So, let me get this right... you were running some production systems on a consumer OS that you thought you could get away with paying $50 support for (when the vendor clearly said that you should move to their enterprise product for such support) and... when they said "look, this is really unsupported, 'cause that $50 barely pays for the coffee around here" you get upset? Red Hat provides amazingly good support for Fedora: paid developers; release engineers; security updates; download servers; etc.
I guess I wasn't clear. I've never used RH support for servers, except in the case of Advanced Server for Oracle. RH, btw, does not guarantee anything like security updates for Fedora. So far it's been diligent about it, but maybe it won't in the future.
I laugh when I hear people talking about switching to Debian. It's not like they provide better support than RHEL.
Actually, community support -- IRC, newsgroups -- is excellent, compared to some monkey sitting in a cubicle answering phones. You really takes your chances taking to official tech support: I'd say about 50/50. Not that I bother with support for stuff like DNS servers, as I had said before.
If anything, RH took the best road. They provide the business suit set with something they can pay for and they provide a high-quality free version that the community gets input on!
You're missing some things here:
security updates and other important stuff are not guaranteed for Fedora, and may be dropped or ignored in the future
the worst: they are going to stop updating RH9 in April.
It's that last point that really sticks in my craw. It was unnecessary, Microsoft-like, and demonstrates the kind of stunt that RH is willing to pull. It makes me worry. It makes me wonder what's coming next for those who run Fedora. And it makes me wonder why I bothered to run RH at all.
What if you build a whole slough of server farms around Fedora Core 2, and then RH suddenly discontinues updating it? And what if Fedora Core 3 is different enough in structure, or very unstable, so that upgrading is difficult?
Those kind of situations, paranoid as they are, aren't unlikely. Heck, it would be good strategy on the part of RH, to attempt to force people to move to Enterprise Server or whatever.
That's why I'm moving. It's not that I'm so upset. I just can't afford to put up with their stunts.
um, yes, a platform recommended by oracle - and that would be red hat enterprise server...
Enterprise, Advanced, whatever. A year ago it was Advanced Server. shrug.
indeed - and you will find that redhat's free-beer, free-speech gift to the community (Fedora) makes solid platform for basic unix services such as you mentioned....
Well, yeah, it's not like I don't know about Fedora Core. But there are potential problems. RH could change strategy yet again. It already is ceasing updates for RH9, forcing us to go to Progeny (who's picking up the slack). (One wonders why RH doesn't charge the $5/server that Progeny is charging for RH9 packages.)
Also, frankly, RH is begging the question: what's so good about RedHat's approach anyway? It's a one-size-fits-all, I-just-dare-you-to-make-a-minimal-system distribution. Want it to be secure? Want to remove unnecessary packages? Good luck.
This is funny enough, but what's important is that it rings true. We're moving away from RedHat, too, probably for the same reasons.
Why would I want to pay for Advanced Server (or whatever they're calling it this week)? Well, if I was running a complex app like Oracle or something, sure; it makes sense to get a highly stable, supported OS that's recommended by the app vendor.
But why would I want it for a DNS server, a webserver, an SMTP server, etc.? Other distributions (ahem, Debian, ahem, cough cough) are at least as stable, much more modular, and don't cost a cent because they're community-maintained.
I've been reading Slashdot for awhile, and I just paid attention to the "Patents" icon for this story. Can anyone tell me what the knife, fork, and spoon represent in the "Patents" icon? Does it represent patenting common objects?
If so, that would seem to imply a belief that patents are bad.
The icon's intent is not to show that patents are bad, necessarily, but that our patent system is so very corrupt. Corporations are being issued patents for ridiculously obvious things because 1) they involve technology or the internet, and 2) the patent office's point of view is that it is a service to the business community, so it ought to issue as many patents as possible.
There is little to no prior art search done by the patent office, as the patents it issues demonstrate. Worse, it's willing to call almost anything an invention -- priceline.com has a patent on the concept of negotiating for a price on the internet. Now, gee, weren't the Arabs doing that in bazaars just a few thousand years ago? It's different because it's on the net?
