That's not actually true, thankfully. The FCC did a bad thing, but their removal of regulation concerned the sharing of equipment, not lines, specifically the provision of wholesale DSL to third parties.
The regulations that force ILECs to lease local loop to CLECs are still in force. Hence companies like Covad will continue to provide companies like SpeakEasy with DSL infrastructure, even if the ILECs do not.
A "patent" is a different thing from a "patent lice...
Oh, for goodness sake. I've already addressed this. The bolded comment was an example, it was apposite in this case.
If you don't have a license to use a patent, then you're in deeper water than if you do. You know that. So stop playing word games. The important part of the GPL is the entire paragraph I quoted, not the example which I bolded simply because it makes things, to readers of ordinary English, pretty clear. Now, I made that point in my last message. I said Moreover, the bolded part is an example. I bolded it because it was clearly showing this issue.. I wasn't blowing smoke when I wrote those words.
If you don't have the right to use a patented technology and others do not either, you do not have the right to distribute GPL'd software that uses it. That's what that entire paragraph of the GPL is about.
Read it. Not just the bolded part, but the whole thing. Don't try using idiot word games to weasel out of an example, the example is only an example. The point is made abundantly clear: if you give someone GPL'd software that they're unable to exercise their GPL-given rights with, then you are breaching the license.
In fact, RMS and the FSF have explicitly REJECTED licenses as being unfree when they've tried to do this!
That's not true. RMS and FSF have explicitly rejected licenses as unfree when they've tied people to a particular juristiction. They have never, ever, rejected a license that outlaws the disobeying of laws within the licencees' juristiction.
Do you mean "everybody who says the same sequence of words" or "everybody who reads out my website"?
The former isn't a copyright violation if they independently came up with that "sentence fragment". Copyright is not like patents - you have to actually copy something for it to be a violation, not merely happen to end up with the same words. As the number of words becomes smaller, the likelihood anyone's copied them from anywhere else (copyrightable, at any rate) is exceptionally small.
Well, not everyone, I'm not and a lot of people are agreeing with me. But yeah, I see a lot of double standards today.
The irony here is that O'Gara's comments and CNets are in different ballparks. O'Gara appears to have thought there was a story about PJ being an IBM shill, and insofar as she believed that, the notion of trying to find out who she really is was relevent. (O'Gara still stepped over the bounds by dragging in third parties, and it's questionable that she really believed that, though she comes across as such a nutcase it's not hard to believe.) CNet, on the other hand, could have digged up the same level of information about one of their own staff (with their permission, of course), including the reporter himself, and had an effective story. That they didn't shows bad faith, in my view.
Well, yeah, that's true too. I guess I should have been more specific as the complaint about DVDs is that you can't exercise your fair use defense in a particular way (ie when you "space shift", if such a thing was fair use in the first place, digitally.) But you're right, there are ways of making copies.
On that note, if I were to buy the DVD of one of the Harry Potter films, and then write a story influenced by it involving the characters, I'd be copying a DVD too. I could use, depending on how I wrote the story, various fair use defenses, from "I wrote it for myself and nobody ever saw it. How the hell did you find out?" (if I never redistributed it) to "It's a parody! As you can clearly tell from the depiction of Potter that he's supposed to be Tony Blair" (if it actually is a parody.)
The CSS system is relatively narrow in what it prevents users from doing. It prevents them from watching DVDs in a particular way, and makes it difficult to use DVDs they've copied in other players, at least until the patents expire and it becomes easy to make DVD-Rs that can contain copies of the entire disks, not just the content portions.
A guy is taking a walk and sees a frog on the side of the road. As he comes closer, the frog starts to talk. 'Kiss me and I will turn into a princess.' The guy picks the frog up and puts it in his pocket. The frog starts shouting, 'Hey! Didn't you hear me? I'm a Princess. Just kiss me and I will be yours.' The guy takes the frog out of his pocket and smiles at it and puts it back. The frog is really frustrated. 'I don't get it. Why won't you kiss me? I will turn into a beautiful princess and do anything you ask.' The guy says, 'Look, I'm a computer geek. I don't have time for girls. But a talking frog is cool.!'
Ok, here's the thing. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. Geeks, and it appears ZDNet UK journalists, think that because something's "cool", it's good, regardless of the use.
