IANAL, but as I recall the DMCA forbids TRAFFICKING (I don't remember the exact wording or definition) in products for the circumvention of COPY or ACCESS controls, but only forbids the actual circumvention in the case of access controls: the circumvention of copy controls is perfectly legal, as long as one does not traffick in products for this purpose. Thus, if you happened to have acquired a copy-protection circumvention device prior to the advent of the DMCA or if you build your own, you will be OK in terms of the DMCA as long as the circumvention only touches copy and not access controls. Of course you still have to make sure that the copying counts as fair use and doesn't infringe on other parts of copyright law than the DMCA.
I don't know, though, whether the Sony stuff is an access or copy control. It seems kind of like an access control, because it blocks access to the CD on a PC if one doesn't agree to the DRM.
Incorrect. IANAL, but the DMCA text seems to me to quite clearly say that what is prohibiting is circumventing access controls WITHOUT the authority of the copyright owner. Thus, there is nothing wrong with me encrypting my own text, losing the password, and then cracking it. Nor is there anything wrong with me hacking through the region controls on a DVD if I got permission from the copyright owner or legal representative thereof (I actually obtained such permission from one major Polish film distributor when I bought one if their DVDs--issue turned out to be moot as the DVD turned out to be R0).
If I take a picture, I own the copyright on it. If the white balance data is based on my choices, then it is a part of my creative vision, and hence a part of my copyrighted material. The DMCA is irrelevant. But who wants to go against their lawyers...
While this isn't enough to prove it in a court of law, in practice it would be really difficult to thoroughly debug the code without actually connecting oneself...
One loss of profit for some academic books would be reprint rights for portions adopted in course packets. When I generate a course packet for a class, I try to make sure that none of the items are available legally for free online, so as to save the students the copyright fees, which can be quite sizeable. I recently got cited $8 per excerpt per copy from one publisher for an out of print book, even when the excerpt was two pages. (In this case, I found a legal overseas publisher who had the book in print and ordered a couple of copies to put it on reserve.) The publisher would lose on such copyright fees if the book were online. Moreover, the publisher would lose the possibility of reprinting the book later under copyright protection.
That said, I do think that such online reprinting should be done, and that authors, when possible, should try to put into their contracts that either rights revert to them on out-of-print, or that they go to a creative commons license then. (I just tried, though, to negotiate the former with a major academic publisher recently, and failed. Instead, I got the reversion of paperback rights upon out-of-print.)
I got an email with one of these urls at least a week ago or more. I can't believe this is taking them so long to fix. Surely it can't take more than a couple of hours to put together a white list of domains.
At the same time, there should be some principle of justice limiting punishment. Suppose that there was a method of copying materials that you had almost zero chance of getting caught doing. Then by the principle that the penalty has to be inversely proportional to the likelihood of getting caught, you could have incredibly large penalties. Since there comes a point where there is no marginal disutility in a fine (for most people it doesn't matter if they're fined $100 million or $100 billion), in order to proportionately increase the penalty after some point you will have to move into longer and longer jail sentences (or amputations or torture or death). Thus, one would get the absurdity that if there is a method of infringing copyright such that one has, say, only a 1/10^9 chance of getting caught, one might end up in jail for life for copying a $10 CD. Why? Because by the inverse proportionality principle, a penalty would have to have a disutility equal to 10^9 times the utility of $10. For most people, a monetary fine will not achieve that amount of disutility, and hence a sizeable jail sentence would be needed.
Traditionally, the limiting factor on penalties has been the lex talionis: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. This would, on the face of it, imply that when you steal/copy something worth $10, you should give back the item or destroy your copy, and pay up a $10 fine. This, however, would fail to deter in cases where one is unlikely to be caught. But it's not clear that it's morally acceptable to ratchet up a penalty just to deter (life in jail for parking violations would be unjust, even though it would deter really well). One might be able to ratchet up the fine to some degree beyond the $10 to account for the costs of a law enforcement system (which one has forced to be active in one's case, and so one should be responsible for a portion of its operating budget), damage to public trust, or whatever. But still, there would surely be a limit, and I suspect lower than $1M in the case of stealing/copying a $10 item.
