So people simply order the products from a company in the UK.
Especially in the computer world where delivery time for a software product can be dependant on your bandwidth.
So people will just start buying more on the internet from companies not in the USA.
Now, that'd be ammusing. If the USA's protectionist trade policies, in the form of letting US companies patent air and other notable innovations, would end up hurting US commerce to the point where the companies themselves lobbied to get rid of software patents.
I don't care if it's ordering a book or starting a car, the innovation is in making a switch that allows a car to be started with a button push, or a key turn. Once that's done, the rest is just packaging. It's like saying that the idea of a blue car should be patentable...
Patents should cover an actual invention, not just a sales-driven repackaging.
And as for inventions, nothing should be patented if it's the only reasonable way to do something.
Some poster mentioned patenting the formula for figuring out the area of a circle, mentioning that it encouraged other people to find a better formula. *WHAT*?
There are many other ways to do this, such as use calculus, or statistic sampling of random points in a bounding area, but that's just insane.
Patenting pi*r^2 shouldn't be possible. Nor should any similar patents be possible. I dunno what the formula for figuring out the 'volume' of a nine-dimensional 'sphere' is, but you can't patent it just because you thought of a use for nine-dimensional spheres...
Now, if you come up with a good way to make hardware do the calculation, such as, implement 'this' design, with these shift registers, this floating point unit, etc. That would be patentable because it's merely an implementation of the idea.
We're allowing people to patent whole areas, or whole inventions. (ie, using recording media to store video and sound.) Instead of specific implementations. (Use 1' tape wound between two spools. Encode a frame of video thusly, then store in this fashion.) That doesn't help innovation, it squashes it completely by preventing any improvements on the basic idea that another company could make.
As the other reply says, you can (and it's automatic usually) copyright your post.
But your copyright won't hold up if it's the simplest possible expression of an idea.
If you mean x times x = y, you write x^2=y. That's the obvious thing to write.
So your copyright wouldn't forbid anyone else from using that, 'fair use' quoting or not.
But, if you wrote x^7/x^5 = sqrt(y^2) or something, and then printed it up in nice calligraphy, your copyright would be much more enforcable because you didn't use the obvious and simplest expression, and you didn't express it in the obvious way (block characters, with a ballpoint, etc).
The nice thing about copyrights is that they allow independant discovery. If you unintentionally reproduce 99% of _Lord_of_the_Rings_ the Tolkein estate can't force you to not print your version. If you can show that you came up with it independantly and it's not derived from any of their copyrighted properties.
With a patent, that sort of thing would cover any use of elves and dwarves with sub-human sized protagonists in an apocalyptic story. And it wouldn't matter who came up with it first, or if both were independant. The patent would win out.
Now, thankfully that's not a valid patent...
But, using XOR to draw to the screen (a very simple exclusive-or logical operation) is patented. That's like patenting using ADD instructions.
Then why did someone from id post a big warning about how the auth servers were going to be down at a certain time? I wasn't just about the server lists, because they said it affected even people using other master servers.
Maybe a later patch fixed this, but in the beginning (which is when they had the most problems) people were actually unable to play.
The problem with Q3's central authorization is that id doesn't run servers. Blizzard is going with central authorization, but only to access their servers.
When id actually coughs up the money to run server, they'll have an ethical right to check ID before letting people on. Until then, they should take a hike.
Not to mention the whole problem with their authorization servers going down. They're down fairly often for a few hours here and there. It's not a large percentage, but that's unimportant. For that period of time paying users aren't able to play.
The only games I'm going to buy are ones that I can play when I want, with or without a net connection. And without any per-per-play features. The exception would be massively multiplayer games that the company runs the servers for, and where the game was bought (and advertised) with the expectation that all games would be played online.
I agree. Assholes will be assholes, regardless of their situation.
But if they didn't use religion to control the masses, the situation they were in wouldn't allow them as much power to abuse.
Religious leaders were (and often still are) free to commit whatever excesses they wish and justify it by saving it was god's will.
So yes, I think the world as a whole would have suffered MUCH less without religion. It wouldn't be perfect because many of those assholes would have gravitated to other lines of work that allowed them to control people, but it would be better. If only because people kill politicians more readily than religious leaders.
Actually, they have a number of very strong claims.
1) Volunteer effort in a for-profit enterprise must be rewarded. The volunteers received nothing for their work. AOL was hit with this and had to pay a significant ammount to all their chat-room supervisors, etc.
2) The copyright on the compilation should rest with all the contributing authors. As is, they're violating the copyrights of most of their contributors by distributing it in the way they do.
3) By advertising themselves as a free (as in beer) project when they asked for help, they offered an implied promise that they would stay free. Or at least that the work put into the project wouldn't be made proprietary by them.
#3 has been tried in the US before. A community center sought community assistance in fixing itself up, buy machines, etc. Then once done, they mentioned that they weren't really a community center, that they were a company who bought an old community center. They were now going to charge for access to the exercise equipment, etc.
It was ruled that the volunteers were owed fair wages for the efforts they were tricked into providing. The company went bankrupt, the city bought them back, and they're now a community center for real.
I don't remember where, it was an article in something like Reader's Digest. But there are a fair number of other cases like that, though maybe not such a perfect test case.
Suffice it to say, Gracenote asked for help, didn't specify that it was for a future pay-to-access project, and now they don't have all the rights over the DB or access to it.
They could start charging for it, it's their bandwidth, but they'd have to do it based on bandwidth instead of 'access to the information' which they don't legally control. And in that case, a do-gooder could download it and setup their own system competing with theirs on bandwidth sales.
If I show you a product, something no-cost, and ask your help in enhancing it and distributing it to those who need it, then once you've helped me, I start charging for it and keep the money, you're entitled to some.
AOL ran into a similar thing with their volunteers. You aren't allowed to solicit unpaid volunteer effort toward a for-profit enterprise.
Because CDDB was free, and not just free to access one at a time, but free to download, while they were soliciting their volunteers, they made the expectation that they would remain that way.
