What do you base that one? Even copying just a single file can actually a criminal act.
Ah, looks like you're right. I'd thought Swedish copyright law was based closely on EUCD (as I had read it was), and most EUCD implementations only make a criminal offence of copyright violation "on commercial scales". Sweden is unusually harsh in making simple "willful or negligent" copyright infringement a criminal offence.
There are other exceptions though. For example copying computer software for private use is not a criminal offence.
As I read it, copying almost any publically released work for private use is not an offence at all in Sweden (Article 12, Act on Copyright in Literary and Artistic Works). Such an exception is, of course, virtually a requirement in a country with such strict criminal handling of infringements. This is a big problem for the prosecution, as even if they show that TPB intended to allow copying of copyright works, if they only intended to allow people to exercise their private copying right under article 12, then they are not encouraging/assisting with a criminal offence.
that, and the small detail, that in Sweden, we don't have a jury system in the courts
That, I'll grant you. I don't know how that system works, but if it's less influenceable by emotive arguments than a jury is, then the responses probably aren't a problem.
Here in the UK, I'm pretty sure those responses would end up being shown to the jury as evidence of the character of the people in the trial, and it would have a negative effect on the jury's opinion. Sure, they don't prove anything in and of themselves, but that isn't the point; the point is to tip the balance a little farther against the defendants, which is what such evidence would achieve.
What they are doing is not against any law in their jurisdiction.
That's what this court case is trying to decide. TPB's lawyers believe it is not against the law, but that's a different thing to it actually not be against the law.
This may be a fine line but its an important one, there is NO copyrighted material on TBP, they don't even link to it, they index links. And indexing services (like search engines) are specifically exempt from legal action based on automated indexing.
Yes, but that's not what this legal action is based on. The question the court is being asked is this: when the defendants set up TPB, or at any time while they were running it, did they intend to help people to share copyrighted material in a manner that would be a criminal offence.
Because if they did, they violated the law against helping people to commit a criminal offence.
Now, it's worth noting first of all that most small-scale copyright infringements are not criminal offences. If TPB's goal was to help people share maybe ten or twenty copies of a file, then it may be they were not intending to help a criminal offence, despite the fact that they were intending to help a copyright violation.
As far as their reputation for ridiculing people serving them legal notices... why shouldn't they?
Because those responses are evidence against them. They show an attitude of not caring about whether the rights-holders' copyright is infringed. Those responses could be bad for them in front of a jury.
Then the govt. would have an incentive to send as many people as possible to the joint, to maximize their bang for the buck, so we end up with the same result.
Not really, as it makes no difference to the government how many people it imprisons. If it feels it will benefit from imprisoning them, it will feel free to do so.
Besides, in most civilised countries it's the judiciary that decides whether somebody goes to prison, and they are independent from the administrators who would have arranged to pay for the prison, so there should be no pressure like this. It wouldn't be worthwhile for those administrators to bribe judges because, frankly, they wouldn't care.
mdcurry: The Pirate Bay: "We reserve the right to choose freely to whom we speak. We do not speak with assholes." #spectrial
Of course the "assholes" they're talking about are media companies who have previously published stories that are biased and slanted away from them. They're unlikely to make friends with these people anyway.
why is there this preconception that linking to content that you know full well is illegal, is acceptable?
i'm yet to see a good defense for this. your an accessory to a crime if you knowingly aid it.
Because different things are illegal in different countries, and I don't know whether or not the country my site's visitor is from is legally allowed to access the content or not, so perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt?
Because while TPB knows that some of the content they host links to is illegal, they don't generally know which content and shouldn't be required to proactively check (which would involve them in committing further offences of actually downloading the content)?
Because telling somebody how to commit a crime (which is at the most what TPB does) is not the same as aiding them to do it?
