According to Salon (ad clickthrough required), John McCain has scheduled a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee for this Wednesday. All 5 commissioners including Powell will be there. Your opinions can be sent to Sen. McCain here. The Commerce Committee's listing is here. While it does include Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) It also includes such high-profile opponents as Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Ted Stevens (Alaska). Congress can still stall this. It isn't over yet.
try "The Fugitive Game". It was written about his life while he was on the run (with his help) and it is an excellent read, especially for skipping the FUD.
For non-tech, you can't beat Shakespeare (well I admit that you might be able to but he doesn't suck that's for sure:).
There is a proposal on the table (in the U.S.) to mandate that rights-restricted products such as these cd's be labelled. This will make is possible for consumers to choose whether or nor they take rights-restrictions or not. You can register your support over at the EFF
"I think that any voting system, if it is programmed and used properly, can be very reliable," she added.
<rant> I think that this, like many other issues, is something that we at/. need to comment on. For good or ill we are the pople who know just how hard it is to ensure that systems are always programmed and used *properly* especially when you users include every regestered voter in the U.S.
The fact that people feel more confident about them says nothing about how tamper-proof or accurate they really are. The fact that they are made by private companies means that they have economic interests behind them. Private companies have a tendency to care who does and does not win elections.
I think that it is incumbent upon us to speak out about this to the wider world beyond/. Even if we think that this is a good thing I think that it is time for some good old fashined letters to the editor. </rant>
Microwave power transmission has been used before. Some tv companies use it to send power from base stations (saw a van) to remote feeds (say a camera crew up on a hill). That having been said I've never heard of anyone running something the size of a village before.
Miller: "What you're implying is that there is a way for a programmer to know where a candidate will be on the ballot to give that candidate a benefit. That's impossible."
Harris: "Regardless of who sets up the ballot, the ballot does identify who is a Republican and who is a Democrat. So there would be a way for the program to know that. Why couldn't a programmer, for example, set the machine to wait for a couple hundred votes and then put, say, one out of every 10 Democrat votes into the Republican bin?"
Miller: "It's not the programmer that programs the machine."
Harris: "But whoever does it identifies, for example, who is a Democrat and who is a Republican, so regardless of who inputs that, the machine would be able to read and identify that too."
Miller: "I'm not going to talk about proving a negative."
Harris: "But the positive, which can be proved, is that every election system that's ever been used in the USA has, at one time or another, been tampered with. And what we do know is that $800 million has gone toward contributions to candidates. So certainly we can predict that someone will try to tamper with a programmer. And therefore, what I'm asking, is what safeguards do we have in place to make sure that, if someone tampers with a program or a CD update --"
Agreed. It's worrisome to see stuff like this being sad at the same time that the Bush Government moves to stifle all public inquiry into their activities.
"Innocent people have nothing to hide" -- John Ashcroft.
Due to the people at slashdot.org linking to this site without asking the owners or the hosters, asciipr0n.com is offline until further notice. Maybe you guys should start mirroring the sites you link to...
Apppently some people do see Slashdotting as a DOS attack.
It's sad to me that people like this can be so well educatied and still not know about programs like COINTELPRO.
In order to protect all of us the FBI did what it could to discredit Civil Rights groups, Unions, Teachers...
I find it hard to swallow this hogwash since we have such great examples of our "protecors" turning on us, hiding their activities, and launching messianic crusades in the wrong directions.
Such as not wanting to click an "innocent-sounding" link and then see someone eating crap I think that this is an area where a simple law will not suffice.
The problem is that there are two issues under discussion here. The first is, what constituted "adult material?" and the second is "what constitutes misleading terms?"
Congress has tried again and again to define "Adult materials" but every attempt has been fraught with some difficulty. Most people would agree that pictures of one man eating crap or graphic sex are for adults but what about the New York Times? They print (sometimes) graphic pictures of war and violence and discuss topics such as HIV, Starvation, Karl Rove, and other things that could scar children. So must they register as an Adult site? All they say is "news." The same gor for protests sites, and indeed most of the world.
With that in mind lets turn to the notion of fale advertising. Personally I support laws that oppose it and I am incredibly pissed that Nike is claiming the right to lie. But, all those laws deal strictly with factual statements. When Nike says that they do not employ slave labor or ford says that their Pinto does not fishtail and explode in flames then those are factual statements that can be independently verified.
When a domain name such as Whitehouse.com is put up then the question of whether or not it is misleading is one of opinion. I personally have entered it in by accident and been annoyed but, at the same time I recognize that ".com" signifies a different domain than ".gov" and expect it to be different. As other posters have pointed out witehousecom has been around for a while and is highly generic.