Besides, they're claiming to have the copyright on this compilation. Copyrights are usually distributed among all the authors, unless those authors SIGN AWAY their copyright. There was no contract so any rights they had are still theirs.
The UCITA is completely insane, not because of some of its claim, but because it's binding without any of the elements of a contract.
If you want to spell out a contract where I'm not allowed to tell others about some thing, that's fine. It's called an NDA. You have to precisely spell out what I can't tell people, I look at it, decide if I like it, and agree to it because you offer me something in return.
The UCITA doesn't require the customer to be able to see the contract for it to be binding. It allows clauses like retroactive changes (with the onus of checking for this on the customer). It allows companies to sell products that are completely different from what was advertised and sue anyone who publicises this fact.
Any of these decisions, on their own, in an informed scenario, would be okay. I occasionally buy 'as is' merchandise that isn't guaranteed to work. That's fine because this merchandise is required to be marked 'as is'. It's not enough that they say "well, it should have been obvious because of... ". I'd even perhaps pay for beta software if it solved a problem I'd been having. And maybe sign an NDA agreeing not to slam the product for bugs because it's still a beta. That's fine, I'd go into it knowing what I was contracting not to say and what the limits were (till out of beta.)
It's only when you pass a law that makes shrinkwrap licenses, which can state any and all of this, binding that you screw the consumers.
The UCITA even allows companies to remotely disable your software if they think that you've violated the license. The incredibly broad license that could theoretically prevent make it a violation if you told your neighbor that you thought one product was better than another. And they can disclaim all responsibility for damages that this may cause. If you take any measures to prevent this (even a firewall) you could very well be tried under the DMCA for disabling an access control mechanism.
No other industry allows blanket disclaimers to be binding. If you sign a disclaimer at a hospital and they perform a sex change instead of an apendectomy you can sue them, regardless of any disclaimer you may have signed absolving them of responsibility.
If you buy a car, you can return it if it's a lemon, regardless of you having bought it. If you take that car to an independant dealer for a tune-up, they can't cancel your warranty. Ditto if you buy user servicable parts (spark plugs) to replace the ones the product came with. Ford can't cancel your warranty or sue you because you used GM-approved tires.
If you buy a TV the company can't dictate what you can play on it.
In no other industries do we allow laws that so blatantly screw the consumer.
We shouldn't accept the software companies line about how software is a new paradigm, etc. etc. We should hold them to the same rules as any other business in any other industry.
Do you honestly think that companies should be allowed to do any of that?
Why not set up a site that proxies CDDB queries. Point all the programs that ARE affected to this site, it generates CDDB requests that appear to come from programs that CDDB allows.
And no, I don't consider it cheating, theft, or underhanded in any way. CDDB lied to the community about the purpose of the DB, enlisted help under false pretenses, and then locked off access to a DB that many people had helped to create.
If we have to change an identifier in a query to get around their fraudulent business model it sounds good to me.
Fucking assholes who're willing to sell out everyone else just for a buck...
> Do you really think that in the absense of religion things would have been any better?
Yes. Immensely. All the nasty things that happened without religion would still have happened, but the ones dependant on religion wouldn't have.
> Yes, religion does have power to influence people and at times that power has been abused,
At times? How is it good to have a corrupt power structure dictating to people how they should live their lives? Don't even bother trying to claim that religious leaders aren't corrupt. They try to convince people of obvious untruths (just read any holy book) and use that to control people.
If they had some grand truth, it would be evident without power structures and orders.
> There are many cases of religious institutions and religious people helping others.
Many religious people have helped others. Sure. But those people would have helped others without the whole organized religion.
Religions exist to gain power for the leaders. Helping people doesn't serve that, thus religions as a whole don't help people.
> While tithing is important in the mormon faith, it pales in comparison to the importance of the family.
What a lie. The mormon church is rapidly rising in the list of richest organizations in the world. They do that precisely because NOTHING is more important to them than tithing. You might be hard pressed to find an official who would ADMIT to thinking tithing is more important, but that's what the religion (like others) is all about, money, money, money. And I doubt they really care about how far anyone strays, as long as they keep tithing.
>> our religion-influenced government will take your children away
> I hardly think the mormon church has a significant influence over the government
The mormon church is no doubt the strongest government influence, in Utah. If they were larger, they'd be a stronger influence in more areas.
I don't want to sound patronizing, but... it's really obvious. If you weren't in a religion, you'd see what they're like.
If people really wanted to help others, they wouldn't invent this whole rigamarole of oddball beliefs and strict punishments, they'd just go help people. But they do create these religions, which means they're looking to do something other than help people.
My point is that your interpretation is NOT the law, it's one interpretation of the law. It's the one the RIAA likes the most.
The other interpretations, which are equally valid until the supreme court rules on them, are that any identical copy of bits is the same. If my CD breaks, I can make a backup after the fact, of yours.
The 'alternative' of licensing everything won't happen without laws like the UCITA. Nobody will agree to a contract to buy a CD, especially a contract that doesn't give them any rights.
And the UCITA violates contract law and is unconstitutional. It may make it in the courts, but if it does, it'll only prove that every judge that upholds it has been bought and paid for. It's against every precedent in existing contract law and it ONLY serves the large companies.
Maybe those will end up being the interpretations of copyright law that win out in the end, but I'm not going to do them a favour and roll over and play dead in anticipation of it. I'm going to assume the law makes sense and follow that.
Oh wow, look at the generous religious man. They tax the people in the form of tithes, order huge temples and monastarys built, and among this, copy a few books. We should be *so* grateful to them for this...
The rich church officials lived better than kings and had incredible power of live and death, which they traditionally used in manipulative ways ("Do this, or I'll declare you to be possessed and kill you.")
They achieved this lifestyle by taking from the actual producers of wealth, the lower and middle classes. What did they produce on their own? Elaborate religions designed to keep people down, complex heirarchies, and secret rules whose violation was punishable by torture.