So the fork and knife are Taco's way of saying: "Ok, what's next? You're going to allow patents on basic utensils?" And perhaps that the current system is not what the American founding fathers had imagined. "Intellectual Property" is not found anywhere in the Constitution, only the idea that a limited monopoly for a limited time might encourage inventors and artists to do their thing.
The concept that an idea can be owned is anathema to a free society.
Does the change from past to present tense signify that they know they don't have any evidence?
Oh, it gets even better. Their latest court papers say that they can't find the evidence of their "intellectual property" unless they get the source code to the very latest versions of some IBM unixes.
IBM had demanded that SCO show them the money, and the court had agreed. SCO's response actually was: IBM has to give us their code, and then we can prove it.
So although they somehow "know" that there is all sorts of theft from their codebase in Linux, they can't prove it until they see someone else's codebase.
The day that these bozos land in the Big House, I'll be dancing on my front lawn naked.
Apparently the deal is to try linking to www.caldera.com instead. Google's blocked the www.sco.com googlebomb, but trying 'litigious bastards sco' already gets you to www.caldera.com.
Is it working? Last check it hasn't done anything but make Google list back a bunch of blogs if you google for 'litigious bastards'. No www.sco.com in sight.
Linus Torvalds Q&A Kate Mackenzie JANUARY 16, 2004 LINUX creator Linus Torvalds spoke to Australian IT during his visit to Adelaide this week for Linux.conf.au, his second after attending last year's conference in Perth.
So what made you come to Australia two years in a row?
It's summer here, and it's winter in California, but literally there are only two conferences I go to anymore, because I like the technical ones, and the Australian one, as far I can tell.. it's not organised in the commercial conference kind of sense, but that just means it's a lot more relaxed, the people just talk about tech they don't try to sell stuff, and these days in the US it's unheard of, you can't make money with this kind of conf, so I go to the Australiani one and I go to one in Canada (Ottowa Linux Symposium).
What do you get out of meeting up with people in real life that you don't get from communicating with them on the net?
I actually meet up with different people, mostly it's getting a sense for what people are saying and thinking.
And, I talk to developers here, but not so much - more of the time, I just talk to people who are writing code. The kind of people who come to conferences like this, they tend to be technical people, they tend to be somewhat involved with development, but they're not so much the people I work with all the time.
It means that it's fun. I'm making a bold prediction that we'll go out for beer every night - it's partly socialising, but also getting a better view of what people are thinking about, what people are worried about.
Has anything struck you so far?
So far no, there haven't been any huge issues which is always nice. But on the other hand, the huge issues - when people start fighting, screaming, that can be interesting - that's how you see where there's real problems - people standing on other side of the rooms and not being very polite... that hasn't happened yet, but the week is young.
Anything you're particuarly looking forward to? I'm mainly following the desktop stuff, so the GNOME meetings...
I remember you saying at last year's Linux.conf.au that you were quite focused on the desktop. How do you think it's gone in the past year?
What's kind of interesting is... literally in a year or so, it's been to concentrate almost entirely on server space and things like telephony, where you have big companies setting up rooms.
Within the last year, even six months, there are big copanies now interested in literally not just selling desktop Linux, but also using desktop Linux internally. I mean it's going to take, literally five to 10 years before "normal users" start seeing Linux desktop, but in the technical space it's doing pretty well, especially in companies that can support it already.
Okay, here's the difficult question. What do you think about this SCO business right now?
Right now I'm actually fairly calm, because they haven't made any huge outrageous claims in the past 12 days or so, so they've been quiet for a while. It hasn't been that bothersome, but every once in a while, when they make some new claim, it really riles me - I mean they've literally claimed copyright on files I can prove I wrote personally, and that's very irritating.
But at the same time, the fact that their claims, when you step back, are so clearly bogus and not worth worrying about, is - that makes me worry a lot less. They're clearly scraping the barrel and coming up empty handed.
So it's irritating but I can live with it. I'm just hoping it's going to finally come to a head soon, because it's just dragging on - it's been dragging on for something like eight months, and it's getting pretty tiresome.
