This is a recent development - in April the European court of human rights decided that it was against EU law for Russia to deny Scientology religeon status - a judgement that applies to all EU member states including the UK and Germany (who have previously been quite outspoken against it).
Reading the details of the case, it seems the Russian situation was quite different from that in the UK or Germany, in that an unregistered church is legally prevented from doing several things that could be considered necessary to running a church (e.g., "renting premises for religious ceremonies and worship" or "receiving and disseminating religious literature") which can be performed legally in the UK and Germany without being a registered church. Because of this factor, refusal to register effectively constituted banning them from spreading their beliefs, which is (IMO) unacceptable unless done in full view of the world, with proper democratic process (rather than via beurocracy as was done here). Not considering them a religion in (say) the UK simply means that they do not acquire a number of taxation benefits that they might otherwise be entitled to. I don't think this would be considered a violation of their human rights.
I'd be very careful about what you read into the conclusions drawn in the "case law" section of the article you link to, BTW. Wikipedia has a strong scientology community, and in this case I believe they have rendered the article rather biased. As an example:
The decision of the Human Rights Court in the Moscow Church of Scientology case mandates that States cannot intervene arbitrarily into religious matters and are strictly prohibited from evaluating or reinterpreting the internal validity of religious beliefs genuinely held by individual believers or religious communities like Scientology.
This is introduced as an interpretation of the court's conclusion that "the autonomous existence of religious communities is indispensable for pluralism in a democratic society and is thus an issue at the very heart of the protection which Article 9 affords. The State's duty of neutrality and impartiality, as defined in the Court's case-law, is incompatible with any power on the State's part to assess the legitimacy of religious beliefs." While it is a valid interpretation of the last sentence, if taken out of context, I'd say the previous sentence (and sentences earlier in the paragraph) limit the scope of the "incompatibility" noted by the court to matters which relate to article 9.
Specifically, article 9 states "Everyone has the right [...] either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance."
Also worth considering is that the court did not consider any public health issues in making this decision (because the basis of the decision that the Russian government made against Scientology was not made on those grounds), but article 9's scope is "subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society [...] for the protection of public [...] health". This means that the courts decision is not incompatible with one where a country introduces a law preventing religious practices that are considered psychologically harmful, for instance.
Didn't start with phpbb, but unless you have something custom that you're familiar with hanging around it's probably the best place to start. I then added plugins to allow the creation of a status & assignee field to a topic, and ability to sort or filter by either (less than a day's work). Create a board for each client, set the main page to sort boards to show oldest open post assigned to logged in user at the top. What's nice about this system is that we get RSS feeds of open jobs, which is a feature I haven't seen anywhere else.
I recently did some research on Wikipedia on the Roman Empire. I ran into repeated use of the term "don the purple" when describing the accession of Roman emperors. Yet I NEVER found a description of what "the purple" really meant.
You can't have looked very hard. I just found the explanation within 2 minutes of starting to look; it's on the page Roman Emperor, which states:
later emperors were distinguished by wearing togae purpurae, purple togas -- hence the phrase "to don the purple" for the assumption of imperial dignity
Lets start from the beginning: I'm not a biologist or a biochemist, so the article 'mitochondrion' that he complains about shouldn't be too easy for me. Looking at the version of the article he complains about:
In cell biology, a mitochondrion (plural mitochondria) (from Greek or mitos, thread + or khondrion, granule) is a membrane-enclosed organelle, found in most eukaryotic cells.[1] Mitochondria are sometimes described as "cellular power plants," because they convert NADH and NADPH into energy in the form of ATP via the process of oxidative phosphorylation.
OK. So I don't know what an 'organelle' is, but it's helpfully hyperlinked to a page that explains it is to a cell what an organ is to a body (and then goes into a lot of detail that I hope is superflous, so I haven't read it). I happen to know what 'eukaryotic' means, but it too is linked to an article that starts with a brief explanation ("Animals, plants, fungi, and protists are eukaryotes"). The next sentence explains what they do. I don't know what 'phosphorylation' is, but it sounds like a chemical reaction involving phosphorus; it's again linked to an explanatory article.
The article continues pretty much in this vein. If I wanted to I could look up the precise details of what it means that it contains phospholipid bilayers, etc...
No, not really. I read this as "the guy we got to develop it was incredibly talented." Not least because this game (or at least the Spectrum port of it I used to have) stands out as a substantially above-average quality game for the period.
