as far as I know, no software patent has ever been tested in an infringement trial. there have been proceedings initiated, but in every case there was a settlement made out of court.
they're just as much a question-mark as the GPL.
there have been cases, but all the decisions (and there are three U.S. Supreme Court decisions) were on patent applications. that is, they were ruling on whether the patent could be granted, not on infringement.
I'd love to see an infringement case. I have real doubts about how easy to enforce many of these patents are. the weird things you have to do to the wording leave quite a few potential defenses open.
M$ has quite a few of them, but the #1 holder of software patents is IBM. and they've been #1 for a long time.
patents control use. yes, it would be illegal to use the infringing product without a patent license.
however, patents aren't a matter of criminal law, unlike copyright. you can't be arrested for infringing a patent. you can only be sued. most likely, the patentholder would get an injunction against you using the patented process. theoretically, the holder could also get damages. they'd only bother with that if you were a big organization that they could suck a lot of money out of.
violating the injunction could land you in jail, for contempt of court. however, you still wouldn't get a criminal record and would normally be let out when the judge decided you were going to comply with the injunction. on the other hand, there's no limit to contempt of court: the judge can keep you there forever. so it's generally a good idea to obey injunctions.:)
you can't be arrested for violating patent law. not even in the United States. it's purely civil. you can only be sued by the patentholders. so what's happening to Dmitry can't happen when you're talking patents.
doesn't matter, at least in the case of patents. dmca is another issue.
patents require registration in the country where they're applied.
that means that if M$ holds a valid U.S. patent, they can forbid you from using the process in the U.S.
you can avoid this patent by moving to a country where the patent has not been registered. That's how Zimmerman got around the RSA patents.
even if that country later on recognizes software patents, it can't register them retroactively. that's a universal precept of patent law.
'course, if people use your infringing product in a country where the patent is valid, they're facing potential liability themselves. that's why PGP was illegal to import into the U.S. for a long time.
when the first star wars movie came out, I was alive, albeit very young. I liked them. mostly I liked Harrison Ford. which is why I still have a hard time with Empire Strikes Back. as a little kid, I was really upset when he got frozen. it aggravated me greatly. so I liked Return mostly because it was, well, the return of han.:)
anyway, all that said. I went to see the special ed re-release. I liked them again. I saw Episode I. it was fun.
I know the Ewoks are a ripoff. actually, I'm a fan of the Piper Fuzzy books. I dislike Jar-Jar.
but I do like the Star Wars films.
I never was a real fan though. I am a Trek fan, I suppose. (Well, I was crazy about Trek about ten years ago. Now I'm more normal. But I still have the incredible collection from when I was crazy.)
The executive agreement on cooperation in criminal law matters, signed in 1995, provides for assistance in cases involving narcotics violations, as well as money laundering cases. In July 1998, the DEA and the MVD signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on counternarcotics cooperation. A 1995 MOU between the Russian federal border service and the U.S. Coast Guard includes provisions for maritime drug interdiction.
There is no extradition treaty in force between Russia and the United States. Russia is a party to the WCO's international convention on mutual administrative assistance for the prevention, investigation, and repression of customs offenses "Nairobi Convention" annex on assistance in narcotics cases. A U.S.-Russia Customs Mutual Assistance Agreement (CMAA) is in force.
emphasis is added. basically if he gets to Russia, he's free.
incidentally, I couldn't find the actual text of the agreement. its citation is:
Agreement on cooperation in criminal law
matters, with annex. Signed at Moscow June
30, 1995; entered into force February 5, 1996.