To use an extreme example (which happens to also be illegal, but being immoral doesn't always imply being illegal), it's not a reasonable thing for me to do to shoot the CEO of Smith & Wesson. Yes, I can use his gun to do that. People do use Smith & Wesson's guns to shoot people, legally and illegally. Smith & Wesson makes a substantial profit from people who use their products to shoot people. However, just as the founders of Google wouldn't advocate using their system to look up personal details about someone for malice, profit, or to invade their privacy, I seriously doubt the founders of Smith & Wesson particularly like the notion of protection racketeers using S&W guns to shoot shop owners or advocate it. There are legitimate and illegitimate uses of Smith and Wesson guns. There are legitimate and illegitimate uses of Google. Some of the former include shooting in self defense. Some of the latter includes looking up some private information because you need it.
Yes I can look up many of Google's founder's "private" information via their own search engine. But while I may do so, I can have legitimate and illegitimate reasons for doing so. Legitimate reasons include trying to get a phone number for an old friend (in a world where Google's founder is a friend of mine); illegitimate reasons include gratuitously drawing the attention of thousands of people to information that reasonably should be considered private, whether it happens to be publically available or not. If CNet had a story about how Google's founder was fighting an attempt to build a mall near his home, it might have been reasonable to include the name of the street he lives upon, because that's relevent too. But this?
I know many people will respond with "Well I can do it, so it's ok, because if it's possible to find out, it's public, and there's no difference between information being buried in the net and it being collected in one place and published as a news story". No, it isn't ok and yes there is a difference. That's the point. The chances are most of you wouldn't know any of this if CNET hadn't published it because you'd never have bothered to find it out. And the net doesn't change much. Anyone who knows my real name can probably Google enough to find out private information to the level of home address, my previous addresses, my telephone numbers, my friends, family, my interests, the music I love, and even my sexual fetishes. However, this information could also be extracted by an investigator using perfectly normal leg work and without any attempts to deceive anyone. Would that justify someone posting the information in my local newspaper, simply because it's out there and possible to find?
The fact some people do not subscribe to the notion of there being a reasonable expectation of privacy does not mean that people should just blast out personal facts about others willy nilly, solicited or unsolicited. There's such a thing as personal responsibility. You have rights, but you also have moral obligations. We see technologies routinely end up crippled or even banned because some idiot decides that laws usually applied to two year olds ("If I can see it, it's mine.
No, a right is something people can't take away. A defense, which is what fair use is, is just something that means you can't lose in a court of law against a charge that you violated a law.
If fair use was a "right", it'd be illegal for DVD players and disks to include CSS technology, because both prevent you from using content in fair use ways.
However, if you take a book, which has no "access controls", and use it in a fair use way, and the author takes you to court, then you're off the hook.
If you take a DVD, you cannot actually get to the point that you can exercise your fair use rights, not without violating a different law to do with access control mechanisms that fair use does not apply to, so you're screwed, essentially.
No, you're wrong. The bolded part does not say you have to be the one with the patent license. It merely says such a thing exists. Moreover, the bolded part is an example. I bolded it because it was clearly showing this issue.
The fact is that, in the US, a patent exists that covers MP3s. Moreover, the patent's owners have indicated that any commercial distribution of MP3 players requires the payment of royalties. Therefore, an additional condition is being imposed over and above those made by the GPL, which means the GPL cannot apply to MP3 players.
Sorry, but it's not just me who sees this, it's also the major commercial Linux distributors. They're the ones with the lawyers. Go take it up with them if you think they're all misunderstanding this!
It doesn't cover the GPL. Anyone selling GPL'd MP3 decoding software has to pay patent royalties, just like anyone selling any other form of decoder. As a result, GPL'd MP3 implementations are in legal limbo, and many Linux distributions actually do not include MP3 players for this very reason. Remember: the GPL is not anti-commercial, it's anti-proprietary. People can, and do, sell GPL'd software, and the GPL gives them the right to. If resellers of GPL'd software have to pay royalties, the GPL is being breached, because an additional restriction is being imposed.
The GPL forbids redistribution if the author is aware of patents that apply to the code that require the payment of royalties:
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example,
if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
If you're in a country where software patents are valid, then you're on thin ice redistributing a GPL'd MP3 player. You are violating the GPL if you do not own the player's copyrights yourself, and if you sell copies or otherwise make money from the operation, you owe royalties to the Thompson/Fraunhoffer et al.