It doesn't seem to be having much negative impact though on the use of Linux, that must be encouraging?
I don't see any customers anyway, but apparently... customers aren't reacting very much, especially not much anymore. But it has for example forced me to - they've subpoe
Yeah, the problem with Helix is that there don't seem to be any binaries available, and the nightly builds take a rocket scientist to figure out.
Yes, I know, the binaries are supposed to be on the Helix site. But if you follow the instructions (accept the EULA and then "proceed"), you just get instructions on how to check out of CVS and build. No binaries, except maybe the ones in the Sharing area that are a few months old.
I tried doing a build, but the quickstart instructions are for building an MP3 player (why in the world?) and if you try to figure out how to build a more generic player, well, the build works, but after it's done, you don't actually get a binary.
And s/he (Jan) misses the point entirely: people who want the stable kernel series want it because it's stable, not because they're itching for new features.
The nightmare isn't that 2.7 starts, not at all -- it would be developers trying to shoehorn big new features into the released 2.6 series. I suppose another bad situation might be that the stable series doesn't get updated with fixes, but a quick look at kernel.org shows that the 2.0 series is up to.40, the 2.2 series is up to.25, and the 2.4 series is at.23. The stable series gets plenty of attention.
So what's the worry here, exactly? (I think it's more like "oh, crap, I have a deadline and I don't have a story -- hey, maybe I'll invent some controversy".)
Well, not really from Starbucks -- the wifi access costs too much. But it's easy enough to find out about free wifi access in various coffee houses, and it's rare you find an empty coffee house these days.
Even if you're not interacting, at least you'd be around (normal) people.
But wouldn't there be a way to make LinuxBIOS fool the OS? (If the OS isn't Linux/*BSD/other-free-OS.) Make it behave just enough like it's got DRM without actually doing the DRM stuff. Give all the proper answers.
Sure, it'd be violating the DMCA, but that law is so draconian that we're probably violating it almost constantly these days, just by being computer users.
Without proper and balanced regulation, corporations stop competing and circle their wagons around us. Why spend effort trying to lure customers when they can find ways to force us to do what they want?
Could you quote the section of the Constitution that you interpreted this from?
I'm betting that you can't.
Oh, c'mon, you couldn't give me anything harder than that? I was hoping for a real mind-cooker. This was easy:
direct my browser to www.google.com
enter keywords: "united states constitution copyright"
pick out a good entry: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/ar ticle01/
zip on down to Section 8
copy and paste
Now, I'll restate what I said before, and then you can see the actual wording of the constitution.
I said: "According to the U.S. Constitution, the author has no such right, except for a limited monopoly, and only to encourage creation." This was in response to someone saying "... you've taken away the author's right for compensation to the product".
The constitution sez: " The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
All the stuff I'm leaving out with the elipses (...) is a bunch of other provisions about how the govt can print money and establish post offices -- in case you were wondering.
The point here is that there is no mention about anyone having a right to compensation, just a limited exclusive right to promote the progress of science and useful arts. No "intellectual property" here, sorry.
Because you've taken away the author's right for compensation to the product
According to the U.S. Constitution, the author has no such right, except for a limited monopoly, and only to encourage creation. Even if he did have the right, it isn't stealing, because I wouldn't have "bought" the work in the first place.
But here's the big problem: if copying = stealing, then all copies are either purchased or stolen, right? Ok, so I have not bought the new Madonna album, because I think she's played out. But I have heard one of the songs -- maybe in the mall. Now, I don't have a copy of the song, so it's ok -- no, wait, I still remember it, crystal clear. That's a copy of the song. Yes, it is. I remember the whole thing and can play it back in my head any time I want.
Do I owe Madonna (or rather the publishing house that actually "owns" the "rights") money? You bet I do. Why not? How is what's in my head not a copy? I owe money even if I make an imperfect copy (on a crappy cassette, let's say -- it's still "infringement"), and I might argue that the copy in my brain is imperfect, but even so, it's still a legal copy. We shouldn't pretend it doesn't exist, because it does.
