"If you use MY code, you go with MY license!" - Wait a second. Why can we say that and not be hypocritical? I want to use a DVD player. The DVD industry insists that the discs I use be encrypted. I want to watch THEIR movies, shouldn't I agree to THEIR license? What about Napster? I want to listen to THEIR (the artists') music, should I obey THEIR wishes?
The difference between the GPL and those examples is, of course, that the GPL is designed to satisfy the needs of users, and is so well-accepted by users that it sustains itself without even being tested in court. The DMCA, on the other hand, only benefits the content providers. Since we are for the most part users, we prefer the spirit of the GPL!
This isn't a question but it will help if/. and other sources of news use a term like "copy control" or "access control", depending on how it works, instead of the meaningless "copy protection". RMS has written on the subject and I tend to agree that the word "protection" lends a false air of credibility and necessity to these technological control schemes.
Imagine hearing a debate against "protection". Who in their right mind except a bunch of evil hackers would want to take away protection? Now imagine a debate against "control". Well that's good! Americans don't like to be controlled!
If they can use spin and propaganda to further their needs, I think we should too. Like when talking about "censorware", that word is really spin we use to make our message clearer.
But all this meant was that the creators/musicans of the songs never got to see a cent from all that downloading, which I know a good majority felt was wrong (yet some still continued to use napster).
What makes you think the artists will get anything now? There's nothing in existing artist's contracts about royalties from downloads, is there? Don't fall for that one.
Now Napster's going to a *SMALL* fee ($5/mnth is a bargain!) for unlimited, legal access to a good library of music
Good library of music? Sheesh I still haven't found anything on Napster that was encoded properly. Now I have to pay for some teenager's poor rip?
The only solution will be to have the label itself distribute the music, which will then turn Napster into another client/server architecture, why not just use web pages and sell passwords to the web pages? Amazon could set up an MP3 page with paid access. For-a-fee napster is obsolete before it gets of the ground, in my opinion!
Damn it, not another fine magazine getting tossed
around. Usually that's the first step before it's put to death.
What's next, Dr. Dobbs? Linux Journal?
What happens to these magazines? Why can't the
people and articles just get regrouped under another
name or something? For some reason I thought Orwant
actually had the rights to TPJ and such. What's with the court case?
Oh well, just venting. I could never understand why when people are willing to pay for a magazine (especially one like TPJ, they couldn't get THAT much from advertising)
why the magazine can be killed.
And just like Byte, I get the news RIGHT AFTER
renewing my subscription.
I hope TPJ is back in full effect (ON PAPER please, no TPJ.com for me)
and this is all just publisher silliness.
If copyright limitations were lowered to say 20 years (instead of, what, life+70 years), there would be a lot less of a fuss about all this crap from copyright holders.
If we knew that a work would be in the public domain within our lifetimes, it would not be such a problem if the copyright holders extracted some fees from the public for their labors. Then after the time passed the information would become part of our shared knowledge, like it's supposed to!
When the framers wrote ``exclusive rights for a limited time'' in the consititution, they meant from the point of view of a normal human, not some immortal being who lived 150 years or more!
*sigh* If only I had the money to buy some laws of my own.
Reading/.'s article might lead you to believe
that the FAQ is making a general statement about open
source..they are not, they are making a statement about
their product only. Here is a better quote:
"[C]alling [Athena/Pandora] open source
may be something of a misnomer from a purist's
point of view."
That confused me at first, thinking that the were
dissing open source but I don't think they are.
Whatever happened to WilberWorks.. some kind of commercial entity for the Gimp. Sold a handy CD-ROM with art and a copy of a Gimp manual. Will there be a 1.2 CD?
For those of us with Photoshop, what does Gimp have to offer?
Freedom baby, Freedom.
Also supposedly the gimp can be scripted easier (I think, I haven't figure it out.) PhotoShop scripting is more difficult because Adobe doesn't want people buying one copy and then setting it up as a batch processor, they want one copy on every desk or whatever.