Right now GPLv2 pays lipservice to patents but doesn't really have strong sanctions against companies who use them to quash free software. The provisions it has are weak and arguably unenforceable if the company distributing GPL'd software suddenly decides to cease.
Nokia, for example, may be able to get away with deciding to end its distribution of GNU/Linux, then suing anyone who's made a derivative version that violates a patent of their's in a way that versions they shipped didn't. Indeed, it's quite possible that a third party entering new code that infringes upon a Nokia patent, even today, could be stopped by Nokia.
(If anyone thinks I'm being unfair to Nokia, yes, unless they actually do this, then I am being, but at the same time they put out a very, very, guarded comment a few months ago that quite obviously left these scenarios open.)
What many people want to see is companies that use patents against free software unable to use a large body of free software from there on. That means a solution to the above issue, but also to, say, discourage suing in general by ensuring that if a company chooses to deny the use of a patented technology to one free software project, it chooses to deny itself the use of any. So if IBM sues to get a technology out of, let's say, Apache, it can't turn around and continue to distribute a (theoretically GPLv3'd) Linux kernel.
Software patents were not a serious problem when the first two GPLs were drafted, though I believe they existed by the time the second version was created. They are now, and they pose a serious threat to free software.
If the insurance companies thought for a single moment that speeding doesn't cause accidents, they'd lower premiums in an instant. The insurance industry is a competitive market. The company that best assesses risk and can draw the largest number of clients paying well set premiums is the company that makes the best money.
If any insurance company believes, sincerely, that speeding isn't a reckless, dangerous, act, that causes accidents then they'll lower the premiums for those caught speeding. It is, if their supposition is currect, in their best interests to do so. By doing so, they attract profitable drivers away from their competitors.
So no, if insurance companies found there were genetic factors that caused speeding, they certainly would, if they could, use it to help determine premiums. And you better believe that those who do fit the criteria would face higher premiums.
No, but even if genetic testing is limited to the fringes, it still has the ability to cause havoc.
For example, a motor insurance company looks for genetic factors that lead drivers to speed and, as a result, have accidents. The genetic factors are found, a certain combination implying a tendency to that kind of recklessness. Anyone with those factors is automatically screened out, and pretty soon cannot afford to insure themselves as the few insurance companies that would do so require much higher premiums, seeing this group as a "guaranteed risk."
You could argue that preventing speeders from being able to gain insurance and hence drive and kill children is reasonable, but the end result is that a large number of people become uninsurable. Those people become unable to drive, so become less able to support themselves in most communities. That in turn means we, the rest of us, end up having to support them, either in higher taxes to make up for their lower contributions to the economy, assuming they're able to find work, or even in unemployment benefits, if they're not. Yes, an employer might take them because, at the end of the day, their genetic factors do not matter, but because of their limited self-transportation ability, they're limited in which employers they can pick from.
This in turn causes problems for employers too. Those employers have a reduced number of people who can work for them, so they're liable to pick less able employees and pay more for them, where certain skills are critical. So again, we, the people who benefit from the lower insurance rates, end up paying more. More in taxes. More for the products and services we use.
One might even make an argument that the type of person an insurance company rejects entirely because of a genetic disposition to deliberately put others in danger might also be the kind of person more willing to indulge in crime and criminal acts than the average person. I'm not implying that everyone who speeds would gladly rob a convenience store, but I'm just saying that if a group of people who are innately irresponsible is likely to include a larger than average group of people who do are not considerate of the boundaries of others, sociopathic one might say.
As if to make matters worse, we might not end up any safer. If premiums are related, primarily, to genetic tendencies and not actual histories, then there's less incentive for those insured to avoid being caught speeding. Sure, there's the fines, but it's a once-over deal. Yet an insurance company still has an incentive to discriminate against those with the necessary genetic qualifications, if only to get ahead of its rivals.
The bottom line ends up being that you're hurt even when the genetic screening apparently doesn't affect you directly, and is focussed on the fringes.
More or less, yeah, you can patent the technology behind the scroll wheel if you want, if it really is novel, but the software... nah. You shouldn't be able to.
You've got to remember that there are tens of millions of computer programmers out there. The chances are for any user interface "solution" you come up with, the chances are someone else will come up with the same idea, and have the resources to implement it. By patenting it (and enforcing the patent), you're not creating something new and wonderful for the world to use, au contraire, you're denying the world something new and wonderful to use, or imposing limits on its use. You've taken something that would have existed anyway, and preventing others from using it.
