By your logic we don't have any examples of decent countries run by blacks (to pull a random example) so we should just assume that black people can't run a proper government? Or would it just show that the countries with black leaders are in poorer parts of the world with a lot of religious and economic problems that would prevent any country from doing well under any leader?
I think it's the same with communism. There's no reason communism requires secret police, or anything else that Russia had. Many non-communist counties are brutal totalitarian regimes so it's not like communists have cornered the market (is that a pun in this context?)
Any state can have politicians who want to stay in power and who fear revolution. Look at Clinton/Gore, and the Bush clan... We just watch them a bit better, but if we didn't I think we'd find our freedoms slipping away just as fast as in any other country where someone takes absolute power.
If Saddam was less of an egotistical prick, why would he care what people said? And in many 'democracies' people get locked up for saying unpopular stuff.
It's just like communism/capitalism... Neither one works only with democracy, or anything like that. It's just that the only good examples we have right now of communisms are petty dictatorships, that doesn't mean communism is necessarily bad, just that pesky little dictators will oppress people no matter what they call their economic system.
I don't think this has any bearing on democracy, nor do I think a democracy is (or isn't) the greatest thing... Any system can work (a dictatorship with a benevolent dictator is better than a one-party democracy...) and any can be just a sham to justify some tyrant.
But I do agree that without a big stick, war is inevitable. Even is Russia and the USA completely disarmed, along with all nations with nukes, what's to stop the Saddam's of the world? The only way to keep them from attacking you is to be able to say that you'll match them bullet for bullet, or better, explosive shell for bullet... There are peaceful solutions to all conflicts - between people who are willing to accept a compromise. If they only understand violence then you *must* be prepared to answer with greater violence.
That's a game that IMHO begs to be cheated at. There's too much fighting and it's all really boring, just the same thing over and over again.
But you have to go through all that to level-up in order to do the quest-type stuff that is the real fun... So grab a cheat, crank the level up, and just play the fun stuff.
Some people can't understand cheating in a single-player game... To me it's a way to play the fun bits of a game and then go on to another game.
As an example of a game that's 95% crap, Zelda64... It's all about running around kicking plants and jars to get gold. Whenever you actually have to do something quest related it's all scripted like 'get something from [the farthest away spot] then take it to [somewhere very far from that] then go talk to [someone hidden away very far from that]...' It's very dull.
But if you could just give yourself all the gold you needed you wouldn't have to play all the stupid little games, like grabbing fish in a bottle and selling them, or pulling up plants, or breaking bottles for gold then leaving the store and coming back and doing it again.
And people call the Zelda designer a visionary in the field of games. Hah. But then, many companies seem to copy his style. "Surround the hour of plot with fifty-nine hours of drudgery and claim it's sixty hours of gameplay!"
All it means to say you don't cheat it that you're too stuck in a rut to skip the dull shit.
(This is a completely different topic than cheating in multiplayer.)
Re:voting from the comfort of your own home -bad
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Not too big of a problem, no.
It just means that the system could be processing a lot of votes, more than it needs to, and that there could be confusion.
If you got one net-vote, then you had to cast the correction vote at a polling station it'd be more secure.. If any number of votes were cast, you could cast one and I could theoretically cast a similar vote later from reconstructing your password (watching you type it, with a keyboard logger, etc) which overrides your vote. You may not have felt coerced and not bother to check the results or recast your vote, so I've got a free vote.
But, if all votes except the first took physical presence you would know if someone had already voted for you, and to override someone's vote you'd have to pretend to be them in person. (Not that this is hard, but it's beyond the scope of *computer* security.)
So, if you vote and it tells you that you already have, you jump in the car and go down to the polling station with ID and get the old vote cancelled and cast a new one. Theoretically this could be more secure because the attendant could check your password but also look at picture ID, etc.
But then, votes aren't terribly secure now. It could be argued that a system with a theoretical loophole is good enough as long as it's not repeatable on a system-wide level. (If I have to work to steal each vote, that's okay... if I can script it to steal as many as I want with a few keyclicks, that's bad.)
Re:voting from the comfort of your own home -bad
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You need to add a couple more things to this e-voting picture...
You need anonimity, so nobody can check on how you voted. Then you need confirmation, where you can check the official logs and see if your vote was counted properly. To avoid coercion you also need the ability to cancel your vote after you make it.
So, you vote. Nobody can look it up by any piece of ID that is connected to you, it's merely indexed by an MD5 hash, or something. Then you can use this hash at a later date at any public terminal to see if your vote is tallied for the right side. And once the results are announced, you can check to see if you vote is for the right candidate.
Then, if you let someone who can form the MD5 hash (someone with the original information) cancel an existing vote, the idea of coercion is mostly gone. You could vote at work (with the boss watching) then drive by a polling booth later and cancel your old vote and place a new one.
This means people could waffle and recast their votes, but if you made them do it at a voting station and they only got one chance, it wouldn't be too big of a deal. And if those voting stations offered anonimity in the form of private booths, etc, people could be safe from coercion while casting the real vote.
