Seems fair, maybe even excessive. He didn't break into the systems, he didn't steal confidential data, he didn't risk life and physical property, he just denied some traffic to websites.
Imagine someone dropping a tree or something across a major highway, and stopping traffic.. would we add up the lost business from these people not reaching their destinations, and then punish the perpetrator based on that?
The punishment should fit the crime. It's easy for a small action to have great consequence on the internet, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should inflate punishments proportionately.
As far as I know, music is sold today without any license agreement of any kind.
True, but keep in mind, the record company's "licenses" are passed as laws. The things you are allowed to do and not do, the Audio Home Recording Act, the DMCA, much of that could be placed in a license spelling out exactly what you're allowed to do.
The RIAA, etc, don't need to make licenses, they just pass the laws they need, and save a lot of trouble.
Software has been a little different because the software monopolies (Microsoft, in other words) haven't been paying much attention to Washington. Just wait until they figure out how to lobby with the efficiency of the record labels, your next MS software might contain no license agreement, since the terms Microsoft likes will be part of copyright law.
Heh, I always get a chuckle out of those pages that say "Images are copyright XXXX and may not be downloaded".
Oops, too late! I already downloaded it so I can look at it! It's in my cache! It's in my RAM! It's in my squid proxy! I guess I better go turn myself in to the Kopyright Kops, eh?
Why do is there open-source software (OSS)? That's easy: the same reason anyone
does anything else, rational self-interest.
If I have a piece of OSS, and it doesn't do what I need, I change it, or pay someone else to change it. If I improve the program, it makes my life easier.
For that single outlay of labor, I have daily benefit. So there is plenty of
incentive for me to tinker with open-source software. That's why most people
who write OSS also use it!
Then I can pass my changes along at almost zero cost, and by scratching once
I've cured both my itch and maybe the itch of many other people. To put it in
economic terms, OSS is a public good with no "free-rider" problem!
You see, someone asks why open-source programmers "give away" their software,
they are falling into a trap that the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft have set. You
can't "give away" an intangible thing. You can duplicate it so that someone
else has a copy. The writer still has what they are giving away, and they still hold
the authorship rights.
Of course, one might ask, why pass along the changes? Why not charge for them?
Why not hoard them, and dole them out for a fee, even if it would probably be
much easier for to just email them to the author or post them on a web site?
Well, for one thing, many of my changes might be relatively small, or my
program might have limited functionality and I'm hoping someone else will flesh
it out. Nobody would be willing to pay just for that. Whatever price I charge
for it, someone can come along and do it cheaper. So I might as well pass it
along in the hopes that someone will improve it further and then I can benefit
from that. Besides, software is often like math: once you find the solution to
a programming problem, that's it, there's no need to have everyone re-invent
the same thing.
You might also ask, where does the big innovation happen? It seems like OSS
produces just incremental evolution, just enought to get our jobs done, not
revolutions that change the way we live. My answer to that is, where does it
happen now? All the big software companies have been making software the same
way for years. Microsoft's best innovation was the licensing scheme they used
when they started selling their OS pre-installed on computers. One big
innovation was the internet, but that was initially paid for with public funds.
I think the big innovation can happen anywhere, at any time, in a proprietary
software company's labs, or a students bedroom. But for the small incremental
innovation, nothing will beat OSS.
OSS is just an example of a free market: software is priced based on the
marginal cost of zero. The software monopolies you see around you are flawed
free markets.
There is another less utilitarian but vitally important reason for OSS software
which, namely Freedom. I would like to live in a world someday where I can buy
a computer and not have to buy a certain company's operating system, whether I
want it or not, or at least be able to sell the operating system if I don't
want to use it. Just like I like to buy a car, and then sell the tires to
replace them, or choose the brand of gasoline, or the garage I keep it in, or
the mechanic who works on it, without violating a license agreement. I like to
have the freedom to alter and share my programs, and the freedom to be paid for
this service. We have many freedoms like this with our houses, televisions,
food, etc, but not with our software.
