I just posted a comment about this in reply to someone else who said largely the same thing, but as I see it, you wont. The reason is that while this law may make such editing "legal", a DVD manufacturer would lose their license to make CSS supporting DVD players the moment they released a DVD player capable of skipping content that the CSS license says must be unskippable.
So the score at the end of the game: Bad guys 2. Good guys 0.
Just to clarify. The law is here (skip down to SEC. 202.) It talks pretty much exclusively about "making imperceptible" parts of motion pictures. When I first read it, I wondered how general it was, but it's actually very specific, and is exclusively about filtering. I say this because I've used the word edit, and you did too, and I don't want anyone reading this to think it means The Phantom Edit type editing.
One issue I can think of is that the tool to do the filtering still needs to be as contracted by the DVDCCA. The DVDCCA's contract, IIRC, forbids allowing users to skip through parts of a DVD marked as unskippable. So a DVD manufacturer who implements this feature needs to make sure they do not allow the unskippable parts of DVDs (such as those you mention) be "editable" or else lose their license to make DVD players capable of playing CSS encapsulated content.
This, ultimately, could have extreme repurcussions. The better movies could become much more difficult to view because of artists not wanting their movies to be edited in this way, and so forcing the release of "unskippable" DVDs.
Suddenly DRM is going to look a lot more attractive to artists with integrity. This is a bad thing.
Your comment about only edits being allowed to be released, not edited copies, doesn't contradict anything I wrote, so I'm not sure why you started your sentence with "sorry but".
As for the second bit, the movie industry is taking the side of artists here who are immensely unhappy with the idea of their works being edited in this way. Not everything is about money and royalties.
Perhaps if it had been about money and royalties, the lobbying would have been a little stronger and the law never passed. Oh, I'm such a cynic!
The part you and the GP missed is a law explictly legalizing mechanisms for third parties to create and release "edits" for movies, the aim being for those third parties to create "cleaned up" versions of Hollywood movies.
For example, you could buy a DVD of "Monster", download an edit into your DVD player, and the player would play the entire thing through except without the big bad rape scene at the beginning (or knowing it ever happened), which, of course, wouldn't affect how you view the film or its message at all... (<foghorn-leghorn>that last bit's sarcasm boy, sar-casm.</foghorn-leghorn>)
Nothing. But the religious right are behind a key part of the bill that makes it ok to release "edits" for movies regardless of what they do to those movies without either the consent of the artist, or at least honouring the artist by allowing them to have their names removed from the edited work.
This was covered yesterday (we have two Slashdot articles about the same thing from different sides.)
Personally, and I know this isn't a popular view here, I don't like this bill at all. It expands my "rights" in one area where I emphatically do not want them and feel the net result is a slap in the face to artists and the concept of artistic integrity.
In the other, it creates the danger of disproportionately high sentences for copyright infringers, which amongst other things threatens to discredit copyright (on top of the overly long copyright terms we see today and absurdities such as the restrictions on equipment we can use to access content we've bought copies of.) Beyond some extra funding of the Library of Congress, I really don't like this.
So would you object to it, so long as it was clear that the edits were Alice's Edits of Bob's Movie?
If Bob objects, and as far as he's concerned, this isn't his movie any more, then, yes, I'd object to it. Of course, regardless of what should be done, we know what is being done: these types of editors are being marketed as "clean" versions of named movies. Not different movies using footage from named movies, but essentially the same thing, only cleaner. We already know how the names of the artists concerned are to be abused.
If you make a different movie, one that an artist whose work you "based it upon" wants no part in, then why name it after the original work, and why include the artist's name? Answer: because you're still wanting to trade off those names, you want people to assume what you're producing is actually some form of the real deal. And it isn't. If the relevent politicians and lobbyests were being honest and respectful, they wouldn't have spent this amount of effort trying to avoid movie houses from invoking trademarks. They're being dishonest here. Blatently. I don't care how reasonable a "standard disclaimer", doubtless added to the hundred or so already attached to every movie, might look.
Importantly though, I don't give a crap about artistic integrity.
I never accused you of anything of the sort. You made it clear in the GGP that as far as you're concerned, it's all about the money:
It's not as though the original artist is harmed or is unable to compete.
Ah. Yes. If people are watching some bullshit you didn't do that nonetheless has your name on it, you're not harmed. Because you can still make money. Right. I just wish this kind of crappy souless materialism wasn't so common these days. Your values are definitely not my values.