During that they copied books, mainly their books of fables, but also some few others that didn't conflict with their books.
Oh yes, we should be so thankful to these wise and benevolent men. If only they'd tortured and taxed even more to death, just think of the neat things we'd have today!
There's *NOTHING* good in the world which can be attributed to religion, which could/would not have happened without it. But there are many bad things which nobody would have been driven to do without power-mad popes and other religious figures forcing them to do.
Scientology is just more blatant about it, most other religions are lying low now and building up a little good will by spreading around a tiny fraction of the wealth they stole over the years. When it really comes down to it, see how helpful they are... show your membership card at the door or get thrown out on your ass.
Members of especially damaging religions should be tried for crimes. I'd especially love to grab a few mormon elders and try them for extortion (tithe or I'll tell your wife to leave you, our religion-influenced government will take your children away, and your mormon boss will fire you.) Ditto with JWs and scientologists.
Personally, if I see a Co$ member of the street I'll harass him because if he supports that religion, he's showing that he's supporting their illegal tactics which have resulted in the death of many people.
Religion exists JUST to coerce people into doing what the people in power tell them to. That's not a good thing. Maybe every now and again they happen to do good, but that's just a fluke event between centuries and raping and pillaging.
Any good that came out of them was because of the people, not because of the religion. The people would have been good people without the religion. The religion on the other hand existed just to exert a controlling force on people. What good ever came out of death threats and forced service?
So now, ask yourself why anyone not brainwashed by the whole religion thing is just a little bit down on the idea.
Nope. Theft is a very clear term. You later say "call it a banana...", but that's not accurate either.
If you mean "lowered the incentive for potential customers to pay for the work", then try saying that. If you use cute sound-byte words that sound all impressive but don't mean what you use them to mean, you're just spreading FUD.
I do agree that unauthorized copying can in some cases deprive an author of potential income. Nobody would disagree as long as you say 'can' and 'some cases'. But I don't agree that it's theft.
As the person who responded to you said, it's not theft if they make you miss two weeks of work by assaulting you, it's assault.
Note though, that I don't always think unauthorized copying costs the author anything... When I was in grade ten I was making about $50 / month. Someone gave me a copy of Photoshop 4. I'd have had to work for over a year, saving every penny, to buy that program. For then ten hours of use that I got out of it. There wasn't a potential sale there, so there wasn't any loss of a sale. Or, rather, not from Adobe. If there was a lost sale it was some shareware author of a $50 art program, something I might concievably bought.
But if Adobe knew about that, they'd count it as $900 in losses, just to inflate 'piracy' numbers and sound all important.
Why is it a red herring? The fact that you paid for the right to use that information is the only relevant fact!
Maybe a lawyerly reading of the law says otherwise, but who does that really serve? Why should we let broken interpretations of the law dictate how we act?
The law is supposed to reflect the will of the people. All of the people, not just the rich ones.
It makes no sense that your right to use information is tied to a physical media. That's not information, that's paper. If it makes no sense, ignore it.
Depends on what you need to trust them for. For an MP3? Trivial. For anything expensive, probably not.
And this communication doesn't need to be tedious, like using PGP, posting to usenet, monitoring for a message, etc.
It could be automated, made to appear something like Napster (depending on the function.)
Encryption and anonynimity would both add complexity to the situation but most would be hidden in the networking, to the user it'd just take an extra second or two...
I think we need to work on freenet type solutions. I personally don't feel the *need* to pirate everything in existance, but we're not truly free until we can, because laws that forbid piracy and a police force that can track us down for doing it can also forbid and track other usage.
Actually, FYI, theft means depriving the author of property.
(See www.m-w.com)
Theft: 1a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.
So this doesn't involve theft because nobody is depriving the author of his copy of the work.
I'm not arguing your point, I just want to encourage you to use the correct words. And theft isn't correct in this context.
I agree with your assesment of the video media. You buy it, you can use it in any way that doesn't conflict with existing law. (You can't copy and distribute it, and you can't kill someone with it (Britney Spears music...))
But you're wrong when you say you that you license software...
They only software you license if something you buy specifically from a contractor, a company that sells you a specific limited site license for a special deal, or shareware.
In the first case it's because you're paying the contrator for the product. You decide which rights you want and then bargain over the value of those. With the specific site license, that'd be like Adobe selling you 100 copies of Photoshop for an 80% discount because you could show that it was all going to be used in a way that they approved of (to teach people who might later buy their own copy for example) and you were both making concessions in the deal (them price, you in what you can do with it.)
And finally and most importantly, shareware. If you download a program off of CNET (or anywhere else) there's no payment on your part so you have no right to expect it'll do anything. You then get it and can agree to a contract allowing certain use in trade for certain payment (maybe nothing, maybe a post card, maybe $$..)
But with commercial software, you buy it at the store and take it home, where you find the 'contract'. At that point, the contract isn't valid. You purchased all required rights to the software already. It's invalid for a number of reasons.
1) You can't put limits on an existing contract (it becomes a new contract, which requires new agreement and especially, new consideration (compensation)). I can't see you a car and then call up later and say that you have to buy gas from me. I can offer you an exclusive gas contract in trade for something, free tires, a low price, whatever, but it's only an offer until you accept.
2) The 'contract' in the form of a click-through license attempts to prevent your use of *YOUR* software (you paid for it at this point) by requiring you to agree to their contract. That's duress. You're not bound by agreements made under duress. Simply click 'Yes' and ignore it...
3) That contract doesn't even offer you anything, just the ability to use your software, so you don't get anything out of it. A contract that doesn't have compensation for both parties isn't valid. Again, click 'Yes' and ignore it.
Certainly don't take the corps' word on any of this, they stand to gain by making you believe you have more obligations than you really do.
What proof do you have that you don't? The word of companies like Microsoft with their EULAs and the RIAA and MPAA who try to take away your ability to use the CD/DVD that you own?
