we can barely launch probes properly to Mars.
Could someone please explain why why we are launching probes to Mars while we can barely understand what's going on inside our bodies, still build houses of wood and bricks and use hundred-years-old-design internal combustion engines?
I don't think these guys realize just how much money and effort, mostly money, it takes to maintain a satellite-based network. This is NOT something that could be done by a bunch of poor (by corporation standards) amateurs. Besides they need to consider the difference between the world of bit and the world of physical objects. Open Source works well for bits, but I don't really see how it will help with maintaining a large amount of very complicated hardware (including launching new satellites on as-needed basis, etc.)
In other words, this is a fun idea to play with, but it does not come even close to passing a reality check.
it's attitudes like that that make lawmakers afraid of us.
They should be afraid [maniacal laughter receding in the distance...]
But really, I don't think that's the right approach. Lawmakers deal in power and tend to understand power better than anything else (not that it's saying much, I know). Consequently, *begging* them for something is not a good way to get it. Getting their back to the wall and *demanding* it, usually works much better. You still have to be civilized about it, though...
Hmmm....is it really your decision on who gets the money?
It may surprise you, but yes, it's my decision. It's my money, after all.
The Artist signed the contract with the Label. This is a decision between the artist and those he chose to go into business with, not your and your moral conciousness.
You are confused. I choose to give my money to whoever I want. They can choose to do whatever they want with that money, but I still get to choose to whom I would give the money in the first place.
That is part of the discussion here: a lot of people feel that by buying a CD you are giving money to the record company, which then would give some (very small) percentage of it to the artist. People want to give money to the artist, who then can (depending on his contracts, etc.) give some of this money to a record company. It's all about the balance of power between an artist and a publisher.
[record labels] it is a viable method of distribution
Looks like it used to be a viable method of distribution, no? That's what all the uproar is about.
if you are realy that concerned, start a label yourself
You don't understand. I'm not concerned -- it's the record industry that's concerned.
The basic problem is that I don't want to pay $15 for a CD with one good song on it. I'm perfectly willing to pay a couple of bucks for a single song as an unencumbered digital file. Given that this seems to be a widespread wish, I believe that the market will adjust itself to serve this need. Those who can't adjust will... remember those huge scaly mountains of walking meat?
finished and produced tracks and film are not 'ideas'. They are intellectual property. They are actually a product. When someone steals this, they are stealing property,
Please unbunch your panties. Thank you. Now, intellectual property is a weird beast. There are good reasons why it is legally separate from "general" property like land, widgets and beer. I'm not going to go into that right now, but any textbook on IP law will spell out it out nicely.
Given that, what you refer as "stealing property" is legally called "copyright infringement". Please note this -- law does not call it theft. Because bits are different enought from physical property, different laws apply to them.
Consider what a copyright is: it is basically a government-granted limited-time monopoly. It's also limited-rights monopoly -- such doctrines as "fair use" (until DMCA, at least) and "first sale" considerably limit what copyright owners can impose on users. So shouting "this is theft, didn't your mother teach you not to steal, you'll rot in hell you bastards" like the RIAA and MPAA are doing is not either particularly useful or accurate.
there's a right way and a wrong way. Breaking the law is the wrong way. Changing the law is the right way.
Well, this depends. I don't know about you, but my life is too short to spend it fighting all the laws I find ridiculous. The current laws neither arouse mystical awe in me, nor they dictate my own personal morality. So I have no problems at all in doing things that I belive are moral, but at the same time break some laws (to give a trivial example, I and 99% of Slashdot readers break speeding laws all the time. The rest 1% cannot tear themselves from the screen in order to drive anywhere).
I don't believe there is an absolute moral imperative that says "Thou shall not break any laws, ever". Obviously, breaking laws may lead to quite severe consequences, and is not always (and, probably, even not usually) the optimal way to solve a problem. However, sitting on a high horse and pronouncing "You people are all thieves, and immature brats, to boot" does not strike me as a particularly reasonable position.
I wonder how long do we have to wait for the first Napster-enabled trojans/viruses: on execution copy oneself to a napsterized directory, rename to something like new_pamela_anderson_mpg.exe and wait for others to pull it in...