Actually, I recall Lucas has always been fairly liberal with the whole people setting things in his universes thing, and initially didn't have a problem with The Phantom Edit until it blew up into a thing that looked like would take sales away from the real thing.
I can imagine he'd be relatively happy with a technology that allows people to buy Star Wars DVDs and view edits of them. A rare case.
Although I don't see what's wrong with cutting out parts of books for one's own consumption, if that's how you get your kicks, or selling the same, if you're upfront about it. It's not as though the original artist is harmed or is unable to compete.
Doing so for yourself is entirely different to doing so for other people. I don't have a problem with most personal uses of copyrighted-by-other's material, but when it comes to saying "Hey everyone, do you want to watch a cleaned up version of XYZ?", and selling edits and presenting the film as a merely sanatized version of the original that's fundamentally the same only without the material-it-would-be-morally-wrong-to-even-view, then, yes, I have a big problem with it. I think it's misrepresenting the original artist to put, under their name, something that clearly they wouldn't say represents what they were trying to do and say at all.
That's why I asked whether, at the very least, an artist could at least have their name removed from an "edited" version if they didn't consent to the edits. It strikes me as remarkably abusive of the artists to not do so, and is actively misrepresenting them and their works.
That a law would be passed not only allowing this, but actually encouraging it and doing everything possible to prevent an artist disassociating themselves in any practical way from an edit, I find very sad.
Ignore the first part of the parent. I've just read the bill, and it's explicit about only covering audio and video. No problems with the GPL, unless you try to license your next blockbuster under the GPL.
Of course, now that I've actually read the article, it looks like all it does is fund the LoC's efforts to preserve and restore old images, a good thing but not a copyright issue at all.
Rereading the article, I see what you mean, and withdraw my concerns. To respond to the other part, I agree that film might be fascinating, but it strikes me that distributing it without the copyright holder's consent is an invasion of their privacy, whether what appears is apparently innoculous or not. In time, of course, it will fall into the public domain, and we at least keep a decent space of time between someone's death and this fall to ensure most reasonable concerns about privacy are addressed.
I would suggest two ways around this: a program encouraging people to submit their diaries and other personal materials for public archival, and a program encouraging those who have found materials belonging to someone else to have it stored, with a release date - assuming the copyright holder is never found - set to at least 100 years from the best estimate available of when the material was made, and at least 50 from now, and with the material on-view but not copyable immediately (unless the rights holder is found.)
Both ensure an archive available to historians, while protecting the legitimate privacy interests of those who made the materials. We're not talking about materials ever intended for public consumption, we shouldn't treat them the same way.
I wasn't making a comparison with the GPL, I was asking if the the GPL might be less enforceable under these circumstances.
The GPL gives me a right to redistribute as long as I redistribute source, including of any modifications. Now, if I do indeed find a way of getting a GPL'd program onto a user's computer (which may not involve redistribution on my part), and independently release a binary equivalent of a "diff" file, the question I have is whether this law now makes this legal? After all, the GPLs power relies upon my agreeing to it. If I don't agree to it, all I have are "fair use" rights such as the one discussed. If I can edit something I don't personally distribute (or find a way of getting a judge to agree my distribution is seperate from my providing of an edit - and that's a question) then do I have a loophole?
This is a question, not a statement. I don't know how the law is worded. The law may explicitly be talking about DVDs, or more widely about movies, or more widely about any copyrighted material. It may only exempt edits made for "moral" reasons. It may only exempt edits that remove rather than add material. ALl of these would invalidate what I'm concerned about.
As for the CD scratches comparison, that's a random and unintended modification of data of the type the artist would know goes with the territory, not an intentional modification of the artist's work designed to change the actual meaning of what the artist was trying to say. (And, yes, no matter how gratuitous, those sex scenes and swear words the censorship mob are always trying to cut do make a difference to the overall meaning of a movie. That applies as much to removing Mr Pink beating a driver whose car he wants to hijack in Reservoir Dogs as it does Aileen Wournos being raped in Monster. The removal of either affects how we see the character. The latter's removal would render the entire message of the movie at odds with the maker's intentions. An ink blot that appears fleetingly on the 35mm film, however, wouldn't.)
Kind of makes sense: A form of fair use where, if you use it, you end up with less than you started, and you insult the artists who produced the content for you. We can have more freedom, as long as we're asking for the freedom to be restricted?
