The United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California announced that Dmitry Sklyarov, of Moscow, Russia, made an initial appearance yesterday in Las Vegas, Nevada, on a complaint from the Northern District of California charging a single count of trafficking in a product designed to circumvent copyright protection measures in violation of Title 17, United States Code, Section 1201(b)(1)(A). This is one of the first prosecutions in the United States under this statute, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA").
there ya go. "a product designed to circumvent copyright protection measures" i.e. software.
Mr. Sklyarov made his initial appearance in federal court in Las Vegas, yesterday, July 16, 2001. Mr. Sklyarov was detained without bail and ordered removed to the Northern District of California. No dates have been set for the defendants next appearance.
However, without evidence, they're going to have to do something soon. It's time for a habeas corpus motion, folks. Forget playing nice. The U.S. has no case without Adobe.
There isn't a country in the world that agrees with you, though.:) Normally, companies patent inventions as a matter of course. It's part of the planning of marketing. Many patented items are never brought to market, simply because it turns out that it's not commercially feasible. Normally, companies haven't decided whether they're going to market with the product when they get the patent. It's the R+D department that gets the patents, and they don't make those calls.
The compulsory licensing regime is there for the benefit of competitors who want to bring a patented item to market, usually in competition with the patentholder's equivalent product.
Re:Does this mean we aren't protesting anymore?
on
Adobe Backs Down
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· Score: 1
I think the protests should continue, but the target should widen.
Instead of focussing on Adobe, protest against the DOJ and the DMCA.
The DMCA. Not the DCMA. Many Slashdotters get the acronym wrong, and it bugs me all to hell... it's the Digital Millennium Copyright, not the Digital Copyright Millennium. Sheesh.
Thing about Adobe, is... if they were to have somebody else arrested, they'd lose the PR boost dropping the complaint against Dmitry has gotten them. IOW, they'd look like a bunch of lying bastards.
German lawyers? Oh, they're just renegades, nothing to do with us.
Sklyarov? Oh, we were just trying to get the cracking software out of the U.S., we didn't really want him to rot in jail.
Then they arrest somebody else. Hacker X? Oh, um...:)
There is a doctrine in some parts of the world called compulsory licensing. Basically, the idea is that multinationals (who control the majority of patents) should, in some circumstances, be forced to license their patents to other people who want to make items that would otherwise infringe on the patents. The licensees pay a fixed royalty fee, usually based on product sales, to the multinationals for the priviledge.
The U.S. has consistently opposed compulsory licensing at the WTO and at every other trade meeting it's been involved in. One of the provisions of NAFTA knocked out much of Canada's compulsory licensing regime for generic drug manufacturers. (We have some pretty big companies that do nothing but get compulsory licenses from the drug megacorps and sell people cheap drugs. They're still going, but NAFTA didn't help.)
In rare cases, some lawsuits have had as a remedy the compulsory licensing of patented items. I think Edison got hit by it in the early days of motion pictures (his company had a patent on film projectors; it leveraged this patent into a monopoly on film - i.e. in order for a theatre to get a patent license to use the projector, it had to buy all its film from Edison - it wasn't actually an antitrust case but it borrowed heavily from the theory of antitrust, IIRC).
Uh, probably really good. M$ would never have gotten big, and all of the different hardware companies would have continued to pump out strangely different machines. The generic PC might not have happened. We'd probably all be running Linux or NetBSD on 86 different platforms now.
However, it would have been sucky for those guys at Compaq, and the ends never justify the means, right?:)
I think you may be jumping the gun a tad. This is from a paper analyzing the issues on the above website.
4.2Legal Protection of Technological Measures
Increasingly, a number of technologies are available that may be used to thwart the
infringement of copyright materials on-line. Many rights holders have indicated that the
adoption of such protective technologies (for example, encryption) are a key aspect of their
plans for disseminating their works in the networked environment. The issue arises whether and under what circumstances copyright legislation ought to provide sanctions against
persons who engage in activities related to the circumvention of these protective measures.