Well, what do you think they'll say? They hope that people will believe them. And they hope they'll do what you did, pass that on to others.
Their view of copyright is incredibly short sighted. I really don't see why they deserve copyright protection anymore. Seriously. Copyright is a social contract... a limited monopoly in trade for opening something up for public use.
The MPAA/RIAA/Software publishers are trying to have the 'limited' part of the monopoly removed, and to take away all your rights to do anything with the work that they don't want you doing.
They aren't living up to their side of the bargain, thus the contract is void.
Now, they can claim anything they like, about how you'll join satan, and undermine capitalism, if you violate THEIR rights, but I don't see them saying anything about your rights. And it's not just a case of "well don't buy it." They're counting on your tax dollars funding the legal system which is granting them this unlimited monopoly, so they're taking from you and giving nothing back.
Anyways, as I see it, their laws are the product of bribery. They lobbied for those laws, which means paying politicians in "campaign funds", then they bribe judges like Kaplan (Dunno if they paid him, or if it was enough that he worked for them before and got paid then) to give weight to their laws. In my view, that's not a valid law. Like a contract for illegal activities isn't a valid contract.
I choose not to follow those laws. I honor copyright as I see it. Limited monopoly, a guarantee to the author that they'll be the first to profit from their work. I don't see it as a right for the author to control everything I do with their work, so I don't feel obligated to follow laws that they buy which say that.
Nobody is arguing that they deserve another physical copy, that the author owes them anything after the sale.
But you bought the book and the right to use the information. The book is short-lived, but there's no reason to expect that the right to use the information is linked to the paper.
That's just ridiculous. Why on earth would anyone think the author or publisher was due more money if you read your friend's book after your was ruined? And if you could go and read your friend's book, why couldn't you copy those words for yourself to read later?
What is the author/publisher doing that deserves more money? Are they sending another physical copy?
I interpret the intention of the law to be that the right to the information travels with the physical copy, OR the owner. Either I can install the software on all five of my computers and use it on either of them, OR I can lend the CD to my friends and they can use it as long as they have the CD. Either way, only one person at a time is using it. Ditto with my view of books.
Any restriction of the actual number of copies made is ridiculous. It gets into stupid issues like allowing ONE copy to be temporarily made, in RAM, to allow use/viewing. How about people with L1/L2 cache? Shall we reboot and turn off the cache just to satisfy that law? That sort of crap is ridiculous.
The only rational view of all this is that you buy the right to view the information and you can sell that right. If you do, you must turn over your copies of the work because you don't have the right to sell new rights to view, just to transfer the ones that were sold to you.
If you choose to exercise those rights by MP3ing your music, fine. If you scan and OCR your books, fine.
You may claim that the law doesn't say that, but that's irrelevant. As long as there are lawyers, the law will never definatively say anything. But as long as there are people, the law should reflect their will. The will of the people is that they aren't controlled by ridiculous laws that only help those rich enough to hire lawyers.
As long as a common sense reading of copyright law would allow backup copies and time/space shifting, those continue to be proper uses. You can't let a lawyer tell you what proper behaviour is.
How is going to the library to read the book any different than downloading it off the net? In fact, a group of publishers are pushing to get rid of libraries (in the form we know them - free access) because they let people read without paying.
If the author isn't making anything from the library, isn't it as morally correct to download the book? The author is making the same $0...
If paper needed electronic devices to view it, the publishers would be pushing for pay-per-use fees, the same as the MPAA and RIAA are. Only the legacy nature of paper prevents this.
As for the issue of copyrights helping the public... The public foots a good part of the bill for protecting copyrighted works, that's supposed to be payed off by those works eventually being free for the public. 95+ years is longer than the average lifespan. Few of us here (if any) will even see _The Lord of the Rings_ in the public domain. So why should we care about funding the legal system that guarantees the Tolkein estates a monopoly on its publication?
I'm not saying that copyright is bad, just that I think it could be served with a 20 year term (after creation, not death).
Copyrights are being unfairly used. M.L. King Jr.'s family is using the copyright on his speech to prevent many uses of it. IMHO that speech no longer belongs to him (if he were alive) let alone them. As soon as something like that becomes part of the shared history of the world, letting any group control it is just asking for trouble.
As an aside, within three years, all my books (only 800 or so, not a whole library) will be scanned and OCRed. That's when I'll consider myself to have a really good reference library.
Take a public key from the keyservers for someone named 1337-Warez, post an encrypted message on alt.test for him. If he sees it (as millions of others will) then he can decrypt it and return the message using the private key that you included.
To accomplish the posting, use anonymous remailers.
By using anonymous remailers and drops like hotmail accounts, you could even trade files back and forth.
You could even have a comment board (completely legal because it's not providing any copyrighted materials) which lists people's opinions on the trustworthiness of various other people. Much like EBay's user ratings.
"Hmmm, seven positive comments, one negative. He looks like he's good to trade with."
As opposed to everyone who says "Oh, pity me, I will lose karma for saying this, but... MS might not actually be the devil. Linux might not rule the world."
Those are straw men. Few people hate MS, most just hate MS's tactics.
If MS is abusing the legal system, they deserve to get slammed. I'd feel the same no matter who was trying to control my ability to comment on a product I used.
People merely want MS to have to follow the same rules as other businesses in other markets.
Yeah, like there'd be anything you could do about it.
But I bet you'd sue anyways. A few million from a deep pocket organization... turn a 'tragedy' into a holiday. Sounds like Susan Smith.
Besides, this thread was about telling phones to vibrate, not jamming them. If someone really wanted to jam them they'd just build fine mesh into the walls and ceilings. No overt device needed, no lawsuit liability. ("No, we didn't do it to jam cellphones, we did it to block potentially harmful EM radiation.")
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So people simply order the products from a company in the UK.
Especially in the computer world where delivery time for a software product can be dependant on your bandwidth.
So people will just start buying more on the internet from companies not in the USA.
