Would it be libel to say "Dr. Ann De Wees Allen has been raping and killing children for the last 20 years"?
No, that would be slander. Libel would involve publishing the comment, say on a popular geek news web site, to people who you do not know directly, like me.
Unless of course you had good reason to believe the statement to be true.
She says that using her name would be "illegal". That implies criminal. Isn't trademark infringement a civil matter?
According to dictionary.com, the distinction between "illegal" and "criminal" is that something is illegal if it is in violation of any statute, but criminal if it is in violation of a penal statute.
So, no, "illegal" does not imply "criminal": criminal is a strict subset of illegal.
Unfortunately, in the US we don't tend to protect terms very much - this is an area where we don't get the nuances of wanting political or personal expression to be relatively unconstrained versus the desire to ensure honesty in certain areas worked out correctly. Chances are somebody made up a board (maybe her?) and declared her to be a doctor - I suspect that using the title of doctor in that way is legal in most states
According to her site, she's based in DC, and judging by wikipedia's article on naturopathy it is considered a protected profession there, so I assume she has followed the full process to get that title and isn't violating state law.
So what would it take to actually build an HDCP re-recording device? Does it require custom silicon from a fab, or can it be built using a FPGA and a bread board?
Somewhere between the two. An FPGA should be able to manage it, but all the FPGAs that are big & fast enough are only available in surface-mount packages that are beyond the capability of most amateurs to solder, so you'll probably need to get a professionally-produced PCB.
a) DHCP is been defeated using hardware removers for a long time already
Yes, but until now buying one is a bit of a gamble because its key could be revoked at any time, turning it into an expensive doorstop. Now, you could design one to produce a new key every time you power it on.
All that has to be done is for a company to make a module with a flashable keyspace. Then the end-user can add the master key to the device themselves, and nobody gets in trouble (unless they start sharing the content).
Nope, sorry, still a device designed to enable breaking "effective" technological measures, whether it requires end-user modification or not.
No, the *real* answer is to market *two* devices, one of which enables a perfectly legal non-copyright-violating use (i.e. an HDMI->DVI adapter that converts standard monitors to HDCP-enabled ones) and one of which doesn't circumvent the DRM (i.e. a DVI video capture board). Plug one into the other and you have an apparently legal means of capturing encrypted video streams.
Problem is, I assume HDCP is patented. You won't see such devices being mass marketed because they would necessarily infringe on those patents. So maybe another approach is required: just a device with an HDMI port, an ethernet port, an FPGA and a memory card reader to provide the design for the FPGA. Legitimate use: can be programmed to display stuff on your TV. Memory card distributed with it has a simple photo-viewing application. Alternative memory card you can download from somewhere apparently unconnected to the manufacturer has the HDCP-cracking application.
I wonder if it's possible to make a hardware HDCP to DVI converter without having to make a custom ASIC. That way there wouldn't be the need to depend on a lone (probably chinese) supplier.
(actually, that board's way over the top... the FPGA on it is higher spec than I imagine would be required, there'll be no need for the expansion RAM as most FPGAs these days have more than enough internal RAM for this kind of thing, and it won't need the expandability designed onto that board, but you get my point: the hardware you'll need already exists)
The design to load onto the FPGA should be relatively easy for anyone skilled in both crypto and digital electronic design. I'd expect to see one released within the next couple of weeks, judging by how many people I've seen complaining about not being able to use their non-HDCP-compatible monitors to watch stuff.
Does anybody know how she got the prefix of "Dr."?
According to the bio on her web site, she's a "Board Certified Doctor of Naturopathy". This appears to mean she has completed a level of education equivalent to a doctorate in most other fields, although she doesn't state where she received the qualification.
But the problem for them is that a trademark is not designed to give them property rights, but designed to prevent the public from being mislead about the origins of a product
Looking at the list of sites that have apparently been sent notices of infringement, it is worth noting that this is precisely what they were doing. These sites were basically all people who were selling supposed fitness-improving supplements (e.g. protein drinks, that kind of stuff), one of which She Who Must Not Be Named apparently invented, and seemed to be using her name to indicate that she was somehow involved with their businesses when (it appears) she wasn't.
For instance, this site appears to sell a drink made with her formulation. However, according to her own site she has not licensed that formulation to them, and nor are they in any way associated with her.
It seems to me that this is an entirely valid use of trademark law. Yes, some of the language on her site is a little strong, but it seems (at least as long as she isn't outright lying about this) that the people receiving the takedown notices are deserving of them.
There's a concept called "non-enabling prior art". Sure, science fiction stories have been written describing time travel, cold fusion, AI, teleportation, etc. Go build them - after all, you've got that "prior art". Wait, they don't fully describe everything sufficient to enable someone skilled in the art to build those things?