It seems companies have needlessly implanted their proprietary software with
the drawbacks of physical things: only one copy can exist at a time, only one
person can use it at a time. And they've also taken away some of the freedoms
we enjoy with physical things: the freedom to take it apart, the freedom to
change it, sometimes even the freedom to sell it to someone else. We lose on
both counts.
People like Freedom, they will fight for it, whether it's obvious like freedom
of speech, or subtle like software freedom. OSS is a very easy and legal way to
fight for this freedom, and to get around what many people feel is a very
flawed system of copyright law.
I was just reading a fascinating article in the latest phrack about using web spiders (like search engines, etc) to deploy exploits, by putting URLs on a page which are actually exploits (like the code red explot) and waiting for the spider to follow them. Many spiders pick up the URL, port, query string, and all.
This could be used to distribute data..here's how:
This guy could take his program, compress it, and encode into ascii and divide into N chunks.
Pick P web sites that might like to see the code (peacefire, slashdot, 2600, CNN, whatever). Then code up N*P links all over your web site, that look like this:
http://<SITE>/<DATA>
where <DATA> is one of the N chunks (plus some data saying which chunk it is, etc) and <SITE> is one of the P sites. Then wait for search engine spiders to index your site (most sites have them coming regularly).
After a few months, the target sites will all have the data in their logs as the spiders follow your links!
This could be improved many ways, for instance the URL links could be spread over many hosts so that it is harder to track down the original source, the chunks could be encrypted, the receiving sites could automatically re-create the links so the data is kept circulating, different spiders could be fed different chunks, etc.
Sort of like a Freenet using search engine spiders as the transport. Has this been done? Time to get coding!!
The recent phenomenon of the popularity of using Napster to obtain unauthorized copies of works strongly suggests that some members of the public will infringe copyright when the likelihood of detection and punishment is low.
Unfortunately, statements like that will be used to justify stronger and stronger punishments for less and less significant "crimes".
This is the same country, remember, that will have a public school call the police when a 4th-grader points a piece of fried chicken at someone at lunchtime and goes "bang-bang".
I can't wait to see the anti-copying police state they'll come up with in 5-10 years.
I don't think clock speed is important. It should be printed on the computer box someplace but it doesn't need to be part of the marketing or product name.
Clock speed hasn't mattered to me since about 100MHz. Just get a current PC, and your computer will be fast enough for the popular applications (MP3 for instance).
Of course power users will care, but average joe doesn't..it's hard to compare MHz to MHz these days anyway.
A fun game in which players are given PDA's with infrared transmitters, and MP3 copies of five popular songs, chosen randomly out of 100. Each person has to convince others to share copies of their songs, and whoever collects all 100 first, wins the game!
We here at Slashdot would like to take the time to say that strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation.
I agree. To put it another way, strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation.
Microsoft is much better than Cats. I'm going to see it again and again.
Why does this just degenerate into the same tired argument of "giving you freedom A takes away my freedom B"? Of course that will always be true, for any argument about freedom. My freedom to walk on the street without getting hit conflicts with your freedom to hit people on the street.
Of course, being able to choose any license is a freedom. But that's not the freedom the FSF stands for, don't we know that already? The stand for other freedoms, namely the freedoms described in the GPL.
What exactly do all these people (and sometimes the FSF does it too, I know) hope to gain by fighting over who's freedom is best?
Society, free markets, etc., those mechanisms will pick what's best for society.
Unfortunately, the way copyright law works for software, the power is automatically in the copyright holder's hands. You have to agree to an arbitrary contract-like agreement to have a copy at all! Sometimes you actively read and agree to the contract, sometimes it's imposed on you without your knowing by some other action (buying a new computer). Imagine if everything you bought had a contract you had to read and agree to. Free markets would be impaired (think "transaction costs" from economics).