1. Release of "Star Wars" 2. Issue of statement that there will be 9 films; the one already released (hurriedly retitled as Episode 4), 3 prequels and 5 sequels. 3. Competent scriptwriters get hold of Lucas's synsposis for episodes 5-9, realise there's only enough good material for 2 films in them, and cut ruthlessly. Bang. No more episodes 7-9.
He needs to make *three* more, to complete the nine episodes he originally promised.
The problem with that is that the scriptwriters he got in to do episodes 5 & 6 for him realised he couldn't plot a series to save his life, and rolled the contents of the following 5 episodes down to just 2, in order to save them from being embarrasingly bad.
If I create a work (derivative or otherwise), and give it to you with the expectation that you will believe it is public domain, can I still claim that the work is copyrighted?
Yes, I believe so. You can't make something public domain without explicitly doing so, as I understand it. Of course, you would almost certainly be precluded from being able to claim any damages relating to unauthorised use prior to a cease & desist notice being served, but once that has been done and a reasonable time to react to it has elapsed, I see no reason you wouldn't be able to make such a claim.
No. In fact, some versions of Vista explicitly allow you to run them under both a virtual and non-virtual machine at the same time (i.e., they're not restricted to only one copy in memory at once). This unrestriction wasn't applied to all versions, which led some people reading the EULA to believe that MS were preventing you running those versions of vista under a virtual machine, but if you read the T&C the right way (which is how a court would read it -- standard terms like this are supposed to be read in the way most favourable to the consumer) you're allowed to, as long as you don't also use the same copy on a real machine.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I do have in-court litigation experience, and I wouldn't want to have to rely on that defence. It doesn't matter how you expect someone to accept the work, copyright is copyright. Duplications can only be made under license (which is pretty clearly not the case here) or fair use (which is probably a better defense, IMO).
It is an invalid claim, as no illegal document can be protected in such a manner
Why not? What about the nature of the document makes it impossible to own the copyright on it? Sure, there are aspects of it that have been copied from another source -- the basic form and layout of the ID that has been forged -- but the details are original: the name on it, the date of birth, the photograph, etc.
So that's the same as in most (all?) Linux distributions by default.
Not since some time around 2000 when all of the major distributions switched from DES to MD5 authentication. Some major Unix vendors do still have the issue, though.
Most of all, to me, I am astonished that almost everyone talks 'virtualisation', VM, QEMU, Xen. When it comes to filesystems, suddenly many seem to want to do everything on their own, on physical platters: partition, volumes/RAID, format. ZFS is a virtual filesystem, where none of such is physically needed.
Who's talking about physical platters? One of the layers that ZFS removes but which Linux has is a virtual addressing layer that separates the filesystem from being concerned with physical disks. This means that in Linux, *any* filesystem can be stored wherever you want, including on a virtual disk if you want.
Snapshots ought to be available easily, at any moment in time, without taking much space. ZFS does so, by only storing the changes and sharing the unmodified data. If you want to do so, you need an abstraction of the hardware. That is, crossing layers. Not to mention writeable snapshots.
I don't see how using a virtual block device that provides snapshot capabilities (e.g. LVM) is "crossing layers". It's using a feature of one of the layers.
In the end, everything disseminated through the internet is a number. Did you read the article I linked to? The important thing, from the point of view of copyright, is how that number is derived.
Or, put another way, show me a law that says a number can't be copyrighted. If there is one, copyright is meaningless because I could derive a number from any copyrighted work I wish and distribute it freely and then somebody receiving it could undo the translation to a number and reproduce the work in question, copyright free, because they're just applying a transformation to a copyright-free number. Does that make sense?
The legitimate software player application that has had its key revoked needs to have its key updated. Fair enough. What's to stop someone from doing a bit-by-bit comparison between the "old" and "new" files, and determining the new key from there?
Because the producers of players have been required by AACSLA to "fix" the "bug" that enabled the doom9 crowd to retrieve the keys, there are going to be larger changes to the code than just the key. Presumably, the key will be obfuscated in some new and exciting way that will take somebody skilled with a debugger all of a couple of days to crack.
You cannot copyright a number. Good luck with that wild goose chase!
Of course you can copyright a number. I, for instance, hold the copyright on 672bce014a8ade862701d036a03b24b9 (a number that is generated by taking a novel I wrote and feeding it through an MD5 calculation program -- the number is therefore a derivitive work of my novel). Of course, if somebody else finds a way of generating that number without needing something that I own the copyright to then I can't claim copyright over it: copyrights don't protect against independent recreation. This is pretty unlikely though, so I think I can claim exclusive rights to that number. (Don't worry, I'll license it under the GFDL if you like).