I'm pretty sure I could build this from a fictional description of it, and could have done any time in the last 10 years. I'm not even particularly skilled in the art of digital video.
They also kept asking me how I could come up with working algorithms to programming assignments on my own (without copying from something). It was as if actually being able to program was wizardry to them. I wonder why.......
Probably because it is to most people. Something I've noticed in coming up to 15 years in this industry is that only about 20% of the people in it appear to be able to come up with their own solutions; everyone else just copies & pastes code then plays with it until it works.
What constitutes a user, though? I mean, I'm guessing if Twitter ran on Oracle they wouldn't be expecting them to pay for 100 million users.
I'm kind-of assuming that a user is anyone who connects to the service directly. Plus perhaps the person who authorizes new releases of the software that uses it. I'd say it wouldn't be hard in this circumstance to work with just 2 or 3 such users.
I would like to know where you are buying your Oracle licenses 'cause I'm paying something like £20000 anually for my Enterprise license (for a quad core, single socket server)
I've never bought an Oracle product, but correct me if this isn't a valid way of purchasing said software?
Either way, my point still stands. £20,000 is a lot less than the cost of retraining your entire development team to a new database system, so if Oracle is what you're familiar with, Oracle is what you should be using. The costs virtually disappear when compared with staff costs.
The Oracle licenses (and support/consulting) aren't exactly cheap
Yes, you're right. The £1600 for Oracle Webcenter, plus presumably £650 for Oracle Enterprise Database Server and around £600 per annum for the support contracts are really going to be problems here. Hell, we can probably double those figures because they'll need a development server as well.
Capita might be ripping off the good people of Birmingham
Crapita never do anything without ripping off good people. Here in Coventry, they've installed voice stress analysis software to attempt to detect people lying when they claim benefits... of course the fact that VSA is essentially snake oil hasn't stopped them spending millions on the piece of software this paper was written about. Well worth reading if you want to know the kind of junk our councils spend our hard earned cash on.
This one time we got a DMCA takedown notice from a software vendor in Australia for a site run by a department of a local university, for running an unlicensed copy of their software.
Erm - correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a DMCA notice applies in this situation even if they are unlicensed... surely a DMCA notice only requires that they cease *distribution* not *use*?
Wow, I want these new cellphone chips in notebooks and network attached devices! They are far ahead of the watt sucking crap from Intel and AMD.
There are a number of cheap chinese manufacturers producing netbooks with this kind of processor. I have one based on a (2-generations-old) ARM926, which has a max power rating of about 0.5mW. Just look for cheap ARM netbooks on ebay, you'll find loads.
Please name one boycott / trade restriction that has worked. [...] And, of course, our oil boycott of Japan in the early 1940's lead directly to Pearl Harbor
Which led directly to the US/Japanese conflict during WWII, which led directly to a change of regime in Japan that eliminated and undid the imperialist/expansionist behaviour that had been the original reason for that embargo. You just killed your own thesis with a counterexample.
While there is piracy on the consoles it isn't like the pc where most of the people playing the games aren't paying for them.
Yes. But until now, piracy on consoles has required hardware modifications, or at least unauthorized firmware updates that have a non-zero chance of bricking your console. This is now changing. IUIC, this hack allows you to run pirate games without modifying your console, just by hooking an external device (that large numbers of people already have) up to its USB port.
That is to say, unlike previous hacks, this is a no-risk, no-cost hack that doesn't invalidate your warranty. Uptake is going to be *much* higher.
Yes it baffles me that you can buy into a situation like that will full prior knowledge and still be allowed to even raise an action in court. In most situations if you knowingly put yourself in a position of harm in order to benefit through legal action (for instance, throwing yourself in front of a car so you can sue the insurance company) and were stupid enough to admit it, you'd be looking at prison time.
Wrong metaphor. Suing for copyright infringement isn't about compensation for harm, it's about enforcing a property right. The equivalent "real" transaction is buying a house with a sitting tenant, and then expecting them to pay rent even if they haven't been paying the previous owner.
Slashdot Mirror
Would it be libel to say "Dr. Ann De Wees Allen has been raping and killing children for the last 20 years"?
No, that would be slander. Libel would involve publishing the comment, say on a popular geek news web site, to people who you do not know directly, like me.
Unless of course you had good reason to believe the statement to be true.
She says that using her name would be "illegal". That implies criminal. Isn't trademark infringement a civil matter?
According to dictionary.com, the distinction between "illegal" and "criminal" is that something is illegal if it is in violation of any statute, but criminal if it is in violation of a penal statute.