Re:Why would anyone bother with PhotoShop now ???
on
Gimp 1.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Well, besides the obvious CMYK and color stuff, PS seems to work better with huge files and/or many many layers. The Gimp seems to eat up a lot of memory and doesn't use it effectively (there is a setting somewhere that helps a little but not much). But otherwise for a lot of tasks The Gimp really is a damn fine piece of work.
Oh man a Mac version of the Gimp would absolutely rule. If those MacGimp people are reading I hope they're working hard..I hope they sell CDROMS or something when they are done because I'd pay big bucks for one. As long as it's cheaper than PhotoShop, comes with source, and can be scripted with AppleScript for batch processing..
Its all very well saying "information wants to be free" and going along with all the open-source rhetoric, but at the end of the day unless someone pays the producer of the information to create it, the information won't get created.
How do we know this is true? What if, as we reduce the amount of original information being created, there comes a point when people are willing to pay a little for some better information. I'm thinking of supply and demand, etc.
What if, instead of waking up and declaring that all information was free, we simply took the world we have now and allowed digital copying. Would people really suddenly stop buying CDs entirely? I think we would just find a new equilibrium point and I bet it would leave everyone better off than the point we're at now. Or maybe it wouldn't, but anything is better than lawsuits and 70 year + life copyright terms that create monopolies in a supposedly free market.
I didn't feel like reading that article/book (it is Xmas after all) but I wonder if these neo-libertarians are using too broad a term when saying ``intellectual property''. Some intellectual property is valuable to society, such as trade and service marks. Regardless of what you think of copyright, trademarks are extremely useful, even though they are abused somewhat by the occasional big company.
Imagine that every time you had to purchase a good or service you had to make sure that what you were getting was the genuine article from a trusted source. The ``information gathering'' would be a huge waste of time and what if you made a mistake?
I think whatever utopian ``new copyright'' we discuss (and it will probably never be more than discussion but still good to think about) must include some kind of ``trademark'' or ``attribution'' as an important component. For instance, Napster should discourage trading songs that are labelled incorrectly. A Metallica song should be attributed to Metallica, etc. In other words copying is copying, but plagerism is more like theft. If you were paying for your music, wouldn't you want it to go to the people who wrote it rather than someone claiming to be them? And if you were a musician, wouldn't you like to know that it was YOU people were praising (or paying, if you're into that:-) and not someone else?
Also, we know software and business method patents are useless and stifle innovation, but what about patents on drugs? Is there any motivation for drug companies besides money? A single person may be philanthropic and want everyone to be healthy, but a profit-maximizing company doesn't want everyone to be healthy and thus put them out of business. I can't imagine someone in their bedroom inventing a drug the way I can imagine them inventing a crypto algorithm or a ``one click shopping'' method. Then again I know little about biology and medicine..another option is to have the government do drug research but something tells me this wouldn't work.
Anyway whenever I hear someone who wants to end all ``intellectual property'' I wince because some is better for society than others. I think the founding fathers intended IP to advance society as a whole.
But someone please answer it.. the article said there is little genetic descrimination for health insurance, because 1) the companies already ask a lot about family history and 2) the genetic information does not give a 100% accurate prediction. Insurance is based on probabilities and so it seems they don't think the probabilities are that much different.
So why did the company fire her? Because of the non-economic reason that they didn't want a sick person on their staff? Either the company shouldn't care, or the insurance companies should care more and descriminate. That doesn't seem rational that employers would descriminate and insurance companies wouldn't. Just wondering about that.
Would this article have been posted if they were asking about a 15-year old scalpel or a 15-year old autoclave, or plotting machine, or file cabinet, or any other tool? I bet they can get a replacement Atari easier than a piece of medical equipment. In fact I have one in a box in my closet.
Whatever works for the job. If I went into a hospital and my life was being decided by the output of a Windows program, I'd be pretty damn scared!