This is only one reason why getting executables from unknown sources is a bad idea. More have been pointed out in other posts around here.
However, I don't expect the (unwashed:-) masses to realize that before something reformats their hard drive for the n-th time, where n is inversely correlated with IQ.
On the other hand, sharing data files over WrapGnapNapster is very interesting idea. I see some parallels to Usenet and to things like Eternity service (which aims to make it impossible to unpublish stuff).
Plus a great portion of this money goes to the workers (high costs are due to large amounts of person-years). These are people with familys. They need jobs. They support their local economies with their food/housing/etc dollars. Their children go to schools. It's a part of the society, and not a detrimental one.
That's a completely bullshit argument. It implies, for example, that if you hire some people to dig holes in the ground, and other people to immediately fill them up, this is "a part of the society and not a detrimental one". Advised reading: Econ 101. Ever heard of the creation of value?
people are too fond of conspiracy theories and the likes... If they knew it wouldn't work they'd have fixed it...
The claim is that somebody (probably a contractor?) fudged the conditions of a test because he knew that his hardware would fail the "correct" test. NASA officials discovered the problem something like three days before landing -- kinda late to do the fixing.
I just can't delude myself into believeing that when a person makes a copy of a musical piece and shares it with a friend, that they have commited some horrid offence.
Well, of course, there are always two possibly different value systems operating: one is your own personal morals, and one is the set of current laws. Your personal morals are (from my point of view, at least) your private business. You may believe it to be immoral to wear bathing suits, or to work for the government -- that's all fine. You can believe all you want.
However, in your interactions with the real world your personal morals do not matter much -- here the laws rule. I may believe that this 35 mph sign is unreasonable and stupid, but if I am caught I have to pay a fine anyway.
Intellectual property is no different. You can believe it must not exist, as long as you remember that:
(1) Your beliefs do not impose any obligations on me -- what I should or should not do;
(2) Your actions in real world are still subject to current laws, regardless of your beliefs.
One more thing that you might want to think about is the freedom of contract. Two adults can enter into any contract they want, right? So if I wrote a song, I can enter into contract with you, giving you a license to play the song but specifying that you shall not make any copies of the song. I clearly can do this, cannot I? And that gives me the opportunity to establish the whole copyright system, even if there is no explicit "copyright law". It would be very inefficient, but it could be done.
So unless you want to make a law forbidding any restrictions on information, contracts will still be able to limit its freedom. And I don't think such a law would be a good idea.
Do you claim the right to not allow others to have the same or similar thoughts? If you express your thoughts to someone else...are they allowed to think them too?
You are mixing up patents and copyright.
If I were able to patent my thoughts, then nobody else would have been allowed to have the same thoughts. Copyright is a right to restrict copying, not use.
And yes, if I express my thoughts to others, they are allowed to think them, but I would not be all that pleased if they start to spread them around claiming they were their own.
I am saying that information is not in and of itself property in my eyes.
I would say that your ideas of "property" are too narrow. You think that only tangible things can be owned. To repeat myself, don't think "property", think "bundle of rights" instead. The composition of this bundle is flexible -- "property" can mean different things in different contexts.
Certainly you have the right to NOT express thoughts of your own, or not release information to others. However, I do not recognize any right beyond that.
How about reputational rights? I wrote a song, can anybody take it and claim *they* wrote it? What can I do in this case?
How about more reputational rights? I wrote an opinion piece, somebody took it, inserted "And, by the way, Adolf Hitler was the greatest man of the XX century" at the end, and started to distribute this article. What can I do now?
And remember that you don't own your name, even under the current intellectual property laws -- and of course, if there is no intellectual property at all, then anybody can take and use your name -- right?
I find the idea absurd that a person can own something which doesn't exist outside of the human mind.
Think about it in this way. What is property? Property is, basically, what is called "a bundle of rights" with respect to the owned thingie, the most important of which is the right to exclude others. Exactly which rights make up this bundle is subject to debate (especially is the owned thingie is not physical).
My thoughts, dreams, ideas, etc. exist only in my mind. Yet I am quite convinced I "own" them -- that is, I have a set of rights with regard to my thoughts and one of them is, clearly, the right not to divulge them to anybody else. Nothing absurd here at all.