Thing is, if that copy is her "property," then what we're really saying is that Madonna/publishing-house owns the section of my mind that remembers her song. I'm just paying a license fee for it being there.
Wait, Madonna owns part of my brain! My god -- humans are property, all over again.
Yep, this is a good way of interpreting the law. It's what the founding fathers clearly intended. Intangible things are property and copying is theft.
I also enjoyed how he opened the story by stating bluntly that copying something is somehow the same thing as stealing. I don't understand the logic, as usual:
And I expect that the RIAA's "fear and awe" campaign will work about as well as our government's "Shock and Awe" plan worked in Iraq. (Meaning: no one was very impressed.)
As much as I believe the RIAA (and any copyright holder for that matter) has the right to defend their copyrights
Sorry, that dog don't hunt. The constitution of the U.S. is being abused. The law obviously never intended the intangible to be treated as some sort of pretend-property.
copyright law was intended for original authors only (see the constitution + letters and other discussion from the founding fathers)
copyright was meant to last only a short time -- in order to encourage creation, and for no other reason! Read the constitution.
The emperor has no clothes on, pal. It doesn't matter how many lawyers use how many big words ("intellectual property"); as long as the constitution says otherwise, then that's the law -- even if that law is being ignored.
You cannot own the intangible, especially when it's so un-scarce as to be worthless anyway. Copying songs is legal. Sure, you can circumvent laws with money, and the lawyers can pretend, and so can the complicit courts -- but let's not join the charade.
Altogether Raymond appealed to the reason of the SCO upper one with an allusion to the insight ability of Darth Vader: "you have the choice. Remove the dark helmet and converse with us like a human nature, or you continue your way, which lets bad times fear for us, however you and the entire SCO Topmanagement into the ruin will completely surely float."
Slashdot Mirror
So, let me get this right... you were running some production systems on a consumer OS that you thought you could get away with paying $50 support for (when the vendor clearly said that you should move to their enterprise product for such support) and... when they said "look, this is really unsupported, 'cause that $50 barely pays for the coffee around here" you get upset? Red Hat provides amazingly good support for Fedora: paid developers; release engineers; security updates; download servers; etc.
I guess I wasn't clear. I've never used RH support for servers, except in the case of Advanced Server for Oracle. RH, btw, does not guarantee anything like security updates for Fedora. So far it's been diligent about it, but maybe it won't in the future.
I laugh when I hear people talking about switching to Debian. It's not like they provide better support than RHEL.
Actually, community support -- IRC, newsgroups -- is excellent, compared to some monkey sitting in a cubicle answering phones. You really takes your chances taking to official tech support: I'd say about 50/50. Not that I bother with support for stuff like DNS servers, as I had said before.
If anything, RH took the best road. They provide the business suit set with something they can pay for and they provide a high-quality free version that the community gets input on!
You're missing some things here:
security updates and other important stuff are not guaranteed for Fedora, and may be dropped or ignored in the future
the worst: they are going to stop updating RH9 in April.
It's that last point that really sticks in my craw. It was unnecessary, Microsoft-like, and demonstrates the kind of stunt that RH is willing to pull. It makes me worry. It makes me wonder what's coming next for those who run Fedora. And it makes me wonder why I bothered to run RH at all.
What if you build a whole slough of server farms around Fedora Core 2, and then RH suddenly discontinues updating it? And what if Fedora Core 3 is different enough in structure, or very unstable, so that upgrading is difficult?
Those kind of situations, paranoid as they are, aren't unlikely. Heck, it would be good strategy on the part of RH, to attempt to force people to move to Enterprise Server or whatever.
That's why I'm moving. It's not that I'm so upset. I just can't afford to put up with their stunts.
um, yes, a platform recommended by oracle - and that would be red hat enterprise server...
Enterprise, Advanced, whatever. A year ago it was Advanced Server. shrug.
indeed - and you will find that redhat's free-beer, free-speech gift to the community (Fedora) makes solid platform for basic unix services such as you mentioned....