Therefore any court case on the issue would devolve into the owners claiming that they don't see it as misleading and some parent's group claiming that it is. The courts would be forced to decide between two opinions. This is, of course something that they do all the time but it is always fraught with landmines.
Moreover, opinions change over time, as do names. Consider "XXX." That string has long signified strong porn. Now that Vin Diesel has made a movie of the same name however that is open for debate. What do you say when some pre-teen Diesel fan enters XXX-fans.com or some other name and finds something that their parents don't want them to see. All of a sudden the porn distributors have a new legal challenge on their hands.
This is why I favor greenspaces such as the.kids domain (legislation that has already passed the house BTW). In this case the law allows sites to opt-in and for parents to restrict their browsers if they wish. Going this route is like taking your kids to a private park or a publiuc one. In thje private park you can let them run free. In the public one you have to take a part but now parents know that they are getting into. Similarly the rest of us aren't forced to censor ourselves everywhere for fear of someone, somewhere seeing "adult" things.
I wonder if this is motivated by the fact that some browsers treat "foo" on the URL line as "foo.com" automatically thus making a child's entry of "whitehouse" into "Whitehouse.com"?
It also helps that the Grammys are not based upon sales. You win an award at the Grammys byb eing voted on by "other music professionals" not everyone who watches MTV. So what it really says is that the music professionsals love what they do so much that the vote for other people.
In short, Britney may be well marketed but she really isn't a hit with her peers.
Punctuated by hisses, applause and shouts of "Amen!" from members of the 100-person crowd, the four-hour debate illustrated the gargantuan gap between Silicon Valley and Hollywood when it comes to so-called digital rights management.
It sounds so much like a tent revival, or a televangelist's show. Perhap the two industries have finally realized that the difference is religious. The tech industry exists to create interesting new tools for the general public. The media companies think that the general public are the spawn of Satan, or at least that we should be treated that way.
"In the future, it will be easier to pay for subscription services than to be an amateur database administrator who moves content from device to device," Lessig said. "We're legislating against a background of the Internet's current architecture of content distribution, and this is a fundamental mistake."
"He said digital rights has become a smoke screen for discussing financial excess of Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and the realities of the industry's slump."
And the lack of them is a smoke screen for the RIAA's slump.
"Let's have some perspective," he said. "This issue is not as bad as 45 million people living without health insurance."
Which would be meaningful if I was under the impression that he was going to do something about the health insurance problem. Parhaps he's subtly arguing for Lessig's side. Congress has generally agreed, that health insurance is an issue, they have also solidly failed to do anything about it. Perhaps this is a congressional way of finding the middle ground by devoting all rhetoric to one side and all action to none.
Money, however, is negative--it's corrupting the body politic. Even though money might be the most self-conflicting force in politics today, there are too many loopholes in this McCain-Feingold bill. All these lobbyists in town who are callous to what the bill stands for are going to exploit it. They'll turn to state parties and special interest groups and the money will keep pouring in. It's a tragedy.
And yet they still participate. According to Opensecrets.org the movie industry donated $20,172,249 to Democrats in 2002 and $713,874 to Republicans in 2002. Most of that money came in the form of soft contributions, the primary targets of the Mcain Feingold bill. See here for details. The Star player in the industry Disney came in at #66 in the all-time top donors list at opensecrets. See here for the list and here for their profile. They too favor a lot of soft money. Jack's own opensecrets link is here.
JV: At all costs, the government should stay out of censorship, except in war. When soldiers lives may be at stake, I think you can. Vietnam is the only war we've ever fought in the history of our country, without censorship. But in any other arena, I'm totally opposed to censorship in any form. I'm a great believer and defender of the First Amendment.
And yet he favors censoring technologies and code when his clients' profits are at stake. It's obvious that he doesn't consider code or engineering to be speech but still it seems odd to take this kind of firm line on one area of human endeavor and yet to be so closed off in another. Perhaps his speech is more important than other peoples' speech.
JV: But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless.
However:
DVD cds and records can become scratched over time and therefore unplayable.
All digital media can become broken and do actually degrade over time through not necessarily from "routine" use.
All digital media and digital files can be lost necessitating a backup. This loss can be due to losing wither the physical device or the file on a hdd. Who hasn't accidentally typed rm at least once, or discovered that their kid decided to experiment with magnetism or the "empty recycle bin" command.
Hard disc drives can fail.
Standards can change making old formats incompatible.
etc.
In Jack's world of course we would all be happy to pay for new copies whenever this occurs. Here on earth however my wallet and I object to re-purchasing the same thing.
If anyone can do it under the rubric of fair use, how can we protect the artists?