Because copyright infringement is a civil offense, not a crime, and "accessory" laws only apply to criminal offences? Because the reason why only being an accessory to criminal offenses is an offense is a good one, i.e. that a criminal offence is one that society as a whole has an interest in discouraging while a civil one is only to protect the interests of an individual/company, and preventing assisting somebody to commit an offence is too draconian if the offence does not fall into the former category?
That's real brilliant advice, but the problem is there are astonishingly few lawyers who will have the slightest clue how to answer this question.
I would suggest that a techie's best bet is to get as informed as possible before taking this to a lawyer, because it's really treading new ground.
That's very strange, because I've seen this kind of license several times in my experience as an IT consultant. Your license seems to differ a little from what I've seen before, so I suspect your goals were slightly different. The terms of your license allow for redistribution of modifications, which I don't think is something the original poster was looking for, and would have substantially complicated the licensing terms.
What the OP wants is a standard license grant, with the additional term "you are permitted to prepare derivitive works of the Software for your own internal use; this does not give you a license to distribute derivitive works or modifications to the Software." Seriously, this is simple stuff that any remotely competent lawyer should be able to handle and is likely to have seen hundreds of times before.
even at a major multi-B corporation with an awesome legal team this was new ground
Don't expect a corporation's legal team to have experience in anything that corporation has never done before. Look at independent copyright lawyers who have worked for many companies; they'll be much more widely experienced. Most major cities should have several firms of copyright lawyers who have plenty of experience in this field.
I would recommend you switch off OpenDNS' proxying then.
Switching it off doesn't work. When my dynamic DNS changes, it takes about 5 minutes for their server settings to update. By that time I usually have a google.com address in my local cache, which lasts for a further 10 minutes.
Wake me when you are not in fact allowed to leave your own country
The UK has legislation that prevents certain "undesirable"s from being permitted to leave the country, in apparent contravention of international treaties. (Sexual Offences Act 2003, s. 114)
I know there is the 4.2.2.2-3 (4-5 too?), any others?
Hold on... that's the unreliable DNS server that my last ISP (3 Mobile Broadband) used to hand out in the link configuration info when I connected to them. Are you saying this is a public service, and they couldn't even be bothered to run their own unreliable DNS service?
Compare that to the data that OpenDNS can collect. They can see every hostname you resolve with their service. Not unlike application-level techniques used by various advertisers (web bugs, third-party cookies, redirections, HTTP "ping", etc.) to track your browsing, a list of every hostname you resolve can certainly compromise your privacy. Every site I visit, when I visited it, and an idea of how often I visited it is not "already available to anyone who wants it." Normally, to obtain this sort of information, an attacker would need to either break into this computer and install a program to log and transmit it, or they would need to conduct a man-in-the-middle type of attack against my ISP's network. There's a reason for that.
They also see every google search you run, too, because by default they proxy requests to google.com addresses. For your convenience, of course.
For those that have OpenDNS running, you go to Settings, Advanced and then at the bottom there is the Network Shortcuts section. Uncheck the box "Enable OpenDNS Proxy".
I have the service and I am quite happy to trade a little privacy for the content filtering done by someone else, without requiring any software installs or any maintenance of IPTables or anything else on my part. It is passive safety, I know, but gives some peace of mind with a teenager who knows his way around computers. It blocks proxies too. If there is an alternative, I'd love to read about it.
I don't know about others, but I found that OpenDNS's tracking of the IP addresses I was coming from was somewhat flaky, even though I was running their dynamic IP update client. So, every so often I would end up getting proxied service for an hour or so. And, yes, I could easily tell the difference: using their proxy server is a lot slower than accessing google directly.
Don't know if it's a good enough justification by itself, but at least it's a logical explanation.
Breaking DNS in order to help people whose computers are set up to provide a poor search system when an unknown URL is added. No, that's not a good enough justification. If I attempt to access www.google.com, I should access www.google.com, not have my searches proxied through OpenDNS's servers. I've found google searches to be slower and less reliable when using OpenDNS, with the home page sometimes taking 10 seconds or so to load. Without OpenDNS, I get almost instant access to the home page, almost every time.
