So, what you are saying is that you, in effect, have purchased a license to the music? Correct?
No, what he's saying is that once you have a copy, you do not need a license to listen to the music. Licenses are only necessary to copy or to publically perform (or a few other activities restricted by copyright), but not to listen.
I had to go through a few hoops to return what the store claimed was "non-returnable".
Interestingly, CDs (and other digital media) are exempt from the returnability requirements of a few laws (e.g. the Distance Selling Regulations, which require you to be able to return within 28 days for a full refund just about anything you buy online or via mail order) because of the possibility that you can copy them. Clearly this exclusion should not be extended to DRM-laden discs.
Hmmm... I thought I knew of a more recent case where making a RAM copy of software in contravention of the wishes of the vendor turned out to be an offence, but it was actually a British case:
(Which ruled the "Messiah 2" PS2 modchip illegal because it created and modified a copy of programs it was used to run in RAM as part of the loading process -- which would appear to be specifically protected under the legislation you cite)
Except I already had the right to install and use the software, when I bought a copy of the program. Copyright law gives me that right. So what is Microsoft's "consideration"?
Do you? That's a more difficult question. Installing it involves making another copy, so is an act that's prohibited by copyright law. There *might* be an implicit term in the contract of sale that grants that right, but then again there might not. This is a grey area.
Do you know why that is? It is because law is too complex for a non-expert to understand.
Actually, it's because nobody makes the effort to understand. I'm not a lawyer, nor a law student, nor anything else along those lines. I live with a first-year law student is as far as it goes. But I understand the difference here. I read most of these posts and think 'god, why don't they just *read* *the* *goddamn* *article* before spouting off some bullshit about EULAs which aren't even approximately related to this decision'?
It doesn't take more than ten minutes of study to gain a better understanding of contract law than most of the posters here have shown. It might not be perfect, I don't know, but Wikipedia has an informative article that will take you well beyond the level of understanding that 99% of the posters above this point have shown. It's more in-depth than necessary, but would still only take about half an hour to read.
To know that the decision under discussion here has no bearing on contract law only takes the briefest examination of it. The prosecution was brought under a statute (described in TFA) about unauthorised access to computer systems. The decision was that the accesses were effectively authorised due to lack of any way of enforcing the requirements. Why would this have *any* bearing on contracts? Beats me, but a lot of slashdotters so missed the point that I don't think they read beyond the first couple of sentences. Of the summary, not the article. I mean, who would think of reading the article?
Modern contracts doctrine has done away with many instances of consideration, one of the few places where it is required is to form binding (i.e. non-revocable) option contracts. There are plenty of places where "consideration" isn't really needed.... [Unilateral contracts, promissory estoppel, the UCC....]
I'm not sure about US contract law, but at least here in the UK:
* A unilateral contract does require consideration. Such contracts are usually phrased "if somebody does something, I'll do something else", at which point doing "something" is the consideration. (This is what, in my view, makes Jack Thompson's Modest Proposal a contract; somebody actually went to the effort to do what he asked, before he rescinded his offer) * Promissary Estoppel isn't considered a contract; it is a way of negating the effects of a contract
Obviously the UCC doesn't apply here, but when I read it a few years ago I don't recall thinking it would change the nature of contracts.
Sorry, I don't think you're right here. An EULA is a contract, and it's a fairly clear one. The consideration given by the vendor is the license to use their software. In exchange for this consideration you may give up certain rights (e.g. any warranties that may legally be disclaimed, the right to use the software in certain ways that don't involve copying and therefore aren't restricted by a copyright license, etc.). E.g., I'm currently reading the EULA from a Microsoft program I downloaded recently. Here's the relevant parts:
* Grant of license to install & use on a single computer (i.e., MS's consideration) * Various restrictions on the license grant, all of which are fairly standard (e.g., if you transfer the license you have to destroy existing copies, etc.) * You agree not to reverse engineer the program (unless your jurisdiction has a law specifically allowing you to do so) * You agree to let MS collect anonymised data on you. * You agree to comply with US export restrictions on the software * Warranties are limited and disclaimed as far as MS can get away with
There's also a variety of crap which repeatedly tells you that all you're getting is a license to use the software, you haven't actually bought any rights beyond that, and that MS can cancel the license if you break the agreement.