But my second point is that you don't legally agree to a contract that's just tossed into a box with your software.
For licenses to be binding they have to be upfront and properly disclosed, like any other contract.
Once you buy software the click-through licenses in it are null and void. Just like I can't sell you a microwave (to use the analogy of the guy who wrote the recent Cuecat article.) and put a 'license' in the box that only allows you to heat liquids.
Now, if I was giving microwaves (or software) away and being clear that there was a license you had to agree with... that'd be different because for one, you wouldn't own it at that point, and it would have been disclosed before any sale that there was a contract you had to accept.
Shrinkwrap licenses aren't binding under *any* interpretation of contract law. That's why 'they' need things like the UCITA and feel willing to bribe politicians to pass them. A proper contract would do if they disclosed it up-front (at the sales counter for instance.)
That's actually what I'm afraid of... if software companies give up on the unenforceable shrink-wrap license and actually go to an enforceable contract... I might actually be forced to stop applying cracks to remove CD protection from the games I buy.
(Yes, that's a seperate rant - I refuse to play a game that demands I have the CD when all it wants is to check if I have it... I do, in the box, in the drawer of my desk, and I'll be damned if I get it out just to insert it to play Quake. So I promote use of cracks for software you legally own.)
You take their free product, use it in a way that prevents the profits they were expecting from its use, and claim that it hasn't hurt them?
The key word is "take". DC sends CueCats free to people who haven't requested them, and has Radio Shack handing them out to everyone, many people who don't really want one, but are willing to try some free electronic gizmo. I don't see how consumers are taking anything from DC.
Now maybe if it was the sort of thing where you sign-up on a webpage and agree to use it for a certain purpose, then change your mind when it arrives... But unless you ask for it, you're not taking anything from them.
The problem is that they want to take away people's rights to tinker with things they own. (And people *do* own the CCs, US postal regulations and laws governing gifts make this clear.)
For DC to say you can't tinker with a CueCat is like Compaq saying you can't tinker with your PC, or Ford saying you can't tinker with your car. Once you own it, you have the moral and legal right to do anything you want with it. DC is trying to take that away.
But, I predict they'll be bankrupt in less than a year. I've already seen links to scripts that send in fake CC scans with random user ids and barcodes from some huge list... When the companies that would pay DC for their ill-gotten demographics see how likely it is that the statistics are all fake, they won't pay a dime. And I'm glad, DC is another good-for-nothing company existing completely on lawyer power. Fuck them.
You are confused. Software, for example, that you bought is not your property. Maybe you want it to be your property, but it's not -- it's somebody else's and that somebody else is allowing you to use it (use, but not own) subject to a number of restrictions. Again, maybe you want to change this, but this is quite outside the scope of DMCA.
Says who? Only the people who sell software. They want this to be the case, but that doesn't mean much.
Currently, UCITA and other bribery aside, you own software just like you own a book. You own the physical work and all rights pertaining to the use of the data printed on it, where those rights don't conflict with copyright. (You can copy it temporarily (overhead projector, etc) for purposes or reading it, burn it, underline/highlight it, and nearly anything else.)
They (the publisher) can't revoke those rights under any circumstances... you paid for it, they sold it, it's yours.
So why do you think software is different? Because of some license you didn't see until after you bought it? Hah. That's the equivalent of me putting a contract in a box of food you buy which states that by your opening of the box, you agree to the terms of the contract. It's completely, and obviously, void.
Yet, you do this with a box of software and people suddenly think it means something? Not bloody likely.
Unless your state (are you in the USA?) government was bribed to pass the UCITA. (And yes, it is bribery which would be criminal in most other countries.) But if it hasn't, who the hell cares what a software company claims? Like anyone else, they'll ask for everything they think they could get, and then a little more just in case. If you give it to them it's your own dumb fault.
Try running that through a more accurate translation...
"The program I compiled from GPL'ed source is mine, not his. They gave me the source to use for that purpose. I can sell the output to whoever I want."
That's more accurate.
Your translation would have been appropriate if people had been reverse engineering the CueCat and selling the schematics to other companies who were building CueCats.
But to just use that CueCat that you legally own, to scan whatever you want, and have those scans recorded or processed in whatever way you want, is the same as using GIMP to make an image and selling the image, or using Linux to run a web server and selling web space.
Now, if people were downloading CueCat software from a webpage after clicking 'I Agree' to a click-through on the page, then modifying and distributing that software, that would be a violation akin to redistributing something that was GPLed without the source code.
btw, I tried not to be pedantic in answering your question because I knew you meant "How would you feel if they turned this around on you" and just picked an example, but... you are allowed to sell GPLed software, or source code, without having to pay the author any royalties. That's what RedHat does. You're just forced to distribute it in certain ways, if you choose to distribute it. (If you use it yourself, the GPL is moot, because you're not copying it...)
Yawn, another reverse psychology karma whore, appear insightful by saying that nobody else really gets it.
Are you unable to see the difference between solicited and unsolicited? Between a voluntary agreement and an EULA? Between copyright violation and reverse engineering?