And of course there are methods of infringing on copyright that have such low chance of getting caught. For instance, lock your doors, cover your windows, disconnect your computer from the Internet, copy from a physical CD to your hard drive, put it on a 200mb tape encrypted and steganographed onto a large bunch of jpgs, label the tape "Summer vacation '03 photos", clean out all temp files and erased data space on your hard disk, and make sure you never do anything that will get your data seized by the government. There is always a chance you'll get caught, but the chance is close to nil. Of course playing the music will be hard.:-) It would be absurd to suppose that one should go to jail for life for such an act.
Not really. It looks to me like you can implement the patented algorithm in a BSD licensed OSS project. If someone then takes the project and adds additional restrictions on the license that makes the license no longer be open source, the new project will no longer be Open Source, and hence will infringe. So, yes, you can use it in BSD code, but the BSD code behaves more like GPL under these circumstances.
Let me second the Batik recommendation. It has excellent quality output. I've had some problems with stuff that referenced external fonts, but I converted the fonts into svg format, and it was fine then (apart maybe from lack of hinting).
Why not go the more legit route: buy the laserdiscs, a laserdisc player (one should be able to get one shipped for less than $35 on ebay), and make a personal-use copy on DVD?
I bought a 1.2ghz (no interference with wifi) pinhole camera on ebay together with a receiver that I then plug into a composite-to-firewire converter. Quality is low but it more or less does the job, except that it doesn't cover every corner of the room and we have a toddler. It needs good light. I could have instead opted for an IR cam instead for a little bit more. If I want to (say to monitor from a laptop), I can have the desktop the receiver is plugged into serve up the video online.
It cost me $45 for the camera/receiver, which is less than the video baby monitors they sell (except those come with little TV screens, but a lot of them are 2.4ghz which is not acceptable in my setting).
If I were MS, I'd be worried about infringement of compilation copyright. Anthologies have an independent copyright claim by the editors in virtue of the arrangement, in addition to copyright claims in virtue of the items anthologized.
For the postal requirements, one can instead use a wordprocessor "all caps" format for the text, which means that the text will still be internally stored as upper and lower, which in turn makes it more useful (e.g., so the data could be automatically used within a letter, where one doesn't want to say: "Dear Mr. JONES").
I think Palm said that even if they win this lawsuit, they're not going back to Graffiti 1. It would be nice if at least they gave users permission to copy the Graffiti 1 files from a device that has them.
Sure one can write books in Word. I've written one doctoral dissertation using Word, then revised it into a 180000 word book manuscript, and also wrote another book manuscript using Word. I've also written another doctoral dissertation using AMS-LaTeX. LaTeX had better cross referencing for numbered statements/formulae, and of course the mathematical formula handling was incomparably better. In my case it was just a question of what each program was good at. For a humanities dissertation, Word. For a mathematical dissertation, AMS-LaTeX. Both did the job.
I've had Word occasionally give out with large texts. That's bad. But with backups, one can handle it.
So these vigilantes bid up the fraudulent items so high that no real buyer would want it--the article talks about over a million for a telescope worth about two thousand. Isn't that risky? After all, it IS a binding contract, and for such a sum of money, the fraudulent seller can surely come up with the item (i.e., buy it from someone for two thousand and then sell it for a million), even if he didn't have it before.
Well, on an Aristotelian account of private property, on which you have a natural right to the product of your labor, there should be little difference between intellectual and tangible property. On a Thomistic account that makes all private property a matter of social contract (though a social contract that one has an ethical duty to obey), there is also little difference, unless society has ruled otherwise.
There may of course be accounts of private property on which the two cases are handled differently, but it is not obvious to me that any such account is right.
Besides, one might reasonably think that one has a duty to obey authorities, when these authorities are not commanding anything immoral. Socrates thought so.:-) Since it's not immoral to obey copyright law (things might be different if someone's life depended on it, as in the case of medicine patents), one should obey it.