Sure sounds like a contract to me. Note that the contract and the license are two separate entities; the contract gives you the license under conditions you must agree to, and the license can be taken away from you if you break those conditions. MS may also be able to sue you for damages if you break them, although depending on your legal system they may have to show that they actually lost something because of your actions. (This is why NDAs are almost useless here in the UK; it's incredibly hard to show that somebody breaking one cost you anything)
I'm not a lawyer, don't take any of this as gospel truth or anything, I just know a bit about contracts.
Anonymous P2P services *cannot* support the kind of volumes that bittorrent does, due to the inherent technical problems that mean connections need to be proxied, thus doubling the amount of data transfer that must take place. I recall an article last year stating that over half of internet traffic is now bittorrent transfers.
Please don't post prices formatted like this. It forces you to go back and reinterpret the sentence when you get to the full specification of the currency, which can be annoying if you aren't used to it. CAD 40/month, 40 CAD/month, CAD $40/month, CA$40/month, or at a push $40 CAD/month are all preferable, because they don't have this issue.
Here in the UK, what companies sell as (eg) a 512Kbps connection is actually (from memory) a 572Kbps connection, with the extra few Kbps to account for that overhead.
My understanding is that the data transfer equipment reports speed including error correction code (at an overhead of 1 bit per byte, so 512 => 576, 1024 => 1152 and so on), whereas the ISPs generally quote the speed you get for the actual data transfer without this overhead.
TCP/IP/PPP overhead is still included within your 512Kbps; on a 1024Kbit line (reported as 1152 by my router) the fastest sustained transfer I've every achieved was 122 Kbytes/sec, or around 5% lower than the quoted value, which seems about right to me.
~Jules, who is still waiting for 8Mbit broadband, despite the fact that Bulldog said his exchange would be LLUd and ready for it on April 1, which they changed to June 1 by sending a letter at the start of May saying it wouldn't go ahead as planned. (Guess I'll get the next letter in a couple of weeks.)
think really hard about why you want to spend your talent managing memory instead of doing things that'll really make your application shine.
I've been doing a large project in garbage-collected C++ lately. It's an option that few people consider, because it isn't well supported by the available C++ class libraries, but a little work (stuff like garbage-collected smart pointers, and things like that) can make a really nice development environment that frees you from worrying about memory management, but allows you to get underneath it and specify memory management details explicitly when you really need to. I think it's the best of both worlds.
I don't see why everyone's having such trouble with the license. It's a pretty damned reasonable one. Basically it says:
* You can't copy it or remove the license text from it * Won't hold MS responsible for inaccuracies * It terminates if somebody buys you ("you" presumably referring to a company here) * Any feedback you give to MS becomes their IP to do with as they want
If I didn't find Gnome software so damned difficult to use, I'd probably be a little more interested. But they don't even seem to be able to make an open-file dialog box that's intuitive and easy to use, let alone a complex application.
My favorite example is Windows Media Player. I still have to figure out what to do just to play a CD with WMP. (And what's with the disappearing window?)
Err... insert CD, wait for the dialog box to appear, click on "Play this CD in Windows Media Player", click OK. Doesn't seem hard to me.
The disappearing window bugs the hell out of me, though. As does all the crap it does. I started a media player... why would I want it to load a web browser in it?
It's so annoying that I usually use media player classic for everything other than playing DRM'd files.
Using it for anything other than personal experimentation in order to try to understand the patented methods would be a patent violation. Although you could argue that not understanding how it worked you weren't aware there was a patent violation, and therefore cannot be held liable, the accessibility of the source code might work against you here; it could be held in a court that as information about how the product worked was available it was your responsibility to check that it didn't infringe patents. Also, the act of compiling it may or may not be interpreted as manufacturing, which is also prohibited I believe.
But this does happen. Do you use mplayer? That's distributed by this method, despite containing a large number of codecs that are patented in the US.