No CueCat software was distributed. That means it's not a copyright violation. The CC license (which isn't enforcable anyways) was never even read by most people because they threw away the CD. How do you get copyright violation from that?
It'd be nice if moderators didn't give points to any snivelling idiot who bitches about an anti-MS bias or GPL communism, etc.
(A geek site will have an anti-MS bias, not only is MS owned by a jerk but it actively attempts to stifle creativity and crushes people and companies with an overactive legal department - what about that isn't deserving of scorn? If you hadn't noticed, people bash all companies that use those tactics.)
Because there's an inverse relationship between education and the number of children women have. Uneducated women tend to have a lot of children, highly educated women usually stop at two, if they have that many.
Makes sense to me, I wouldn't want to carry around a kid for nine months, then babysit it constantly for ten years or so. Ugh.
But it does mean that stupid people breed more than smart people, as a rule.
My Apple 2+ booted up faster than my Win98 box running a p3-800, and it loaded a word processor more quickly than my current computer loads word.
But it did a *lot* less. It's easy to load an OS in five seconds if it doesn't support anything, and if a word processor deals in plain text and doesn't even have a spell checker, it's kinda trivial.
I;m sure many people thought of the button-less mouse... people unable to move their fingers independantly, people unable to distinguish left from right, etc.
That's not innovation, that's crap.
Apple shoulda shut down in the mid 80s, they went steadily downhill from there.
Many of the factory owners of the days performed what would be called 'anti-competetive' practices today. They weren't content to simply let market forces win. Everyone they shut down was less competition and also more potential workers.
But yeah, I bet people jumped up and down for an honest chance to be chained to some big death-dealing machine for slave wages.
That wasn't a problem with mechanized looms, that was a problem with companies that built them without safety precautions, etc.
Today I'm sure a descendant of that machine is chugging away making most of our clothing and probably killing very few of the users.
The luddites fought against essentially forced servitude in the factories (the factory owners were proved to try to put people out of business and in debt so they'd have no choice but factory work...) where the loom was but one way to die.
That forced servitude in a death-trap went away but the loom stayed.
So I think the assumption that the loom is progressive is a safe one.
I can't see how a carnivore box could benefit the majority of society, it'll be used to control the majority of society, bringing them in line with what their masters want. That sounds positively smashable to me.
(Don't be suprised if many ISP workers accidentally drop coffee into the vents of these things many times...)
I knew that, I used it on the Mac before it was a PC tool. My words didn't specifically mean it started on the PC, just that the PC and Mac versions are different, and someone else had said "You don't expect the Mac version for free along with it..." and no, you don't because the Mac one is seperately written (even if it was written first.)
That's back before Apple's later screw-ups let MS get ahead in the GUI area and led a lot of the high-end users to go to Wintel machines... (I was an Apple user at one time.)
I don't know what you guys pay for books, but I'd laugh at anyone who wanted me to pay $13 USD for a novel.
And then, if they told me I'd only have the right to read it, but it didn't come with the actual book, that I'd need to read it on the computer or print it out (paying again for ink and paper)...
Not bloody likely.
$13 might not be bad for a collectible book, like a hard-cover. But for an e-book? King's just greedy, that's all there is to it, wanting more for this than he'd make for a similar book while giving the customer less. (That is, if he ever does get off his skanky ass and write the whole thing, instead of blaming people downloading two copies and only paying once, for ruining the project for everyone.)
Sounds reasonable to me... After all, King accepted their payment for the first sections of the book, now he wants to stop providing to them not (and he admits) because of them, but because of the behaviour of other people who refuse to be bound by King's stupid rules.
Photoshop for the Mac is a complete re-write. A new product. It actually took more effort for Adobe to make it. But in the days before everyone had CDs, most software came on 3.5s and CDs... And before that, on 5.25s and 3.5s. And they did it for free, or at most a media cost of $5 or so.
King on the other hand wants to charge more for a text file which was simple run through a different filter.
Can anyone be more money-grubbing? Next he'll be applying to congress for a tax on disks and demanding his share because people who buy one copy of his lame little e-book will use the space to store multiple formats...
The guy's plainly a jerk looking for a free ride. He wants to make more money (no printing costs), take no risk (if it shuts down, he's out nothing) and no blame (if anything happens, it's the fault of the bad internet). So he'll screw over anyone dumb enough to give him any money.
Quite frankly, I see different encodings of the books to be the same content. I'd consider a JPG and a PNG of the same photo to be covered under the same copyright, and if I bought one I'd expect to be able to use it. (You may not think the law works this way but you're wrong, and even if you weren't, I don't give a shit.)
To be fair, if I was to download a version of the story from him every day because I didn't have room to store it I'd expect to pay a reasonable download fee for the use of his bandwidth, but I'd expect it to be less than the cost of the e-book + transport...
But he not only expects people to pay for every one they download but he wants us to pay more for the story than we would in paper form on Amazon... What kind of crack is that moron smoking? He wants to be payed more, for less.