TIAS 12674.
anybody with WestLaw here? or, for hardcopy, it costs a little over a buck to order the treaty here.
the judge has to look at the people across the table when setting bail. the EFF and the other civil activist organizations don't want Sklyarov to flee the country, because then they lose the chance to fight the DMCA in court. His employer might want him to, though.
therefore, the judge wants to set bail at a high enough level that he won't just bop out of the country, but low enough that he won't rot in jail for a few years awaiting trial ala Mitnick.
also, the bench does look at the facts of the case. the feds allege that he wrote a program that violated the DMCA, and then allowed it to be distributed by an American distributor in contravention of the DMCA. even if he's convicted, his alleged role is fairly small: the distributor should to be the main defendant, since they're the ones actively involving in trafficking in the product on U.S. soil. Sklyarov isn't like a Colombian mastermind, he's not running the show.
good lord. You can't commit perjury unless you're IN COURT.
the best Sklyarov could get against them is maybe some petty-ante little charge like laying a false complaint.
anyway, if he shows to the trial, even if he's convicted, Elcomsoft gets its money back. It's being held by the bail bondsman now. Nobody can touch it unless he jumps.
he may have a case against the California D.A. for malicious prosecution though. And get this through your legally-untrained skull: it's the federal government who's holding him. Adobe set the ball in motion, but they're not the ones that're doing anything now.
the next time we should discuss Adobe is when their employees are called to the stand. That's when we find out where they really stand on the issues. Right now they can't do anything - good or bad.
Sound alone isn't enough? I can see it now... connect to your favourite phone sex line... no 1-900 number needed... from anywhere in the world on the Internet... talk to me, baby, talk to me.:)
it's kind-of both. you see, the reason why RCA was able to lobby for the 6-hour format is because JVC (the inventors of VHS) wanted to use them to market the VCRs in the U.S. RCA made the 6-hour tape the breaking point. No 6-hour tape, no contract. JVC's engineers headed on back, said to each other "Those crazy Americans, nobody'll ever use it" and produced the SLP format. (Also known as EP. Gah.)
in other words, it was because VHS was a more open format that this happened in the first place. Sony's tight grip over Beta meant that nobody else could help them out. I'm sure JVC got other helpful suggestions from its partners along the way; this is just the one I know about.
Perhaps you have cable. I don't. (Huh, never saw the point. I have DSL instead.:)
And even cable suffers from transmission defects. Unless, of course, there's a cable running from the broadcaster right to the cable co. Which there never is.
FWIW, I own laserdiscs (both analog and digital) and DVDs. I think I like the digital laserdiscs the best, at least the ones that are well-mastered. You can see some of the compression defects in the DVD. It's hard though. And certainly the convenience of the DVD makes up for it.
Letting this horribly bad law sit on the books any longer is as a bad an idea as telling Sklyarov to run for it.
Apparently, the guys running the Underground Railroad had the wrong idea. Oh yeah, and all the people in Windsor who defied the 18th Amendment had no effect on American history. No sirree.
Although it's peculiar that, here we are in the 21st century, and a man from a Frozen Northern Country (tm) is being jailed by the Americans for selling stuff to Americans. I thought they gave up doing that with Canadians in the 20th century, and switched over to Colombians. Guess the tide is heading back north.
Linus? Now is a good time to start pining for the fjords...:)
I have an iMac DV. its usb keyboard started doing weird things about four or five months after I got it. (IIRC every key but the space bar worked fine most of the time. the space bar failed to do anything, and sometimes garbage would spontaneously spew.) I took it to a local AASP. they plugged it in, said "Yeah it's broke" and gave me a new one in about 3 days. sure I could've done this without AppleCare, but my AppleCare # simplified things greatly (the guys I had bought it from were a few thousand miles away at the time:)
I got my first VCR in 1980. it was a Panasonic VHS top-loader. monster. it finally died about ten years later.
anyway, the point is this: when I got a VCR, I couldn't rent tapes. any tapes. there were no video rental outlets in my city.
about six months later, the first video rental store in the city opened. (it's still open, actually. it makes me angsty for lost days when I go there. it's so clean and not like how it used to be now.:) it had maybe 50-100 tapes for rent.
you could buy tapes there too. I think the cheap ones were $80 canadian.
that changed around 1984 when Paramount cut the rates to $20. eventually, everybody followed suit.