Besided, consider this. You go to a fine restaurant and pay a sum of money -- for what? For the food (as in some protein, some carbs, a lot of fat, some minerals, etc)? Nope -- you can get your carbs in a more cheap and convenient way. You come to a good restaurant for the *taste* of food and for the atmosphere. Both of these are intangibles -- they exist only in the human mind. Yet would you deny the restaurant the right to charge you for them? for something that exists only in your mind?
We should be allowed open access to the unrestricted copying and redistribution... [snip]... Published or in the wild data should be immanently shareable
Well, that's the basic idea of FSF and like-minded people: that there is no such thing as "intellectual property", that information cannot be owned in the sense of putting restrictions on its spread.
However it's all good and well to make sweeping declarations like this, but in order to convince people you have to come with reasonable arguments why this should be so.
Is there a "natural right" to copy information? Hm.. doubtful. Is it "you can't stop me so that's got to be legal" thing? Not a very good argument, that. Can you offer an "economic efficiency" arguement? Perhaps you can, but it's very much non-trivial to show that lack of intellectual propery will promote socioeconomic growth.
Or is it really "I want stuff and I don't want to pay for it"?
if someone actually wrote a mail reader for Linux that was so helpful that it says, "hey -- here's some new mail for you! Let me immediately display it in this window for you!
Well, besides the obvious note that in order to look at an email you *have* to display it, AFAIK at least some mail readers in EMACS would helpfully execute any emacs-lisp code they found in the mail message. Of course that probably was in the olden days and these readers got patched many moons ago...
This whole rant seems like people who complain mom and pop shops can't compete with Walmart in price or availability.
That's mostly true. But notice what: mom-and-pop shops around Walmarts have very low life expectancy, and the reasons for that have a lot to do with price and availability.
So given that we all like this particular mom-and-pop shop (hey, who's mom there?:-)), it's not particulary useful to say the equivalent of "hey, we're small -- we're supposed to suck!".
seems like a misplaced complaint to say that Red Hat cannot compete with MS in certain ways. They can't. Get over it.
Well, if they can't, they'd better get off their ass pronto and do something about it. *I* will get over it, and *you* will get over it, but some middle manager at United Diapers will not see why *he* has to get over something -- so he'll go to Microsoft again.
To reiterate, if you think mom-and-pop vs Walmart comparison is valid, Red Hat better make sure it does not end up in exactly the same place where all these mom-and-pop shops have ended up.
Government intervention, like stuffing a hamster up your own ass, seems like a good idea intially...
I think that this is a very valid comparison. I agree that people who think that government intervention is a good idea tend to be the same people who think that stuffing a hamster up your ass is a good idea. At least the IQ level and ability to foresee consequences seem to be the same.
$50 for a reactive vision processing system? Couple that with a cheap (or free) reliable operating system, and cheap networking that has lots of addresses (IPv6), and you could put watching devices on every street corner, heck in every house (you know, for the safety of the children!).
You are thinking in the right direction, but this particular piece of hardware just detects movement and tracks moving objects very cheaply. That's not such a big deal for human surveillance. What you should REALLY be worried about is automated face recognition that feeds into big-ass backend database. Once the street cameras + database system will be able to identify you by your face and track you from camera to camera as you walk the streets, life suddenly becomes much more interesting. In particular, Darth Vader-ish helmets start looking very attractive.
And yes, I fully expect such systems to be operational within the next few years. Of course, they may forget to tell the public about it...
The DMCA does permit cracking devices to conduct encryption research for the purpose of interoperability and to test computer security systems.
True. So far so good.
Fair Use. This is what Haselton has done, plain and simple.
That's not a question of fair use. It is explicitly permitted to sue people under DMCA even if there was no copyright infringement whatsoever. Yep, that's one of the beauties of DMCA: the act of breaking protection is the offense in itself, regardless of the rights that you might have with regard to the protected copyrighted material.
So fair use doesn't fly here.
Reverse engineering is addressed in the DMCA for certain areas. Haselton was fully within the realm of information security validation.