Think I'm wrong? Take a look at this article, you know, the one we're talking about now. Some guy and Apple both independently created this "interface." They both did the R&D, they both would have done so regardless of whether patent laws existed, but one, at the end of this, is going to get a monopoly on producing stuff with this technology. How is that fair? And what benefit has this given to the rest of us?
That's why we don't like software patents. Come to think of it, generally I don't like patents, I just know that in a small number of cases, where the cost to develop something new is high, where it is highly unlikely two or more people will come up with the same technology independently, and where the inventor intends to publish the technology widely so people can understand and use it, it's justified. In software, this is exceptionally rare.
If I remember correctly, you can collect statutory damages of between $750 and $30,000 per violation (eg per copy of the LKPM that SCO sold) as an alternative to having to prove monetary damages. (There's some information here, the court will decide how much, but $750 is the minimum.)
The reason is almost certainly that, yes, copyright law does specifically recognize that people frequently want control over their works and compensation that isn't directly monetary. In the GPL's case, it's a "I'll show you mine, you show me your's" arrangement.
The assertion was generally correct: unless Linus et al decide to waive their rights or demand some other settlement, SCO can be sued for damages (and can only avoid such a lawsuit by putting the Unix kernel under the GPL and releasing the source. Which they probably can't do because even if Novell is incorrect, they're still unlikely to own it 100%)
So I'm not sure what "FUD" you're refering to. Yes, generally the free software movement tends to focus on calls to remove violating code, but they don't have to, and they can, if they want, get real damages if they're prepared to take the cases to court.
I'm sure you did. However, by the time Sony came out with decent length tapes, the fight was over. VHS had already won, despite its lack of a first mover advantage. And SP/LP/SLP came much later, they weren't built into early generations of VHS.
As far as the latter paragraph goes, that's complete nonsense. Studios had access to tapes of both formats, and generally recorded them the same way, at roughly the same cost. Sony's "licensing" really had no affect whatsoever on availability or flexibility, except for the lack of directly competitive environment to push down prices, which ultimately was rendered irrelevent by the fact BetaMax was competing with VHS anyway.
VHS beat BetaMax because it was practical for the types of recording most people wanted to do at a time when BetaMax wasn't. Yes, BetaMax caught up. But not when it mattered.
Given Sony sold blank tapes in retail outlets, I think it's safe to say the "BetaMax died because of Sony hated pornographers" claim is a ludicrous urban legend that ought to be obvious to anyone who's spent more than a few seconds thinking about it.
BetaMax died because of its short tape lengths. You want a device to record movies off the TV. One has 30 minute and one hour tapes available. The other two hour tapes. Which unit would you buy, especially in an environment in which most of the content you'll be owning will be self-recorded, not purchased?
I'm afraid the pronounciation of "Beta" is "Bee, Tar", not "Better".;-)
Honestly, BetaMax was not, in practice, a better standard than VHS. It may have had perceptable quality improvements (though the jury is out on this), but that was more than made up for by VHS's early ability to record an entire two hour movie on a single cassette.
Sony essentially put out a format that was impractical. VHS beat it initially and immediately took off as a video recording technology that did what people wanted it to do. Once Sony fixed the problems, it was too late, and VHS was still wiping the floor with it.
VHS was objectively better, even if in some, largely unimportant area, BetaMax may have had a small technical advantage. The technical advantages of VHS were more important than those of BetaMax.
A good comparison might be with, given this is Troll Tuesday and Slashdot, cars (because cars are the standard Slashdot analogy area, and because on TT I can joke about that.) Electric cars are less poluting, more efficient, and theoretically more responsive than their gas guzzling cousins (assuming we're not talking about milk floats.) But given their short range, the gas powered car is, right now, the superior vehicle.
You could argue they had the same advantage over eBay. I'm surprised however how few people even realise that Amazon operates an auction service, and there seem to be many amongst my friends unaware of their (separate) Amazon Marketplace service that also, in practice, ends up competing with eBay.
In practice, people generally think "Amazon = books", and "eBay = secondhand goods". Right now, people think "Netflix = online DVD rentals". I don't doubt Amazon can probably make their service profitable, but Netflix is an established brand, and Amazon's "brand" brings less to the table in this case than it did with Amazon Marketplace, let alone Amazon Auctions.
As for the last comment, if Netflix doesn't copy Amazon and continues to do what it's always done, and are not currently violating any Amazon patents, they have nothing to fear from Amazon patenting anything. They'll always be their own example of prior art.