The same way that we always have with books, cd's and movies, by relying on sensible laws. And accepting the fact that the profit models just have to take a hit now and again.
Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Not completely true. It is illegal for me to copy the Spider man videotape and to share it with a million friends. It is not illegal for me to copy excerpts from it for activities covered under fair use restrictions. I agree with Jack that you cannot legally make backup copied of your tapes (unlike cassette tapes) but I would argue that this is wronmg and that this restriction, in light of the fair-use provisions, exists soley to guarantee a stream of new customers as tapes wear out and to permit hollywood to adopt a two-tier model of pricing whereby video stores pay more than the rest of us for each copy.
Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that.
That's what people have been doing for generations.
Just how old does he think video tapes are? Seriously, Would I find one if I looked through my grandparent's house?
JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.
Other people have pointed this out already but just to rub his face in it the law is here. Since we haven't been using the Internet for generations he may not be used to it. In his testemony before Congress on the VCR he stated "I am suggesting that the copyright royalty fee lives under the canopy of fair use."
Jack Valenti: I wasn't opposed to the VCR. The MPAA tried to establish by law that the VCR was infringing on copyright. Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy].
Actually he was opposed to the VCR and what he felt that it would do. The presentation before congress is a beautiful read in which he quotes excerpts from peoples' diaries as evidence not unlike the recording industry's current work with phone surveys. He also decries the first sale doctrine as a route to an unstable marketplace, spends time discussing the greed of Japenese companies and his desire to help the American Consumer. He even admits to infringing himself and asserts that the only purpose of VCR's is to "is to copy coyrighted material that belongs to other people".
I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy. It was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that determined VCRs were not infringing, which I regret. As a result, we never got the copyright royalty fee, but
everything I predicted came true.
He predicted:
The trade imbalance with Japan would be deeply effected as a result: "We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine. "
Producers would get less for their films on the air and less revenues will be availible to networks and producers.
That commercial skipping would strip away the reasons for free television.
That the eceonomic benefits of recording movies from tv would reduce the need or desire for people to attend movies in the theatres, buy prerecorded tapes, or rent prerecorded tapes. He did not specifically predict that the desire would be killed just lessened.
That the inevitable reduction in films availible in the theatrees and on TV (due to the rise of VCRs) will adversely impact "the less-affluent, the disadvantaged people pressed against the wall, out of work, who can't afford these expensive machines, and free television to the sick and the old and the poor will remain the primary source of home entertainment. "
"substantial portions of any fees will be borne by manufacturers and retailers rather than passed on to the consumer."
"The audio business today is where the video business is going to be 4, 5, 6 years from now. By that time, Mr. Railsback, it is going to be too late. You can't salvage the business then. " I am not so sure about this one but he seems to be referencing the fact that as of 1982 the music industry had utterly and irrevocably collapsed.
"plus the people on fast connections in universities, making it so easy to bring down a movie in minutes..."
Where the hell can you download >700mb in a matter of minutes?
Although this isn't in his article but in the testimony above I feel it should be commented on too:
"I want to go on record as saying that the motion picture industry, and I hope I am including all of those who are allied with me today, we are free traders. We do not believe in duties and import quotas."
If that is the case, then he has a lot of explaining to do about the DVD Reigon Encoding system.
Final quotes from Jack:
"One final point, Mr. Chairman, and then I am through and I have taken more time than I should have, but I am so fascinated by what I am saying..."
"They have more than 40,000 artists and they have people who poll and spot check the logs of radio stations and they make allocations of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of musical recordings and they have done it with almost no dissention from the ranks because they have gotten expertise in it and everybody trusts their judgment..."
If you read the article that I linked tyou will see that the patent was granted on the cell line taken from Moore's body a cell line that can be used for research purposes. While you are correct in asserting that he doesn't pay a tax for the continued right to use his body I think that you are missing the overall point.
Cells were extracted from John Moore, copied and patented without his consent. Because of that he cannot freely share his cells with other researchers or otherwise make use of his cells. If you wanted to take a property comparison its as if someone snuck into his house in the middle of the night, discovered gold in the basement, and got the legal right to continue mining it without his consent. In that sense his body is no longer completely his own.
Seriosuly given how well things have gone with SBC's patent perhaps its time to collect prior art examples of this and post them onto/. Can anyone think of a test that (in their humble opinion) occured online and met the standards of this patent before February 11th 1999?
..otherwise one is forced to consider the ludicrous situation of one being forbidden to sequence one's own DNA,
There is a case in which something similar occured. John Moore woke up one day to discover that he had been patented without his consent and that his genes, according to the USPTO were no longer his own. Esquire magazine did a supprisingly good peice on the subject that you can find as a PDF or as HTML from Google. He tried to get the patent revoked on the grounds that he, the object in question, did not consent. He was refused but, as a consolation proze he was offered the chance to sue his doctor for failing to tell him how valuable he was as a product not for going ahead and patenting him when he chose not to.