Background
In the digitally networked world, different technologies (referred to in this paper as
technological measures) for retaining control over material available on-line may become
increasingly prevalent. Such measures allow for varying degrees of control: access
restrictions such as passwords, confirmation measures such as signatures and watermarks, to complete controls such as encryption. Some stakeholders consider technological measures as an important set of tools available to copyright owners for preventing unauthorized uses of their copyrighted materials and for securing their continued ability to negotiate the terms and conditions under which such materials may be further disseminated.
Completely foolproof measures are unlikely to be technologically feasible. However, advances in technology will continue to increase their effectiveness. In this respect, the departments encourage the private sector to develop standards for such measures that will help to enable the emergence of the networked environment as a new marketplace for the copyright sectors. In time, the catalogue of technological measures available will likely range from those that protect copyrights by preventing unauthorized uses to complete access systems that integrate watermarking technologies and electronic rights management systems.
Concerns remain, however, that once a technological measure is defeated, control over the authorized dissemination and use of works in the networked environment is effectively lost. Given that even the strongest of technological measures will be vulnerable to circumvention, policy makers must consider whether to provide recourse against those who would defeat or assist in defeating such measures.
In proceeding with this analysis, the status of such measures is worth reviewing. Copyright law itself protects rights holders against unauthorized uses, while technological measures adopted by rights holders to ensure their rights serve to provide an additional layer of protection for works. Any proposed statutory provisions to protect technological measures would be in effect a third layer of protection, albeit one which relates not to works, per se,
but to the technological measures in relation to works. In some jurisdictions, such legal
provisions protecting technological protection measures extend beyond copyright to include
restrictions on access and on the manufacture and distribution of circumvention devices. In other words, by providing legal recognition of the technological measures, the traditional boundaries of copyright law would be extended to include new layers of protection. There is concern that the Copyright Act may not be the proper instrument for protection measures that, prima facie, are extraneous to copyright principles.
In other words, sounds interesting, but we don't really think so. Use your encryption if you want, have a ball with it, but don't expect us to back your right to not be broken.
These are the guys to line up against. They've been around since the '80s. I suspect that Adobe's lawyers are all BSA stooges. Certainly Adobe's PR department doesn't seem to be toeing the BSA line.
The FBI agents involved did not give any warnings. They arrived with arrest warrants, failed to identify themselves, and shot Randy's son dead upon observing that he was in possession of a shotgun.
Jeez, man, get the facts. The Weavers weren't resisting arrest when they were shot. They hadn't been arrested. That's why people are so upset about it.
This isn't just me, some Slashdotter. The Weavers are in an Amnesty report on humran rights problems in the U.S. Go to the section on federal agents. They're not mentioned by name ("a white separatist whose wife and son were shot dead by FBI sharpshooters during a siege in Idaho in 1992") but there ya go.
And don't go hauling South Africa into it. Stephen Biko's one of my heroes. Randy Weaver's not. That doesn't mean that I don't think what happened to the Weavers was despicable. They're human beings, dammit.
Oh, fergawdsakes. Spend $100, get a 486, pop *BSD and qmail on it. You don't even need a Real IP Address, so long as you've got either nat or a socks proxy.
Actually, I don't think the DMCA has anything in common with fascism.
Fascism normally has the following features:
A strong, central government
A reliance on direct physical force to enforce laws
Emphasizes things remaining the same - it's essentially conservative
Wealth is viewed as highly material: goods, not services
The DMCA has more in common with feudalism. It's a kind of corporate feudalism, I think. It suggests an archetype where states have no borders, and real power is held by poorly-defined groupings of people (in medieval terms, that would be chivalric orders, monastic orders, and the like; in modern terms, we have business corporations, activist organizations, and the whole gamut). Instead of being an economy based on the ownership of land (which always was wholly fictional; you can't own land the way you can own a peanut), we've gone to an economy based on the ownership of information (see above for the relevance this has), and the DMCA is an attempt to allow the owners of intellectual property to control their property the way feudal lords controlled the land.