That's complete rubbish. The prices of unbundled lines are regulated, and Verizon's ability to sell long distance services, something they badly want, is dependent on their ability to provision unbundled lines to CLECs.
Verizon cannot "charge (Covad and other CLECs) whatever they want", neither legally nor practically.
This is unlike Slashdot.org, which can quite legally insert however many minutes they want between successive posts from the same user forcing them to be unable to participate in a conversation in a typically dumbass and ineffective attempt to avoid people flooding their forums with junk.
When I was waiting for someone to supply a (real) DSL service to my home, which was listed in the public records as too far away from a Central Office (CO), BellSouth made an announcement it'd be available in February. I spoke to someone at SpeakEasy who told me that this was because BellSouth was building some form of repeater station (I don't remember the term used, but the point was the DSLAMs would be housed outside of the CO, closer to my home), and that "unfortunately we'll not have access to that".
So it looks to me like Covad's ability to provision DSL isn't necessarily dependent purely on what areas they cover, sometimes the unbundled lines just aren't good enough and the line's owners (the ILECs) have an advantage in what they can do with them anyway.
It would make sense if you had read what the parent post had stated. What he said was that Laser Printers last for months of HEAVY PRINTING. I'd like to see any non-continuous flow ink-jet printer do the same.
Actually I did read what he had to say, and he didn't say anything about the level of printing from the ink jet, which by default implied he was talking about the same level. Hence my obviously sarcastic response. Of course, if you'd read my comment, you'd have also seen that I knew he didn't intend to imply what he actually implied, as I said that as the first few words of the second paragraph. You apparently didn't read my comment fully before deciding to complain I didn't read its parent.
Your comment about laser printers is well taken, however my point wasn't that lasers are crap, it's that inkjets tend to be very high quality in comparison when it comes to the specific application of photo printing. An inkjet will generally print at a quality better than that most colour posters I've seen are printed at, but I wouldn't have a problem putting those on my wall either.
Given the low cost of an inkjet, which is typically a fraction of the difference between the price of a high quality Black and White laser and a high quality Colour laser, there's no real reason not to get both, unless you're really, really, pressed for space.
My "Good quality Epson", which is at home and not used enough for me to remember the model number, but, combined with The GIMP and Epson photo paper, produces better photos than I've seen from any photo shop, cost less than $100 six years ago. I think most people would have little trouble finding something to print high quality photos for less than half the price you're talking about.
I mean, sure, they could possibly afford $150, but why bother? You can buy three years worth of ink for the difference. And as a new home owner with a bank to support, I wouldn't pay $150 for the ability to print photos at home.
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The regulations that force ILECs to lease local loop to CLECs are still in force. Hence companies like Covad will continue to provide companies like SpeakEasy with DSL infrastructure, even if the ILECs do not.
If you don't have a license to use a patent, then you're in deeper water than if you do. You know that. So stop playing word games. The important part of the GPL is the entire paragraph I quoted, not the example which I bolded simply because it makes things, to readers of ordinary English, pretty clear. Now, I made that point in my last message. I said Moreover, the bolded part is an example. I bolded it because it was clearly showing this issue.. I wasn't blowing smoke when I wrote those words.
If you don't have the right to use a patented technology and others do not either, you do not have the right to distribute GPL'd software that uses it. That's what that entire paragraph of the GPL is about.
Read it. Not just the bolded part, but the whole thing. Don't try using idiot word games to weasel out of an example, the example is only an example. The point is made abundantly clear: if you give someone GPL'd software that they're unable to exercise their GPL-given rights with, then you are breaching the license.
That's not true. RMS and FSF have explicitly rejected licenses as unfree when they've tied people to a particular juristiction. They have never, ever, rejected a license that outlaws the disobeying of laws within the licencees' juristiction.The former isn't a copyright violation if they independently came up with that "sentence fragment". Copyright is not like patents - you have to actually copy something for it to be a violation, not merely happen to end up with the same words. As the number of words becomes smaller, the likelihood anyone's copied them from anywhere else (copyrightable, at any rate) is exceptionally small.
The irony here is that O'Gara's comments and CNets are in different ballparks. O'Gara appears to have thought there was a story about PJ being an IBM shill, and insofar as she believed that, the notion of trying to find out who she really is was relevent. (O'Gara still stepped over the bounds by dragging in third parties, and it's questionable that she really believed that, though she comes across as such a nutcase it's not hard to believe.) CNet, on the other hand, could have digged up the same level of information about one of their own staff (with their permission, of course), including the reporter himself, and had an effective story. That they didn't shows bad faith, in my view.