Though I regularly formatted 360K floppies to 420K for my 8086 unit. They worked fine, except there were compatibility problems with other PCs and a driver needed to be loaded.
Actually, I think a lie is a statement one believes to be false made with the intent of deceiving. Certainly one need not KNOW that it is untrue; one might just believe it. And, I think, it need not actually BE untrue, as long as the speaker believes it to be untrue. If
I think that more than half of my reading, apart from what I read to prepare for class, is older books that I can get in ebook format and that are in the public domain. The only things I like paper books more for is being able to read in the bathtub (oh, for a waterproof Clie), ease of marginal annotation, and ability to flip through quickly (my Clie screen is too small to find things quickly by flipping through).
Searching is helpful. Having a book in one's pocket always is great. Some of the things I read are parts of enormous multi-volume sets that I wouldn't have room on a bookshelf for. For instance, dozens of volumes of Cardinal Newman or of the Jesuit Relations. Various classic books, too, are greatly improved by hyperlinking. For instance, Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae which has lots of back-references.
At one point my wife claimed to find it to be more fun to read in ebook format on a Clie NX60/70 (using Plucker) than to read the dead-tree editions. Autoscrolling was particularly nice when our baby was small and we had no hands free while doing things for the baby.
And, yes, it's nice to have a big library with one. I've got some 600mb of flash on my NX70. It's expensive, but when one considers the cost of printed books, it's not so bad. (For instance, I bet the complete works of Cardinal Newman would set me back a couple of hundred dollars in print format for the books themselves, and more when one considers the cost of another bookcase.) I just wish everybody published in ebook format. Then I wouldn't have to buy physical books almost at all.
I thought POSE already worked just fine on Linux. It's open source, after all. It's the Simulator that needs Win NT/2K/XP (it runs VERY slowly on 9X). And one can certainly do OS5 development under Linux. Most of the members of the Plucker Team, say, do.
Except that css is not just an anti-duplication measure but perhaps also an access control measure (that's what the copyright office seems to think), and in the case of access controls it's not just trafficking but use that is prohibited. But IANAL.
What, by the way, is trafficking. If I download a piece of software, am I trafficking in it by cooperating in someone's sending it to me?
All my students are told that I reserve the right to ask for an electronic version to run through turnitin.com, and that if they do not want to do this, then I will make alternate arrangements. Nobody's asked for alternate arrangements, but if they did, I would ask for an outline and a draft ahead of time.
My own worry about turnitin.com is that they allow students to access the service as a "deterrent", so that students can see whether their essays infringe. Since students should already know whether their essays are plagiarized, the only point here is to submit essays to see whether one will get caught.
Fortunately, most plagiarists are stupid. (I keep a mental list of anecdotes of dumb plagiarists, like the one who turned in an essay by Karl Marx--not just any essay by Marx, but one that was assigned for class reading--or the one who got caught because the essay included words like "My mother always said, 'Frank...'" but his name wasn't Frank, or the highschool student who accidentally stapled a printout of his source website to his paper.)
Whether this particular instance of copying would count as fair use is an open question, I suspect. I am not sure it counts as "non-profit use" if one is making a copy in order to use the information on it for profit. But you might be right. (Of course that assumes copyright is the only issue. There might have been some implicit or explicit contract violated, for instance.)
On the privacy side, it is not uncommon for an individual to want to keep things private for a while. Someone throwing a surprise party for a friend, a person planning to propose marriage, a person waiting for a suitable time to break a bad piece of news, or a professor preparing an exam are all cases where an individual would wish to keep some information private despite planning to make it public.
Nor would it be OK for you to reveal the current contents of my checkbook if I, for some eccentric reason, had a habit of posting my checkbook data on the Internet six months after the fact. Or suppose that I always posted my old canceled credit card numbers online. That would not give you the right to most my credit card numbers before they've been canceled.