Actually, cable descramblers are legal in the US, or were before the DMCA.
Selling them was considered a Disreputable Business Practice, though, so they weren't exactly common. Also, often their makers used copyright and patent law to prevent black boxes from being constructed. (For example, if the descrambling technique is patented, nobody can build a box using that technique until the patent expires. Another way to do it is to copyright the encryption key used in the box. Then, anybody who makes a box with the same encryption key is copying your key, and violating copyright in so doing.)
However, the DMCA makes the very active of building the box illegal.
If it's been on for an hour or two, you can cook eggs on the top of mine.
Well, not quite. But hot enough that, if more stupid people bought from Apple, there'd be a warning label there somewhere. (You know, like the "Warning: Coffee is Hot" stickers.:)
Image sharpness usually has more to do with the scan frequency than the card itself. Odds are, the Matrox has a smarter driver that sets the scan rate better.
IOW, it's probably a difference in software, not hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I am continually dismayed.
your keyboard is there to service your programming language, not the other way around. you're obviously not an APL programmers.
where have all the real programmers gone?
or even the ones who know my favourite programming language...
object-oriented, bah.
Actually, a lot of OEM setups I've seen have file-sharing set up by default.
There are a lot of packages that you can get for Win9x that turn on file sharing, too. IIRC, doing a DUN upgrade often turns it on.
They need your SSN to do a credit check?
Here in Canada, all they need is your name, address, and a number.
Any number. A MasterCard will do.
The only thing I need to give out my SIN for is when I'm employed (the employer needs it) or when I file my taxes.
Wow, Americans and bureaucracy. Wacky.
everybody should read my posts.
from the DOJ press release:
there ya go. "a product designed to circumvent copyright protection measures" i.e. software.
He cannot.
The U.S. Department of Justice is still holding him. See the week-old press release:
However, without evidence, they're going to have to do something soon. It's time for a habeas corpus motion, folks. Forget playing nice. The U.S. has no case without Adobe.
Well, you have an argument.
There isn't a country in the world that agrees with you, though. :) Normally, companies patent inventions as a matter of course. It's part of the planning of marketing. Many patented items are never brought to market, simply because it turns out that it's not commercially feasible. Normally, companies haven't decided whether they're going to market with the product when they get the patent. It's the R+D department that gets the patents, and they don't make those calls.
The compulsory licensing regime is there for the benefit of competitors who want to bring a patented item to market, usually in competition with the patentholder's equivalent product.
I think the protests should continue, but the target should widen.
Instead of focussing on Adobe, protest against the DOJ and the DMCA.
The DMCA. Not the DCMA. Many Slashdotters get the acronym wrong, and it bugs me all to hell... it's the Digital Millennium Copyright, not the Digital Copyright Millennium. Sheesh.
Thing about Adobe, is... if they were to have somebody else arrested, they'd lose the PR boost dropping the complaint against Dmitry has gotten them. IOW, they'd look like a bunch of lying bastards.
German lawyers? Oh, they're just renegades, nothing to do with us.
Sklyarov? Oh, we were just trying to get the cracking software out of the U.S., we didn't really want him to rot in jail.
Then they arrest somebody else. Hacker X? Oh, um... :)
You are SO WRONG.
There is a doctrine in some parts of the world called compulsory licensing. Basically, the idea is that multinationals (who control the majority of patents) should, in some circumstances, be forced to license their patents to other people who want to make items that would otherwise infringe on the patents. The licensees pay a fixed royalty fee, usually based on product sales, to the multinationals for the priviledge.
The U.S. has consistently opposed compulsory licensing at the WTO and at every other trade meeting it's been involved in. One of the provisions of NAFTA knocked out much of Canada's compulsory licensing regime for generic drug manufacturers. (We have some pretty big companies that do nothing but get compulsory licenses from the drug megacorps and sell people cheap drugs. They're still going, but NAFTA didn't help.)