So when TOR (Tim O'Reilly) says we should be able to choose any license for software, I think he is implicitly supporting the tilted playing field of the status quo, so it's no surprise that the FSF would not agree with that standpoint.
And to suggest that the FSF would want to pass a law to make proprietary licenses illegal is silly! Pass one law, to counteract the effects of another? ESR is starting from the viewpoint that software should have a license in the first place. He should know by now, the FSF doesn't agree with that. Why not just remove the law that lets copyright holders enforce their contracts. Then the GPL would be pretty much unecessary!
RMS has never suggested many of the things people always ascribe to him. ESR is simply inventing things that he thinks RMS might want or say. It would be like RMS arguing that ESR wants to pass a law that makes it illegal not to carry a gun. Since ESR supports our freedom to carry guns, it's only logical that he would be against a freedom NOT to carry a gun, yes?
love of "popular culture"?
on
Seanbaby.com
·
· Score: 2
If there's a single trait most people who read Slashdot share -- maybe the only one besides an addiction to software -- it's a love of popular culture.
Eh? I'm so out of touch with popular culture I'm not even sure if I love it or not!
imagine if other utilities did this
on
Broadband Crackdown
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Imagine if the phone company checked your lines for "business use" and shut you down unless you got a business contract.
Or how about the power company, charging you differently depending on how you use the power, and limiting you to, say, 10 amps peak if you don't have a business contract.
I wonder if it isn't appropriate to have a little (eek) government regulation when it comes to these things? Like not blocking any ports for any customer unless it is clearly marked in advertising or something?
I always wonder when my ISP will decide, for the good of all customers, to shut down this or that port or filter or monitor traffic. They'll probably not even notify me, they'll just update the terms of service buried in their web page someplace.
This would've made my high-school Apple basic program a crime, eh?
10 CLEAR
20 X = INT(24*RND(1))+1
30 VTAB X
40 PRINT "__________PLEASE ADJUST VERTICAL HOLD__________"
50 GOTO 10
Ah it was such pleasure watching from a distance as the librarian tried to get the image to stabilize...and gosh how did the computer know???
So I will join the chorus and say "Thank goodness I'm out of school, because I would probably be in jail now!" (Not for that BASIC program particularly. But then again who knows? Having to adjust the monitor caused the librarian all sorts of harm and damages and theft of intellectual property and loss of wages).
I was waiting to get my hands on one of those CDs with copy interference and see if I could hack a CD player to supply raw digital data to some kind of aquisition board or something connected to the computer. I know some electronics but very little about CD players so I thought it would be a fun project. Maybe an EE could do it as a digital design project sometime.
Anybody know where I could find specs or schematics or service manuals for old Sony Discmans (Discmen?)...? Or any other info useful for such a project?
So let me get this straight, the solution to heavy-handed government interference in a free market via the overly-burdensome copyright laws is to create MORE government interference?
How about relaxing copyright law in the interests of the public? How about unravelling the complex mess that the RIAA/MPAA has created over the decades, taking rights away from artists and the public? How about removing the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions? How about reducing the length of copyright terms?
If society can copy works more freely, there will be no "holes in history".
Watch out, they might build a DEBIGULATOR and then they'll debigulate you and suck you down into their city and treat you like their god and creator. It sure sux when shit like that happens......you need some kind of re-bigulator and the thought of such a thing, well, boggles the mind really.
Yeah, so other companies are doing this too. For instance the other day, I was out of town and called my young daughter and read to her from her favorite book. After the first paragraph, on operator came on the line and asked me to please cease and desist with my balatant copyright violation. I told her to fuck off and that information wants to be free, but they cancelled my phone service and put my daughter in juvinile detention. Now I have two copies of the book, one here, and one at home, and I purchased a reading license. It feels so good to be legal, and not an evil pirate!
Then there was the time I was calling a friend from work, and my CD player was on, and the same thing happened. I got a letter from the RIAA, and they cancelled my employers phone service. Of course, I was fired and they took my CD. But I should've known better! Distributing copyrighted content is WRONG!