I remember back in the early '80s when the Cool Thing was if a store had a copy of Star Wars. you couldn't rent it legally. it wasn't released on video until sometime in the '90s.
anyway, the point is that by the time I got a VCR Beta had already lost.
Betamax was there first. VHS overtook it. Sony marketed Betamax VCRs in the US before RCA marketed VHS. (Which is why Universal Studios sued Sony, not RCA, to stop VCRs from being distributed in the US.)
The reason VHS won is simple: people liked being able to tape six hours of crappy NTSC on one tape. Sony thought they'd care more about quality. JVC had already caved a little by suggesting maybe a 4-hour format would be useful sometimes. RCA pressured them into providing the 6-hour format.
RCA was right. 6 hours makes timeshifting much more practical. Broadcast TV is crap quality anyway, we don't need high-quality formats to preserve its defects for the future.
Anyway, the point is that that comparison has really nothing to do with OGG/MP3. Where.ogg stands to gain is if some of the major media player writers support it. It has no chance of support from MS, but if RealNetworks, Nullsoft and/or Apple add it to RealPlayer/Jukebox, Winamp and iTunes, then we might see a momentum shift.
palm portable keyboard, inside a small camera case
okay, so I need a flat surface to whip out the keyboard. and normally I carry a battery recharger full of charged batteries for the rio in my backpack. but I don't really need the charger. I can switch the batteries to the pockets in my shorts/jeans.
and I can wear it all while on rollerblades. heh.:)
incidentally, while in suit it's even easier. the palm stays on my belt. the rio moves to the back of my belt (i.e. invisible to anyone who can't see through the jacket). when I'm actually at work (and need to look less like an extra from Johnny M:) the sennheisers go into my inside jacket pocket. the keyboard easily fits into my shirt pocket.
of course, unlike many geeks, I'm in good shape. I don't worry about the weight on my belt: there isn't very much of me there to hold it up anyway.:)
there is an implication in the post above that classical music is free from copyright. not so.
sure, the composers, Mozart, Bach, etc., now long-dead, no longer exercise copyright over their works. however, generally recorded classical music is performed by musicians. living ones.
there's a kind of copyright that's held by musicians making performances. it doesn't last as long as regular author's copyright but otherwise it's the same. for example, hendrix's version of the star spangled banner is in copyright: as a performance.
OBTW, use the preview button. paragraphs are good.:)
how would you suggest doing that? apart from the point raised by the other person replying to you, that cash is anonymous, where would you put the tag on the CD so that it would survive encoding to MP3?
sure you could tag some part of the CD, so that if somebody posted a full ISO or something of the disc it would be found. okay, fine. who does that?
people just extract the digital audio and encode it. it's lossy ANYWAY. they're not going to try and preserve your digital signature.
Look at this. Another large organization whose wealth is entirely based on copyright royalties is subject to an antitrust investigation.
It's long been argued that the amendments to copyright made in recent years are, in themselves, monopolizing. Copyright is, by definition, a limited monopoly. Expanding it makes it less limited.
Should we be surprised when the holders of these statutory monopolies abuse their powers? Of course not. Fair use is there in part to circumscribe monopoly power. When it's eroded, the monopoly is extended.
In other words: The correct attitude is not to applaud the efforts of the DoJ and EU antitrust divisions, but rather to stop passing legislation that makes these kinds of antitrust actions necessary. Let the market sort it out.
Government created copyright. It's not natural, the way that owning a fork is natural. It should be willing to step up and take responsibility for the artificial distortions of the market that copyright creates, and try to finesse it so that copyright distorts the market in a desirable way without making reference to rights-based talk. ("I have a right to control copiers of my works. I have a right to forbid Russians from reading this document." There is no difference between these two: they're just declaratory statements with no justification.)
winning the "they're a monopoly" part of the case is easy. where the trick is in finding anti-competitive behaviour. this is in many ways just like the microsoft case: getting MS declared a monopoly was so easy.