Grokking object-oriented programming, and users' mindsets as well, I agree that it would be worth at least examining the concept of a "file-less OS", one that simply keeps a live OO system persistent.
Google "smalltalk-80". Download an implementation. Play with it. The concepts you're talking about are coming up to 30 years old.
Memory in all computers is mapped to address space. I get the idea that these guys are programmers who don't really understand how the hardware works.
I think you're missing the point. A standard OS has multiple processes, each of which has its own page tables, meaning that there are multiple address spaces that the processor switches between. In Phantom, all processes are being run in the same address space, a design decision which cuts down on switching overhead. Of course, in order to achieve this, you really need to provide some alternative mechanism for achieving what those multiple address spaces used to achieve, which is preventing one running program from modifying the working space of another; in this case, that's achieved by using a virtual machine rather than direct execution, and presumably the VM is designed such that such issues cannot occur.
Nobody needs files? How, exactly, can I retrieve a document then? This FA is damned short on details.
My guess is that somewhere or other in the system's memory image there's a data structure that contains pointers to documents that any application can add items to or get existing items from, something rather like PalmOS's persistent databases.
TFA didn't point to a single thing about it that would lead me to want it, except for the state saving on shutdown, and I doubt seriously that's going to work. If your data are in memory and not the hard drive when it quits, you'll lose your data. If data are all written instantly to the HD, your PC will be slower than molasses in january.
I'd like to see how it performs. My suspicion is it flushes transactions to disk periodically (say in 5 second batches), which would provide an appropriate level of data retention in case of power failure, and I suspect could maintain reasonable performance.
My main concern with this is how reliable the data structures are if power fails in the middle of a write.
If all computers were 64 bit and had at least 500-1000GB of non-volatile fast RAM, computers could do exactly what Grandma wanted. Such a computer would never really "boot" because all OS type programming would be installed by the manufacturer into memory, rather than a mechanical or solid state storage device. There would only be ONE fast main memory system where everything would stay as it as last written. A given piece of data would occupy a section of the address space until that space was released for other data. Data would seldom be moved around, but only memory pointers as move, unless two copies of the same data were needed.
Which is precisely the kind of system that this OS emulates: it uses a virtual machine that effectively pretends it's running on such a system, and keeps flushing memory changes out to disk so that it can pretend to have NVRAM when you switch it back on again. Of course, it'll be slower than the system you describe, but probably it will still be fast enough to do most things.
That's not really true is it. With C++ I can get a library that serializes my object, transmits to a file, or over a network, or to a cluster via MPI and then reconstructs it at another point or on another computer (e.g. Boost Serialisation, Boost MPI etc.). It's just isn't a language feature, it's a library feature. Because it's a library feature it can be harder to use than say Java. That's the trade off, flexibility and performance over ease of use.
Serialization in Java is a library feature, too. You can implement your own serialization code, if you want, and have it work just as well (or even better perhaps) than the standard implementation.
What _is_ a language feature of Java is reflection, which makes implementing serialization a lot easier. But there's no reason to be tied to a VM to get reflection; it's perfectly possible to have reflection in a native compiled language, you just need to stuff a load of metadata into your generated code.
Slashdot Mirror
The artwork for the Virgin Killer album was said to clearly fall under new UK child pornography laws.
Who said that? Unless it was a court of law, then the decision has no legal standing.
Which is why it shouldn't be a private company's job to decide what's legal and what isn't.
Doesn't this only really make sense if there's some connection between the police investigation and being put on the list?
My understanding is that it is IWF policy to notify the police when they block an image, so in at least some cases there is such a link...
What do you base that one? Even copying just a single file can actually a criminal act.
Ah, looks like you're right. I'd thought Swedish copyright law was based closely on EUCD (as I had read it was), and most EUCD implementations only make a criminal offence of copyright violation "on commercial scales". Sweden is unusually harsh in making simple "willful or negligent" copyright infringement a criminal offence.