And the other day, I connected my stereo to my computer and played my favorite Metallica MP3s that I downloaded and didn't pay anybody for. After 4 seconds, the power went out. The next day I received a fedex telling me that "your electricity service is only licensed for legal purposes. failure to abide by these terms will result in the immediate termination of your account.".
So don't worry folks, this is nothing new. Now I just have to read the license terms on this new flashlight I bought: "Your new Mag-Lite(r) flashlight is licensed soley for the illlumination of material that you have the right view. In order to enforce these terms, we reserve the right to audit your flashlight use at any time and without prior notice."
"There has been a lot of discussion about circumvention and free speech," Adler said. "But I wonder if those same advocates would be as protective of a piece of technology that helps people obtain their personal information online."
Reading a book sold in a publicly-accessible bookstore is the same as getting someone's personal information??
The DMCA allowed the Internet to grow and by and large the act has worked.
Please, spare me...
that would be so nice
on
DeMuDi Linux
·
· Score: 2
As a huge fan of electronic music and occasional dabbler in writing it with my Mac and MIDI gear, I hearby announce that if Linux and Free software can replace a Mac running Cubase with VST plugins, Reaktor, Reason, the new Absynth, and other staples of electronic music, with MIDI and low latency, I will SHIT MYSELF LIKE AN INFANT IN DIAPERS!!
i.e., I would really be impressed and would install it straight away.:-)
You let somebody else listen to your 1000 CDs? That's intellectual property theft! You pirate! You should go to jail for illegally distributing the music on your CDs! Remember kids, sharing is stealing! Protect those CDs better next time!
Slashdot Mirror
Seems fair, maybe even excessive. He didn't break into the systems, he didn't steal confidential data, he didn't risk life and physical property, he just denied some traffic to websites.
Imagine someone dropping a tree or something across a major highway, and stopping traffic.. would we add up the lost business from these people not reaching their destinations, and then punish the perpetrator based on that?
The punishment should fit the crime. It's easy for a small action to have great consequence on the internet, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should inflate punishments proportionately.
As far as I know, music is sold today without any license agreement of any kind.
True, but keep in mind, the record company's "licenses" are passed as laws. The things you are allowed to do and not do, the Audio Home Recording Act, the DMCA, much of that could be placed in a license spelling out exactly what you're allowed to do.
The RIAA, etc, don't need to make licenses, they just pass the laws they need, and save a lot of trouble.
Software has been a little different because the software monopolies (Microsoft, in other words) haven't been paying much attention to Washington. Just wait until they figure out how to lobby with the efficiency of the record labels, your next MS software might contain no license agreement, since the terms Microsoft likes will be part of copyright law.
Heh, I always get a chuckle out of those pages that say "Images are copyright XXXX and may not be downloaded".
Oops, too late! I already downloaded it so I can look at it! It's in my cache! It's in my RAM! It's in my squid proxy! I guess I better go turn myself in to the Kopyright Kops, eh?
This is all just silly.
Why do is there open-source software (OSS)? That's easy: the same reason anyone does anything else, rational self-interest.
If I have a piece of OSS, and it doesn't do what I need, I change it, or pay someone else to change it. If I improve the program, it makes my life easier. For that single outlay of labor, I have daily benefit. So there is plenty of incentive for me to tinker with open-source software. That's why most people who write OSS also use it!
Then I can pass my changes along at almost zero cost, and by scratching once I've cured both my itch and maybe the itch of many other people. To put it in economic terms, OSS is a public good with no "free-rider" problem!
You see, someone asks why open-source programmers "give away" their software, they are falling into a trap that the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft have set. You can't "give away" an intangible thing. You can duplicate it so that someone else has a copy. The writer still has what they are giving away, and they still hold the authorship rights.