On that note, if I were to buy the DVD of one of the Harry Potter films, and then write a story influenced by it involving the characters, I'd be copying a DVD too. I could use, depending on how I wrote the story, various fair use defenses, from "I wrote it for myself and nobody ever saw it. How the hell did you find out?" (if I never redistributed it) to "It's a parody! As you can clearly tell from the depiction of Potter that he's supposed to be Tony Blair" (if it actually is a parody.)
The CSS system is relatively narrow in what it prevents users from doing. It prevents them from watching DVDs in a particular way, and makes it difficult to use DVDs they've copied in other players, at least until the patents expire and it becomes easy to make DVD-Rs that can contain copies of the entire disks, not just the content portions.
Ok, here's the thing. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. Geeks, and it appears ZDNet UK journalists, think that because something's "cool", it's good, regardless of the use.
To use an extreme example (which happens to also be illegal, but being immoral doesn't always imply being illegal), it's not a reasonable thing for me to do to shoot the CEO of Smith & Wesson. Yes, I can use his gun to do that. People do use Smith & Wesson's guns to shoot people, legally and illegally. Smith & Wesson makes a substantial profit from people who use their products to shoot people. However, just as the founders of Google wouldn't advocate using their system to look up personal details about someone for malice, profit, or to invade their privacy, I seriously doubt the founders of Smith & Wesson particularly like the notion of protection racketeers using S&W guns to shoot shop owners or advocate it. There are legitimate and illegitimate uses of Smith and Wesson guns. There are legitimate and illegitimate uses of Google. Some of the former include shooting in self defense. Some of the latter includes looking up some private information because you need it.
Yes I can look up many of Google's founder's "private" information via their own search engine. But while I may do so, I can have legitimate and illegitimate reasons for doing so. Legitimate reasons include trying to get a phone number for an old friend (in a world where Google's founder is a friend of mine); illegitimate reasons include gratuitously drawing the attention of thousands of people to information that reasonably should be considered private, whether it happens to be publically available or not. If CNet had a story about how Google's founder was fighting an attempt to build a mall near his home, it might have been reasonable to include the name of the street he lives upon, because that's relevent too. But this?
I know many people will respond with "Well I can do it, so it's ok, because if it's possible to find out, it's public, and there's no difference between information being buried in the net and it being collected in one place and published as a news story". No, it isn't ok and yes there is a difference. That's the point. The chances are most of you wouldn't know any of this if CNET hadn't published it because you'd never have bothered to find it out. And the net doesn't change much. Anyone who knows my real name can probably Google enough to find out private information to the level of home address, my previous addresses, my telephone numbers, my friends, family, my interests, the music I love, and even my sexual fetishes. However, this information could also be extracted by an investigator using perfectly normal leg work and without any attempts to deceive anyone. Would that justify someone posting the information in my local newspaper, simply because it's out there and possible to find?
The fact some people do not subscribe to the notion of there being a reasonable expectation of privacy does not mean that people should just blast out personal facts about others willy nilly, solicited or unsolicited. There's such a thing as personal responsibility. You have rights, but you also have moral obligations. We see technologies routinely end up crippled or even banned because some idiot decides that laws usually applied to two year olds ("If I can see it, it's mine.
If fair use was a "right", it'd be illegal for DVD players and disks to include CSS technology, because both prevent you from using content in fair use ways.
However, if you take a book, which has no "access controls", and use it in a fair use way, and the author takes you to court, then you're off the hook.
If you take a DVD, you cannot actually get to the point that you can exercise your fair use rights, not without violating a different law to do with access control mechanisms that fair use does not apply to, so you're screwed, essentially.
ISPs will close the ports in an instant...
The fact is that, in the US, a patent exists that covers MP3s. Moreover, the patent's owners have indicated that any commercial distribution of MP3 players requires the payment of royalties. Therefore, an additional condition is being imposed over and above those made by the GPL, which means the GPL cannot apply to MP3 players.
Sorry, but it's not just me who sees this, it's also the major commercial Linux distributors. They're the ones with the lawyers. Go take it up with them if you think they're all misunderstanding this!