Now, that'd be ammusing. If the USA's protectionist trade policies, in the form of letting US companies patent air and other notable innovations, would end up hurting US commerce to the point where the companies themselves lobbied to get rid of software patents.
One-[Click/Push/etc] pattents shouldn't be valid.
I don't care if it's ordering a book or starting a car, the innovation is in making a switch that allows a car to be started with a button push, or a key turn. Once that's done, the rest is just packaging. It's like saying that the idea of a blue car should be patentable...
Patents should cover an actual invention, not just a sales-driven repackaging.
And as for inventions, nothing should be patented if it's the only reasonable way to do something.
Some poster mentioned patenting the formula for figuring out the area of a circle, mentioning that it encouraged other people to find a better formula. *WHAT*?
There are many other ways to do this, such as use calculus, or statistic sampling of random points in a bounding area, but that's just insane.
Patenting pi*r^2 shouldn't be possible. Nor should any similar patents be possible. I dunno what the formula for figuring out the 'volume' of a nine-dimensional 'sphere' is, but you can't patent it just because you thought of a use for nine-dimensional spheres...
Now, if you come up with a good way to make hardware do the calculation, such as, implement 'this' design, with these shift registers, this floating point unit, etc. That would be patentable because it's merely an implementation of the idea.
We're allowing people to patent whole areas, or whole inventions. (ie, using recording media to store video and sound.) Instead of specific implementations. (Use 1' tape wound between two spools. Encode a frame of video thusly, then store in this fashion.) That doesn't help innovation, it squashes it completely by preventing any improvements on the basic idea that another company could make.
As the other reply says, you can (and it's automatic usually) copyright your post.
But your copyright won't hold up if it's the simplest possible expression of an idea.
If you mean x times x = y, you write x^2=y. That's the obvious thing to write.
So your copyright wouldn't forbid anyone else from using that, 'fair use' quoting or not.
But, if you wrote x^7/x^5 = sqrt(y^2) or something, and then printed it up in nice calligraphy, your copyright would be much more enforcable because you didn't use the obvious and simplest expression, and you didn't express it in the obvious way (block characters, with a ballpoint, etc).
The nice thing about copyrights is that they allow independant discovery. If you unintentionally reproduce 99% of _Lord_of_the_Rings_ the Tolkein estate can't force you to not print your version. If you can show that you came up with it independantly and it's not derived from any of their copyrighted properties.
With a patent, that sort of thing would cover any use of elves and dwarves with sub-human sized protagonists in an apocalyptic story. And it wouldn't matter who came up with it first, or if both were independant. The patent would win out.
Now, thankfully that's not a valid patent...
But, using XOR to draw to the screen (a very simple exclusive-or logical operation) is patented. That's like patenting using ADD instructions.
Then why did someone from id post a big warning about how the auth servers were going to be down at a certain time? I wasn't just about the server lists, because they said it affected even people using other master servers.
Maybe a later patch fixed this, but in the beginning (which is when they had the most problems) people were actually unable to play.
The problem with Q3's central authorization is that id doesn't run servers. Blizzard is going with central authorization, but only to access their servers.
When id actually coughs up the money to run server, they'll have an ethical right to check ID before letting people on. Until then, they should take a hike.
Not to mention the whole problem with their authorization servers going down. They're down fairly often for a few hours here and there. It's not a large percentage, but that's unimportant. For that period of time paying users aren't able to play.
The only games I'm going to buy are ones that I can play when I want, with or without a net connection. And without any per-per-play features. The exception would be massively multiplayer games that the company runs the servers for, and where the game was bought (and advertised) with the expectation that all games would be played online.
Ummm... Mute, Ox/Orn/Omnivore, Viscous Circle (series), and a bunch of others. Early Xanth, Incarnations, and Adept books.
I liked those ones much more than his later work which I stopped reading. I partly outgrew him, but he also got a lot more childish in later books.
IMHO the 80s were his strong period.
I agree. Assholes will be assholes, regardless of their situation.
But if they didn't use religion to control the masses, the situation they were in wouldn't allow them as much power to abuse.
Religious leaders were (and often still are) free to commit whatever excesses they wish and justify it by saving it was god's will.
So yes, I think the world as a whole would have suffered MUCH less without religion. It wouldn't be perfect because many of those assholes would have gravitated to other lines of work that allowed them to control people, but it would be better. If only because people kill politicians more readily than religious leaders.
Actually, they have a number of very strong claims.
1) Volunteer effort in a for-profit enterprise must be rewarded. The volunteers received nothing for their work. AOL was hit with this and had to pay a significant ammount to all their chat-room supervisors, etc.
2) The copyright on the compilation should rest with all the contributing authors. As is, they're violating the copyrights of most of their contributors by distributing it in the way they do.
3) By advertising themselves as a free (as in beer) project when they asked for help, they offered an implied promise that they would stay free. Or at least that the work put into the project wouldn't be made proprietary by them.
#3 has been tried in the US before. A community center sought community assistance in fixing itself up, buy machines, etc. Then once done, they mentioned that they weren't really a community center, that they were a company who bought an old community center. They were now going to charge for access to the exercise equipment, etc.
It was ruled that the volunteers were owed fair wages for the efforts they were tricked into providing. The company went bankrupt, the city bought them back, and they're now a community center for real.
I don't remember where, it was an article in something like Reader's Digest. But there are a fair number of other cases like that, though maybe not such a perfect test case.
Suffice it to say, Gracenote asked for help, didn't specify that it was for a future pay-to-access project, and now they don't have all the rights over the DB or access to it.
They could start charging for it, it's their bandwidth, but they'd have to do it based on bandwidth instead of 'access to the information' which they don't legally control. And in that case, a do-gooder could download it and setup their own system competing with theirs on bandwidth sales.
If I show you a product, something no-cost, and ask your help in enhancing it and distributing it to those who need it, then once you've helped me, I start charging for it and keep the money, you're entitled to some.
AOL ran into a similar thing with their volunteers. You aren't allowed to solicit unpaid volunteer effort toward a for-profit enterprise.