Slashdot Mirror
Writing isn't quite a universal format. Look at Linear A. :-)
IANAL, but as I recall the DMCA forbids TRAFFICKING (I don't remember the exact wording or definition) in products for the circumvention of COPY or ACCESS controls, but only forbids the actual circumvention in the case of access controls: the circumvention of copy controls is perfectly legal, as long as one does not traffick in products for this purpose. Thus, if you happened to have acquired a copy-protection circumvention device prior to the advent of the DMCA or if you build your own, you will be OK in terms of the DMCA as long as the circumvention only touches copy and not access controls. Of course you still have to make sure that the copying counts as fair use and doesn't infringe on other parts of copyright law than the DMCA.
I don't know, though, whether the Sony stuff is an access or copy control. It seems kind of like an access control, because it blocks access to the CD on a PC if one doesn't agree to the DRM.
Incorrect. IANAL, but the DMCA text seems to me to quite clearly say that what is prohibiting is circumventing access controls WITHOUT the authority of the copyright owner. Thus, there is nothing wrong with me encrypting my own text, losing the password, and then cracking it. Nor is there anything wrong with me hacking through the region controls on a DVD if I got permission from the copyright owner or legal representative thereof (I actually obtained such permission from one major Polish film distributor when I bought one if their DVDs--issue turned out to be moot as the DVD turned out to be R0).
If I take a picture, I own the copyright on it. If the white balance data is based on my choices, then it is a part of my creative vision, and hence a part of my copyrighted material. The DMCA is irrelevant. But who wants to go against their lawyers...
Of course a proof where the mathematician uses a pocket calculator to do arithmetic instead of computing by hand raises the same issues, no?
While this isn't enough to prove it in a court of law, in practice it would be really difficult to thoroughly debug the code without actually connecting oneself...
One loss of profit for some academic books would be reprint rights for portions adopted in course packets. When I generate a course packet for a class, I try to make sure that none of the items are available legally for free online, so as to save the students the copyright fees, which can be quite sizeable. I recently got cited $8 per excerpt per copy from one publisher for an out of print book, even when the excerpt was two pages. (In this case, I found a legal overseas publisher who had the book in print and ordered a couple of copies to put it on reserve.) The publisher would lose on such copyright fees if the book were online. Moreover, the publisher would lose the possibility of reprinting the book later under copyright protection.
That said, I do think that such online reprinting should be done, and that authors, when possible, should try to put into their contracts that either rights revert to them on out-of-print, or that they go to a creative commons license then. (I just tried, though, to negotiate the former with a major academic publisher recently, and failed. Instead, I got the reversion of paperback rights upon out-of-print.)
I got an email with one of these urls at least a week ago or more. I can't believe this is taking them so long to fix. Surely it can't take more than a couple of hours to put together a white list of domains.
At the same time, there should be some principle of justice limiting punishment. Suppose that there was a method of copying materials that you had almost zero chance of getting caught doing. Then by the principle that the penalty has to be inversely proportional to the likelihood of getting caught, you could have incredibly large penalties. Since there comes a point where there is no marginal disutility in a fine (for most people it doesn't matter if they're fined $100 million or $100 billion), in order to proportionately increase the penalty after some point you will have to move into longer and longer jail sentences (or amputations or torture or death). Thus, one would get the absurdity that if there is a method of infringing copyright such that one has, say, only a 1/10^9 chance of getting caught, one might end up in jail for life for copying a $10 CD. Why? Because by the inverse proportionality principle, a penalty would have to have a disutility equal to 10^9 times the utility of $10. For most people, a monetary fine will not achieve that amount of disutility, and hence a sizeable jail sentence would be needed.
:-) It would be absurd to suppose that one should go to jail for life for such an act.
Traditionally, the limiting factor on penalties has been the lex talionis: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. This would, on the face of it, imply that when you steal/copy something worth $10, you should give back the item or destroy your copy, and pay up a $10 fine. This, however, would fail to deter in cases where one is unlikely to be caught. But it's not clear that it's morally acceptable to ratchet up a penalty just to deter (life in jail for parking violations would be unjust, even though it would deter really well). One might be able to ratchet up the fine to some degree beyond the $10 to account for the costs of a law enforcement system (which one has forced to be active in one's case, and so one should be responsible for a portion of its operating budget), damage to public trust, or whatever. But still, there would surely be a limit, and I suspect lower than $1M in the case of stealing/copying a $10 item.