Seeing those hand recounts in Florida made me wonder if there would be some way to distribute the disputed ballots so that hundreds of people would "vote" on each one to arrive at a decision. Maybe if they could've distributed digitally signed image of each ballots.
Is there a digital technology to do this? I think I read once that Bruce Schneier(sp) had a system that worked this way by passing signed votes around between voters.
That was a pretty funny article! Whoever wrote it did a good job coming up with quotes for British Telecom that sounded real. And this was the best part:
British Telecommunications PLC (BT), which earlier in the year said it had discovered that it owns the U.S. patent for the invention of the hyperlink technology used on the Internet, has sued U.S.-based Prodigy Communications Corp. for copyright infringement.
"Discovered the patent," I love it! Like some company is digging through their dusty attic and finds they have the patent for the wheel. Eureka! And like any company would be so stupid to try and enforce it!
If it wasn't for the mistake of saying "copyright infringement" instead of "patent infringement", I would've believed it. Damn, even the IDG logo looks real.
So let me get this straight. We have patents so people won't use existing technology, and instead will have incentive to create new solutions to problems. Now patents are used to make sure new technologies DON'T appear. When did this huge disconnect come about?
I've been doing something like this with my eBay auctions.. put a small GIF in your auction going to a script that reads the auction number from the referer field and plays a different sound for each auction (also make sure to send out headers that keep the gif from being cached). It's pretty cool to see how popular different items are and at what times of the day, and how some people hit reload OVER and OVER again as the auction ends...
"Most of these customers have probably never heard of the doctrine of first sale, the doctrine of fair use, or section 117 of the Copyright Act."
I'm wondering if any COMPANIES are aware of what those things are??
These are the same lawyers who take down eBay auctions of sealed software, even though first sale allows that? The same lawyers who forbid screenshots, even though fair use would allow it them in editorial articles such as product reviews? (I don't know what section 117 is so I can't make an example. But I sure as hell didn't learn what it is from any EULA.)
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The difference between the GPL and those examples is, of course, that the GPL is designed to satisfy the needs of users, and is so well-accepted by users that it sustains itself without even being tested in court. The DMCA, on the other hand, only benefits the content providers. Since we are for the most part users, we prefer the spirit of the GPL!
Maybe I'm just a little too leftist but I'll take taxes over lawsuits anyday.
Of course like too many liberals I may be naive in my thinking that any of this money will actually go to the intended recipients.....
This isn't a question but it will help if /. and other sources of news use a term like "copy control" or "access control", depending on how it works, instead of the meaningless "copy protection". RMS has written on the subject and I tend to agree that the word "protection" lends a false air of credibility and necessity to these technological control schemes.
Imagine hearing a debate against "protection". Who in their right mind except a bunch of evil hackers would want to take away protection? Now imagine a debate against "control". Well that's good! Americans don't like to be controlled!
If they can use spin and propaganda to further their needs, I think we should too. Like when talking about "censorware", that word is really spin we use to make our message clearer.
But all this meant was that the creators/musicans of the songs never got to see a cent from all that downloading, which I know a good majority felt was wrong (yet some still continued to use napster).
What makes you think the artists will get anything now? There's nothing in existing artist's contracts about royalties from downloads, is there? Don't fall for that one.
Now Napster's going to a *SMALL* fee ($5/mnth is a bargain!) for unlimited, legal access to a good library of music
Good library of music? Sheesh I still haven't found anything on Napster that was encoded properly. Now I have to pay for some teenager's poor rip?
The only solution will be to have the label itself distribute the music, which will then turn Napster into another client/server architecture, why not just use web pages and sell passwords to the web pages? Amazon could set up an MP3 page with paid access. For-a-fee napster is obsolete before it gets of the ground, in my opinion!
Damn it, not another fine magazine getting tossed around. Usually that's the first step before it's put to death. What's next, Dr. Dobbs? Linux Journal?