So, no, "illegal" does not imply "criminal": criminal is a strict subset of illegal.
Unfortunately, in the US we don't tend to protect terms very much - this is an area where we don't get the nuances of wanting political or personal expression to be relatively unconstrained versus the desire to ensure honesty in certain areas worked out correctly. Chances are somebody made up a board (maybe her?) and declared her to be a doctor - I suspect that using the title of doctor in that way is legal in most states
According to her site, she's based in DC, and judging by wikipedia's article on naturopathy it is considered a protected profession there, so I assume she has followed the full process to get that title and isn't violating state law.
So what would it take to actually build an HDCP re-recording device? Does it require custom silicon from a fab, or can it be built using a FPGA and a bread board?
Somewhere between the two. An FPGA should be able to manage it, but all the FPGAs that are big & fast enough are only available in surface-mount packages that are beyond the capability of most amateurs to solder, so you'll probably need to get a professionally-produced PCB.
a) DHCP is been defeated using hardware removers for a long time already
Yes, but until now buying one is a bit of a gamble because its key could be revoked at any time, turning it into an expensive doorstop. Now, you could design one to produce a new key every time you power it on.
All that has to be done is for a company to make a module with a flashable keyspace. Then the end-user can add the master key to the device themselves, and nobody gets in trouble (unless they start sharing the content).
Nope, sorry, still a device designed to enable breaking "effective" technological measures, whether it requires end-user modification or not.
No, the *real* answer is to market *two* devices, one of which enables a perfectly legal non-copyright-violating use (i.e. an HDMI->DVI adapter that converts standard monitors to HDCP-enabled ones) and one of which doesn't circumvent the DRM (i.e. a DVI video capture board). Plug one into the other and you have an apparently legal means of capturing encrypted video streams.
Problem is, I assume HDCP is patented. You won't see such devices being mass marketed because they would necessarily infringe on those patents. So maybe another approach is required: just a device with an HDMI port, an ethernet port, an FPGA and a memory card reader to provide the design for the FPGA. Legitimate use: can be programmed to display stuff on your TV. Memory card distributed with it has a simple photo-viewing application. Alternative memory card you can download from somewhere apparently unconnected to the manufacturer has the HDCP-cracking application.
I wonder if it's possible to make a hardware HDCP to DVI converter without having to make a custom ASIC. That way there wouldn't be the need to depend on a lone (probably chinese) supplier.
Hardware should be something like this: http://www.thisnext.com/item/C582EA3E/E0650FCC/2-Channel-Dual-Link-DVI-FPGA
(actually, that board's way over the top... the FPGA on it is higher spec than I imagine would be required, there'll be no need for the expansion RAM as most FPGAs these days have more than enough internal RAM for this kind of thing, and it won't need the expandability designed onto that board, but you get my point: the hardware you'll need already exists)
The design to load onto the FPGA should be relatively easy for anyone skilled in both crypto and digital electronic design. I'd expect to see one released within the next couple of weeks, judging by how many people I've seen complaining about not being able to use their non-HDCP-compatible monitors to watch stuff.
Does anybody know how she got the prefix of "Dr."?
According to the bio on her web site, she's a "Board Certified Doctor of Naturopathy". This appears to mean she has completed a level of education equivalent to a doctorate in most other fields, although she doesn't state where she received the qualification.
But the problem for them is that a trademark is not designed to give them property rights, but designed to prevent the public from being mislead about the origins of a product
Looking at the list of sites that have apparently been sent notices of infringement, it is worth noting that this is precisely what they were doing. These sites were basically all people who were selling supposed fitness-improving supplements (e.g. protein drinks, that kind of stuff), one of which She Who Must Not Be Named apparently invented, and seemed to be using her name to indicate that she was somehow involved with their businesses when (it appears) she wasn't.
For instance, this site appears to sell a drink made with her formulation. However, according to her own site she has not licensed that formulation to them, and nor are they in any way associated with her.
It seems to me that this is an entirely valid use of trademark law. Yes, some of the language on her site is a little strong, but it seems (at least as long as she isn't outright lying about this) that the people receiving the takedown notices are deserving of them.
Careful quoting movies... you could end up charged with felonies like Joe Lipari.
For anyone who missed it: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent
There's a concept called "non-enabling prior art".
Sure, science fiction stories have been written describing time travel, cold fusion, AI, teleportation, etc. Go build them - after all, you've got that "prior art". Wait, they don't fully describe everything sufficient to enable someone skilled in the art to build those things?
I'm pretty sure I could build this from a fictional description of it, and could have done any time in the last 10 years. I'm not even particularly skilled in the art of digital video.