There are two important things to note:
- There was creative work involved in generating the number; it wasn't a purely automatic process - I can't prevent other people using the number if they have their own way of generating it, unless I can show that their way of generating it is in some way a derivitive work of either my original novel or the number itself.
For a better explanation of this than I can write, see this page.
That image is being sent without a Content-Type HTTP header. It's people like you that hold the web back.
Honestly, I think you should at least stop for a moment and consider who's likely to be responsible here. The image was served from homepage.mac.com, which is rather unlikely to be a server the poster has rights to administer. So, at least one of two things has occurred:
1. The server has been set up badly, and it's Apple's fault, not the poster's, or 2. The system running on the server relies on metadata uploaded with the file (e.g. the Content-type: header in HTTP file uploads) which the poster hasn't supplied (e.g. because he uses Internet Explorer which AFAIK doesn't supply that header).
So it's Apple and Microsoft that are holding the web back.
There is a rule in security: "Don't Prohibit what you can't Prevent" [1]. The same rule applies to laws.
Well, we'd better start installing that intrusive, all-locations monitoring system and instant police response (presumably via teleport) system then, because at the moment there is no crime we cannot prevent. All we can do is make it harder to do, and make it harder to get away with afterwards. Which is about what DRM systems achieve, too.
Who in their right mind is going to spend hours downloading a 40GB HD movie from bit torrent? Most pirates would be perfectly happy with a divx or xvid rip which doesn't even need a high definition source
It doesn't have to be 40GB. A 1280x720p 24fps 2 hour movie could be encoded to ~3.2GB without problematic compression artifacts using the same technology that encodes 720x480p 24fps[1] down to ~1.2GB.
[1]: Most NTSC DVDs are in this format; they're progressive because they come from film source which is 24fps progressive. They might be designed to play on an interlaced playback device, but the encoded content is progressive.
Huh? I'm not a hardware expert, but in order to play a cd or dvd, your drive has to read bits off of it and pass them to the program playing it. So, you mean that in some cases the drive can't tell what the bit is and in some cases it can? That doesn't make any sense to me.
The uncopiable CDs have sectors that are effectively not written correctly according to the standard. It's possible to sense when it isn't written correctly with a player, but a writer isn't capable of writing such incorrectly-written sectors.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a recent development - in April the European court of human rights decided that it was against EU law for Russia to deny Scientology religeon status - a judgement that applies to all EU member states including the UK and Germany (who have previously been quite outspoken against it).
Reading the details of the case, it seems the Russian situation was quite different from that in the UK or Germany, in that an unregistered church is legally prevented from doing several things that could be considered necessary to running a church (e.g., "renting premises for religious ceremonies and worship" or "receiving and disseminating religious literature") which can be performed legally in the UK and Germany without being a registered church. Because of this factor, refusal to register effectively constituted banning them from spreading their beliefs, which is (IMO) unacceptable unless done in full view of the world, with proper democratic process (rather than via beurocracy as was done here). Not considering them a religion in (say) the UK simply means that they do not acquire a number of taxation benefits that they might otherwise be entitled to. I don't think this would be considered a violation of their human rights.
I'd be very careful about what you read into the conclusions drawn in the "case law" section of the article you link to, BTW. Wikipedia has a strong scientology community, and in this case I believe they have rendered the article rather biased. As an example:
The decision of the Human Rights Court in the Moscow Church of Scientology case mandates that States cannot intervene arbitrarily into religious matters and are strictly prohibited from evaluating or reinterpreting the internal validity of religious beliefs genuinely held by individual believers or religious communities like Scientology.
This is introduced as an interpretation of the court's conclusion that "the autonomous existence of religious communities is indispensable for pluralism in a democratic society and is thus an issue at the very heart of the protection which Article 9 affords. The State's duty of neutrality and impartiality, as defined in the Court's case-law, is incompatible with any power on the State's part to assess the legitimacy of religious beliefs." While it is a valid interpretation of the last sentence, if taken out of context, I'd say the previous sentence (and sentences earlier in the paragraph) limit the scope of the "incompatibility" noted by the court to matters which relate to article 9.
Specifically, article 9 states "Everyone has the right [...] either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance."
Also worth considering is that the court did not consider any public health issues in making this decision (because the basis of the decision that the Russian government made against Scientology was not made on those grounds), but article 9's scope is "subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society [...] for the protection of public [...] health". This means that the courts decision is not incompatible with one where a country introduces a law preventing religious practices that are considered psychologically harmful, for instance.