Go back and read the article again. Yes, mathematical methods are not patentable "to the extent that [the method] relates to [mathematical methods] as such". So, a patent granted on such a method couldn't prevent somebody else from performing the same mathematical process. But include it in a broader application and you may be onto a winner. If I were to invite a way of factorizing prime numbers in linear time, for example, I wouldn't be able to patent it. I might be able to patent its inclusion in a device that automatically intercepts and decrypts communications transmitted using RSA encryption, though.
I think you misunderstood the point of mine; I didn't make it clear. What I meant to say was more like this: user interest in a project is critical because users are often developers and so once you get the users hooked it becomes easy to get developers on board.
if you plot knowledge gained (vertical axis) against time taken (horizontal axis), then a steep learning curve is the best to have as you learn a lot quickly...
A shallow learning curve usually means that there wasn't that much to learn in the first place, or that the environment allows you to more easily defer learning it until you really need it. People prefer not to have to learn so much, so a shallow learning curve is preferable.
Is that the one that was written by the author of elm, and so spent a significant proportion of that time discussing elm? And UUCP.
It was good back in the day, but I'd say that a lot of what it discusses is out of date by now. I've heard good things about Teach Yourself Linux, though.
Users do not do that for open source projects. Having been involved in a few projects myself, I can tell you what the *real* lifeblood of a project is: developer interest.
You do realise that most open source developers are also users of the projects they work on, don't you?
I for one only have one problem with cvs, and its specific to sourceforge. Specifically its pure bullshit that their server for any one project is down 90% of the time.
???
I'm not a *regular* sourceforge CVS user, but I have participated in several projects that use sf's CVS service, and probably check out a project from them about 5 or 6 times per year on average. And I've *never* found it down. Are you saying I've been extremely lucky, or is this something that has only been happening in the last couple of months, or what?
in both Britain and the US, laws phrased the way this is are usually construed such that [emphasis mine]
I don't care. I want to be sure that the law will be interpreted that way. I want it to be totally unambiguous. That way, there's no chance of creeping scope in the case law.
Slashdot Mirror
But the players are lawyers. I'd be playing scissors.
So, what you are saying is that you, in effect, have purchased a license to the music? Correct?
No, what he's saying is that once you have a copy, you do not need a license to listen to the music. Licenses are only necessary to copy or to publically perform (or a few other activities restricted by copyright), but not to listen.
I had to go through a few hoops to return what the store claimed was "non-returnable".
Interestingly, CDs (and other digital media) are exempt from the returnability requirements of a few laws (e.g. the Distance Selling Regulations, which require you to be able to return within 28 days for a full refund just about anything you buy online or via mail order) because of the possibility that you can copy them. Clearly this exclusion should not be extended to DRM-laden discs.
Hmmm... I thought I knew of a more recent case where making a RAM copy of software in contravention of the wishes of the vendor turned out to be an offence, but it was actually a British case:
/ j2680/sony-v-ball.htm
http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/judgmentsfiles
(Which ruled the "Messiah 2" PS2 modchip illegal because it created and modified a copy of programs it was used to run in RAM as part of the loading process -- which would appear to be specifically protected under the legislation you cite)
Except I already had the right to install and use the software, when I bought a copy of the program. Copyright law gives me that right. So what is Microsoft's "consideration"?
Do you? That's a more difficult question. Installing it involves making another copy, so is an act that's prohibited by copyright law. There *might* be an implicit term in the contract of sale that grants that right, but then again there might not. This is a grey area.
Do you know why that is? It is because law is too complex for a non-expert to understand.
Actually, it's because nobody makes the effort to understand. I'm not a lawyer, nor a law student, nor anything else along those lines. I live with a first-year law student is as far as it goes. But I understand the difference here. I read most of these posts and think 'god, why don't they just *read* *the* *goddamn* *article* before spouting off some bullshit about EULAs which aren't even approximately related to this decision'?
It doesn't take more than ten minutes of study to gain a better understanding of contract law than most of the posters here have shown. It might not be perfect, I don't know, but Wikipedia has an informative article that will take you well beyond the level of understanding that 99% of the posters above this point have shown. It's more in-depth than necessary, but would still only take about half an hour to read.