Well, yeah, it's not like I don't know about Fedora Core. But there are potential problems. RH could change strategy yet again. It already is ceasing updates for RH9, forcing us to go to Progeny (who's picking up the slack). (One wonders why RH doesn't charge the $5/server that Progeny is charging for RH9 packages.)
Also, frankly, RH is begging the question: what's so good about RedHat's approach anyway? It's a one-size-fits-all, I-just-dare-you-to-make-a-minimal-system distribution. Want it to be secure? Want to remove unnecessary packages? Good luck.
This is funny enough, but what's important is that it rings true. We're moving away from RedHat, too, probably for the same reasons.
Why would I want to pay for Advanced Server (or whatever they're calling it this week)? Well, if I was running a complex app like Oracle or something, sure; it makes sense to get a highly stable, supported OS that's recommended by the app vendor.
But why would I want it for a DNS server, a webserver, an SMTP server, etc.? Other distributions (ahem, Debian, ahem, cough cough) are at least as stable, much more modular, and don't cost a cent because they're community-maintained.
"Core" my ass.
Or "Litigious Bastard".
I've been reading Slashdot for awhile, and I just paid attention to the "Patents" icon for this story. Can anyone tell me what the knife, fork, and spoon represent in the "Patents" icon? Does it represent patenting common objects?
If so, that would seem to imply a belief that patents are bad.
The icon's intent is not to show that patents are bad, necessarily, but that our patent system is so very corrupt. Corporations are being issued patents for ridiculously obvious things because 1) they involve technology or the internet, and 2) the patent office's point of view is that it is a service to the business community, so it ought to issue as many patents as possible.
There is little to no prior art search done by the patent office, as the patents it issues demonstrate. Worse, it's willing to call almost anything an invention -- priceline.com has a patent on the concept of negotiating for a price on the internet. Now, gee, weren't the Arabs doing that in bazaars just a few thousand years ago? It's different because it's on the net?
So the fork and knife are Taco's way of saying: "Ok, what's next? You're going to allow patents on basic utensils?" And perhaps that the current system is not what the American founding fathers had imagined. "Intellectual Property" is not found anywhere in the Constitution, only the idea that a limited monopoly for a limited time might encourage inventors and artists to do their thing. The concept that an idea can be owned is anathema to a free society.
Does the change from past to present tense signify that they know they don't have any evidence?
Oh, it gets even better. Their latest court papers say that they can't find the evidence of their "intellectual property" unless they get the source code to the very latest versions of some IBM unixes.
IBM had demanded that SCO show them the money, and the court had agreed. SCO's response actually was: IBM has to give us their code, and then we can prove it.
So although they somehow "know" that there is all sorts of theft from their codebase in Linux, they can't prove it until they see someone else's codebase.
The day that these bozos land in the Big House, I'll be dancing on my front lawn naked.
Apparently the deal is to try linking to www.caldera.com instead. Google's blocked the www.sco.com googlebomb, but trying 'litigious bastards sco' already gets you to www.caldera.com.
Is it working? Last check it hasn't done anything but make Google list back a bunch of blogs if you google for 'litigious bastards'. No www.sco.com in sight.
Linus Torvalds Q&A
Kate Mackenzie
JANUARY 16, 2004
LINUX creator Linus Torvalds spoke to Australian IT during his visit to Adelaide this week for Linux.conf.au, his second after attending last year's conference in Perth.
So what made you come to Australia two years in a row?
It's summer here, and it's winter in California, but literally there are only two conferences I go to anymore, because I like the technical ones, and the Australian one, as far I can tell.. it's not organised in the commercial conference kind of sense, but that just means it's a lot more relaxed, the people just talk about tech they don't try to sell stuff, and these days in the US it's unheard of, you can't make money with this kind of conf, so I go to the Australiani one and I go to one in Canada (Ottowa Linux Symposium).
What do you get out of meeting up with people in real life that you don't get from communicating with them on the net?
I actually meet up with different people, mostly it's getting a sense for what people are saying and thinking.