In rare cases, some lawsuits have had as a remedy the compulsory licensing of patented items. I think Edison got hit by it in the early days of motion pictures (his company had a patent on film projectors; it leveraged this patent into a monopoly on film - i.e. in order for a theatre to get a patent license to use the projector, it had to buy all its film from Edison - it wasn't actually an antitrust case but it borrowed heavily from the theory of antitrust, IIRC).
The key part is that magic "attempt" word.
They lost.
Under the DMCA, I think they might've won.
That would have been...
Uh, probably really good. M$ would never have gotten big, and all of the different hardware companies would have continued to pump out strangely different machines. The generic PC might not have happened. We'd probably all be running Linux or NetBSD on 86 different platforms now.
However, it would have been sucky for those guys at Compaq, and the ends never justify the means, right? :)
People have already been put in jail for screwdriver possession.
Jeez. It's funny when Slashdotters complain about the editors being a week behind, when the ACs can't even keep up with five-years-old news. ;)
I think you may be jumping the gun a tad. This is from a paper analyzing the issues on the above website.
4.2Legal Protection of Technological Measures
Increasingly, a number of technologies are available that may be used to thwart the infringement of copyright materials on-line. Many rights holders have indicated that the adoption of such protective technologies (for example, encryption) are a key aspect of their plans for disseminating their works in the networked environment. The issue arises whether and under what circumstances copyright legislation ought to provide sanctions against persons who engage in activities related to the circumvention of these protective measures.
Background
In the digitally networked world, different technologies (referred to in this paper as technological measures) for retaining control over material available on-line may become increasingly prevalent. Such measures allow for varying degrees of control: access restrictions such as passwords, confirmation measures such as signatures and watermarks, to complete controls such as encryption. Some stakeholders consider technological measures as an important set of tools available to copyright owners for preventing unauthorized uses of their copyrighted materials and for securing their continued ability to negotiate the terms and conditions under which such materials may be further disseminated.
Completely foolproof measures are unlikely to be technologically feasible. However, advances in technology will continue to increase their effectiveness. In this respect, the departments encourage the private sector to develop standards for such measures that will help to enable the emergence of the networked environment as a new marketplace for the copyright sectors. In time, the catalogue of technological measures available will likely range from those that protect copyrights by preventing unauthorized uses to complete access systems that integrate watermarking technologies and electronic rights management systems.
Concerns remain, however, that once a technological measure is defeated, control over the authorized dissemination and use of works in the networked environment is effectively lost. Given that even the strongest of technological measures will be vulnerable to circumvention, policy makers must consider whether to provide recourse against those who would defeat or assist in defeating such measures.
In proceeding with this analysis, the status of such measures is worth reviewing. Copyright law itself protects rights holders against unauthorized uses, while technological measures adopted by rights holders to ensure their rights serve to provide an additional layer of protection for works. Any proposed statutory provisions to protect technological measures would be in effect a third layer of protection, albeit one which relates not to works, per se, but to the technological measures in relation to works. In some jurisdictions, such legal provisions protecting technological protection measures extend beyond copyright to include restrictions on access and on the manufacture and distribution of circumvention devices. In other words, by providing legal recognition of the technological measures, the traditional boundaries of copyright law would be extended to include new layers of protection. There is concern that the Copyright Act may not be the proper instrument for protection measures that, prima facie, are extraneous to copyright principles.
In other words, sounds interesting, but we don't really think so. Use your encryption if you want, have a ball with it, but don't expect us to back your right to not be broken.
Adobe's a member of the BSA.
The BSA has an interesting statement on the DMCA here. This is a response to a Library of Congress rule available here.
Members of the BSA include Adobe, Apple Computer, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, CNC Software/Mastercam, Compaq, Corel Corporation, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Lotus Development, Macromedia, Microsoft, Network Associates, Novell, Sybase, Symantec, and Walker Digital; i.e. most of /.'s favourite hate companies, plus some extras.