And then you get into this bastard's demanding that everyone be held liable for the actions of a few. If someone with a PC, Mac, and Palm is (oh god!) downloading three copies, he expects other people to either pay more times to offset this or risk their initial payment being for naught, and told that they're not worthy of his oh-so-marvelous e-book.
Then, the moron can't even quote Heinlein right, it's TANSTAFL, not TANFL. Yet he wants a free lunch... He wants innocent consumers to bear *all* the costs of non-paying downloads, and the risk that some script-kiddy will close it down, AND then to pay more for this text file than for a paper and ink book.
So, he wants more money, no risk, and no blame. Ummm, TANSTAFL comes to mind.
King is a shithead. (And a pathetic author, but that's beside the point...) And what the fuck is with that inch-wide strip of small-font text down the center of the screen? Has his web-designer been lobotomized or haven't they seen monitors with a higher resolution than 640x480 in Maine?
This isn't a defense against an EULA. Picture the example where a gas station had a large changeable sign (where the letters can be moved) and it said "Item X, free with fill-up - pay with your gas-card and take one."
This is valid, they're making an offer and you accept by taking an Item X when you fill-up.
Now, if *you* changed the sign to read "Two Item Xs...", would that mean the contract the gas station had offered changed?
What if you had a friend do it for you? Nope. You still know that the modified contract isn't what the gas station is offering, so you can't just take an Item X, even if the sign now offers them for free...
The bright side of this is that EULAs in the form of a click-through or shrink-wrap licenses aren't valid at all, so you can click 'I Agree' and not actually have entered into a contract.
The basic rundown is that you have to know about a contract to be ableto accept it, and you have to get something out of it (called Consideration.)
If they display the license (either in click-through or inside the shrink-wrap) *after* you buy the product, or they give it to you as a gift, you can't be said to have known about the contract (and not just that there is one, you can't agree to a contract you've never seen.) so you can't agree to it.
Also, further invalidating them, is the fact that after they've given you the software or you've bought it, they're trying to offer you the ability to use it as the consideration for the contract, but you've already be granted that right by the gift/sale so they have nothing else to give. No consideration = no contract. (Like me trying to get you to sign a contract where I offer you the right to use your car... hello?)
You do click 'I agree' but that's not binding because you're being coerced. That's *your* program there, free to use, and they're keeping you out until you click a button. You *have to* click that button to use it. For the EULA to be binding (in ANY case) it'd have to say 'I Agree' 'I don't agree, cancel' and 'I don't agree, install anyway'...
Basically, extortion is when you try to demand something (usually money) for letting someone do something they have the right to do anyways. That's what they're doing when they don't let you use your program without giving them agreement...
Luckily, extortion is illegal.
Click-through and shrink-wrap licenses are illegal and you could actually sue over them (and likely win) if you had the money for the lawyers.
In some places the UCITA makes these licenses legal but it won't last, it goes against centuries of contract law. And it makes really stunningly illegal things legal. (The right to retroactively change a contract without notice, etc...)
By refusing to use their CueCat scanners the way they'd prefer?
I could throw it in the garbage (within my rights, even they would admit) and they'd get to scans from me.
I could write (leaving asside questions of *my* programming ability, I mean the generic *me*) a driver that actually displays the information from the barcode. This I could use locally only, or to look-up items on any company, Amazon, B&N, or even DC, if they make a decent interface, etc.
So, if I use it my own way, they have a potential of getting scans, but likely don't.
How does my doing this affect what everyone else does?
If their service is so bad as to turn off users, or to make them look for new software, that's their fault.
What they should be afraid of is Amazon.com writing cueCat software that does a better lookup, for free, without DC's specific privacy invasion. Amazon would easily make their investment back just from the orders they'd get.
And it'd be perfectly legal, after all, the EULA for the DC software says 'if you don't agree, don't use it...' Well, they might get their wish, people wouldn't use their crippled, invasive software.
And it'd all be fair, free markets mean free choice. It's not like by giving us a cheap barcode scanner that DC could claim the ongoing right to any barcode scans we ever made.
Oh, I am. When we're successful and they're out of business or paying reparation to those they threatened for performing completely legal actions, then that'll fix the legal problem. The legal problem is THEM.
I'm sick and tired of bullying. When I was in school I watched a bunch of kids getting picked on, so I beat the crap out of the bully. He threatened to kill me and I reported him to the teachers, he got kicked out of school and sent to juvie.
I'm trying to do the same thing to DC. They pick on people, I'm trying to return the hurt to them, more than they dished out.
Bullies don't care if you ask them to stop, they want to get something and don't care who they hurt. You can't use polite societal rules to fight a sociopath. If DC is threatening people, we have the threaten the only thing DC holds dear, their bottom line.
My way to do this is send in tons of false scans (and record it how it happens to prove it later). When they try to sell their demographic info I can release the info and make it worthless... Doesn't take a lot of scripts running 24/7 to flood the actual data.
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By your logic we don't have any examples of decent countries run by blacks (to pull a random example) so we should just assume that black people can't run a proper government? Or would it just show that the countries with black leaders are in poorer parts of the world with a lot of religious and economic problems that would prevent any country from doing well under any leader?