They also kept asking me how I could come up with working algorithms to programming assignments on my own (without copying from something). It was as if actually being able to program was wizardry to them. I wonder why.......
Probably because it is to most people. Something I've noticed in coming up to 15 years in this industry is that only about 20% of the people in it appear to be able to come up with their own solutions; everyone else just copies & pastes code then plays with it until it works.
What constitutes a user, though? I mean, I'm guessing if Twitter ran on Oracle they wouldn't be expecting them to pay for 100 million users.
I'm kind-of assuming that a user is anyone who connects to the service directly. Plus perhaps the person who authorizes new releases of the software that uses it. I'd say it wouldn't be hard in this circumstance to work with just 2 or 3 such users.
I would like to know where you are buying your Oracle licenses 'cause I'm paying something like £20000 anually for my Enterprise license (for a quad core, single socket server)
I've never bought an Oracle product, but correct me if this isn't a valid way of purchasing said software?
Either way, my point still stands. £20,000 is a lot less than the cost of retraining your entire development team to a new database system, so if Oracle is what you're familiar with, Oracle is what you should be using. The costs virtually disappear when compared with staff costs.
The Oracle licenses (and support/consulting) aren't exactly cheap
Yes, you're right. The £1600 for Oracle Webcenter, plus presumably £650 for Oracle Enterprise Database Server and around £600 per annum for the support contracts are really going to be problems here. Hell, we can probably double those figures because they'll need a development server as well.
Capita might be ripping off the good people of Birmingham
Crapita never do anything without ripping off good people. Here in Coventry, they've installed voice stress analysis software to attempt to detect people lying when they claim benefits... of course the fact that VSA is essentially snake oil hasn't stopped them spending millions on the piece of software this paper was written about. Well worth reading if you want to know the kind of junk our councils spend our hard earned cash on.
Cause and effect - I suspect that this company is going to regret such actions, and in a big way.
You mean they're going to be posting without a +1 bonus? No mod points for them, ever.
This one time we got a DMCA takedown notice from a software vendor in Australia for a site run by a department of a local university, for running an unlicensed copy of their software.
Erm - correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a DMCA notice applies in this situation even if they are unlicensed... surely a DMCA notice only requires that they cease *distribution* not *use*?
Wouldn't that mean that if you were to do something illegal then you would be charged in every country that your traffic was routed through?
No, only America has such a witless law.
(Although here in the UK, we have a few. For instance, it's illegal for a British citizen to bribe an official anywhere in the world.)
Wow, I want these new cellphone chips in notebooks and network attached devices! They are far ahead of the watt sucking crap from Intel and AMD.
There are a number of cheap chinese manufacturers producing netbooks with this kind of processor. I have one based on a (2-generations-old) ARM926, which has a max power rating of about 0.5mW. Just look for cheap ARM netbooks on ebay, you'll find loads.
Please name one boycott / trade restriction that has worked. [...] And, of course, our oil boycott of Japan in the early 1940's lead directly to Pearl Harbor
Which led directly to the US/Japanese conflict during WWII, which led directly to a change of regime in Japan that eliminated and undid the imperialist/expansionist behaviour that had been the original reason for that embargo. You just killed your own thesis with a counterexample.
Is it currently illegal for a US company to trade with North Korea?
Irrelevant. News Corp is not a US company; it is incorporated in Australia.
Is it illegal for a multi-national which does business in the US to do so?
AIUI, such a company only submits to US jurisdiction for business activities that occur within the US, so I would guess not.
While there is piracy on the consoles it isn't like the pc where most of the people playing the games aren't paying for them.
Yes. But until now, piracy on consoles has required hardware modifications, or at least unauthorized firmware updates that have a non-zero chance of bricking your console. This is now changing. IUIC, this hack allows you to run pirate games without modifying your console, just by hooking an external device (that large numbers of people already have) up to its USB port.
That is to say, unlike previous hacks, this is a no-risk, no-cost hack that doesn't invalidate your warranty. Uptake is going to be *much* higher.
Yes it baffles me that you can buy into a situation like that will full prior knowledge and still be allowed to even raise an action in court. In most situations if you knowingly put yourself in a position of harm in order to benefit through legal action (for instance, throwing yourself in front of a car so you can sue the insurance company) and were stupid enough to admit it, you'd be looking at prison time.
Wrong metaphor. Suing for copyright infringement isn't about compensation for harm, it's about enforcing a property right. The equivalent "real" transaction is buying a house with a sitting tenant, and then expecting them to pay rent even if they haven't been paying the previous owner.
The others I can understand, but: Auslese? This is a production technique, not a location.