There are other exceptions though. For example copying computer software for private use is not a criminal offence.
As I read it, copying almost any publically released work for private use is not an offence at all in Sweden (Article 12, Act on Copyright in Literary and Artistic Works). Such an exception is, of course, virtually a requirement in a country with such strict criminal handling of infringements. This is a big problem for the prosecution, as even if they show that TPB intended to allow copying of copyright works, if they only intended to allow people to exercise their private copying right under article 12, then they are not encouraging/assisting with a criminal offence.
that, and the small detail, that in Sweden, we don't have a jury system in the courts
That, I'll grant you. I don't know how that system works, but if it's less influenceable by emotive arguments than a jury is, then the responses probably aren't a problem.
Here in the UK, I'm pretty sure those responses would end up being shown to the jury as evidence of the character of the people in the trial, and it would have a negative effect on the jury's opinion. Sure, they don't prove anything in and of themselves, but that isn't the point; the point is to tip the balance a little farther against the defendants, which is what such evidence would achieve.
What they are doing is not against any law in their jurisdiction.
That's what this court case is trying to decide. TPB's lawyers believe it is not against the law, but that's a different thing to it actually not be against the law.
This may be a fine line but its an important one, there is NO copyrighted material on TBP, they don't even link to it, they index links. And indexing services (like search engines) are specifically exempt from legal action based on automated indexing.
Yes, but that's not what this legal action is based on. The question the court is being asked is this: when the defendants set up TPB, or at any time while they were running it, did they intend to help people to share copyrighted material in a manner that would be a criminal offence.
Because if they did, they violated the law against helping people to commit a criminal offence.
Now, it's worth noting first of all that most small-scale copyright infringements are not criminal offences. If TPB's goal was to help people share maybe ten or twenty copies of a file, then it may be they were not intending to help a criminal offence, despite the fact that they were intending to help a copyright violation.
As far as their reputation for ridiculing people serving them legal notices... why shouldn't they?
Because those responses are evidence against them. They show an attitude of not caring about whether the rights-holders' copyright is infringed. Those responses could be bad for them in front of a jury.
Then the govt. would have an incentive to send as many people as possible to the joint, to maximize their bang for the buck, so we end up with the same result.
Not really, as it makes no difference to the government how many people it imprisons. If it feels it will benefit from imprisoning them, it will feel free to do so.
Besides, in most civilised countries it's the judiciary that decides whether somebody goes to prison, and they are independent from the administrators who would have arranged to pay for the prison, so there should be no pressure like this. It wouldn't be worthwhile for those administrators to bribe judges because, frankly, they wouldn't care.
You don't make friends talking like this:
mdcurry: The Pirate Bay: "We reserve the right to choose freely to whom we speak. We do not speak with assholes." #spectrial
Of course the "assholes" they're talking about are media companies who have previously published stories that are biased and slanted away from them. They're unlikely to make friends with these people anyway.
doesn't the web have enough retarded pretend words?
No! We should encourage them! We should set up a web site listing them. We can call them retardologisms.
why is there this preconception that linking to content that you know full well is illegal, is acceptable?
i'm yet to see a good defense for this. your an accessory to a crime if you knowingly aid it.
Because different things are illegal in different countries, and I don't know whether or not the country my site's visitor is from is legally allowed to access the content or not, so perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt?
Because while TPB knows that some of the content they host links to is illegal, they don't generally know which content and shouldn't be required to proactively check (which would involve them in committing further offences of actually downloading the content)?
Because telling somebody how to commit a crime (which is at the most what TPB does) is not the same as aiding them to do it?
Because copyright infringement is a civil offense, not a crime, and "accessory" laws only apply to criminal offences? Because the reason why only being an accessory to criminal offenses is an offense is a good one, i.e. that a criminal offence is one that society as a whole has an interest in discouraging while a civil one is only to protect the interests of an individual/company, and preventing assisting somebody to commit an offence is too draconian if the offence does not fall into the former category?