I'm not overly impressed by this, as you can probably tell. Can we at least do the decent thing, and require that companies that provide such "filtering" solutions rename the films they edit, and take the makers of that film off the credits, if they so wish? This basic right would be afforded to the movie creators by a studio that forces edits upon a movie before release. Why shouldn't it apply to those selling edits of a film against those same artists' wishes?
I guess, if it's on Dubya's desk for signing right now, then the answer is "No. We don't want to do this because we hate artists, either because we're right wing pseudo-moralists, or certain types of technie freeloaders."
I'm curious to know if the editing of movies or the editing on moral grounds is the only thing allowed by the bill, or if the "right" to edit goes further. If it does, we may have a massive loophole that allows people to alter anything they can redistribute. Ship a GPL'd app, for example, and include proprietary "edits" to the binaries. *shudder*
BTW, on the home movies thing, are they serious? Exactly when did private, deliberately unpublished, material become something to be preserved for future generations? Is this a poor write-up by the article submitter?
The reason for the dual core rumours being taken seriously originated at Apple. Apple released a new version of "CHUD", a "How well will my app work on an X processor running at Y GHz" tool. The new version differed only slightly from the former, suddenly supporting four CPUs instead of two.
There are no Macs with four CPUs, or even ones that can be upgraded to have four CPUs. You can't blame people for assuming that Apple wouldn't make a completely spurious upgrade to their developer tools on this kind of scale.
No, it doesn't use CDMA, it uses Code Division Multiple Access. Or rather, yes, it uses CDMA, but not CDMA.
Confused? Blame Qualcomm and their army of shills.
CDMA is used to refer to both a standard and a particular technology type. (The same is kind of the case with TDMA, which was used by Qualcomm to great effect. TDMA is how a fairly awful US mobile phone standard based upon Time Division Multiple Access was usually refered to, the technical name being IS-136. Qualcomm shills would say things like "Look at this awful TDMA phone. See how crappy TDMA is? Well, that's what GSM uses!" In reality, there was no connection whatsoever other than the same basic principle being used to transmit data.) CDMA the standard is a system that uses the CDMA technology type to transmit calls, and is codified as IS-95. CDMA the technology type involves sending a large number of coded packets containing your data via a spread spectrum technique, with the receiver doing lots of work to put it all back together.
Now, when you're talking about convergance, you're talking about standards, not technology types. Otherwise, for example, you could argue that IBM and Apple's computers were "converged" in the early seventies because they both used logic gates made out of CMOS type silicon chips.
WCDMA is not based on the IS-95 standard. It has nothing to do with IS-95. The radio part is different in terms of how it uses spectrum except for the basic principle behind how it works. So it doesn't represent "convergance" with CDMA because, well:
If it's convergance with CDMA the technology type, then the term is meaningless. You can't "converge" a standard with a technology type. That's silly.
If it's convergance with CDMA the popular name for IS-95, then no, that's not happening either. Qualcomm isn't happy with WCDMA and is cooperating largely because they get a few patent royalties out of the deal. You'll not even be able to (efficiently) use the two standards on the same frequencies. That's how different they are.
I hope that answers your question. It would help a lot if people hadn't bought the "We'll refer to standards by the initials of a technology they use" thing that makes references to CDMA and TDMA so ambigious. I was trying to avoid ambiguity in what I wrote, but I'm guessing I didn't make it clear enough.
I'm sorry, but this is just yet another example of mindless Microsoft bashing. Why would some Microsoft techie care whether you were criticising his boss? And ordinary Microsoft users use their software because it's difficult to switch over to alternatives unless you already know about them, can obtain them, and have no problem with the concept of installing them wiping out what you already have.
It may be fun in these forums to criticise M$, but the fact is they put together some very capable software that's normally "good enough" for the vast majority of users. And most of us simply will use what we already have rather than upgrade if Microsoft decides to abuse their position. You can think of it like a couch. If the couch is comfortable, the only way we'd be willing to upgrade it is if we break it completely, or if we move house, and even in the latter case, if the house arrives furnished we still have the option of throwing out their stuff and replacing it with our old furniture, even if the original owners of the new house would prefer we use their old furniture, which chances are we don't want anyway even though it's likely to match the way the house is decorated.
In other words, we need an incentive to upgrade. And we'll happily plod along with what we have unless there's a very good reason. I know many people with XP who upgraded from the 9X range of operating systems, but a lot of people happy with Windows 2000 who'll not upgrade unless forced to at the barrel of a gun because it's no worse than XP and doesn't have that stupid activation stuff, and XPs lack of support for floppies and its "no more than three applications at once" restriction in some versions.