And of course there are methods of infringing on copyright that have such low chance of getting caught. For instance, lock your doors, cover your windows, disconnect your computer from the Internet, copy from a physical CD to your hard drive, put it on a 200mb tape encrypted and steganographed onto a large bunch of jpgs, label the tape "Summer vacation '03 photos", clean out all temp files and erased data space on your hard disk, and make sure you never do anything that will get your data seized by the government. There is always a chance you'll get caught, but the chance is close to nil. Of course playing the music will be hard.
Not really. It looks to me like you can implement the patented algorithm in a BSD licensed OSS project. If someone then takes the project and adds additional restrictions on the license that makes the license no longer be open source, the new project will no longer be Open Source, and hence will infringe. So, yes, you can use it in BSD code, but the BSD code behaves more like GPL under these circumstances.
Let me second the Batik recommendation. It has excellent quality output. I've had some problems with stuff that referenced external fonts, but I converted the fonts into svg format, and it was fine then (apart maybe from lack of hinting).
Why not go the more legit route: buy the laserdiscs, a laserdisc player (one should be able to get one shipped for less than $35 on ebay), and make a personal-use copy on DVD?
I bought a 1.2ghz (no interference with wifi) pinhole camera on ebay together with a receiver that I then plug into a composite-to-firewire converter. Quality is low but it more or less does the job, except that it doesn't cover every corner of the room and we have a toddler. It needs good light. I could have instead opted for an IR cam instead for a little bit more. If I want to (say to monitor from a laptop), I can have the desktop the receiver is plugged into serve up the video online.
It cost me $45 for the camera/receiver, which is less than the video baby monitors they sell (except those come with little TV screens, but a lot of them are 2.4ghz which is not acceptable in my setting).
If I were MS, I'd be worried about infringement of compilation copyright. Anthologies have an independent copyright claim by the editors in virtue of the arrangement, in addition to copyright claims in virtue of the items anthologized.
For the postal requirements, one can instead use a wordprocessor "all caps" format for the text, which means that the text will still be internally stored as upper and lower, which in turn makes it more useful (e.g., so the data could be automatically used within a letter, where one doesn't want to say: "Dear Mr. JONES").
I think Palm said that even if they win this lawsuit, they're not going back to Graffiti 1. It would be nice if at least they gave users permission to copy the Graffiti 1 files from a device that has them.
Sure one can write books in Word. I've written one doctoral dissertation using Word, then revised it into a 180000 word book manuscript, and also wrote another book manuscript using Word. I've also written another doctoral dissertation using AMS-LaTeX. LaTeX had better cross referencing for numbered statements/formulae, and of course the mathematical formula handling was incomparably better. In my case it was just a question of what each program was good at. For a humanities dissertation, Word. For a mathematical dissertation, AMS-LaTeX. Both did the job.
I've had Word occasionally give out with large texts. That's bad. But with backups, one can handle it.
So these vigilantes bid up the fraudulent items so high that no real buyer would want it--the article talks about over a million for a telescope worth about two thousand. Isn't that risky? After all, it IS a binding contract, and for such a sum of money, the fraudulent seller can surely come up with the item (i.e., buy it from someone for two thousand and then sell it for a million), even if he didn't have it before.
Well, on an Aristotelian account of private property, on which you have a natural right to the product of your labor, there should be little difference between intellectual and tangible property. On a Thomistic account that makes all private property a matter of social contract (though a social contract that one has an ethical duty to obey), there is also little difference, unless society has ruled otherwise.
:-) Since it's not immoral to obey copyright law (things might be different if someone's life depended on it, as in the case of medicine patents), one should obey it.
There may of course be accounts of private property on which the two cases are handled differently, but it is not obvious to me that any such account is right.