See, the problem is that judges (with some notable exceptions) are not stupid. They can understand why Haselton broke the encryption just as well as we all do. There is no interoperability issue (interoperability with what??) and the "testing security" defence looks *very* shaky to me.
I'm getting tired of pointing out that DMCA does, really really does criminalize standard actions that we all take for granted. It's not the case of some judge "not getting it", it the case of a very bad law that must be repealed or at the very least castrated.
Remember when Sony filed suit against Connectix for essentially the same thing?
Not the same thing. Connectix did the full-blown clean-room reverse engineering thing and they were able to show and document that the room was "really clean". That's why they won. Besides what Connectix was doing was a straight interoperability example.
You've been warned: until something is done about DMCA we are going to see uglier and uglier applications of it.
Slashdot Mirror
However, you guys... you CAN be put in jail for antitrust, it just never happens. But that's because it always is like, "ooops, slipped up and broke the antitrust laws... sorry" and the company pays.
First of all, I don't think any of Slashdot readers is in danger of being put in jail for antitrust law violations. Maybe after my first billion... but not yet, not yet.
Second, a corporation is an independent legal entity (the name 'corporation' comes from Latin 'corpus': a body), it is legally a person. Bill Gates did not violate antitrust laws -- Microsoft did. Regardless of the fact that Bill is MS's majority shareholder and until recently used to be its CEO (or the president, or whatever), Bill and MS are two separate persons.
There could, conceivably, be a case where our friend Bill would be accused of knowingly directing Microsoft to do illegal acts. However that would require showing that Bill knew for sure that these actions are illegal. Showing intent is hard in the best of cases, and in antitrust... this is just not going to fly.
Kaa
Is it possible, under any circumstances, for Mr. Gates to be charged criminally? Is there any crime which he has committed for which he could go to jail?
And why, pray tell me, you are so interested in sending Mr.Gates to jail? He may be very successful and very obnoxious, but these are hardly reasons to incarcerate him. You may think he harmed software development, but that again is a personal opinion of yours and hardly a crime. Besides, there are plenty less successful but just as obnoxious people -- should they all go to jail, too?
Kaa
Could someone please explain why seemingly impossible things that are the domain of Captain Picard and the boys are getting attention from science when we can barely launch probes properly to Mars.
Could someone please explain why why we are launching probes to Mars while we can barely understand what's going on inside our bodies, still build houses of wood and bricks and use hundred-years-old-design internal combustion engines?
I think your argument is seriously flawed.
Kaa
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup truck full of floppies.
That was in the olden days. Now, how about a Boeing 747 full of DVD-ROMs? There might be a problem with latency, but think of the bandwidth!
Kaa
IF YOU GET A SUBPONEA AND DESTROY THE LOGS, YOU ARE FUCKED.
I can hear you perfectly well.
However, if you destroy the logs and get a subpoena, they are fucked.
See the difference?
Kaa
I don't think these guys realize just how much money and effort, mostly money, it takes to maintain a satellite-based network. This is NOT something that could be done by a bunch of poor (by corporation standards) amateurs. Besides they need to consider the difference between the world of bit and the world of physical objects. Open Source works well for bits, but I don't really see how it will help with maintaining a large amount of very complicated hardware (including launching new satellites on as-needed basis, etc.)
In other words, this is a fun idea to play with, but it does not come even close to passing a reality check.
Kaa
it's attitudes like that that make lawmakers afraid of us.
They should be afraid [maniacal laughter receding in the distance...]
But really, I don't think that's the right approach. Lawmakers deal in power and tend to understand power better than anything else (not that it's saying much, I know). Consequently, *begging* them for something is not a good way to get it. Getting their back to the wall and *demanding* it, usually works much better. You still have to be civilized about it, though...
Kaa
Hmmm....is it really your decision on who gets the money?
It may surprise you, but yes, it's my decision. It's my money, after all.
The Artist signed the contract with the Label. This is a decision between the artist and those he chose to go into business with, not your and your moral conciousness.
You are confused. I choose to give my money to whoever I want. They can choose to do whatever they want with that money, but I still get to choose to whom I would give the money in the first place.