Microsoft clearly believes these features will be useful to future users. I think it's reasonable to hold out and see whether they really are abusive before claiming they are. Time will tell.
WCDMA is the use of Code Division Multiple Access (ie the raw technology, not the Qualcomm variant, though Qualcomm has co-developed it) with UMTS (UMTS is, essentially, "GSM2", and isn't limited to a single air-interface technology), so it doesn't represent a convergance.
Unfortunately, people are often using WCDMA and UMTS interchangably, which makes it hard to understand what's going on. But essentially, WCDMA is a technology (optionally) used by UMTS. It has little to do with Qualcomm's IS-95 standard CDMA, whose "Version 2" variant is called cdma2000.
(Response to AC, not grandparent, for those filtering ACs)
Actually, innovation merely means introducing a technology. So Henry Ford, Microsoft, et al, can reasonably called innovators even though they didn't invent anything and people were doing the same things as they were doing before they did.
That said, my comment was that there have been no surprises. Technological progress has been slow, and while usage has moved towards home entertainment et al, it's been a gradual, not revolutionary, process. We're far away from what was going on in the late eighties and early nineties.
If Apple built the functionality into an iPod, then I can see people paying $600 for the thing, possibly even more. The key is making a unit that happens to be a phone where the unit itself is clearly worth the money. If it's just a phone, then, yeah, nobody would pay for that. If it's something more...
One thing I think a manufacturer like Apple might be interested in is teaming up with a wireless company and pre-installing a widely supported UMTS implementation in something like an iMac or Mac mini, and the company's laptops. "It just works" goes as far as being a basic matter of buying the Mac from the store, including a credit card to be billed a monthly $50 Internet access fee, you get home, and the entire machine is already set up, Internet access and everything.
The major networks have to get their networks upgraded to make this happen, but I don't see why it shouldn't. And I bet they'd be willing to subsidize the cost of such a PC too so the extra functionality doesn't add much to the price.
While I understand Dell's decision to get into the cellphone business, it has to be said this marks the beginning of a potentially worrying trend. Dell is the biggest manufacturer of commodity PC hardware in the world, and cellphones are also going in that direction. While that might seem a good thing, remember that the commoditization of the PC industry essentially sucked the innovation from it. PCs have gotten faster, but for the most part, there hasn't been a surprise, a new way of doing things, in PCs and in personal computing, since the early nineties.
What we may be seeing is the start of essentially the phone clones. Imagine the offerings from most of the large manufacturers being essentially identical, perhaps three or four models, all looking broadly the same as their competitors equivalents, differing from competitors by battery life, probably running the same firmware. You might get the basic no-frills phone, similar to a Nokia 61xx series, a slightly more advanced colour phone with a camera, a PDA phone that's literally a pen-based PDA with GSM/UMTS built-in, and an expensive slimline phone. That's the future of phones, much as every PC manufacturer produces essentially low-end and high-end PC-clones, differing from competitors by case colour, and laptops.
From a technologists standpoint, it's also depressing. Phones remain a relatively closed platform, with only limited opening up in the form of the occasional J2ME implementation, usually badly implemented and slow, or Symbian/WinCE platform, both of which are designed to be as closed as the phone manufacturer chooses. The idea of being able to get independent development environments, independent convertors and compilers (on an off-topic note: why do we now call compilers "linkers" and use the word "compiler" to refer to code converters? That's just dumb. I used to think it was only tech-illiterates that used it that way around, but it's slipped into normal usage. People: It's a "C convertor", not a "C compiler". You can't get language compilers, compilers compile - Compile (tr.v): To put together or compose from materials gathered from several sources: compile an encyclopedia - object code to produce executables) so people can create new software for their phones and make them genuinely friendly to them is unlikely, and probably going to become less likely the more phones become commodities. In some ways that's ironic, as the opposite happened to personal computing, but in personal computing people were directly buying PCs rather than trying to get them from phone service companies.
Will this essentially be the end of the diversity we see from Nokia's 9xxx series to the Treo to all manner of other technologies? I hope not, but I fear Dell wouldn't be interested if the industry wasn't going in this direction. If it happens, expect Nokia and Sony Ericsson to become also-rans, or else shadows of their former selves, to the Nokias and SEs of today what HP was to the HP of old.