Of course, one might ask, why pass along the changes? Why not charge for them? Why not hoard them, and dole them out for a fee, even if it would probably be much easier for to just email them to the author or post them on a web site? Well, for one thing, many of my changes might be relatively small, or my program might have limited functionality and I'm hoping someone else will flesh it out. Nobody would be willing to pay just for that. Whatever price I charge for it, someone can come along and do it cheaper. So I might as well pass it along in the hopes that someone will improve it further and then I can benefit from that. Besides, software is often like math: once you find the solution to a programming problem, that's it, there's no need to have everyone re-invent the same thing.
You might also ask, where does the big innovation happen? It seems like OSS produces just incremental evolution, just enought to get our jobs done, not revolutions that change the way we live. My answer to that is, where does it happen now? All the big software companies have been making software the same way for years. Microsoft's best innovation was the licensing scheme they used when they started selling their OS pre-installed on computers. One big innovation was the internet, but that was initially paid for with public funds. I think the big innovation can happen anywhere, at any time, in a proprietary software company's labs, or a students bedroom. But for the small incremental innovation, nothing will beat OSS.
OSS is just an example of a free market: software is priced based on the marginal cost of zero. The software monopolies you see around you are flawed free markets.
There is another less utilitarian but vitally important reason for OSS software which, namely Freedom. I would like to live in a world someday where I can buy a computer and not have to buy a certain company's operating system, whether I want it or not, or at least be able to sell the operating system if I don't want to use it. Just like I like to buy a car, and then sell the tires to replace them, or choose the brand of gasoline, or the garage I keep it in, or the mechanic who works on it, without violating a license agreement. I like to have the freedom to alter and share my programs, and the freedom to be paid for this service. We have many freedoms like this with our houses, televisions, food, etc, but not with our software.
It seems companies have needlessly implanted their proprietary software with the drawbacks of physical things: only one copy can exist at a time, only one person can use it at a time. And they've also taken away some of the freedoms we enjoy with physical things: the freedom to take it apart, the freedom to change it, sometimes even the freedom to sell it to someone else. We lose on both counts.
People like Freedom, they will fight for it, whether it's obvious like freedom of speech, or subtle like software freedom. OSS is a very easy and legal way to fight for this freedom, and to get around what many people feel is a very flawed system of copyright law.
Just for shits and giggles, here are some prices from a June 1990 Byte magazine (the one with a rave review of Windows 3.0):
Windows 3.0 retail: $150
Price of a Dell 386 with color monitor and 40mb hard drive, 512K, 16MHz, a midrange system for running Windows: $2,399
Price of a 25MHz 486, a high-end system: $5,295
No conclusions but I thought maybe somebody would find this interesting!
As soon as I finish this hamburger, I'm going to kick your ass for saying that.
Mmm, Big Mac(tm).
I was just reading a fascinating article in the latest phrack about using web spiders (like search engines, etc) to deploy exploits, by putting URLs on a page which are actually exploits (like the code red explot) and waiting for the spider to follow them. Many spiders pick up the URL, port, query string, and all.
This could be used to distribute data..here's how:
This guy could take his program, compress it, and encode into ascii and divide into N chunks.
Pick P web sites that might like to see the code (peacefire, slashdot, 2600, CNN, whatever). Then code up N*P links all over your web site, that look like this:
where <DATA> is one of the N chunks (plus some data saying which chunk it is, etc) and <SITE> is one of the P sites. Then wait for search engine spiders to index your site (most sites have them coming regularly).After a few months, the target sites will all have the data in their logs as the spiders follow your links!
This could be improved many ways, for instance the URL links could be spread over many hosts so that it is harder to track down the original source, the chunks could be encrypted, the receiving sites could automatically re-create the links so the data is kept circulating, different spiders could be fed different chunks, etc.
Sort of like a Freenet using search engine spiders as the transport. Has this been done? Time to get coding!!
The recent phenomenon of the popularity of using Napster to obtain unauthorized copies of works strongly suggests that some members of the public will infringe copyright when the likelihood of detection and punishment is low.
Unfortunately, statements like that will be used to justify stronger and stronger punishments for less and less significant "crimes".