To know that the decision under discussion here has no bearing on contract law only takes the briefest examination of it. The prosecution was brought under a statute (described in TFA) about unauthorised access to computer systems. The decision was that the accesses were effectively authorised due to lack of any way of enforcing the requirements. Why would this have *any* bearing on contracts? Beats me, but a lot of slashdotters so missed the point that I don't think they read beyond the first couple of sentences. Of the summary, not the article. I mean, who would think of reading the article?
Err.. with proportional force (e.g., by dragging them)?
Modern contracts doctrine has done away with many instances of consideration, one of the few places where it is required is to form binding (i.e. non-revocable) option contracts. There are plenty of places where "consideration" isn't really needed.... [Unilateral contracts, promissory estoppel, the UCC....]
I'm not sure about US contract law, but at least here in the UK:
* A unilateral contract does require consideration. Such contracts are usually phrased "if somebody does something, I'll do something else", at which point doing "something" is the consideration. (This is what, in my view, makes Jack Thompson's Modest Proposal a contract; somebody actually went to the effort to do what he asked, before he rescinded his offer)
* Promissary Estoppel isn't considered a contract; it is a way of negating the effects of a contract
Obviously the UCC doesn't apply here, but when I read it a few years ago I don't recall thinking it would change the nature of contracts.
Sorry, I don't think you're right here. An EULA is a contract, and it's a fairly clear one. The consideration given by the vendor is the license to use their software. In exchange for this consideration you may give up certain rights (e.g. any warranties that may legally be disclaimed, the right to use the software in certain ways that don't involve copying and therefore aren't restricted by a copyright license, etc.). E.g., I'm currently reading the EULA from a Microsoft program I downloaded recently. Here's the relevant parts:
* Grant of license to install & use on a single computer (i.e., MS's consideration)
* Various restrictions on the license grant, all of which are fairly standard (e.g., if you transfer the license you have to destroy existing copies, etc.)
* You agree not to reverse engineer the program (unless your jurisdiction has a law specifically allowing you to do so)
* You agree to let MS collect anonymised data on you.
* You agree to comply with US export restrictions on the software
* Warranties are limited and disclaimed as far as MS can get away with
There's also a variety of crap which repeatedly tells you that all you're getting is a license to use the software, you haven't actually bought any rights beyond that, and that MS can cancel the license if you break the agreement.
Sure sounds like a contract to me. Note that the contract and the license are two separate entities; the contract gives you the license under conditions you must agree to, and the license can be taken away from you if you break those conditions. MS may also be able to sue you for damages if you break them, although depending on your legal system they may have to show that they actually lost something because of your actions. (This is why NDAs are almost useless here in the UK; it's incredibly hard to show that somebody breaking one cost you anything)
I'm not a lawyer, don't take any of this as gospel truth or anything, I just know a bit about contracts.
I'm just not quite sure why everyone's block-capitalising Tor.
Anonymous P2P services *cannot* support the kind of volumes that bittorrent does, due to the inherent technical problems that mean connections need to be proxied, thus doubling the amount of data transfer that must take place. I recall an article last year stating that over half of internet traffic is now bittorrent transfers.
On a 3 Mbps DSL line ($40/month CAD)
Please don't post prices formatted like this. It forces you to go back and reinterpret the sentence when you get to the full specification of the currency, which can be annoying if you aren't used to it. CAD 40/month, 40 CAD/month, CAD $40/month, CA$40/month, or at a push $40 CAD/month are all preferable, because they don't have this issue.
Thanks.
Here in the UK, what companies sell as (eg) a 512Kbps connection is actually (from memory) a 572Kbps connection, with the extra few Kbps to account for that overhead.
My understanding is that the data transfer equipment reports speed including error correction code (at an overhead of 1 bit per byte, so 512 => 576, 1024 => 1152 and so on), whereas the ISPs generally quote the speed you get for the actual data transfer without this overhead.
TCP/IP/PPP overhead is still included within your 512Kbps; on a 1024Kbit line (reported as 1152 by my router) the fastest sustained transfer I've every achieved was 122 Kbytes/sec, or around 5% lower than the quoted value, which seems about right to me.
~Jules, who is still waiting for 8Mbit broadband, despite the fact that Bulldog said his exchange would be LLUd and ready for it on April 1, which they changed to June 1 by sending a letter at the start of May saying it wouldn't go ahead as planned. (Guess I'll get the next letter in a couple of weeks.)
think really hard about why you want to spend your talent managing memory instead of doing things that'll really make your application shine.