Because CDDB was free, and not just free to access one at a time, but free to download, while they were soliciting their volunteers, they made the expectation that they would remain that way.
Besides, they're claiming to have the copyright on this compilation. Copyrights are usually distributed among all the authors, unless those authors SIGN AWAY their copyright. There was no contract so any rights they had are still theirs.
The UCITA is completely insane, not because of some of its claim, but because it's binding without any of the elements of a contract.
... ". I'd even perhaps pay for beta software if it solved a problem I'd been having. And maybe sign an NDA agreeing not to slam the product for bugs because it's still a beta. That's fine, I'd go into it knowing what I was contracting not to say and what the limits were (till out of beta.)
If you want to spell out a contract where I'm not allowed to tell others about some thing, that's fine. It's called an NDA. You have to precisely spell out what I can't tell people, I look at it, decide if I like it, and agree to it because you offer me something in return.
The UCITA doesn't require the customer to be able to see the contract for it to be binding. It allows clauses like retroactive changes (with the onus of checking for this on the customer). It allows companies to sell products that are completely different from what was advertised and sue anyone who publicises this fact.
Any of these decisions, on their own, in an informed scenario, would be okay. I occasionally buy 'as is' merchandise that isn't guaranteed to work. That's fine because this merchandise is required to be marked 'as is'. It's not enough that they say "well, it should have been obvious because of
It's only when you pass a law that makes shrinkwrap licenses, which can state any and all of this, binding that you screw the consumers.
The UCITA even allows companies to remotely disable your software if they think that you've violated the license. The incredibly broad license that could theoretically prevent make it a violation if you told your neighbor that you thought one product was better than another. And they can disclaim all responsibility for damages that this may cause. If you take any measures to prevent this (even a firewall) you could very well be tried under the DMCA for disabling an access control mechanism.
No other industry allows blanket disclaimers to be binding. If you sign a disclaimer at a hospital and they perform a sex change instead of an apendectomy you can sue them, regardless of any disclaimer you may have signed absolving them of responsibility.
If you buy a car, you can return it if it's a lemon, regardless of you having bought it. If you take that car to an independant dealer for a tune-up, they can't cancel your warranty. Ditto if you buy user servicable parts (spark plugs) to replace the ones the product came with. Ford can't cancel your warranty or sue you because you used GM-approved tires.
If you buy a TV the company can't dictate what you can play on it.
In no other industries do we allow laws that so blatantly screw the consumer.
We shouldn't accept the software companies line about how software is a new paradigm, etc. etc. We should hold them to the same rules as any other business in any other industry.
Do you honestly think that companies should be allowed to do any of that?
Why not set up a site that proxies CDDB queries. Point all the programs that ARE affected to this site, it generates CDDB requests that appear to come from programs that CDDB allows.
And no, I don't consider it cheating, theft, or underhanded in any way. CDDB lied to the community about the purpose of the DB, enlisted help under false pretenses, and then locked off access to a DB that many people had helped to create.
If we have to change an identifier in a query to get around their fraudulent business model it sounds good to me.
Fucking assholes who're willing to sell out everyone else just for a buck...
Screaming FUD doesn't make it so.
> Do you really think that in the absense of religion things would have been any better?
Yes. Immensely. All the nasty things that happened without religion would still have happened, but the ones dependant on religion wouldn't have.
> Yes, religion does have power to influence people and at times that power has been abused,
At times? How is it good to have a corrupt power structure dictating to people how they should live their lives? Don't even bother trying to claim that religious leaders aren't corrupt. They try to convince people of obvious untruths (just read any holy book) and use that to control people.
If they had some grand truth, it would be evident without power structures and orders.
> There are many cases of religious institutions and religious people helping others.
Many religious people have helped others. Sure. But those people would have helped others without the whole organized religion.
Religions exist to gain power for the leaders. Helping people doesn't serve that, thus religions as a whole don't help people.
> While tithing is important in the mormon faith, it pales in comparison to the importance of the family.
What a lie. The mormon church is rapidly rising in the list of richest organizations in the world. They do that precisely because NOTHING is more important to them than tithing. You might be hard pressed to find an official who would ADMIT to thinking tithing is more important, but that's what the religion (like others) is all about, money, money, money. And I doubt they really care about how far anyone strays, as long as they keep tithing.
>> our religion-influenced government will take your children away
> I hardly think the mormon church has a significant influence over the government
The mormon church is no doubt the strongest government influence, in Utah. If they were larger, they'd be a stronger influence in more areas.
I don't want to sound patronizing, but... it's really obvious. If you weren't in a religion, you'd see what they're like.
If people really wanted to help others, they wouldn't invent this whole rigamarole of oddball beliefs and strict punishments, they'd just go help people. But they do create these religions, which means they're looking to do something other than help people.
My point is that your interpretation is NOT the law, it's one interpretation of the law. It's the one the RIAA likes the most.
The other interpretations, which are equally valid until the supreme court rules on them, are that any identical copy of bits is the same. If my CD breaks, I can make a backup after the fact, of yours.
The 'alternative' of licensing everything won't happen without laws like the UCITA. Nobody will agree to a contract to buy a CD, especially a contract that doesn't give them any rights.
And the UCITA violates contract law and is unconstitutional. It may make it in the courts, but if it does, it'll only prove that every judge that upholds it has been bought and paid for. It's against every precedent in existing contract law and it ONLY serves the large companies.
Maybe those will end up being the interpretations of copyright law that win out in the end, but I'm not going to do them a favour and roll over and play dead in anticipation of it. I'm going to assume the law makes sense and follow that.
Oh wow, look at the generous religious man. They tax the people in the form of tithes, order huge temples and monastarys built, and among this, copy a few books. We should be *so* grateful to them for this...
The rich church officials lived better than kings and had incredible power of live and death, which they traditionally used in manipulative ways ("Do this, or I'll declare you to be possessed and kill you.")