I think it's the same with communism. There's no reason communism requires secret police, or anything else that Russia had. Many non-communist counties are brutal totalitarian regimes so it's not like communists have cornered the market (is that a pun in this context?)
Any state can have politicians who want to stay in power and who fear revolution. Look at Clinton/Gore, and the Bush clan... We just watch them a bit better, but if we didn't I think we'd find our freedoms slipping away just as fast as in any other country where someone takes absolute power.
That has nothing to do with a democracy.
If Saddam was less of an egotistical prick, why would he care what people said? And in many 'democracies' people get locked up for saying unpopular stuff.
It's just like communism/capitalism... Neither one works only with democracy, or anything like that. It's just that the only good examples we have right now of communisms are petty dictatorships, that doesn't mean communism is necessarily bad, just that pesky little dictators will oppress people no matter what they call their economic system.
I don't think this has any bearing on democracy, nor do I think a democracy is (or isn't) the greatest thing... Any system can work (a dictatorship with a benevolent dictator is better than a one-party democracy...) and any can be just a sham to justify some tyrant.
But I do agree that without a big stick, war is inevitable. Even is Russia and the USA completely disarmed, along with all nations with nukes, what's to stop the Saddam's of the world? The only way to keep them from attacking you is to be able to say that you'll match them bullet for bullet, or better, explosive shell for bullet... There are peaceful solutions to all conflicts - between people who are willing to accept a compromise. If they only understand violence then you *must* be prepared to answer with greater violence.
That's a game that IMHO begs to be cheated at. There's too much fighting and it's all really boring, just the same thing over and over again.
But you have to go through all that to level-up in order to do the quest-type stuff that is the real fun... So grab a cheat, crank the level up, and just play the fun stuff.
Some people can't understand cheating in a single-player game... To me it's a way to play the fun bits of a game and then go on to another game.
As an example of a game that's 95% crap, Zelda64... It's all about running around kicking plants and jars to get gold. Whenever you actually have to do something quest related it's all scripted like 'get something from [the farthest away spot] then take it to [somewhere very far from that] then go talk to [someone hidden away very far from that]...' It's very dull.
But if you could just give yourself all the gold you needed you wouldn't have to play all the stupid little games, like grabbing fish in a bottle and selling them, or pulling up plants, or breaking bottles for gold then leaving the store and coming back and doing it again.
And people call the Zelda designer a visionary in the field of games. Hah. But then, many companies seem to copy his style. "Surround the hour of plot with fifty-nine hours of drudgery and claim it's sixty hours of gameplay!"
All it means to say you don't cheat it that you're too stuck in a rut to skip the dull shit.
(This is a completely different topic than cheating in multiplayer.)
Not too big of a problem, no.
It just means that the system could be processing a lot of votes, more than it needs to, and that there could be confusion.
If you got one net-vote, then you had to cast the correction vote at a polling station it'd be more secure.. If any number of votes were cast, you could cast one and I could theoretically cast a similar vote later from reconstructing your password (watching you type it, with a keyboard logger, etc) which overrides your vote. You may not have felt coerced and not bother to check the results or recast your vote, so I've got a free vote.
But, if all votes except the first took physical presence you would know if someone had already voted for you, and to override someone's vote you'd have to pretend to be them in person. (Not that this is hard, but it's beyond the scope of *computer* security.)
So, if you vote and it tells you that you already have, you jump in the car and go down to the polling station with ID and get the old vote cancelled and cast a new one. Theoretically this could be more secure because the attendant could check your password but also look at picture ID, etc.
But then, votes aren't terribly secure now. It could be argued that a system with a theoretical loophole is good enough as long as it's not repeatable on a system-wide level. (If I have to work to steal each vote, that's okay... if I can script it to steal as many as I want with a few keyclicks, that's bad.)
You need to add a couple more things to this e-voting picture...
You need anonimity, so nobody can check on how you voted. Then you need confirmation, where you can check the official logs and see if your vote was counted properly. To avoid coercion you also need the ability to cancel your vote after you make it.
So, you vote. Nobody can look it up by any piece of ID that is connected to you, it's merely indexed by an MD5 hash, or something. Then you can use this hash at a later date at any public terminal to see if your vote is tallied for the right side. And once the results are announced, you can check to see if you vote is for the right candidate.
Then, if you let someone who can form the MD5 hash (someone with the original information) cancel an existing vote, the idea of coercion is mostly gone. You could vote at work (with the boss watching) then drive by a polling booth later and cancel your old vote and place a new one.
This means people could waffle and recast their votes, but if you made them do it at a voting station and they only got one chance, it wouldn't be too big of a deal. And if those voting stations offered anonimity in the form of private booths, etc, people could be safe from coercion while casting the real vote.
But my second point is that you don't legally agree to a contract that's just tossed into a box with your software.
For licenses to be binding they have to be upfront and properly disclosed, like any other contract.