That's real brilliant advice, but the problem is there are astonishingly few lawyers who will have the slightest clue how to answer this question.
I would suggest that a techie's best bet is to get as informed as possible before taking this to a lawyer, because it's really treading new ground.
That's very strange, because I've seen this kind of license several times in my experience as an IT consultant. Your license seems to differ a little from what I've seen before, so I suspect your goals were slightly different. The terms of your license allow for redistribution of modifications, which I don't think is something the original poster was looking for, and would have substantially complicated the licensing terms.
What the OP wants is a standard license grant, with the additional term "you are permitted to prepare derivitive works of the Software for your own internal use; this does not give you a license to distribute derivitive works or modifications to the Software." Seriously, this is simple stuff that any remotely competent lawyer should be able to handle and is likely to have seen hundreds of times before.
even at a major multi-B corporation with an awesome legal team this was new ground
Don't expect a corporation's legal team to have experience in anything that corporation has never done before. Look at independent copyright lawyers who have worked for many companies; they'll be much more widely experienced. Most major cities should have several firms of copyright lawyers who have plenty of experience in this field.
commitTransaction(); // Just serialize the fucker to a file. The idiots using this won't know the difference.
You've come across prevayler then?
that's efficient -a summary that refutes the inflammatory headline
I'm just sayin'
Nah. Efficient would be if the summary were "No."
Three reasons spring to mind:
* Discrimination against blind users
* Disregard for fair use in copyright law
* Dinosaur-like worldviews
* Dinosaur-like brains
Not to mention:
* Ability to count to four.
I would recommend you switch off OpenDNS' proxying then.
Switching it off doesn't work. When my dynamic DNS changes, it takes about 5 minutes for their server settings to update. By that time I usually have a google.com address in my local cache, which lasts for a further 10 minutes.
Wake me when you are not in fact allowed to leave your own country
The UK has legislation that prevents certain "undesirable"s from being permitted to leave the country, in apparent contravention of international treaties. (Sexual Offences Act 2003, s. 114)
If the plan is to see how many baddies go to "suspect" countries
What makes you think that's the plan? Info on travel to any other country is useful in catching benefit fraudsters and tax dodgers.
I know there is the 4.2.2.2-3 (4-5 too?), any others?
Hold on... that's the unreliable DNS server that my last ISP (3 Mobile Broadband) used to hand out in the link configuration info when I connected to them. Are you saying this is a public service, and they couldn't even be bothered to run their own unreliable DNS service?
Compare that to the data that OpenDNS can collect. They can see every hostname you resolve with their service. Not unlike application-level techniques used by various advertisers (web bugs, third-party cookies, redirections, HTTP "ping", etc.) to track your browsing, a list of every hostname you resolve can certainly compromise your privacy. Every site I visit, when I visited it, and an idea of how often I visited it is not "already available to anyone who wants it." Normally, to obtain this sort of information, an attacker would need to either break into this computer and install a program to log and transmit it, or they would need to conduct a man-in-the-middle type of attack against my ISP's network. There's a reason for that.
They also see every google search you run, too, because by default they proxy requests to google.com addresses. For your convenience, of course.
You can turn this feature off. http://www.opendns.com/support/article/244 is their response to questions about privacy.
For those that have OpenDNS running, you go to Settings, Advanced and then at the bottom there is the Network Shortcuts section. Uncheck the box "Enable OpenDNS Proxy".
I have the service and I am quite happy to trade a little privacy for the content filtering done by someone else, without requiring any software installs or any maintenance of IPTables or anything else on my part. It is passive safety, I know, but gives some peace of mind with a teenager who knows his way around computers. It blocks proxies too. If there is an alternative, I'd love to read about it.
I don't know about others, but I found that OpenDNS's tracking of the IP addresses I was coming from was somewhat flaky, even though I was running their dynamic IP update client. So, every so often I would end up getting proxied service for an hour or so. And, yes, I could easily tell the difference: using their proxy server is a lot slower than accessing google directly.