That is part of the discussion here: a lot of people feel that by buying a CD you are giving money to the record company, which then would give some (very small) percentage of it to the artist. People want to give money to the artist, who then can (depending on his contracts, etc.) give some of this money to a record company. It's all about the balance of power between an artist and a publisher.
[record labels] it is a viable method of distribution
Looks like it used to be a viable method of distribution, no? That's what all the uproar is about.
if you are realy that concerned, start a label yourself
You don't understand. I'm not concerned -- it's the record industry that's concerned.
The basic problem is that I don't want to pay $15 for a CD with one good song on it. I'm perfectly willing to pay a couple of bucks for a single song as an unencumbered digital file. Given that this seems to be a widespread wish, I believe that the market will adjust itself to serve this need. Those who can't adjust will... remember those huge scaly mountains of walking meat?
Kaa
to respectfully make your opinion known to the lawmakers.
Can I skip the "respectful" part? I won't throw bricks at them or anything, but I was taught that lying is bad...
Kaa
finished and produced tracks and film are not 'ideas'. They are intellectual property. They are actually a product. When someone steals this, they are stealing property,
Please unbunch your panties. Thank you. Now, intellectual property is a weird beast. There are good reasons why it is legally separate from "general" property like land, widgets and beer. I'm not going to go into that right now, but any textbook on IP law will spell out it out nicely.
Given that, what you refer as "stealing property" is legally called "copyright infringement". Please note this -- law does not call it theft. Because bits are different enought from physical property, different laws apply to them.
Consider what a copyright is: it is basically a government-granted limited-time monopoly. It's also limited-rights monopoly -- such doctrines as "fair use" (until DMCA, at least) and "first sale" considerably limit what copyright owners can impose on users. So shouting "this is theft, didn't your mother teach you not to steal, you'll rot in hell you bastards" like the RIAA and MPAA are doing is not either particularly useful or accurate.
there's a right way and a wrong way. Breaking the law is the wrong way. Changing the law is the right way.
Well, this depends. I don't know about you, but my life is too short to spend it fighting all the laws I find ridiculous. The current laws neither arouse mystical awe in me, nor they dictate my own personal morality. So I have no problems at all in doing things that I belive are moral, but at the same time break some laws (to give a trivial example, I and 99% of Slashdot readers break speeding laws all the time. The rest 1% cannot tear themselves from the screen in order to drive anywhere).
I don't believe there is an absolute moral imperative that says "Thou shall not break any laws, ever". Obviously, breaking laws may lead to quite severe consequences, and is not always (and, probably, even not usually) the optimal way to solve a problem. However, sitting on a high horse and pronouncing "You people are all thieves, and immature brats, to boot" does not strike me as a particularly reasonable position.
Kaa
I wonder how long do we have to wait for the first Napster-enabled trojans/viruses: on execution copy oneself to a napsterized directory, rename to something like new_pamela_anderson_mpg.exe and wait for others to pull it in...
:-) masses to realize that before something reformats their hard drive for the n-th time, where n is inversely correlated with IQ.
This is only one reason why getting executables from unknown sources is a bad idea. More have been pointed out in other posts around here.
However, I don't expect the (unwashed
On the other hand, sharing data files over WrapGnapNapster is very interesting idea. I see some parallels to Usenet and to things like Eternity service (which aims to make it impossible to unpublish stuff).
Kaa
Plus a great portion of this money goes to the workers (high costs are due to large amounts of person-years). These are people with familys. They need jobs. They support their local economies with their food/housing/etc dollars. Their children go to schools. It's a part of the society, and not a detrimental one.
That's a completely bullshit argument. It implies, for example, that if you hire some people to dig holes in the ground, and other people to immediately fill them up, this is "a part of the society and not a detrimental one". Advised reading: Econ 101. Ever heard of the creation of value?
Kaa
people are too fond of conspiracy theories and the likes... If they knew it wouldn't work they'd have fixed it...
The claim is that somebody (probably a contractor?) fudged the conditions of a test because he knew that his hardware would fail the "correct" test. NASA officials discovered the problem something like three days before landing -- kinda late to do the fixing.
This all looks eminently probable to me.
Kaa
I just can't delude myself into believeing that when a person makes a copy of a musical piece and shares it with a friend, that they have commited some horrid offence.