Once you buy software the click-through licenses in it are null and void. Just like I can't sell you a microwave (to use the analogy of the guy who wrote the recent Cuecat article.) and put a 'license' in the box that only allows you to heat liquids.
Now, if I was giving microwaves (or software) away and being clear that there was a license you had to agree with... that'd be different because for one, you wouldn't own it at that point, and it would have been disclosed before any sale that there was a contract you had to accept.
Shrinkwrap licenses aren't binding under *any* interpretation of contract law. That's why 'they' need things like the UCITA and feel willing to bribe politicians to pass them. A proper contract would do if they disclosed it up-front (at the sales counter for instance.)
That's actually what I'm afraid of... if software companies give up on the unenforceable shrink-wrap license and actually go to an enforceable contract... I might actually be forced to stop applying cracks to remove CD protection from the games I buy.
(Yes, that's a seperate rant - I refuse to play a game that demands I have the CD when all it wants is to check if I have it... I do, in the box, in the drawer of my desk, and I'll be damned if I get it out just to insert it to play Quake. So I promote use of cracks for software you legally own.)
You take their free product, use it in a way that prevents the profits they were expecting from its use, and claim that it hasn't hurt them?
The key word is "take". DC sends CueCats free to people who haven't requested them, and has Radio Shack handing them out to everyone, many people who don't really want one, but are willing to try some free electronic gizmo. I don't see how consumers are taking anything from DC.
Now maybe if it was the sort of thing where you sign-up on a webpage and agree to use it for a certain purpose, then change your mind when it arrives... But unless you ask for it, you're not taking anything from them.
The problem is that they want to take away people's rights to tinker with things they own. (And people *do* own the CCs, US postal regulations and laws governing gifts make this clear.)
For DC to say you can't tinker with a CueCat is like Compaq saying you can't tinker with your PC, or Ford saying you can't tinker with your car. Once you own it, you have the moral and legal right to do anything you want with it. DC is trying to take that away.
But, I predict they'll be bankrupt in less than a year. I've already seen links to scripts that send in fake CC scans with random user ids and barcodes from some huge list... When the companies that would pay DC for their ill-gotten demographics see how likely it is that the statistics are all fake, they won't pay a dime. And I'm glad, DC is another good-for-nothing company existing completely on lawyer power. Fuck them.
You are confused. Software, for example, that you bought is not your property. Maybe you want it to be your property, but it's not -- it's somebody else's and that somebody else is allowing you to use it (use, but not own) subject to a number of restrictions. Again, maybe you want to change this, but this is quite outside the scope of DMCA.
Says who? Only the people who sell software. They want this to be the case, but that doesn't mean much.
Currently, UCITA and other bribery aside, you own software just like you own a book. You own the physical work and all rights pertaining to the use of the data printed on it, where those rights don't conflict with copyright. (You can copy it temporarily (overhead projector, etc) for purposes or reading it, burn it, underline/highlight it, and nearly anything else.)
They (the publisher) can't revoke those rights under any circumstances... you paid for it, they sold it, it's yours.
So why do you think software is different? Because of some license you didn't see until after you bought it? Hah. That's the equivalent of me putting a contract in a box of food you buy which states that by your opening of the box, you agree to the terms of the contract. It's completely, and obviously, void.
Yet, you do this with a box of software and people suddenly think it means something? Not bloody likely.
Unless your state (are you in the USA?) government was bribed to pass the UCITA. (And yes, it is bribery which would be criminal in most other countries.) But if it hasn't, who the hell cares what a software company claims? Like anyone else, they'll ask for everything they think they could get, and then a little more just in case. If you give it to them it's your own dumb fault.
"The program I compiled from GPL'ed source is mine, not his. They gave me the source to use for that purpose. I can sell the output to whoever I want."
That's more accurate.
Your translation would have been appropriate if people had been reverse engineering the CueCat and selling the schematics to other companies who were building CueCats.
But to just use that CueCat that you legally own, to scan whatever you want, and have those scans recorded or processed in whatever way you want, is the same as using GIMP to make an image and selling the image, or using Linux to run a web server and selling web space.
Now, if people were downloading CueCat software from a webpage after clicking 'I Agree' to a click-through on the page, then modifying and distributing that software, that would be a violation akin to redistributing something that was GPLed without the source code.
btw, I tried not to be pedantic in answering your question because I knew you meant "How would you feel if they turned this around on you" and just picked an example, but... you are allowed to sell GPLed software, or source code, without having to pay the author any royalties. That's what RedHat does. You're just forced to distribute it in certain ways, if you choose to distribute it. (If you use it yourself, the GPL is moot, because you're not copying it...)
Yawn, another reverse psychology karma whore, appear insightful by saying that nobody else really gets it.
Are you unable to see the difference between solicited and unsolicited? Between a voluntary agreement and an EULA? Between copyright violation and reverse engineering?
No CueCat software was distributed. That means it's not a copyright violation. The CC license (which isn't enforcable anyways) was never even read by most people because they threw away the CD. How do you get copyright violation from that?
It'd be nice if moderators didn't give points to any snivelling idiot who bitches about an anti-MS bias or GPL communism, etc.