This is the same country, remember, that will have a public school call the police when a 4th-grader points a piece of fried chicken at someone at lunchtime and goes "bang-bang".
I can't wait to see the anti-copying police state they'll come up with in 5-10 years.
I don't think clock speed is important. It should be printed on the computer box someplace but it doesn't need to be part of the marketing or product name.
Clock speed hasn't mattered to me since about 100MHz. Just get a current PC, and your computer will be fast enough for the popular applications (MP3 for instance).
Of course power users will care, but average joe doesn't..it's hard to compare MHz to MHz these days anyway.
A fun game in which players are given PDA's with infrared transmitters, and MP3 copies of five popular songs, chosen randomly out of 100. Each person has to convince others to share copies of their songs, and whoever collects all 100 first, wins the game!
Sounds easy, right? But watch out! Hillary ®osen and her crack gang of ©opyright police are out in full force, posing as regular players, and whenever you try and share with them, they take all your songs and you have to start over!
It's loads of fun! And remember, sharing is stealing!
We here at Slashdot would like to take the time to say that strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation.
I agree. To put it another way, strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation.
Microsoft is much better than Cats. I'm going to see it again and again.
J. Doe (deceased)
Why does this just degenerate into the same tired argument of "giving you freedom A takes away my freedom B"? Of course that will always be true, for any argument about freedom. My freedom to walk on the street without getting hit conflicts with your freedom to hit people on the street.
Of course, being able to choose any license is a freedom. But that's not the freedom the FSF stands for, don't we know that already? The stand for other freedoms, namely the freedoms described in the GPL.
What exactly do all these people (and sometimes the FSF does it too, I know) hope to gain by fighting over who's freedom is best?
Society, free markets, etc., those mechanisms will pick what's best for society.
Unfortunately, the way copyright law works for software, the power is automatically in the copyright holder's hands. You have to agree to an arbitrary contract-like agreement to have a copy at all! Sometimes you actively read and agree to the contract, sometimes it's imposed on you without your knowing by some other action (buying a new computer). Imagine if everything you bought had a contract you had to read and agree to. Free markets would be impaired (think "transaction costs" from economics).
So when TOR (Tim O'Reilly) says we should be able to choose any license for software, I think he is implicitly supporting the tilted playing field of the status quo, so it's no surprise that the FSF would not agree with that standpoint.
And to suggest that the FSF would want to pass a law to make proprietary licenses illegal is silly! Pass one law, to counteract the effects of another? ESR is starting from the viewpoint that software should have a license in the first place. He should know by now, the FSF doesn't agree with that. Why not just remove the law that lets copyright holders enforce their contracts. Then the GPL would be pretty much unecessary!
RMS has never suggested many of the things people always ascribe to him. ESR is simply inventing things that he thinks RMS might want or say. It would be like RMS arguing that ESR wants to pass a law that makes it illegal not to carry a gun. Since ESR supports our freedom to carry guns, it's only logical that he would be against a freedom NOT to carry a gun, yes?
If there's a single trait most people who read Slashdot share -- maybe the only one besides an addiction to software -- it's a love of popular culture.
Eh? I'm so out of touch with popular culture I'm not even sure if I love it or not!
Imagine if the phone company checked your lines for "business use" and shut you down unless you got a business contract.
Or how about the power company, charging you differently depending on how you use the power, and limiting you to, say, 10 amps peak if you don't have a business contract.
I wonder if it isn't appropriate to have a little (eek) government regulation when it comes to these things? Like not blocking any ports for any customer unless it is clearly marked in advertising or something?
I always wonder when my ISP will decide, for the good of all customers, to shut down this or that port or filter or monitor traffic. They'll probably not even notify me, they'll just update the terms of service buried in their web page someplace.
PETAWATT laser?? God damn! Do you hear me? God damn!
This would've made my high-school Apple basic program a crime, eh?
Ah it was such pleasure watching from a distance as the librarian tried to get the image to stabilize...and gosh how did the computer know???