Besides, one might reasonably think that one has a duty to obey authorities, when these authorities are not commanding anything immoral. Socrates thought so.
Though I regularly formatted 360K floppies to 420K for my 8086 unit. They worked fine, except there were compatibility problems with other PCs and a driver needed to be loaded.
Actually, I think a lie is a statement one believes to be false made with the intent of deceiving. Certainly one need not KNOW that it is untrue; one might just believe it. And, I think, it need not actually BE untrue, as long as the speaker believes it to be untrue. If
I think that more than half of my reading, apart from what I read to prepare for class, is older books that I can get in ebook format and that are in the public domain. The only things I like paper books more for is being able to read in the bathtub (oh, for a waterproof Clie), ease of marginal annotation, and ability to flip through quickly (my Clie screen is too small to find things quickly by flipping through).
Searching is helpful. Having a book in one's pocket always is great. Some of the things I read are parts of enormous multi-volume sets that I wouldn't have room on a bookshelf for. For instance, dozens of volumes of Cardinal Newman or of the Jesuit Relations. Various classic books, too, are greatly improved by hyperlinking. For instance, Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae which has lots of back-references.
At one point my wife claimed to find it to be more fun to read in ebook format on a Clie NX60/70 (using Plucker) than to read the dead-tree editions. Autoscrolling was particularly nice when our baby was small and we had no hands free while doing things for the baby.
And, yes, it's nice to have a big library with one. I've got some 600mb of flash on my NX70. It's expensive, but when one considers the cost of printed books, it's not so bad. (For instance, I bet the complete works of Cardinal Newman would set me back a couple of hundred dollars in print format for the books themselves, and more when one considers the cost of another bookcase.) I just wish everybody published in ebook format. Then I wouldn't have to buy physical books almost at all.
I thought POSE already worked just fine on Linux. It's open source, after all. It's the Simulator that needs Win NT/2K/XP (it runs VERY slowly on 9X). And one can certainly do OS5 development under Linux. Most of the members of the Plucker Team, say, do.
Except that css is not just an anti-duplication measure but perhaps also an access control measure (that's what the copyright office seems to think), and in the case of access controls it's not just trafficking but use that is prohibited. But IANAL.
What, by the way, is trafficking. If I download a piece of software, am I trafficking in it by cooperating in someone's sending it to me?
All my students are told that I reserve the right to ask for an electronic version to run through turnitin.com, and that if they do not want to do this, then I will make alternate arrangements. Nobody's asked for alternate arrangements, but if they did, I would ask for an outline and a draft ahead of time.
...'" but his name wasn't Frank, or the highschool student who accidentally stapled a printout of his source website to his paper.)
My own worry about turnitin.com is that they allow students to access the service as a "deterrent", so that students can see whether their essays infringe. Since students should already know whether their essays are plagiarized, the only point here is to submit essays to see whether one will get caught.
Fortunately, most plagiarists are stupid. (I keep a mental list of anecdotes of dumb plagiarists, like the one who turned in an essay by Karl Marx--not just any essay by Marx, but one that was assigned for class reading--or the one who got caught because the essay included words like "My mother always said, 'Frank
Whether this particular instance of copying would count as fair use is an open question, I suspect. I am not sure it counts as "non-profit use" if one is making a copy in order to use the information on it for profit. But you might be right. (Of course that assumes copyright is the only issue. There might have been some implicit or explicit contract violated, for instance.)
On the privacy side, it is not uncommon for an individual to want to keep things private for a while. Someone throwing a surprise party for a friend, a person planning to propose marriage, a person waiting for a suitable time to break a bad piece of news, or a professor preparing an exam are all cases where an individual would wish to keep some information private despite planning to make it public.
Nor would it be OK for you to reveal the current contents of my checkbook if I, for some eccentric reason, had a habit of posting my checkbook data on the Internet six months after the fact. Or suppose that I always posted my old canceled credit card numbers online. That would not give you the right to most my credit card numbers before they've been canceled.