Don't know if it's a good enough justification by itself, but at least it's a logical explanation.
Breaking DNS in order to help people whose computers are set up to provide a poor search system when an unknown URL is added. No, that's not a good enough justification. If I attempt to access www.google.com, I should access www.google.com, not have my searches proxied through OpenDNS's servers. I've found google searches to be slower and less reliable when using OpenDNS, with the home page sometimes taking 10 seconds or so to load. Without OpenDNS, I get almost instant access to the home page, almost every time.
I have to go work in some CSS style sheets for a web site that links ISBN numbers to UPC codes. I hope they don't make me redundant.
They won't make you redundant. ISBN-13, that'll make you redundant.
Grokking object-oriented programming, and users' mindsets as well, I agree that it would be worth at least examining the concept of a "file-less OS", one that simply keeps a live OO system persistent.
Google "smalltalk-80". Download an implementation. Play with it. The concepts you're talking about are coming up to 30 years old.
Memory in all computers is mapped to address space. I get the idea that these guys are programmers who don't really understand how the hardware works.
I think you're missing the point. A standard OS has multiple processes, each of which has its own page tables, meaning that there are multiple address spaces that the processor switches between. In Phantom, all processes are being run in the same address space, a design decision which cuts down on switching overhead. Of course, in order to achieve this, you really need to provide some alternative mechanism for achieving what those multiple address spaces used to achieve, which is preventing one running program from modifying the working space of another; in this case, that's achieved by using a virtual machine rather than direct execution, and presumably the VM is designed such that such issues cannot occur.
Nobody needs files? How, exactly, can I retrieve a document then? This FA is damned short on details.
My guess is that somewhere or other in the system's memory image there's a data structure that contains pointers to documents that any application can add items to or get existing items from, something rather like PalmOS's persistent databases.
TFA didn't point to a single thing about it that would lead me to want it, except for the state saving on shutdown, and I doubt seriously that's going to work. If your data are in memory and not the hard drive when it quits, you'll lose your data. If data are all written instantly to the HD, your PC will be slower than molasses in january.
I'd like to see how it performs. My suspicion is it flushes transactions to disk periodically (say in 5 second batches), which would provide an appropriate level of data retention in case of power failure, and I suspect could maintain reasonable performance.
My main concern with this is how reliable the data structures are if power fails in the middle of a write.
If all computers were 64 bit and had at least 500-1000GB of non-volatile fast RAM, computers could do exactly what Grandma wanted. Such a computer would never really "boot" because all OS type programming would be installed by the manufacturer into memory, rather than a mechanical or solid state storage device. There would only be ONE fast main memory system where everything would stay as it as last written. A given piece of data would occupy a section of the address space until that space was released for other data. Data would seldom be moved around, but only memory pointers as move, unless two copies of the same data were needed.
Which is precisely the kind of system that this OS emulates: it uses a virtual machine that effectively pretends it's running on such a system, and keeps flushing memory changes out to disk so that it can pretend to have NVRAM when you switch it back on again. Of course, it'll be slower than the system you describe, but probably it will still be fast enough to do most things.
That's not really true is it. With C++ I can get a library that serializes my object, transmits to a file, or over a network, or to a cluster via MPI and then reconstructs it at another point or on another computer (e.g. Boost Serialisation, Boost MPI etc.). It's just isn't a language feature, it's a library feature. Because it's a library feature it can be harder to use than say Java. That's the trade off, flexibility and performance over ease of use.
Serialization in Java is a library feature, too. You can implement your own serialization code, if you want, and have it work just as well (or even better perhaps) than the standard implementation.
What _is_ a language feature of Java is reflection, which makes implementing serialization a lot easier. But there's no reason to be tied to a VM to get reflection; it's perfectly possible to have reflection in a native compiled language, you just need to stuff a load of metadata into your generated code.