And, I talk to developers here, but not so much - more of the time, I just talk to people who are writing code. The kind of people who come to conferences like this, they tend to be technical people, they tend to be somewhat involved with development, but they're not so much the people I work with all the time.
It means that it's fun. I'm making a bold prediction that we'll go out for beer every night - it's partly socialising, but also getting a better view of what people are thinking about, what people are worried about.
Has anything struck you so far?
So far no, there haven't been any huge issues which is always nice. But on the other hand, the huge issues - when people start fighting, screaming, that can be interesting - that's how you see where there's real problems - people standing on other side of the rooms and not being very polite... that hasn't happened yet, but the week is young.
Anything you're particuarly looking forward to? I'm mainly following the desktop stuff, so the GNOME meetings...
I remember you saying at last year's Linux.conf.au that you were quite focused on the desktop. How do you think it's gone in the past year?
What's kind of interesting is... literally in a year or so, it's been to concentrate almost entirely on server space and things like telephony, where you have big companies setting up rooms.
Within the last year, even six months, there are big copanies now interested in literally not just selling desktop Linux, but also using desktop Linux internally. I mean it's going to take, literally five to 10 years before "normal users" start seeing Linux desktop, but in the technical space it's doing pretty well, especially in companies that can support it already.
Okay, here's the difficult question. What do you think about this SCO business right now?
Right now I'm actually fairly calm, because they haven't made any huge outrageous claims in the past 12 days or so, so they've been quiet for a while. It hasn't been that bothersome, but every once in a while, when they make some new claim, it really riles me - I mean they've literally claimed copyright on files I can prove I wrote personally, and that's very irritating.
But at the same time, the fact that their claims, when you step back, are so clearly bogus and not worth worrying about, is - that makes me worry a lot less. They're clearly scraping the barrel and coming up empty handed.
So it's irritating but I can live with it. I'm just hoping it's going to finally come to a head soon, because it's just dragging on - it's been dragging on for something like eight months, and it's getting pretty tiresome.
It doesn't seem to be having much negative impact though on the use of Linux, that must be encouraging?
I don't see any customers anyway, but apparently... customers aren't reacting very much, especially not much anymore. But it has for example forced me to - they've subpoe
Yeah, the problem with Helix is that there don't seem to be any binaries available, and the nightly builds take a rocket scientist to figure out.
Yes, I know, the binaries are supposed to be on the Helix site. But if you follow the instructions (accept the EULA and then "proceed"), you just get instructions on how to check out of CVS and build. No binaries, except maybe the ones in the Sharing area that are a few months old.
I tried doing a build, but the quickstart instructions are for building an MP3 player (why in the world?) and if you try to figure out how to build a more generic player, well, the build works, but after it's done, you don't actually get a binary.
Go figure.
'There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,' Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co., said Wednesday.
Including yours.
As does Firebird 0.7.
And s/he (Jan) misses the point entirely: people who want the stable kernel series want it because it's stable, not because they're itching for new features.
The nightmare isn't that 2.7 starts, not at all -- it would be developers trying to shoehorn big new features into the released 2.6 series. I suppose another bad situation might be that the stable series doesn't get updated with fixes, but a quick look at kernel.org shows that the 2.0 series is up to .40, the 2.2 series is up to .25, and the 2.4 series is at .23. The stable series gets plenty of attention.
So what's the worry here, exactly? (I think it's more like "oh, crap, I have a deadline and I don't have a story -- hey, maybe I'll invent some controversy".)
Well, not really from Starbucks -- the wifi access costs too much. But it's easy enough to find out about free wifi access in various coffee houses, and it's rare you find an empty coffee house these days.
Even if you're not interacting, at least you'd be around (normal) people.
They could be RedFedora.
Sure, it'd be violating the DMCA, but that law is so draconian that we're probably violating it almost constantly these days, just by being computer users.
When did a better user experience get lost?
Around the time that true capitalism died.
Without proper and balanced regulation, corporations stop competing and circle their wagons around us. Why spend effort trying to lure customers when they can find ways to force us to do what they want?