The GPL forbids redistribution if the author is aware of patents that apply to the code that require the payment of royalties:
If you're in a country where software patents are valid, then you're on thin ice redistributing a GPL'd MP3 player. You are violating the GPL if you do not own the player's copyrights yourself, and if you sell copies or otherwise make money from the operation, you owe royalties to the Thompson/Fraunhoffer et al.Right now GPLv2 pays lipservice to patents but doesn't really have strong sanctions against companies who use them to quash free software. The provisions it has are weak and arguably unenforceable if the company distributing GPL'd software suddenly decides to cease.
Nokia, for example, may be able to get away with deciding to end its distribution of GNU/Linux, then suing anyone who's made a derivative version that violates a patent of their's in a way that versions they shipped didn't. Indeed, it's quite possible that a third party entering new code that infringes upon a Nokia patent, even today, could be stopped by Nokia.
(If anyone thinks I'm being unfair to Nokia, yes, unless they actually do this, then I am being, but at the same time they put out a very, very, guarded comment a few months ago that quite obviously left these scenarios open.)
What many people want to see is companies that use patents against free software unable to use a large body of free software from there on. That means a solution to the above issue, but also to, say, discourage suing in general by ensuring that if a company chooses to deny the use of a patented technology to one free software project, it chooses to deny itself the use of any. So if IBM sues to get a technology out of, let's say, Apache, it can't turn around and continue to distribute a (theoretically GPLv3'd) Linux kernel.
Software patents were not a serious problem when the first two GPLs were drafted, though I believe they existed by the time the second version was created. They are now, and they pose a serious threat to free software.
If any insurance company believes, sincerely, that speeding isn't a reckless, dangerous, act, that causes accidents then they'll lower the premiums for those caught speeding. It is, if their supposition is currect, in their best interests to do so. By doing so, they attract profitable drivers away from their competitors.
So no, if insurance companies found there were genetic factors that caused speeding, they certainly would, if they could, use it to help determine premiums. And you better believe that those who do fit the criteria would face higher premiums.
For example, a motor insurance company looks for genetic factors that lead drivers to speed and, as a result, have accidents. The genetic factors are found, a certain combination implying a tendency to that kind of recklessness. Anyone with those factors is automatically screened out, and pretty soon cannot afford to insure themselves as the few insurance companies that would do so require much higher premiums, seeing this group as a "guaranteed risk."
You could argue that preventing speeders from being able to gain insurance and hence drive and kill children is reasonable, but the end result is that a large number of people become uninsurable. Those people become unable to drive, so become less able to support themselves in most communities. That in turn means we, the rest of us, end up having to support them, either in higher taxes to make up for their lower contributions to the economy, assuming they're able to find work, or even in unemployment benefits, if they're not. Yes, an employer might take them because, at the end of the day, their genetic factors do not matter, but because of their limited self-transportation ability, they're limited in which employers they can pick from.
This in turn causes problems for employers too. Those employers have a reduced number of people who can work for them, so they're liable to pick less able employees and pay more for them, where certain skills are critical. So again, we, the people who benefit from the lower insurance rates, end up paying more. More in taxes. More for the products and services we use.
One might even make an argument that the type of person an insurance company rejects entirely because of a genetic disposition to deliberately put others in danger might also be the kind of person more willing to indulge in crime and criminal acts than the average person. I'm not implying that everyone who speeds would gladly rob a convenience store, but I'm just saying that if a group of people who are innately irresponsible is likely to include a larger than average group of people who do are not considerate of the boundaries of others, sociopathic one might say.
As if to make matters worse, we might not end up any safer. If premiums are related, primarily, to genetic tendencies and not actual histories, then there's less incentive for those insured to avoid being caught speeding. Sure, there's the fines, but it's a once-over deal. Yet an insurance company still has an incentive to discriminate against those with the necessary genetic qualifications, if only to get ahead of its rivals.
The bottom line ends up being that you're hurt even when the genetic screening apparently doesn't affect you directly, and is focussed on the fringes.
You know what I'm talking about, yeah, you do.
You've got to remember that there are tens of millions of computer programmers out there. The chances are for any user interface "solution" you come up with, the chances are someone else will come up with the same idea, and have the resources to implement it. By patenting it (and enforcing the patent), you're not creating something new and wonderful for the world to use, au contraire, you're denying the world something new and wonderful to use, or imposing limits on its use. You've taken something that would have existed anyway, and preventing others from using it.