Didn't start with phpbb, but unless you have something custom that you're familiar with hanging around it's probably the best place to start. I then added plugins to allow the creation of a status & assignee field to a topic, and ability to sort or filter by either (less than a day's work). Create a board for each client, set the main page to sort boards to show oldest open post assigned to logged in user at the top. What's nice about this system is that we get RSS feeds of open jobs, which is a feature I haven't seen anywhere else.
You can't have looked very hard. I just found the explanation within 2 minutes of starting to look; it's on the page Roman Emperor, which states:
OK. So I don't know what an 'organelle' is, but it's helpfully hyperlinked to a page that explains it is to a cell what an organ is to a body (and then goes into a lot of detail that I hope is superflous, so I haven't read it). I happen to know what 'eukaryotic' means, but it too is linked to an article that starts with a brief explanation ("Animals, plants, fungi, and protists are eukaryotes"). The next sentence explains what they do. I don't know what 'phosphorylation' is, but it sounds like a chemical reaction involving phosphorus; it's again linked to an explanatory article.
The article continues pretty much in this vein. If I wanted to I could look up the precise details of what it means that it contains phospholipid bilayers, etc...
Yes.
No, not really. I read this as "the guy we got to develop it was incredibly talented." Not least because this game (or at least the Spectrum port of it I used to have) stands out as a substantially above-average quality game for the period.
Yes, and when they give the formatting capacity people want (e.g., ability to embed fonts), then perhaps people will start using them.
I think you misunderstood my comment.
The basic chronology goes:
1. Release of "Star Wars"
2. Issue of statement that there will be 9 films; the one already released (hurriedly retitled as Episode 4), 3 prequels and 5 sequels.
3. Competent scriptwriters get hold of Lucas's synsposis for episodes 5-9, realise there's only enough good material for 2 films in them, and cut ruthlessly. Bang. No more episodes 7-9.
He needs to make *three* more, to complete the nine episodes he originally promised.
The problem with that is that the scriptwriters he got in to do episodes 5 & 6 for him realised he couldn't plot a series to save his life, and rolled the contents of the following 5 episodes down to just 2, in order to save them from being embarrasingly bad.
If I create a work (derivative or otherwise), and give it to you with the expectation that you will believe it is public domain, can I still claim that the work is copyrighted?
Yes, I believe so. You can't make something public domain without explicitly doing so, as I understand it. Of course, you would almost certainly be precluded from being able to claim any damages relating to unauthorised use prior to a cease & desist notice being served, but once that has been done and a reasonable time to react to it has elapsed, I see no reason you wouldn't be able to make such a claim.
Have they implemented 3D harware acceleration virtualization? I don't see a lot of point in virtualizing Vista if you can't have the 3D desktop stuff.
No. In fact, some versions of Vista explicitly allow you to run them under both a virtual and non-virtual machine at the same time (i.e., they're not restricted to only one copy in memory at once). This unrestriction wasn't applied to all versions, which led some people reading the EULA to believe that MS were preventing you running those versions of vista under a virtual machine, but if you read the T&C the right way (which is how a court would read it -- standard terms like this are supposed to be read in the way most favourable to the consumer) you're allowed to, as long as you don't also use the same copy on a real machine.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I do have in-court litigation experience, and I wouldn't want to have to rely on that defence. It doesn't matter how you expect someone to accept the work, copyright is copyright. Duplications can only be made under license (which is pretty clearly not the case here) or fair use (which is probably a better defense, IMO).
It is an invalid claim, as no illegal document can be protected in such a manner
Why not? What about the nature of the document makes it impossible to own the copyright on it? Sure, there are aspects of it that have been copied from another source -- the basic form and layout of the ID that has been forged -- but the details are original: the name on it, the date of birth, the photograph, etc.
So that's the same as in most (all?) Linux distributions by default.
Not since some time around 2000 when all of the major distributions switched from DES to MD5 authentication. Some major Unix vendors do still have the issue, though.
Most of all, to me, I am astonished that almost everyone talks 'virtualisation', VM, QEMU, Xen.
When it comes to filesystems, suddenly many seem to want to do everything on their own, on physical platters: partition, volumes/RAID, format. ZFS is a virtual filesystem, where none of such is physically needed.