The products the movie industry is selling are a hell of a lot better than the crap they were producing in 1983!
Uh, who the hell actually thinks that? I hope you're talking about DVDs or something, and not fabulous new blockbuster innovations like Gigli.
Could you quote the section of the Constitution that you interpreted this from? I'm betting that you can't.
Oh, c'mon, you couldn't give me anything harder than that? I was hoping for a real mind-cooker. This was easy:
Now, I'll restate what I said before, and then you can see the actual wording of the constitution.
I said: "According to the U.S. Constitution, the author has no such right, except for a limited monopoly, and only to encourage creation." This was in response to someone saying "... you've taken away the author's right for compensation to the product".
The constitution sez: " The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
All the stuff I'm leaving out with the elipses (...) is a bunch of other provisions about how the govt can print money and establish post offices -- in case you were wondering.
The point here is that there is no mention about anyone having a right to compensation, just a limited exclusive right to promote the progress of science and useful arts. No "intellectual property" here, sorry.
Because you've taken away the author's right for compensation to the product
According to the U.S. Constitution, the author has no such right, except for a limited monopoly, and only to encourage creation. Even if he did have the right, it isn't stealing, because I wouldn't have "bought" the work in the first place.
But here's the big problem: if copying = stealing, then all copies are either purchased or stolen, right? Ok, so I have not bought the new Madonna album, because I think she's played out. But I have heard one of the songs -- maybe in the mall. Now, I don't have a copy of the song, so it's ok -- no, wait, I still remember it, crystal clear. That's a copy of the song. Yes, it is. I remember the whole thing and can play it back in my head any time I want.
Do I owe Madonna (or rather the publishing house that actually "owns" the "rights") money? You bet I do. Why not? How is what's in my head not a copy? I owe money even if I make an imperfect copy (on a crappy cassette, let's say -- it's still "infringement"), and I might argue that the copy in my brain is imperfect, but even so, it's still a legal copy. We shouldn't pretend it doesn't exist, because it does.
Thing is, if that copy is her "property," then what we're really saying is that Madonna/publishing-house owns the section of my mind that remembers her song. I'm just paying a license fee for it being there.
Wait, Madonna owns part of my brain! My god -- humans are property, all over again.
Yep, this is a good way of interpreting the law. It's what the founding fathers clearly intended. Intangible things are property and copying is theft.
I also enjoyed how he opened the story by stating bluntly that copying something is somehow the same thing as stealing. I don't understand the logic, as usual:
- You have something
- I make a perfect copy
- You still have the original in perfect condition
How is that stealing, again? You've lostI didn't know that Dubya was working for the RIAA
And I expect that the RIAA's "fear and awe" campaign will work about as well as our government's "Shock and Awe" plan worked in Iraq. (Meaning: no one was very impressed.)
As much as I believe the RIAA (and any copyright holder for that matter) has the right to defend their copyrights
Sorry, that dog don't hunt. The constitution of the U.S. is being abused. The law obviously never intended the intangible to be treated as some sort of pretend-property.
- copyright law was intended for original authors only (see the constitution + letters and other discussion from the founding fathers)
- copyright was meant to last only a short time -- in order to encourage creation, and for no other reason! Read the constitution.
The emperor has no clothes on, pal. It doesn't matter how many lawyers use how many big words ("intellectual property"); as long as the constitution says otherwise, then that's the law -- even if that law is being ignored.You cannot own the intangible, especially when it's so un-scarce as to be worthless anyway. Copying songs is legal. Sure, you can circumvent laws with money, and the lawyers can pretend, and so can the complicit courts -- but let's not join the charade.
I love babelfish:
Altogether Raymond appealed to the reason of the SCO upper one with an allusion to the insight ability of Darth Vader: "you have the choice. Remove the dark helmet and converse with us like a human nature, or you continue your way, which lets bad times fear for us, however you and the entire SCO Topmanagement into the ruin will completely surely float."
It'll probably be just a judge, but that (from what I know) is actually up to IBM, the defendent. IANAL.