Well, of course, there are always two possibly different value systems operating: one is your own personal morals, and one is the set of current laws. Your personal morals are (from my point of view, at least) your private business. You may believe it to be immoral to wear bathing suits, or to work for the government -- that's all fine. You can believe all you want.
However, in your interactions with the real world your personal morals do not matter much -- here the laws rule. I may believe that this 35 mph sign is unreasonable and stupid, but if I am caught I have to pay a fine anyway.
Intellectual property is no different. You can believe it must not exist, as long as you remember that:
(1) Your beliefs do not impose any obligations on me -- what I should or should not do;
(2) Your actions in real world are still subject to current laws, regardless of your beliefs.
One more thing that you might want to think about is the freedom of contract. Two adults can enter into any contract they want, right? So if I wrote a song, I can enter into contract with you, giving you a license to play the song but specifying that you shall not make any copies of the song. I clearly can do this, cannot I? And that gives me the opportunity to establish the whole copyright system, even if there is no explicit "copyright law". It would be very inefficient, but it could be done.
So unless you want to make a law forbidding any restrictions on information, contracts will still be able to limit its freedom. And I don't think such a law would be a good idea.
Kaa
Do you claim the right to not allow others to have the same or similar thoughts? If you express your thoughts to someone else...are they allowed to think them too?
You are mixing up patents and copyright.
If I were able to patent my thoughts, then nobody else would have been allowed to have the same thoughts. Copyright is a right to restrict copying, not use.
And yes, if I express my thoughts to others, they are allowed to think them, but I would not be all that pleased if they start to spread them around claiming they were their own.
I am saying that information is not in and of itself property in my eyes.
I would say that your ideas of "property" are too narrow. You think that only tangible things can be owned. To repeat myself, don't think "property", think "bundle of rights" instead. The composition of this bundle is flexible -- "property" can mean different things in different contexts.
Certainly you have the right to NOT express thoughts of your own, or not release information to others. However, I do not recognize any right beyond that.
How about reputational rights? I wrote a song, can anybody take it and claim *they* wrote it? What can I do in this case?
How about more reputational rights? I wrote an opinion piece, somebody took it, inserted "And, by the way, Adolf Hitler was the greatest man of the XX century" at the end, and started to distribute this article. What can I do now?
And remember that you don't own your name, even under the current intellectual property laws -- and of course, if there is no intellectual property at all, then anybody can take and use your name -- right?
Kaa
I find the idea absurd that a person can own something which doesn't exist outside of the human mind.
Think about it in this way. What is property? Property is, basically, what is called "a bundle of rights" with respect to the owned thingie, the most important of which is the right to exclude others. Exactly which rights make up this bundle is subject to debate (especially is the owned thingie is not physical).
My thoughts, dreams, ideas, etc. exist only in my mind. Yet I am quite convinced I "own" them -- that is, I have a set of rights with regard to my thoughts and one of them is, clearly, the right not to divulge them to anybody else. Nothing absurd here at all.
Besided, consider this. You go to a fine restaurant and pay a sum of money -- for what? For the food (as in some protein, some carbs, a lot of fat, some minerals, etc)? Nope -- you can get your carbs in a more cheap and convenient way. You come to a good restaurant for the *taste* of food and for the atmosphere. Both of these are intangibles -- they exist only in the human mind. Yet would you deny the restaurant the right to charge you for them? for something that exists only in your mind?
Kaa
We should be allowed open access to the unrestricted copying and redistribution ... [snip] ... Published or in the wild data should be immanently shareable
Well, that's the basic idea of FSF and like-minded people: that there is no such thing as "intellectual property", that information cannot be owned in the sense of putting restrictions on its spread.
However it's all good and well to make sweeping declarations like this, but in order to convince people you have to come with reasonable arguments why this should be so.
Is there a "natural right" to copy information? Hm.. doubtful. Is it "you can't stop me so that's got to be legal" thing? Not a very good argument, that. Can you offer an "economic efficiency" arguement? Perhaps you can, but it's very much non-trivial to show that lack of intellectual propery will promote socioeconomic growth.
Or is it really "I want stuff and I don't want to pay for it"?