What happens to these magazines? Why can't the people and articles just get regrouped under another name or something? For some reason I thought Orwant actually had the rights to TPJ and such. What's with the court case?
Oh well, just venting. I could never understand why when people are willing to pay for a magazine (especially one like TPJ, they couldn't get THAT much from advertising) why the magazine can be killed.
And just like Byte, I get the news RIGHT AFTER renewing my subscription.
I hope TPJ is back in full effect (ON PAPER please, no TPJ.com for me) and this is all just publisher silliness.
Due to downturn in economy, dot-com stocks, DotComGuy drops DotCom, becomes just Guy, announces new business plan: working for a living.
If copyright limitations were lowered to say 20 years (instead of, what, life+70 years), there would be a lot less of a fuss about all this crap from copyright holders.
If we knew that a work would be in the public domain within our lifetimes, it would not be such a problem if the copyright holders extracted some fees from the public for their labors. Then after the time passed the information would become part of our shared knowledge, like it's supposed to!
When the framers wrote ``exclusive rights for a limited time'' in the consititution, they meant from the point of view of a normal human, not some immortal being who lived 150 years or more!
*sigh* If only I had the money to buy some laws of my own.
Reading /.'s article might lead you to believe
that the FAQ is making a general statement about open
source..they are not, they are making a statement about
their product only. Here is a better quote:
That confused me at first, thinking that the were dissing open source but I don't think they are.
Aww, heck and I thought you were going to point out that I can't play tapes on my Linux machine either.
Though it seems people with bushy beards and long hair all tend to look the same anyway..
Why are we talking about DVDs here? It's not like we can play them on our Linux machines, at least not without breaking laws.
Whatever happened to WilberWorks .. some kind of commercial entity for the Gimp. Sold a handy CD-ROM with art and a copy of a Gimp manual. Will there be a 1.2 CD?
For those of us with Photoshop, what does Gimp have to offer?
Freedom baby, Freedom.
Also supposedly the gimp can be scripted easier (I think, I haven't figure it out.) PhotoShop scripting is more difficult because Adobe doesn't want people buying one copy and then setting it up as a batch processor, they want one copy on every desk or whatever.
Well, besides the obvious CMYK and color stuff, PS seems to work better with huge files and/or many many layers. The Gimp seems to eat up a lot of memory and doesn't use it effectively (there is a setting somewhere that helps a little but not much). But otherwise for a lot of tasks The Gimp really is a damn fine piece of work.
Oh man a Mac version of the Gimp would absolutely rule. If those MacGimp people are reading I hope they're working hard..I hope they sell CDROMS or something when they are done because I'd pay big bucks for one. As long as it's cheaper than PhotoShop, comes with source, and can be scripted with AppleScript for batch processing..
Its all very well saying "information wants to be free" and going along with all the open-source rhetoric, but at the end of the day unless someone pays the producer of the information to create it, the information won't get created.
How do we know this is true? What if, as we reduce the amount of original information being created, there comes a point when people are willing to pay a little for some better information. I'm thinking of supply and demand, etc.
What if, instead of waking up and declaring that all information was free, we simply took the world we have now and allowed digital copying. Would people really suddenly stop buying CDs entirely? I think we would just find a new equilibrium point and I bet it would leave everyone better off than the point we're at now. Or maybe it wouldn't, but anything is better than lawsuits and 70 year + life copyright terms that create monopolies in a supposedly free market.
I didn't feel like reading that article/book (it is Xmas after all) but I wonder if these neo-libertarians are using too broad a term when saying ``intellectual property''. Some intellectual property is valuable to society, such as trade and service marks. Regardless of what you think of copyright, trademarks are extremely useful, even though they are abused somewhat by the occasional big company.
Imagine that every time you had to purchase a good or service you had to make sure that what you were getting was the genuine article from a trusted source. The ``information gathering'' would be a huge waste of time and what if you made a mistake?