I've been doing a large project in garbage-collected C++ lately. It's an option that few people consider, because it isn't well supported by the available C++ class libraries, but a little work (stuff like garbage-collected smart pointers, and things like that) can make a really nice development environment that frees you from worrying about memory management, but allows you to get underneath it and specify memory management details explicitly when you really need to. I think it's the best of both worlds.
Boehm-Demers-Weiser GC - all you'll need to make C++ useful.
I don't see why everyone's having such trouble with the license. It's a pretty damned reasonable one. Basically it says:
* You can't copy it or remove the license text from it
* Won't hold MS responsible for inaccuracies
* It terminates if somebody buys you ("you" presumably referring to a company here)
* Any feedback you give to MS becomes their IP to do with as they want
I don't see the issue.
If I didn't find Gnome software so damned difficult to use, I'd probably be a little more interested. But they don't even seem to be able to make an open-file dialog box that's intuitive and easy to use, let alone a complex application.
My favorite example is Windows Media Player. I still have to figure out what to do just to play a CD with WMP. (And what's with the disappearing window?)
Err... insert CD, wait for the dialog box to appear, click on "Play this CD in Windows Media Player", click OK. Doesn't seem hard to me.
The disappearing window bugs the hell out of me, though. As does all the crap it does. I started a media player... why would I want it to load a web browser in it?
It's so annoying that I usually use media player classic for everything other than playing DRM'd files.
Using it for anything other than personal experimentation in order to try to understand the patented methods would be a patent violation. Although you could argue that not understanding how it worked you weren't aware there was a patent violation, and therefore cannot be held liable, the accessibility of the source code might work against you here; it could be held in a court that as information about how the product worked was available it was your responsibility to check that it didn't infringe patents. Also, the act of compiling it may or may not be interpreted as manufacturing, which is also prohibited I believe.
But this does happen. Do you use mplayer? That's distributed by this method, despite containing a large number of codecs that are patented in the US.
Go back and read the article again. Yes, mathematical methods are not patentable "to the extent that [the method] relates to [mathematical methods] as such". So, a patent granted on such a method couldn't prevent somebody else from performing the same mathematical process. But include it in a broader application and you may be onto a winner. If I were to invite a way of factorizing prime numbers in linear time, for example, I wouldn't be able to patent it. I might be able to patent its inclusion in a device that automatically intercepts and decrypts communications transmitted using RSA encryption, though.
I think you misunderstood the point of mine; I didn't make it clear. What I meant to say was more like this: user interest in a project is critical because users are often developers and so once you get the users hooked it becomes easy to get developers on board.
if you plot knowledge gained (vertical axis) against time taken (horizontal axis), then a steep learning curve is the best to have as you learn a lot quickly...
A shallow learning curve usually means that there wasn't that much to learn in the first place, or that the environment allows you to more easily defer learning it until you really need it. People prefer not to have to learn so much, so a shallow learning curve is preferable.
Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours (first edition)
Is that the one that was written by the author of elm, and so spent a significant proportion of that time discussing elm? And UUCP.
It was good back in the day, but I'd say that a lot of what it discusses is out of date by now. I've heard good things about Teach Yourself Linux, though.
Users do not do that for open source projects. Having been involved in a few projects myself, I can tell you what the *real* lifeblood of a project is: developer interest.
You do realise that most open source developers are also users of the projects they work on, don't you?
I for one only have one problem with cvs, and its specific to sourceforge. Specifically its pure bullshit that their server for any one project is down 90% of the time.
???
I'm not a *regular* sourceforge CVS user, but I have participated in several projects that use sf's CVS service, and probably check out a project from them about 5 or 6 times per year on average. And I've *never* found it down. Are you saying I've been extremely lucky, or is this something that has only been happening in the last couple of months, or what?
in both Britain and the US, laws phrased the way this is are usually construed such that [emphasis mine]
I don't care. I want to be sure that the law will be interpreted that way. I want it to be totally unambiguous. That way, there's no chance of creeping scope in the case law.