They achieved this lifestyle by taking from the actual producers of wealth, the lower and middle classes. What did they produce on their own? Elaborate religions designed to keep people down, complex heirarchies, and secret rules whose violation was punishable by torture.
During that they copied books, mainly their books of fables, but also some few others that didn't conflict with their books.
Oh yes, we should be so thankful to these wise and benevolent men. If only they'd tortured and taxed even more to death, just think of the neat things we'd have today!
There's *NOTHING* good in the world which can be attributed to religion, which could/would not have happened without it. But there are many bad things which nobody would have been driven to do without power-mad popes and other religious figures forcing them to do.
Scientology is just more blatant about it, most other religions are lying low now and building up a little good will by spreading around a tiny fraction of the wealth they stole over the years. When it really comes down to it, see how helpful they are... show your membership card at the door or get thrown out on your ass.
Members of especially damaging religions should be tried for crimes. I'd especially love to grab a few mormon elders and try them for extortion (tithe or I'll tell your wife to leave you, our religion-influenced government will take your children away, and your mormon boss will fire you.) Ditto with JWs and scientologists.
Personally, if I see a Co$ member of the street I'll harass him because if he supports that religion, he's showing that he's supporting their illegal tactics which have resulted in the death of many people.
Religion exists JUST to coerce people into doing what the people in power tell them to. That's not a good thing. Maybe every now and again they happen to do good, but that's just a fluke event between centuries and raping and pillaging.
Any good that came out of them was because of the people, not because of the religion. The people would have been good people without the religion. The religion on the other hand existed just to exert a controlling force on people. What good ever came out of death threats and forced service?
So now, ask yourself why anyone not brainwashed by the whole religion thing is just a little bit down on the idea.
Nope. Theft is a very clear term. You later say "call it a banana...", but that's not accurate either.
If you mean "lowered the incentive for potential customers to pay for the work", then try saying that. If you use cute sound-byte words that sound all impressive but don't mean what you use them to mean, you're just spreading FUD.
I do agree that unauthorized copying can in some cases deprive an author of potential income. Nobody would disagree as long as you say 'can' and 'some cases'. But I don't agree that it's theft.
As the person who responded to you said, it's not theft if they make you miss two weeks of work by assaulting you, it's assault.
Note though, that I don't always think unauthorized copying costs the author anything... When I was in grade ten I was making about $50 / month. Someone gave me a copy of Photoshop 4. I'd have had to work for over a year, saving every penny, to buy that program. For then ten hours of use that I got out of it. There wasn't a potential sale there, so there wasn't any loss of a sale. Or, rather, not from Adobe. If there was a lost sale it was some shareware author of a $50 art program, something I might concievably bought.
But if Adobe knew about that, they'd count it as $900 in losses, just to inflate 'piracy' numbers and sound all important.
Why is it a red herring? The fact that you paid for the right to use that information is the only relevant fact!
Maybe a lawyerly reading of the law says otherwise, but who does that really serve? Why should we let broken interpretations of the law dictate how we act?
The law is supposed to reflect the will of the people. All of the people, not just the rich ones.
It makes no sense that your right to use information is tied to a physical media. That's not information, that's paper. If it makes no sense, ignore it.
Depends on what you need to trust them for. For an MP3? Trivial. For anything expensive, probably not.
And this communication doesn't need to be tedious, like using PGP, posting to usenet, monitoring for a message, etc.
It could be automated, made to appear something like Napster (depending on the function.)
Encryption and anonynimity would both add complexity to the situation but most would be hidden in the networking, to the user it'd just take an extra second or two...
I think we need to work on freenet type solutions. I personally don't feel the *need* to pirate everything in existance, but we're not truly free until we can, because laws that forbid piracy and a police force that can track us down for doing it can also forbid and track other usage.
Actually, FYI, theft means depriving the author of property.
(See www.m-w.com)
Theft: 1a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.
So this doesn't involve theft because nobody is depriving the author of his copy of the work.
I'm not arguing your point, I just want to encourage you to use the correct words. And theft isn't correct in this context.
I agree with your assesment of the video media. You buy it, you can use it in any way that doesn't conflict with existing law. (You can't copy and distribute it, and you can't kill someone with it (Britney Spears music...))
But you're wrong when you say you that you license software...
They only software you license if something you buy specifically from a contractor, a company that sells you a specific limited site license for a special deal, or shareware.
In the first case it's because you're paying the contrator for the product. You decide which rights you want and then bargain over the value of those. With the specific site license, that'd be like Adobe selling you 100 copies of Photoshop for an 80% discount because you could show that it was all going to be used in a way that they approved of (to teach people who might later buy their own copy for example) and you were both making concessions in the deal (them price, you in what you can do with it.)
And finally and most importantly, shareware. If you download a program off of CNET (or anywhere else) there's no payment on your part so you have no right to expect it'll do anything. You then get it and can agree to a contract allowing certain use in trade for certain payment (maybe nothing, maybe a post card, maybe $$..)
But with commercial software, you buy it at the store and take it home, where you find the 'contract'. At that point, the contract isn't valid. You purchased all required rights to the software already. It's invalid for a number of reasons.
1) You can't put limits on an existing contract (it becomes a new contract, which requires new agreement and especially, new consideration (compensation)). I can't see you a car and then call up later and say that you have to buy gas from me. I can offer you an exclusive gas contract in trade for something, free tires, a low price, whatever, but it's only an offer until you accept.
2) The 'contract' in the form of a click-through license attempts to prevent your use of *YOUR* software (you paid for it at this point) by requiring you to agree to their contract. That's duress. You're not bound by agreements made under duress. Simply click 'Yes' and ignore it...
3) That contract doesn't even offer you anything, just the ability to use your software, so you don't get anything out of it. A contract that doesn't have compensation for both parties isn't valid. Again, click 'Yes' and ignore it.
Certainly don't take the corps' word on any of this, they stand to gain by making you believe you have more obligations than you really do.
Of course you own something when you buy it.