Slashdot Mirror
as far as I know, no software patent has ever been tested in an infringement trial. there have been proceedings initiated, but in every case there was a settlement made out of court.
they're just as much a question-mark as the GPL.
there have been cases, but all the decisions (and there are three U.S. Supreme Court decisions) were on patent applications. that is, they were ruling on whether the patent could be granted, not on infringement.
I'd love to see an infringement case. I have real doubts about how easy to enforce many of these patents are. the weird things you have to do to the wording leave quite a few potential defenses open.
M$ has quite a few of them, but the #1 holder of software patents is IBM. and they've been #1 for a long time.
and 95 and 98. and persuaded people to download the driver.
oh yeah, and 3.11. people are still using it. it's frightening.
and after all, look at all the success they've had before getting people to download their updates... ;)
patents control use. yes, it would be illegal to use the infringing product without a patent license.
however, patents aren't a matter of criminal law, unlike copyright. you can't be arrested for infringing a patent. you can only be sued. most likely, the patentholder would get an injunction against you using the patented process. theoretically, the holder could also get damages. they'd only bother with that if you were a big organization that they could suck a lot of money out of.
violating the injunction could land you in jail, for contempt of court. however, you still wouldn't get a criminal record and would normally be let out when the judge decided you were going to comply with the injunction. on the other hand, there's no limit to contempt of court: the judge can keep you there forever. so it's generally a good idea to obey injunctions. :)
I'll give ya every version of Windows, though.
wow, too many x-files episodes buddy.
you can't be arrested for violating patent law. not even in the United States. it's purely civil. you can only be sued by the patentholders. so what's happening to Dmitry can't happen when you're talking patents.
doesn't matter, at least in the case of patents. dmca is another issue.
patents require registration in the country where they're applied.
that means that if M$ holds a valid U.S. patent, they can forbid you from using the process in the U.S.
you can avoid this patent by moving to a country where the patent has not been registered. That's how Zimmerman got around the RSA patents.
even if that country later on recognizes software patents, it can't register them retroactively. that's a universal precept of patent law.
'course, if people use your infringing product in a country where the patent is valid, they're facing potential liability themselves. that's why PGP was illegal to import into the U.S. for a long time.
when the first star wars movie came out, I was alive, albeit very young. I liked them. mostly I liked Harrison Ford. which is why I still have a hard time with Empire Strikes Back. as a little kid, I was really upset when he got frozen. it aggravated me greatly. so I liked Return mostly because it was, well, the return of han. :)
anyway, all that said. I went to see the special ed re-release. I liked them again. I saw Episode I. it was fun.
I know the Ewoks are a ripoff. actually, I'm a fan of the Piper Fuzzy books. I dislike Jar-Jar.
but I do like the Star Wars films.
I never was a real fan though. I am a Trek fan, I suppose. (Well, I was crazy about Trek about ten years ago. Now I'm more normal. But I still have the incredible collection from when I was crazy.)
but I like 'em. they're fun.
true enough. the basic point you're making is really that classical musicians don't sell so well, so they get paid even less.
on the other hand, they're guaranteed to get paid. lots of pop musicians get paid a percentage, wind up losing money.
Extradition requires a treaty. Relations between the U.S. and the Russian Federation are still rather minimal.
Here's a quick summary from a fairly interesting page:
emphasis is added. basically if he gets to Russia, he's free.
incidentally, I couldn't find the actual text of the agreement. its citation is:
anybody with WestLaw here? or, for hardcopy, it costs a little over a buck to order the treaty here.
flight risk. cops never run. they have nowhere to hide.
bail isn't about punishing the accused, unless he's Kevin Mitnick. it's about getting the accused to show up for trial. cops always show.