Who's talking about physical platters? One of the layers that ZFS removes but which Linux has is a virtual addressing layer that separates the filesystem from being concerned with physical disks. This means that in Linux, *any* filesystem can be stored wherever you want, including on a virtual disk if you want.
Snapshots ought to be available easily, at any moment in time, without taking much space. ZFS does so, by only storing the changes and sharing the unmodified data. If you want to do so, you need an abstraction of the hardware. That is, crossing layers. Not to mention writeable snapshots.
I don't see how using a virtual block device that provides snapshot capabilities (e.g. LVM) is "crossing layers". It's using a feature of one of the layers.
In the end, everything disseminated through the internet is a number. Did you read the article I linked to? The important thing, from the point of view of copyright, is how that number is derived.
Or, put another way, show me a law that says a number can't be copyrighted. If there is one, copyright is meaningless because I could derive a number from any copyrighted work I wish and distribute it freely and then somebody receiving it could undo the translation to a number and reproduce the work in question, copyright free, because they're just applying a transformation to a copyright-free number. Does that make sense?
The legitimate software player application that has had its key revoked needs to have its key updated. Fair enough. What's to stop someone from doing a bit-by-bit comparison between the "old" and "new" files, and determining the new key from there?
Because the producers of players have been required by AACSLA to "fix" the "bug" that enabled the doom9 crowd to retrieve the keys, there are going to be larger changes to the code than just the key. Presumably, the key will be obfuscated in some new and exciting way that will take somebody skilled with a debugger all of a couple of days to crack.
You cannot copyright a number. Good luck with that wild goose chase!
Of course you can copyright a number. I, for instance, hold the copyright on 672bce014a8ade862701d036a03b24b9 (a number that is generated by taking a novel I wrote and feeding it through an MD5 calculation program -- the number is therefore a derivitive work of my novel). Of course, if somebody else finds a way of generating that number without needing something that I own the copyright to then I can't claim copyright over it: copyrights don't protect against independent recreation. This is pretty unlikely though, so I think I can claim exclusive rights to that number. (Don't worry, I'll license it under the GFDL if you like).
There are two important things to note:
- There was creative work involved in generating the number; it wasn't a purely automatic process
- I can't prevent other people using the number if they have their own way of generating it, unless I can show that their way of generating it is in some way a derivitive work of either my original novel or the number itself.
For a better explanation of this than I can write, see this page.
That image is being sent without a Content-Type HTTP header. It's people like you that hold the web back.
Honestly, I think you should at least stop for a moment and consider who's likely to be responsible here. The image was served from homepage.mac.com, which is rather unlikely to be a server the poster has rights to administer. So, at least one of two things has occurred:
1. The server has been set up badly, and it's Apple's fault, not the poster's, or
2. The system running on the server relies on metadata uploaded with the file (e.g. the Content-type: header in HTTP file uploads) which the poster hasn't supplied (e.g. because he uses Internet Explorer which AFAIK doesn't supply that header).
So it's Apple and Microsoft that are holding the web back.
at the moment there is no crime we cannot prevent
s/cannot/can/
Note to self: Learn to proofread any sentences more complex than this one before pressing submit.
There is a rule in security: "Don't Prohibit what you can't Prevent" [1]. The same rule applies to laws.
Well, we'd better start installing that intrusive, all-locations monitoring system and instant police response (presumably via teleport) system then, because at the moment there is no crime we cannot prevent. All we can do is make it harder to do, and make it harder to get away with afterwards. Which is about what DRM systems achieve, too.
If there was no DRM on the disc (which is what's being argued for here), that section wouldn't apply.
Who in their right mind is going to spend hours downloading a 40GB HD movie from bit torrent? Most pirates would be perfectly happy with a divx or xvid rip which doesn't even need a high definition source
It doesn't have to be 40GB. A 1280x720p 24fps 2 hour movie could be encoded to ~3.2GB without problematic compression artifacts using the same technology that encodes 720x480p 24fps[1] down to ~1.2GB.
[1]: Most NTSC DVDs are in this format; they're progressive because they come from film source which is 24fps progressive. They might be designed to play on an interlaced playback device, but the encoded content is progressive.
Huh? I'm not a hardware expert, but in order to play a cd or dvd, your drive has to read bits off of it and pass them to the program playing it. So, you mean that in some cases the drive can't tell what the bit is and in some cases it can? That doesn't make any sense to me.
The uncopiable CDs have sectors that are effectively not written correctly according to the standard. It's possible to sense when it isn't written correctly with a player, but a writer isn't capable of writing such incorrectly-written sectors.