Think I'm wrong? Take a look at this article, you know, the one we're talking about now. Some guy and Apple both independently created this "interface." They both did the R&D, they both would have done so regardless of whether patent laws existed, but one, at the end of this, is going to get a monopoly on producing stuff with this technology. How is that fair? And what benefit has this given to the rest of us?
That's why we don't like software patents. Come to think of it, generally I don't like patents, I just know that in a small number of cases, where the cost to develop something new is high, where it is highly unlikely two or more people will come up with the same technology independently, and where the inventor intends to publish the technology widely so people can understand and use it, it's justified. In software, this is exceptionally rare.
The reason is almost certainly that, yes, copyright law does specifically recognize that people frequently want control over their works and compensation that isn't directly monetary. In the GPL's case, it's a "I'll show you mine, you show me your's" arrangement.
So I'm not sure what "FUD" you're refering to. Yes, generally the free software movement tends to focus on calls to remove violating code, but they don't have to, and they can, if they want, get real damages if they're prepared to take the cases to court.
As far as the latter paragraph goes, that's complete nonsense. Studios had access to tapes of both formats, and generally recorded them the same way, at roughly the same cost. Sony's "licensing" really had no affect whatsoever on availability or flexibility, except for the lack of directly competitive environment to push down prices, which ultimately was rendered irrelevent by the fact BetaMax was competing with VHS anyway.
VHS beat BetaMax because it was practical for the types of recording most people wanted to do at a time when BetaMax wasn't. Yes, BetaMax caught up. But not when it mattered.
BetaMax died because of its short tape lengths. You want a device to record movies off the TV. One has 30 minute and one hour tapes available. The other two hour tapes. Which unit would you buy, especially in an environment in which most of the content you'll be owning will be self-recorded, not purchased?
Honestly, BetaMax was not, in practice, a better standard than VHS. It may have had perceptable quality improvements (though the jury is out on this), but that was more than made up for by VHS's early ability to record an entire two hour movie on a single cassette.
Sony essentially put out a format that was impractical. VHS beat it initially and immediately took off as a video recording technology that did what people wanted it to do. Once Sony fixed the problems, it was too late, and VHS was still wiping the floor with it.
VHS was objectively better, even if in some, largely unimportant area, BetaMax may have had a small technical advantage. The technical advantages of VHS were more important than those of BetaMax.
A good comparison might be with, given this is Troll Tuesday and Slashdot, cars (because cars are the standard Slashdot analogy area, and because on TT I can joke about that.) Electric cars are less poluting, more efficient, and theoretically more responsive than their gas guzzling cousins (assuming we're not talking about milk floats.) But given their short range, the gas powered car is, right now, the superior vehicle.
In practice, people generally think "Amazon = books", and "eBay = secondhand goods". Right now, people think "Netflix = online DVD rentals". I don't doubt Amazon can probably make their service profitable, but Netflix is an established brand, and Amazon's "brand" brings less to the table in this case than it did with Amazon Marketplace, let alone Amazon Auctions.
As for the last comment, if Netflix doesn't copy Amazon and continues to do what it's always done, and are not currently violating any Amazon patents, they have nothing to fear from Amazon patenting anything. They'll always be their own example of prior art.
Verizon cannot "charge (Covad and other CLECs) whatever they want", neither legally nor practically.
This is unlike Slashdot.org, which can quite legally insert however many minutes they want between successive posts from the same user forcing them to be unable to participate in a conversation in a typically dumbass and ineffective attempt to avoid people flooding their forums with junk.
So it looks to me like Covad's ability to provision DSL isn't necessarily dependent purely on what areas they cover, sometimes the unbundled lines just aren't good enough and the line's owners (the ILECs) have an advantage in what they can do with them anyway.
Your comment about laser printers is well taken, however my point wasn't that lasers are crap, it's that inkjets tend to be very high quality in comparison when it comes to the specific application of photo printing. An inkjet will generally print at a quality better than that most colour posters I've seen are printed at, but I wouldn't have a problem putting those on my wall either.
Given the low cost of an inkjet, which is typically a fraction of the difference between the price of a high quality Black and White laser and a high quality Colour laser, there's no real reason not to get both, unless you're really, really, pressed for space.
I mean, sure, they could possibly afford $150, but why bother? You can buy three years worth of ink for the difference. And as a new home owner with a bank to support, I wouldn't pay $150 for the ability to print photos at home.