I don't think the size of the bail is low.
the judge has to look at the people across the table when setting bail. the EFF and the other civil activist organizations don't want Sklyarov to flee the country, because then they lose the chance to fight the DMCA in court. His employer might want him to, though.
therefore, the judge wants to set bail at a high enough level that he won't just bop out of the country, but low enough that he won't rot in jail for a few years awaiting trial ala Mitnick.
also, the bench does look at the facts of the case. the feds allege that he wrote a program that violated the DMCA, and then allowed it to be distributed by an American distributor in contravention of the DMCA. even if he's convicted, his alleged role is fairly small: the distributor should to be the main defendant, since they're the ones actively involving in trafficking in the product on U.S. soil. Sklyarov isn't like a Colombian mastermind, he's not running the show.
slashdotters.
good lord. You can't commit perjury unless you're IN COURT.
the best Sklyarov could get against them is maybe some petty-ante little charge like laying a false complaint.
anyway, if he shows to the trial, even if he's convicted, Elcomsoft gets its money back. It's being held by the bail bondsman now. Nobody can touch it unless he jumps.
he may have a case against the California D.A. for malicious prosecution though. And get this through your legally-untrained skull: it's the federal government who's holding him. Adobe set the ball in motion, but they're not the ones that're doing anything now.
the next time we should discuss Adobe is when their employees are called to the stand. That's when we find out where they really stand on the issues. Right now they can't do anything - good or bad.
Sound alone isn't enough? I can see it now... connect to your favourite phone sex line... no 1-900 number needed... from anywhere in the world on the Internet... talk to me, baby, talk to me. :)
we're probably actually agreeing.
it's kind-of both. you see, the reason why RCA was able to lobby for the 6-hour format is because JVC (the inventors of VHS) wanted to use them to market the VCRs in the U.S. RCA made the 6-hour tape the breaking point. No 6-hour tape, no contract. JVC's engineers headed on back, said to each other "Those crazy Americans, nobody'll ever use it" and produced the SLP format. (Also known as EP. Gah.)
in other words, it was because VHS was a more open format that this happened in the first place. Sony's tight grip over Beta meant that nobody else could help them out. I'm sure JVC got other helpful suggestions from its partners along the way; this is just the one I know about.
Perhaps you have cable. I don't. (Huh, never saw the point. I have DSL instead. :)
And even cable suffers from transmission defects. Unless, of course, there's a cable running from the broadcaster right to the cable co. Which there never is.
FWIW, I own laserdiscs (both analog and digital) and DVDs. I think I like the digital laserdiscs the best, at least the ones that are well-mastered. You can see some of the compression defects in the DVD. It's hard though. And certainly the convenience of the DVD makes up for it.
Apparently, the guys running the Underground Railroad had the wrong idea. Oh yeah, and all the people in Windsor who defied the 18th Amendment had no effect on American history. No sirree.
Although it's peculiar that, here we are in the 21st century, and a man from a Frozen Northern Country (tm) is being jailed by the Americans for selling stuff to Americans. I thought they gave up doing that with Canadians in the 20th century, and switched over to Colombians. Guess the tide is heading back north.
Linus? Now is a good time to start pining for the fjords... :)
AppleCare is extremely well worth it.
I have an iMac DV. its usb keyboard started doing weird things about four or five months after I got it. (IIRC every key but the space bar worked fine most of the time. the space bar failed to do anything, and sometimes garbage would spontaneously spew.) I took it to a local AASP. they plugged it in, said "Yeah it's broke" and gave me a new one in about 3 days. sure I could've done this without AppleCare, but my AppleCare # simplified things greatly (the guys I had bought it from were a few thousand miles away at the time :)
VHS-C?
don't make me laugh. in cams, everybody's using 8mm, hi-8, digital 8, or one of the others.
show me the sales :)
uh uh. not in the beginning.
I got my first VCR in 1980. it was a Panasonic VHS top-loader. monster. it finally died about ten years later.
anyway, the point is this: when I got a VCR, I couldn't rent tapes. any tapes. there were no video rental outlets in my city.
about six months later, the first video rental store in the city opened. (it's still open, actually. it makes me angsty for lost days when I go there. it's so clean and not like how it used to be now. :) it had maybe 50-100 tapes for rent.
you could buy tapes there too. I think the cheap ones were $80 canadian.
that changed around 1984 when Paramount cut the rates to $20. eventually, everybody followed suit.