No. The RIAA is a US based industry association. They don't have a monopoly on anything. They've occasionally run copyright enforcement campaigns on behalf of their members, which is why a lot of Slashbots (a) hate them and (b) think they actually have something to do with the creation of music, but in their absense the FBI might do the same thing and you wouldn't say they have a monopoly on music.
Regardless, their actions have been limited to the US. They are not a monopoly. Their members make up the vast majority of music publishers, but you'd expect any industry association with any credibility to be in that situation.
Having source code is not about being able to reproduce a program at no cost.
You can reproduce a program at no cost when it's provided in binary form. Look up "Freeware".
Having source code is about being able to modify a program. Being able to make changes, so you can fix bugs, improve the tool, or even just learn from it so you can use what you've learned in other applications.
I think Free Software has become mainstream because of Firefox and GNU (specifically GNU/Linux), not because of either of the two groups most loudly advocating it.
Criticisms of RMS have been done to death and I will not bother repeating them. On the Open Source side, the loudest advocate has been ESR, who has had very public spats with would-be allies, and frequently come down so far on the side of "pragmatism" that he's pretty much gone outside of the open source mandate. I'm glad he, and his successor, are out, but it'll take a lot of work before the OSI is able to be more than a license "approval" agency. It has little or no political clout, and about the only thing its members take credit for beyond the licensing function is the term "Open Source", which, to be honest, I think has a popularity that would have occured even if the OSI hadn't been set up.
The "political" side has really ended up bankrupt. What's worked has been the functional side, which has largely come from the FSF and from independent and corporate Open Source projects. The GPL has done a great deal to ensure that Free Software generates more Free Software rather than dying as it gets so far before private entities decide to keep their modifications closed and private.
The GPL. GNU. Linux. Firefox. These are why people are attracted to Free Software. Economic squabbles really haven't, people can see for themselves if it's good for them. Large businesses may have been slightly swayed to look into Open Source thanks to these arguments, but it will not have moved that many ordinary people and programmers.
Ordinary programmers have probably been moved, in part, because of the freedom. Not because RMS has argued for freedom, but because they've been told about this great thing they can download the source to, and they've done it, and played with it, and, wow, this is so refreshing, I don't have to get a license to do this from Microsoft or anyone.
Don't underestimate the Freedom argument. Just don't think it's any individual's advocacy that's selling the Freedom. It isn't. It's the code itself that's doing all the work.
Slashdot Mirror
So the score at the end of the game: Bad guys 2. Good guys 0.
One issue I can think of is that the tool to do the filtering still needs to be as contracted by the DVDCCA. The DVDCCA's contract, IIRC, forbids allowing users to skip through parts of a DVD marked as unskippable. So a DVD manufacturer who implements this feature needs to make sure they do not allow the unskippable parts of DVDs (such as those you mention) be "editable" or else lose their license to make DVD players capable of playing CSS encapsulated content.
This, ultimately, could have extreme repurcussions. The better movies could become much more difficult to view because of artists not wanting their movies to be edited in this way, and so forcing the release of "unskippable" DVDs.
Suddenly DRM is going to look a lot more attractive to artists with integrity. This is a bad thing.
As for the second bit, the movie industry is taking the side of artists here who are immensely unhappy with the idea of their works being edited in this way. Not everything is about money and royalties.
Perhaps if it had been about money and royalties, the lobbying would have been a little stronger and the law never passed. Oh, I'm such a cynic!
For example, you could buy a DVD of "Monster", download an edit into your DVD player, and the player would play the entire thing through except without the big bad rape scene at the beginning (or knowing it ever happened), which, of course, wouldn't affect how you view the film or its message at all... (<foghorn-leghorn>that last bit's sarcasm boy, sar-casm.</foghorn-leghorn>)
This was covered yesterday (we have two Slashdot articles about the same thing from different sides.)
Personally, and I know this isn't a popular view here, I don't like this bill at all. It expands my "rights" in one area where I emphatically do not want them and feel the net result is a slap in the face to artists and the concept of artistic integrity.
In the other, it creates the danger of disproportionately high sentences for copyright infringers, which amongst other things threatens to discredit copyright (on top of the overly long copyright terms we see today and absurdities such as the restrictions on equipment we can use to access content we've bought copies of.) Beyond some extra funding of the Library of Congress, I really don't like this.