(A geek site will have an anti-MS bias, not only is MS owned by a jerk but it actively attempts to stifle creativity and crushes people and companies with an overactive legal department - what about that isn't deserving of scorn? If you hadn't noticed, people bash all companies that use those tactics.)
Because there's an inverse relationship between education and the number of children women have. Uneducated women tend to have a lot of children, highly educated women usually stop at two, if they have that many.
Makes sense to me, I wouldn't want to carry around a kid for nine months, then babysit it constantly for ten years or so. Ugh.
But it does mean that stupid people breed more than smart people, as a rule.
My Apple 2+ booted up faster than my Win98 box running a p3-800, and it loaded a word processor more quickly than my current computer loads word.
But it did a *lot* less. It's easy to load an OS in five seconds if it doesn't support anything, and if a word processor deals in plain text and doesn't even have a spell checker, it's kinda trivial.
I;m sure many people thought of the button-less mouse ... people unable to move their fingers independantly, people unable to distinguish left from right, etc.
That's not innovation, that's crap.
Apple shoulda shut down in the mid 80s, they went steadily downhill from there.
Many of the factory owners of the days performed what would be called 'anti-competetive' practices today. They weren't content to simply let market forces win. Everyone they shut down was less competition and also more potential workers.
But yeah, I bet people jumped up and down for an honest chance to be chained to some big death-dealing machine for slave wages.
That wasn't a problem with mechanized looms, that was a problem with companies that built them without safety precautions, etc.
Today I'm sure a descendant of that machine is chugging away making most of our clothing and probably killing very few of the users.
The luddites fought against essentially forced servitude in the factories (the factory owners were proved to try to put people out of business and in debt so they'd have no choice but factory work...) where the loom was but one way to die.
That forced servitude in a death-trap went away but the loom stayed.
So I think the assumption that the loom is progressive is a safe one.
I can't see how a carnivore box could benefit the majority of society, it'll be used to control the majority of society, bringing them in line with what their masters want. That sounds positively smashable to me.
(Don't be suprised if many ISP workers accidentally drop coffee into the vents of these things many times...)
I knew that, I used it on the Mac before it was a PC tool. My words didn't specifically mean it started on the PC, just that the PC and Mac versions are different, and someone else had said "You don't expect the Mac version for free along with it..." and no, you don't because the Mac one is seperately written (even if it was written first.)
That's back before Apple's later screw-ups let MS get ahead in the GUI area and led a lot of the high-end users to go to Wintel machines... (I was an Apple user at one time.)
I don't know what you guys pay for books, but I'd laugh at anyone who wanted me to pay $13 USD for a novel.
And then, if they told me I'd only have the right to read it, but it didn't come with the actual book, that I'd need to read it on the computer or print it out (paying again for ink and paper)...
Not bloody likely.
$13 might not be bad for a collectible book, like a hard-cover. But for an e-book? King's just greedy, that's all there is to it, wanting more for this than he'd make for a similar book while giving the customer less. (That is, if he ever does get off his skanky ass and write the whole thing, instead of blaming people downloading two copies and only paying once, for ruining the project for everyone.)
Sounds reasonable to me... After all, King accepted their payment for the first sections of the book, now he wants to stop providing to them not (and he admits) because of them, but because of the behaviour of other people who refuse to be bound by King's stupid rules.
Photoshop for the Mac is a complete re-write. A new product. It actually took more effort for Adobe to make it. But in the days before everyone had CDs, most software came on 3.5s and CDs... And before that, on 5.25s and 3.5s. And they did it for free, or at most a media cost of $5 or so.
King on the other hand wants to charge more for a text file which was simple run through a different filter.
Can anyone be more money-grubbing? Next he'll be applying to congress for a tax on disks and demanding his share because people who buy one copy of his lame little e-book will use the space to store multiple formats...
The guy's plainly a jerk looking for a free ride. He wants to make more money (no printing costs), take no risk (if it shuts down, he's out nothing) and no blame (if anything happens, it's the fault of the bad internet). So he'll screw over anyone dumb enough to give him any money.
I'd agree, a arrogant schmuck.
Quite frankly, I see different encodings of the books to be the same content. I'd consider a JPG and a PNG of the same photo to be covered under the same copyright, and if I bought one I'd expect to be able to use it. (You may not think the law works this way but you're wrong, and even if you weren't, I don't give a shit.)
To be fair, if I was to download a version of the story from him every day because I didn't have room to store it I'd expect to pay a reasonable download fee for the use of his bandwidth, but I'd expect it to be less than the cost of the e-book + transport...
But he not only expects people to pay for every one they download but he wants us to pay more for the story than we would in paper form on Amazon... What kind of crack is that moron smoking? He wants to be payed more, for less.
And then you get into this bastard's demanding that everyone be held liable for the actions of a few. If someone with a PC, Mac, and Palm is (oh god!) downloading three copies, he expects other people to either pay more times to offset this or risk their initial payment being for naught, and told that they're not worthy of his oh-so-marvelous e-book.