So I will join the chorus and say "Thank goodness I'm out of school, because I would probably be in jail now!" (Not for that BASIC program particularly. But then again who knows? Having to adjust the monitor caused the librarian all sorts of harm and damages and theft of intellectual property and loss of wages).
I was waiting to get my hands on one of those CDs with copy interference and see if I could hack a CD player to supply raw digital data to some kind of aquisition board or something connected to the computer. I know some electronics but very little about CD players so I thought it would be a fun project. Maybe an EE could do it as a digital design project sometime.
Anybody know where I could find specs or schematics or service manuals for old Sony Discmans (Discmen?)...? Or any other info useful for such a project?
them: so if (this organization) was a circus, what role would do you play?
me (thinking): what the fuck kind of stupid question is that??
me (speaking): *laff* I clean up the elephant shit.
I think they wanted me to say ringmaster or something.
So let me get this straight, the solution to heavy-handed government interference in a free market via the overly-burdensome copyright laws is to create MORE government interference?
How about relaxing copyright law in the interests of the public? How about unravelling the complex mess that the RIAA/MPAA has created over the decades, taking rights away from artists and the public? How about removing the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions? How about reducing the length of copyright terms?
If society can copy works more freely, there will be no "holes in history".
Watch out, they might build a DEBIGULATOR and then they'll debigulate you and suck you down into their city and treat you like their god and creator. It sure sux when shit like that happens......you need some kind of re-bigulator and the thought of such a thing, well, boggles the mind really.
*laff* *laff* *laff* that's good stuff. My first porn-viewing was a penthouse in a friend's dad's bedroom. Peer-to-peer via piece of paper! (P2PvPP?)
Yeah, so other companies are doing this too. For instance the other day, I was out of town and called my young daughter and read to her from her favorite book. After the first paragraph, on operator came on the line and asked me to please cease and desist with my balatant copyright violation. I told her to fuck off and that information wants to be free, but they cancelled my phone service and put my daughter in juvinile detention. Now I have two copies of the book, one here, and one at home, and I purchased a reading license. It feels so good to be legal, and not an evil pirate!
Then there was the time I was calling a friend from work, and my CD player was on, and the same thing happened. I got a letter from the RIAA, and they cancelled my employers phone service. Of course, I was fired and they took my CD. But I should've known better! Distributing copyrighted content is WRONG!
And the other day, I connected my stereo to my computer and played my favorite Metallica MP3s that I downloaded and didn't pay anybody for. After 4 seconds, the power went out. The next day I received a fedex telling me that "your electricity service is only licensed for legal purposes. failure to abide by these terms will result in the immediate termination of your account.".
So don't worry folks, this is nothing new. Now I just have to read the license terms on this new flashlight I bought: "Your new Mag-Lite(r) flashlight is licensed soley for the illlumination of material that you have the right view. In order to enforce these terms, we reserve the right to audit your flashlight use at any time and without prior notice."
"There has been a lot of discussion about circumvention and free speech," Adler said. "But I wonder if those same advocates would be as protective of a piece of technology that helps people obtain their personal information online."
Reading a book sold in a publicly-accessible bookstore is the same as getting someone's personal information??
The DMCA allowed the Internet to grow and by and large the act has worked.
Please, spare me...
As a huge fan of electronic music and occasional dabbler in writing it with my Mac and MIDI gear, I hearby announce that if Linux and Free software can replace a Mac running Cubase with VST plugins, Reaktor, Reason, the new Absynth, and other staples of electronic music, with MIDI and low latency, I will SHIT MYSELF LIKE AN INFANT IN DIAPERS!!
i.e., I would really be impressed and would install it straight away. :-)
You let somebody else listen to your 1000 CDs? That's intellectual property theft! You pirate! You should go to jail for illegally distributing the music on your CDs! Remember kids, sharing is stealing! Protect those CDs better next time!
(in case it isn't clear, that's a joke.)