Kaa
if someone actually wrote a mail reader for Linux that was so helpful that it says, "hey -- here's some new mail for you! Let me immediately display it in this window for you!
Well, besides the obvious note that in order to look at an email you *have* to display it, AFAIK at least some mail readers in EMACS would helpfully execute any emacs-lisp code they found in the mail message. Of course that probably was in the olden days and these readers got patched many moons ago...
Kaa
This whole rant seems like people who complain mom and pop shops can't compete with Walmart in price or availability.
:-)), it's not particulary useful to say the equivalent of "hey, we're small -- we're supposed to suck!".
That's mostly true. But notice what: mom-and-pop shops around Walmarts have very low life expectancy, and the reasons for that have a lot to do with price and availability.
So given that we all like this particular mom-and-pop shop (hey, who's mom there?
seems like a misplaced complaint to say that Red Hat cannot compete with MS in certain ways. They can't. Get over it.
Well, if they can't, they'd better get off their ass pronto and do something about it. *I* will get over it, and *you* will get over it, but some middle manager at United Diapers will not see why *he* has to get over something -- so he'll go to Microsoft again.
To reiterate, if you think mom-and-pop vs Walmart comparison is valid, Red Hat better make sure it does not end up in exactly the same place where all these mom-and-pop shops have ended up.
Kaa
No longer will the future of the human race be decided by strangers alone in their bedrooms
Alone??? That's a peculiarly geeky way of viewing human procreation....
Kaa
Government intervention, like stuffing a hamster up your own ass, seems like a good idea intially ...
I think that this is a very valid comparison. I agree that people who think that government intervention is a good idea tend to be the same people who think that stuffing a hamster up your ass is a good idea. At least the IQ level and ability to foresee consequences seem to be the same.
Kaa
It was a joke...
Well, duh! People who needed this told to them are beyond help anyway IMAO.
Kaa
$50 for a reactive vision processing system? Couple that with a cheap (or free) reliable operating system, and cheap networking that has lots of addresses (IPv6), and you could put watching devices on every street corner, heck in every house (you know, for the safety of the children!).
You are thinking in the right direction, but this particular piece of hardware just detects movement and tracks moving objects very cheaply. That's not such a big deal for human surveillance. What you should REALLY be worried about is automated face recognition that feeds into big-ass backend database. Once the street cameras + database system will be able to identify you by your face and track you from camera to camera as you walk the streets, life suddenly becomes much more interesting. In particular, Darth Vader-ish helmets start looking very attractive.
And yes, I fully expect such systems to be operational within the next few years. Of course, they may forget to tell the public about it...
Kaa
I know I would be willing to take a few minutes every once in a while to do so.
If you want to get by email a list of porn sites every once in a while, I believe there are a bunch of services that can oblige...
;-)
Kaa
The DMCA does permit cracking devices to conduct encryption research for the purpose of interoperability and to test computer security systems.
True. So far so good.
Fair Use. This is what Haselton has done, plain and simple.
That's not a question of fair use. It is explicitly permitted to sue people under DMCA even if there was no copyright infringement whatsoever. Yep, that's one of the beauties of DMCA: the act of breaking protection is the offense in itself, regardless of the rights that you might have with regard to the protected copyrighted material.
So fair use doesn't fly here.
Reverse engineering is addressed in the DMCA for certain areas. Haselton was fully within the realm of information security validation.
See, the problem is that judges (with some notable exceptions) are not stupid. They can understand why Haselton broke the encryption just as well as we all do. There is no interoperability issue (interoperability with what??) and the "testing security" defence looks *very* shaky to me.
I'm getting tired of pointing out that DMCA does, really really does criminalize standard actions that we all take for granted. It's not the case of some judge "not getting it", it the case of a very bad law that must be repealed or at the very least castrated.
Remember when Sony filed suit against Connectix for essentially the same thing?
Not the same thing. Connectix did the full-blown clean-room reverse engineering thing and they were able to show and document that the room was "really clean". That's why they won. Besides what Connectix was doing was a straight interoperability example.
You've been warned: until something is done about DMCA we are going to see uglier and uglier applications of it.
Kaa