... a limited monopoly in trade for opening something up for public use.
What proof do you have that you don't? The word of companies like Microsoft with their EULAs and the RIAA and MPAA who try to take away your ability to use the CD/DVD that you own?
Well, what do you think they'll say? They hope that people will believe them. And they hope they'll do what you did, pass that on to others.
Their view of copyright is incredibly short sighted. I really don't see why they deserve copyright protection anymore. Seriously. Copyright is a social contract
The MPAA/RIAA/Software publishers are trying to have the 'limited' part of the monopoly removed, and to take away all your rights to do anything with the work that they don't want you doing.
They aren't living up to their side of the bargain, thus the contract is void.
Now, they can claim anything they like, about how you'll join satan, and undermine capitalism, if you violate THEIR rights, but I don't see them saying anything about your rights. And it's not just a case of "well don't buy it." They're counting on your tax dollars funding the legal system which is granting them this unlimited monopoly, so they're taking from you and giving nothing back.
Anyways, as I see it, their laws are the product of bribery. They lobbied for those laws, which means paying politicians in "campaign funds", then they bribe judges like Kaplan (Dunno if they paid him, or if it was enough that he worked for them before and got paid then) to give weight to their laws. In my view, that's not a valid law. Like a contract for illegal activities isn't a valid contract.
I choose not to follow those laws. I honor copyright as I see it. Limited monopoly, a guarantee to the author that they'll be the first to profit from their work. I don't see it as a right for the author to control everything I do with their work, so I don't feel obligated to follow laws that they buy which say that.
Nobody is arguing that they deserve another physical copy, that the author owes them anything after the sale.
But you bought the book and the right to use the information. The book is short-lived, but there's no reason to expect that the right to use the information is linked to the paper.
That's just ridiculous. Why on earth would anyone think the author or publisher was due more money if you read your friend's book after your was ruined? And if you could go and read your friend's book, why couldn't you copy those words for yourself to read later?
What is the author/publisher doing that deserves more money? Are they sending another physical copy?
I interpret the intention of the law to be that the right to the information travels with the physical copy, OR the owner. Either I can install the software on all five of my computers and use it on either of them, OR I can lend the CD to my friends and they can use it as long as they have the CD. Either way, only one person at a time is using it. Ditto with my view of books.
Any restriction of the actual number of copies made is ridiculous. It gets into stupid issues like allowing ONE copy to be temporarily made, in RAM, to allow use/viewing. How about people with L1/L2 cache? Shall we reboot and turn off the cache just to satisfy that law? That sort of crap is ridiculous.
The only rational view of all this is that you buy the right to view the information and you can sell that right. If you do, you must turn over your copies of the work because you don't have the right to sell new rights to view, just to transfer the ones that were sold to you.
If you choose to exercise those rights by MP3ing your music, fine. If you scan and OCR your books, fine.
You may claim that the law doesn't say that, but that's irrelevant. As long as there are lawyers, the law will never definatively say anything. But as long as there are people, the law should reflect their will. The will of the people is that they aren't controlled by ridiculous laws that only help those rich enough to hire lawyers.
As long as a common sense reading of copyright law would allow backup copies and time/space shifting, those continue to be proper uses. You can't let a lawyer tell you what proper behaviour is.
How is going to the library to read the book any different than downloading it off the net? In fact, a group of publishers are pushing to get rid of libraries (in the form we know them - free access) because they let people read without paying.
If the author isn't making anything from the library, isn't it as morally correct to download the book? The author is making the same $0...
If paper needed electronic devices to view it, the publishers would be pushing for pay-per-use fees, the same as the MPAA and RIAA are. Only the legacy nature of paper prevents this.
As for the issue of copyrights helping the public... The public foots a good part of the bill for protecting copyrighted works, that's supposed to be payed off by those works eventually being free for the public. 95+ years is longer than the average lifespan. Few of us here (if any) will even see _The Lord of the Rings_ in the public domain. So why should we care about funding the legal system that guarantees the Tolkein estates a monopoly on its publication?
I'm not saying that copyright is bad, just that I think it could be served with a 20 year term (after creation, not death).
Copyrights are being unfairly used. M.L. King Jr.'s family is using the copyright on his speech to prevent many uses of it. IMHO that speech no longer belongs to him (if he were alive) let alone them. As soon as something like that becomes part of the shared history of the world, letting any group control it is just asking for trouble.
As an aside, within three years, all my books (only 800 or so, not a whole library) will be scanned and OCRed. That's when I'll consider myself to have a really good reference library.
Re #2.
Anonymous people can communicate securely.
Take a public key from the keyservers for someone named 1337-Warez, post an encrypted message on alt.test for him. If he sees it (as millions of others will) then he can decrypt it and return the message using the private key that you included.
To accomplish the posting, use anonymous remailers.
By using anonymous remailers and drops like hotmail accounts, you could even trade files back and forth.
You could even have a comment board (completely legal because it's not providing any copyrighted materials) which lists people's opinions on the trustworthiness of various other people. Much like EBay's user ratings.
"Hmmm, seven positive comments, one negative. He looks like he's good to trade with."
As opposed to everyone who says "Oh, pity me, I will lose karma for saying this, but ... MS might not actually be the devil. Linux might not rule the world."
Those are straw men. Few people hate MS, most just hate MS's tactics.
If MS is abusing the legal system, they deserve to get slammed. I'd feel the same no matter who was trying to control my ability to comment on a product I used.
People merely want MS to have to follow the same rules as other businesses in other markets.
Yeah, like there'd be anything you could do about it.
But I bet you'd sue anyways. A few million from a deep pocket organization... turn a 'tragedy' into a holiday. Sounds like Susan Smith.
Besides, this thread was about telling phones to vibrate, not jamming them. If someone really wanted to jam them they'd just build fine mesh into the walls and ceilings. No overt device needed, no lawsuit liability. ("No, we didn't do it to jam cellphones, we did it to block potentially harmful EM radiation.")