If you make a different movie, one that an artist whose work you "based it upon" wants no part in, then why name it after the original work, and why include the artist's name? Answer: because you're still wanting to trade off those names, you want people to assume what you're producing is actually some form of the real deal. And it isn't. If the relevent politicians and lobbyests were being honest and respectful, they wouldn't have spent this amount of effort trying to avoid movie houses from invoking trademarks. They're being dishonest here. Blatently. I don't care how reasonable a "standard disclaimer", doubtless added to the hundred or so already attached to every movie, might look.
I never accused you of anything of the sort. You made it clear in the GGP that as far as you're concerned, it's all about the money:It's not as though the original artist is harmed or is unable to compete.
Ah. Yes. If people are watching some bullshit you didn't do that nonetheless has your name on it, you're not harmed. Because you can still make money. Right. I just wish this kind of crappy souless materialism wasn't so common these days. Your values are definitely not my values.
Actually, I recall Lucas has always been fairly liberal with the whole people setting things in his universes thing, and initially didn't have a problem with The Phantom Edit until it blew up into a thing that looked like would take sales away from the real thing.
I can imagine he'd be relatively happy with a technology that allows people to buy Star Wars DVDs and view edits of them. A rare case.
That's why I asked whether, at the very least, an artist could at least have their name removed from an "edited" version if they didn't consent to the edits. It strikes me as remarkably abusive of the artists to not do so, and is actively misrepresenting them and their works.
That a law would be passed not only allowing this, but actually encouraging it and doing everything possible to prevent an artist disassociating themselves in any practical way from an edit, I find very sad.
Ignore the first part of the parent. I've just read the bill, and it's explicit about only covering audio and video. No problems with the GPL, unless you try to license your next blockbuster under the GPL.
I would suggest two ways around this: a program encouraging people to submit their diaries and other personal materials for public archival, and a program encouraging those who have found materials belonging to someone else to have it stored, with a release date - assuming the copyright holder is never found - set to at least 100 years from the best estimate available of when the material was made, and at least 50 from now, and with the material on-view but not copyable immediately (unless the rights holder is found.)
Both ensure an archive available to historians, while protecting the legitimate privacy interests of those who made the materials. We're not talking about materials ever intended for public consumption, we shouldn't treat them the same way.
The GPL gives me a right to redistribute as long as I redistribute source, including of any modifications. Now, if I do indeed find a way of getting a GPL'd program onto a user's computer (which may not involve redistribution on my part), and independently release a binary equivalent of a "diff" file, the question I have is whether this law now makes this legal? After all, the GPLs power relies upon my agreeing to it. If I don't agree to it, all I have are "fair use" rights such as the one discussed. If I can edit something I don't personally distribute (or find a way of getting a judge to agree my distribution is seperate from my providing of an edit - and that's a question) then do I have a loophole?
This is a question, not a statement. I don't know how the law is worded. The law may explicitly be talking about DVDs, or more widely about movies, or more widely about any copyrighted material. It may only exempt edits made for "moral" reasons. It may only exempt edits that remove rather than add material. ALl of these would invalidate what I'm concerned about.
As for the CD scratches comparison, that's a random and unintended modification of data of the type the artist would know goes with the territory, not an intentional modification of the artist's work designed to change the actual meaning of what the artist was trying to say. (And, yes, no matter how gratuitous, those sex scenes and swear words the censorship mob are always trying to cut do make a difference to the overall meaning of a movie. That applies as much to removing Mr Pink beating a driver whose car he wants to hijack in Reservoir Dogs as it does Aileen Wournos being raped in Monster. The removal of either affects how we see the character. The latter's removal would render the entire message of the movie at odds with the maker's intentions. An ink blot that appears fleetingly on the 35mm film, however, wouldn't.)
I'm not overly impressed by this, as you can probably tell. Can we at least do the decent thing, and require that companies that provide such "filtering" solutions rename the films they edit, and take the makers of that film off the credits, if they so wish? This basic right would be afforded to the movie creators by a studio that forces edits upon a movie before release. Why shouldn't it apply to those selling edits of a film against those same artists' wishes?
I guess, if it's on Dubya's desk for signing right now, then the answer is "No. We don't want to do this because we hate artists, either because we're right wing pseudo-moralists, or certain types of technie freeloaders."