I remember back in the early '80s when the Cool Thing was if a store had a copy of Star Wars. you couldn't rent it legally. it wasn't released on video until sometime in the '90s.
anyway, the point is that by the time I got a VCR Beta had already lost.
interesting little post, except for one thing.
Betamax was there first. VHS overtook it. Sony marketed Betamax VCRs in the US before RCA marketed VHS. (Which is why Universal Studios sued Sony, not RCA, to stop VCRs from being distributed in the US.)
The reason VHS won is simple: people liked being able to tape six hours of crappy NTSC on one tape. Sony thought they'd care more about quality. JVC had already caved a little by suggesting maybe a 4-hour format would be useful sometimes. RCA pressured them into providing the 6-hour format.
RCA was right. 6 hours makes timeshifting much more practical. Broadcast TV is crap quality anyway, we don't need high-quality formats to preserve its defects for the future.
Anyway, the point is that that comparison has really nothing to do with OGG/MP3. Where .ogg stands to gain is if some of the major media player writers support it. It has no chance of support from MS, but if RealNetworks, Nullsoft and/or Apple add it to RealPlayer/Jukebox, Winamp and iTunes, then we might see a momentum shift.
all on my belt.
what I have:
okay, so I need a flat surface to whip out the keyboard. and normally I carry a battery recharger full of charged batteries for the rio in my backpack. but I don't really need the charger. I can switch the batteries to the pockets in my shorts/jeans.
and I can wear it all while on rollerblades. heh. :)
incidentally, while in suit it's even easier. the palm stays on my belt. the rio moves to the back of my belt (i.e. invisible to anyone who can't see through the jacket). when I'm actually at work (and need to look less like an extra from Johnny M :) the sennheisers go into my inside jacket pocket. the keyboard easily fits into my shirt pocket.
of course, unlike many geeks, I'm in good shape. I don't worry about the weight on my belt: there isn't very much of me there to hold it up anyway. :)
there is an implication in the post above that classical music is free from copyright. not so.
sure, the composers, Mozart, Bach, etc., now long-dead, no longer exercise copyright over their works. however, generally recorded classical music is performed by musicians. living ones.
there's a kind of copyright that's held by musicians making performances. it doesn't last as long as regular author's copyright but otherwise it's the same. for example, hendrix's version of the star spangled banner is in copyright: as a performance.
OBTW, use the preview button. paragraphs are good. :)
how would you suggest doing that? apart from the point raised by the other person replying to you, that cash is anonymous, where would you put the tag on the CD so that it would survive encoding to MP3?
sure you could tag some part of the CD, so that if somebody posted a full ISO or something of the disc it would be found. okay, fine. who does that?
people just extract the digital audio and encode it. it's lossy ANYWAY. they're not going to try and preserve your digital signature.
Look at this. Another large organization whose wealth is entirely based on copyright royalties is subject to an antitrust investigation.
It's long been argued that the amendments to copyright made in recent years are, in themselves, monopolizing. Copyright is, by definition, a limited monopoly. Expanding it makes it less limited.
Should we be surprised when the holders of these statutory monopolies abuse their powers? Of course not. Fair use is there in part to circumscribe monopoly power. When it's eroded, the monopoly is extended.
In other words: The correct attitude is not to applaud the efforts of the DoJ and EU antitrust divisions, but rather to stop passing legislation that makes these kinds of antitrust actions necessary. Let the market sort it out.
Government created copyright. It's not natural, the way that owning a fork is natural. It should be willing to step up and take responsibility for the artificial distortions of the market that copyright creates, and try to finesse it so that copyright distorts the market in a desirable way without making reference to rights-based talk. ("I have a right to control copiers of my works. I have a right to forbid Russians from reading this document." There is no difference between these two: they're just declaratory statements with no justification.)
winning the "they're a monopoly" part of the case is easy. where the trick is in finding anti-competitive behaviour. this is in many ways just like the microsoft case: getting MS declared a monopoly was so easy.