I think whatever utopian ``new copyright'' we discuss (and it will probably never be more than discussion but still good to think about) must include some kind of ``trademark'' or ``attribution'' as an important component. For instance, Napster should discourage trading songs that are labelled incorrectly. A Metallica song should be attributed to Metallica, etc. In other words copying is copying, but plagerism is more like theft. If you were paying for your music, wouldn't you want it to go to the people who wrote it rather than someone claiming to be them? And if you were a musician, wouldn't you like to know that it was YOU people were praising (or paying, if you're into that :-) and not someone else?
Also, we know software and business method patents are useless and stifle innovation, but what about patents on drugs? Is there any motivation for drug companies besides money? A single person may be philanthropic and want everyone to be healthy, but a profit-maximizing company doesn't want everyone to be healthy and thus put them out of business. I can't imagine someone in their bedroom inventing a drug the way I can imagine them inventing a crypto algorithm or a ``one click shopping'' method. Then again I know little about biology and medicine..another option is to have the government do drug research but something tells me this wouldn't work.
Anyway whenever I hear someone who wants to end all ``intellectual property'' I wince because some is better for society than others. I think the founding fathers intended IP to advance society as a whole.
But someone please answer it .. the article said there is little genetic descrimination for health insurance, because 1) the companies already ask a lot about family history and 2) the genetic information does not give a 100% accurate prediction. Insurance is based on probabilities and so it seems they don't think the probabilities are that much different.
So why did the company fire her? Because of the non-economic reason that they didn't want a sick person on their staff? Either the company shouldn't care, or the insurance companies should care more and descriminate. That doesn't seem rational that employers would descriminate and insurance companies wouldn't. Just wondering about that.
Wow, just looking at one of the first ads..that APF machine included SCHEMATICS!
Nowadays, if you know how your hardware works, somebody sues you! (a la DeCSS). That's progress!
Would this article have been posted if they were asking about a 15-year old scalpel or a 15-year old autoclave, or plotting machine, or file cabinet, or any other tool? I bet they can get a replacement Atari easier than a piece of medical equipment. In fact I have one in a box in my closet.
Whatever works for the job. If I went into a hospital and my life was being decided by the output of a Windows program, I'd be pretty damn scared!
Seeing those hand recounts in Florida made me wonder if there would be some way to distribute the disputed ballots so that hundreds of people would "vote" on each one to arrive at a decision. Maybe if they could've distributed digitally signed image of each ballots.
Is there a digital technology to do this? I think I read once that Bruce Schneier(sp) had a system that worked this way by passing signed votes around between voters.
Just wondering..
That was a pretty funny article! Whoever wrote it did a good job coming up with quotes for British Telecom that sounded real. And this was the best part:
"Discovered the patent," I love it! Like some company is digging through their dusty attic and finds they have the patent for the wheel. Eureka! And like any company would be so stupid to try and enforce it!If it wasn't for the mistake of saying "copyright infringement" instead of "patent infringement", I would've believed it. Damn, even the IDG logo looks real.
Hey..wait a minute.. oh crap.
So let me get this straight. We have patents so people won't use existing technology, and instead will have incentive to create new solutions to problems. Now patents are used to make sure new technologies DON'T appear. When did this huge disconnect come about?
I've been doing something like this with my eBay auctions .. put a small GIF in your auction going to a script that reads the auction number from the referer field and plays a different sound for each auction (also make sure to send out headers that keep the gif from being cached). It's pretty cool to see how popular different items are and at what times of the day, and how some people hit reload OVER and OVER again as the auction ends...
Lawyer quote from the article:
"Most of these customers have probably never heard of the doctrine of first sale, the doctrine of fair use, or section 117 of the Copyright Act."
I'm wondering if any COMPANIES are aware of what those things are??
These are the same lawyers who take down eBay auctions of sealed software, even though first sale allows that? The same lawyers who forbid screenshots, even though fair use would allow it them in editorial articles such as product reviews? (I don't know what section 117 is so I can't make an example. But I sure as hell didn't learn what it is from any EULA.)