I'm curious to know if the editing of movies or the editing on moral grounds is the only thing allowed by the bill, or if the "right" to edit goes further. If it does, we may have a massive loophole that allows people to alter anything they can redistribute. Ship a GPL'd app, for example, and include proprietary "edits" to the binaries. *shudder*
BTW, on the home movies thing, are they serious? Exactly when did private, deliberately unpublished, material become something to be preserved for future generations? Is this a poor write-up by the article submitter?
There are no Macs with four CPUs, or even ones that can be upgraded to have four CPUs. You can't blame people for assuming that Apple wouldn't make a completely spurious upgrade to their developer tools on this kind of scale.
Sorry, what was the joke again?
I'm wondering if it was submitted yesterday for "Troll Tuesday".
Confused? Blame Qualcomm and their army of shills.
CDMA is used to refer to both a standard and a particular technology type. (The same is kind of the case with TDMA, which was used by Qualcomm to great effect. TDMA is how a fairly awful US mobile phone standard based upon Time Division Multiple Access was usually refered to, the technical name being IS-136. Qualcomm shills would say things like "Look at this awful TDMA phone. See how crappy TDMA is? Well, that's what GSM uses!" In reality, there was no connection whatsoever other than the same basic principle being used to transmit data.) CDMA the standard is a system that uses the CDMA technology type to transmit calls, and is codified as IS-95. CDMA the technology type involves sending a large number of coded packets containing your data via a spread spectrum technique, with the receiver doing lots of work to put it all back together.
Now, when you're talking about convergance, you're talking about standards, not technology types. Otherwise, for example, you could argue that IBM and Apple's computers were "converged" in the early seventies because they both used logic gates made out of CMOS type silicon chips.
WCDMA is not based on the IS-95 standard. It has nothing to do with IS-95. The radio part is different in terms of how it uses spectrum except for the basic principle behind how it works. So it doesn't represent "convergance" with CDMA because, well:
- If it's convergance with CDMA the technology type, then the term is meaningless. You can't "converge" a standard with a technology type. That's silly.
- If it's convergance with CDMA the popular name for IS-95, then no, that's not happening either. Qualcomm isn't happy with WCDMA and is cooperating largely because they get a few patent royalties out of the deal. You'll not even be able to (efficiently) use the two standards on the same frequencies. That's how different they are.
I hope that answers your question. It would help a lot if people hadn't bought the "We'll refer to standards by the initials of a technology they use" thing that makes references to CDMA and TDMA so ambigious. I was trying to avoid ambiguity in what I wrote, but I'm guessing I didn't make it clear enough.It may be fun in these forums to criticise M$, but the fact is they put together some very capable software that's normally "good enough" for the vast majority of users. And most of us simply will use what we already have rather than upgrade if Microsoft decides to abuse their position. You can think of it like a couch. If the couch is comfortable, the only way we'd be willing to upgrade it is if we break it completely, or if we move house, and even in the latter case, if the house arrives furnished we still have the option of throwing out their stuff and replacing it with our old furniture, even if the original owners of the new house would prefer we use their old furniture, which chances are we don't want anyway even though it's likely to match the way the house is decorated.
In other words, we need an incentive to upgrade. And we'll happily plod along with what we have unless there's a very good reason. I know many people with XP who upgraded from the 9X range of operating systems, but a lot of people happy with Windows 2000 who'll not upgrade unless forced to at the barrel of a gun because it's no worse than XP and doesn't have that stupid activation stuff, and XPs lack of support for floppies and its "no more than three applications at once" restriction in some versions.
Microsoft clearly believes these features will be useful to future users. I think it's reasonable to hold out and see whether they really are abusive before claiming they are. Time will tell.
The big selling point of the Palms was that they were much, much, lower in price, at their peak the majority were priced in the $100-200 range.
That's all. Nothing to do with "digital communication", it's not as if the majority of people use their Palms to compose emails or browse the web.
Unfortunately, people are often using WCDMA and UMTS interchangably, which makes it hard to understand what's going on. But essentially, WCDMA is a technology (optionally) used by UMTS. It has little to do with Qualcomm's IS-95 standard CDMA, whose "Version 2" variant is called cdma2000.
Apologies for the pedantary!
Actually, innovation merely means introducing a technology. So Henry Ford, Microsoft, et al, can reasonably called innovators even though they didn't invent anything and people were doing the same things as they were doing before they did.
That said, my comment was that there have been no surprises. Technological progress has been slow, and while usage has moved towards home entertainment et al, it's been a gradual, not revolutionary, process. We're far away from what was going on in the late eighties and early nineties.