These are the guys to line up against. They've been around since the '80s. I suspect that Adobe's lawyers are all BSA stooges. Certainly Adobe's PR department doesn't seem to be toeing the BSA line.
This is so very true.
However, RMS created gcc. Linus created the Linux kernel. These things are in Slackware, and consequently...
Talks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Even if you want to call it Slackware. :)
Read the news.
The FBI agents involved did not give any warnings. They arrived with arrest warrants, failed to identify themselves, and shot Randy's son dead upon observing that he was in possession of a shotgun.
Jeez, man, get the facts. The Weavers weren't resisting arrest when they were shot. They hadn't been arrested. That's why people are so upset about it.
This isn't just me, some Slashdotter. The Weavers are in an Amnesty report on humran rights problems in the U.S. Go to the section on federal agents. They're not mentioned by name ("a white separatist whose wife and son were shot dead by FBI sharpshooters during a siege in Idaho in 1992") but there ya go.
And don't go hauling South Africa into it. Stephen Biko's one of my heroes. Randy Weaver's not. That doesn't mean that I don't think what happened to the Weavers was despicable. They're human beings, dammit.
Then it's time to find a new ISP.
Jeez, folks, it's Verizon. Are you really shocked?
POP-before-SMTP is really annoying.
Why's it annoying? Well, let's say you're surfing the web, and you decide to send off a quick little email to somebody whose addy you just found.
You have to POP first.
SMTP-AUTH on the other hand is a good technology, I do approve. It allows you to SEND email without READING it.
Radical.
It isn't feasible to set up an SMTP server?
Oh, fergawdsakes. Spend $100, get a 486, pop *BSD and qmail on it. You don't even need a Real IP Address, so long as you've got either nat or a socks proxy.
Of course, everybody on the mailing list thinks the catholics need to be stopped immediately. :)
Randy Weaver's son was shot, no warning, by FBI agents.
While I don't agree with Weaver's political views, I support his right to hold them without fear of being shot.
Actually, I don't think the DMCA has anything in common with fascism.
Fascism normally has the following features:
The DMCA has more in common with feudalism. It's a kind of corporate feudalism, I think. It suggests an archetype where states have no borders, and real power is held by poorly-defined groupings of people (in medieval terms, that would be chivalric orders, monastic orders, and the like; in modern terms, we have business corporations, activist organizations, and the whole gamut). Instead of being an economy based on the ownership of land (which always was wholly fictional; you can't own land the way you can own a peanut), we've gone to an economy based on the ownership of information (see above for the relevance this has), and the DMCA is an attempt to allow the owners of intellectual property to control their property the way feudal lords controlled the land.
Actually, cable descramblers are legal in the US, or were before the DMCA.
Selling them was considered a Disreputable Business Practice, though, so they weren't exactly common. Also, often their makers used copyright and patent law to prevent black boxes from being constructed. (For example, if the descrambling technique is patented, nobody can build a box using that technique until the patent expires. Another way to do it is to copyright the encryption key used in the box. Then, anybody who makes a box with the same encryption key is copying your key, and violating copyright in so doing.)
However, the DMCA makes the very active of building the box illegal.
Yellow Dog.
Silly boy. Red Hat is GNU/Linux. Debian is GNU/Linux. Slackware is GNU/Linux. Yellow Dog is GNU/Linux.
A pattern.
What's more, iMacs are designed to run hot.
If it's been on for an hour or two, you can cook eggs on the top of mine.
Well, not quite. But hot enough that, if more stupid people bought from Apple, there'd be a warning label there somewhere. (You know, like the "Warning: Coffee is Hot" stickers. :)
OpenBSD is x86-specific. :)
You should be able to run netBSD on 'em though.
Image sharpness usually has more to do with the scan frequency than the card itself. Odds are, the Matrox has a smarter driver that sets the scan rate better.
IOW, it's probably a difference in software, not hardware.