Then, the moron can't even quote Heinlein right, it's TANSTAFL, not TANFL. Yet he wants a free lunch... He wants innocent consumers to bear *all* the costs of non-paying downloads, and the risk that some script-kiddy will close it down, AND then to pay more for this text file than for a paper and ink book.
So, he wants more money, no risk, and no blame. Ummm, TANSTAFL comes to mind.
King is a shithead. (And a pathetic author, but that's beside the point...) And what the fuck is with that inch-wide strip of small-font text down the center of the screen? Has his web-designer been lobotomized or haven't they seen monitors with a higher resolution than 640x480 in Maine?
> [...] generally above them where the /visibility/ is thinner.
?? How can visibility be thinner?
:P
> [...] just like Napster doesn't go out and get illegal copies of music by iteslf.
And that's just the problem, isn't it?
We need a fully automated version of Napster!
This isn't a defense against an EULA. Picture the example where a gas station had a large changeable sign (where the letters can be moved) and it said "Item X, free with fill-up - pay with your gas-card and take one."
...", would that mean the contract the gas station had offered changed?
This is valid, they're making an offer and you accept by taking an Item X when you fill-up.
Now, if *you* changed the sign to read "Two Item Xs
What if you had a friend do it for you? Nope. You still know that the modified contract isn't what the gas station is offering, so you can't just take an Item X, even if the sign now offers them for free...
The bright side of this is that EULAs in the form of a click-through or shrink-wrap licenses aren't valid at all, so you can click 'I Agree' and not actually have entered into a contract.
The basic rundown is that you have to know about a contract to be ableto accept it, and you have to get something out of it (called Consideration.)
If they display the license (either in click-through or inside the shrink-wrap) *after* you buy the product, or they give it to you as a gift, you can't be said to have known about the contract (and not just that there is one, you can't agree to a contract you've never seen.) so you can't agree to it.
Also, further invalidating them, is the fact that after they've given you the software or you've bought it, they're trying to offer you the ability to use it as the consideration for the contract, but you've already be granted that right by the gift/sale so they have nothing else to give. No consideration = no contract. (Like me trying to get you to sign a contract where I offer you the right to use your car... hello?)
You do click 'I agree' but that's not binding because you're being coerced. That's *your* program there, free to use, and they're keeping you out until you click a button. You *have to* click that button to use it. For the EULA to be binding (in ANY case) it'd have to say 'I Agree' 'I don't agree, cancel' and 'I don't agree, install anyway'...
Basically, extortion is when you try to demand something (usually money) for letting someone do something they have the right to do anyways. That's what they're doing when they don't let you use your program without giving them agreement...
Luckily, extortion is illegal.
Click-through and shrink-wrap licenses are illegal and you could actually sue over them (and likely win) if you had the money for the lawyers.
In some places the UCITA makes these licenses legal but it won't last, it goes against centuries of contract law. And it makes really stunningly illegal things legal. (The right to retroactively change a contract without notice, etc...)
How are 'we' ruining DC?
By refusing to use their CueCat scanners the way they'd prefer?
I could throw it in the garbage (within my rights, even they would admit) and they'd get to scans from me.
I could write (leaving asside questions of *my* programming ability, I mean the generic *me*) a driver that actually displays the information from the barcode. This I could use locally only, or to look-up items on any company, Amazon, B&N, or even DC, if they make a decent interface, etc.
So, if I use it my own way, they have a potential of getting scans, but likely don't.
How does my doing this affect what everyone else does?
If their service is so bad as to turn off users, or to make them look for new software, that's their fault.
What they should be afraid of is Amazon.com writing cueCat software that does a better lookup, for free, without DC's specific privacy invasion. Amazon would easily make their investment back just from the orders they'd get.
And it'd be perfectly legal, after all, the EULA for the DC software says 'if you don't agree, don't use it...' Well, they might get their wish, people wouldn't use their crippled, invasive software.
And it'd all be fair, free markets mean free choice. It's not like by giving us a cheap barcode scanner that DC could claim the ongoing right to any barcode scans we ever made.
> you think the geeks at DC are lawyers?
Hell no, but the people in charge are.
> HELP THEM FIX THE LEGAL PROBLEM
Oh, I am. When we're successful and they're out of business or paying reparation to those they threatened for performing completely legal actions, then that'll fix the legal problem. The legal problem is THEM.
I'm sick and tired of bullying. When I was in school I watched a bunch of kids getting picked on, so I beat the crap out of the bully. He threatened to kill me and I reported him to the teachers, he got kicked out of school and sent to juvie.
I'm trying to do the same thing to DC. They pick on people, I'm trying to return the hurt to them, more than they dished out.
Bullies don't care if you ask them to stop, they want to get something and don't care who they hurt. You can't use polite societal rules to fight a sociopath. If DC is threatening people, we have the threaten the only thing DC holds dear, their bottom line.
My way to do this is send in tons of false scans (and record it how it happens to prove it later). When they try to sell their demographic info I can release the info and make it worthless... Doesn't take a lot of scripts running 24/7 to flood the actual data.