One thing I think a manufacturer like Apple might be interested in is teaming up with a wireless company and pre-installing a widely supported UMTS implementation in something like an iMac or Mac mini, and the company's laptops. "It just works" goes as far as being a basic matter of buying the Mac from the store, including a credit card to be billed a monthly $50 Internet access fee, you get home, and the entire machine is already set up, Internet access and everything.
The major networks have to get their networks upgraded to make this happen, but I don't see why it shouldn't. And I bet they'd be willing to subsidize the cost of such a PC too so the extra functionality doesn't add much to the price.
What we may be seeing is the start of essentially the phone clones. Imagine the offerings from most of the large manufacturers being essentially identical, perhaps three or four models, all looking broadly the same as their competitors equivalents, differing from competitors by battery life, probably running the same firmware. You might get the basic no-frills phone, similar to a Nokia 61xx series, a slightly more advanced colour phone with a camera, a PDA phone that's literally a pen-based PDA with GSM/UMTS built-in, and an expensive slimline phone. That's the future of phones, much as every PC manufacturer produces essentially low-end and high-end PC-clones, differing from competitors by case colour, and laptops.
From a technologists standpoint, it's also depressing. Phones remain a relatively closed platform, with only limited opening up in the form of the occasional J2ME implementation, usually badly implemented and slow, or Symbian/WinCE platform, both of which are designed to be as closed as the phone manufacturer chooses. The idea of being able to get independent development environments, independent convertors and compilers (on an off-topic note: why do we now call compilers "linkers" and use the word "compiler" to refer to code converters? That's just dumb. I used to think it was only tech-illiterates that used it that way around, but it's slipped into normal usage. People: It's a "C convertor", not a "C compiler". You can't get language compilers, compilers compile - Compile (tr.v): To put together or compose from materials gathered from several sources: compile an encyclopedia - object code to produce executables) so people can create new software for their phones and make them genuinely friendly to them is unlikely, and probably going to become less likely the more phones become commodities. In some ways that's ironic, as the opposite happened to personal computing, but in personal computing people were directly buying PCs rather than trying to get them from phone service companies.
Will this essentially be the end of the diversity we see from Nokia's 9xxx series to the Treo to all manner of other technologies? I hope not, but I fear Dell wouldn't be interested if the industry wasn't going in this direction. If it happens, expect Nokia and Sony Ericsson to become also-rans, or else shadows of their former selves, to the Nokias and SEs of today what HP was to the HP of old.
I guess, whatever else, time will tell.
Regardless, their actions have been limited to the US. They are not a monopoly. Their members make up the vast majority of music publishers, but you'd expect any industry association with any credibility to be in that situation.
You can reproduce a program at no cost when it's provided in binary form. Look up "Freeware".
Having source code is about being able to modify a program. Being able to make changes, so you can fix bugs, improve the tool, or even just learn from it so you can use what you've learned in other applications.
Criticisms of RMS have been done to death and I will not bother repeating them. On the Open Source side, the loudest advocate has been ESR, who has had very public spats with would-be allies, and frequently come down so far on the side of "pragmatism" that he's pretty much gone outside of the open source mandate. I'm glad he, and his successor, are out, but it'll take a lot of work before the OSI is able to be more than a license "approval" agency. It has little or no political clout, and about the only thing its members take credit for beyond the licensing function is the term "Open Source", which, to be honest, I think has a popularity that would have occured even if the OSI hadn't been set up.
The "political" side has really ended up bankrupt. What's worked has been the functional side, which has largely come from the FSF and from independent and corporate Open Source projects. The GPL has done a great deal to ensure that Free Software generates more Free Software rather than dying as it gets so far before private entities decide to keep their modifications closed and private.
The GPL. GNU. Linux. Firefox. These are why people are attracted to Free Software. Economic squabbles really haven't, people can see for themselves if it's good for them. Large businesses may have been slightly swayed to look into Open Source thanks to these arguments, but it will not have moved that many ordinary people and programmers.
Ordinary programmers have probably been moved, in part, because of the freedom. Not because RMS has argued for freedom, but because they've been told about this great thing they can download the source to, and they've done it, and played with it, and, wow, this is so refreshing, I don't have to get a license to do this from Microsoft or anyone.
Don't underestimate the Freedom argument. Just don't think it's any individual's advocacy that's selling the Freedom. It isn't. It's the code itself that's doing all the work.