While I agree that the U.S. Military is not always perfect or always blessed with the all the brains that they purport to have I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. Note that in the article they said that the system was "...based on the IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN standard." They also pointed out that this is part of a longer term project that they have been running not the initiative of the month. While I doubt that they've got it perfect I also doubt that they've just equipped the 3'rd fleet with a poorly controlled destroyer ready to be hacked by any idiot with a pc.
payola/Kickbacks/"Finder's Fees" for radio stations and MTV.
The costs of organizing public relations appearences for the the band members at various locations.
The costs of getting the band in the door to play their songs at various venues (various TV Shows, clubs, benefits, etc.
And, the costs of a road tour.
Keep in mind that, despite how little the artists make there is still money to pay out to:
The author of the tune (not always the band).
The Producer of the Tune (also different from the band.
Whoever else owns a copyright chunk of the tune (there are more I beleive besides the band).
Studio Musicians.
Technicians to setup the Studio.
Lawyers.
PR People who advertize the band with flyerr or whatever else.
Whomsoever designed the CD Cover art, poster cover art, T-Shirt Cover art, etc.
Whomsoever pressed the damn things.
The Manager(s).
Aaaand... The Band
Ultimately I think that asessing things on a per-cd cost is the wrong way to go. The RIAA Like everyone else is not just into CD's they are into "Brands." Each band isn't just woth the fees for CD's but also the revenue from concert tours (that Ticketmaster doesn't take), the Revenue for Music Videos (minus the cost of getting them made), T-Shirts, Magazine appearences, benefit shows, movie spinoffs (I'm certain that Britney's manager got a cut of her acting fees), etc. So the real question is, is the amount that I kick in to the brand with my cd price of 20USD "fair" or am I getting shafted by the same people who claim that I'm screwing them because I have an internet connection and a CD burner and therefore must be stealing Mettalica's crap? I say its not. Even though Clearchannel owns enough radio stations to dictate the rules there, and MTV/VH1 are in the same sets of hands, thus forcing the record companies to play by their rules, I still think that they're doing well. I belive this because The costs of CDs has risen faster (so far as I can tell) than the rate of inflation. In order for this to be a survival move it would mean that:
The amount of revenue from some other stream (T-shirts etc) has fallen off but, the last time that I checked the RIAA was not reporting a shortfall of licencing rights requests, and Ticketmaster was doing well for itself (suggesting that concerts are still doing well).
The costs of producing CDs (or other aspects of the band) have gone up more than inflation but:
The cost of producing that CD according to the logic of industry should only be going down as more and more people purchase sound equipment and newer equipment becomes availible. As Henry Foird showed doing things on a massive scale can "standardize them to cheapness."
The cost of paying the bands could have gone up but, the last time that I checked even the successful stars were complaining of low pay.
It is possible that the cost of legal or business issues surrounding the bands have become more expensive such as in hiring extra lawyers to sue verizon. But, without taking a deeper look at the company books I cannot prove or disprove that one.
The record companies are maintaining fewer bands and therefore have less revenue streams to rely on. This is one that their opponents have accused them of, and that they have admitted to. But, this one is purely under their control and therefore I have no sympathy for them.
At then end of the day though I have little sympathy for them because:
They just lost a price-fixing lawsuit showing that a Federal court beleives that they are conpiring to bilk us.
They themselves (not clearchannel or MTV or Ticketmaster) control how many different bands they produce.
They themselves (and noone else) have worked to kill Internet Radio, Peer-to-Peer Systems, and indeed our general freedom to innovate.
Thair profits have dropped less than the economic downturn would suggest especially for what is, after all, a luxury item.
I can't stand most of the music that the major's priduce anyway.
To Quote Paul Wolofowitz "Companies come, companies go that's the genius of capitalism."
They Quote the police Cheif saying that it is too costly and ineffective. They also mention the ACLU's objections to it as unreliable, if not worse than useless, and a vast privasy invasion. Then they spend the bulk of the article taking quotes from the makers of the systems and discussing how popular it is.
The feeling that I get from the article is that this is really a nonissue, yes one of the makers mentions "privacy concerns" but there is little mention made of the consequences of "False Positives" or even of how many false positives there were in Tampa Bay.
" Names registered or re-registered after July 1, 2002 are subject to the new rules. A decision by a one-person panel costs $1500; a three-person panel can rule for $3000. One other case over an unidentified name is pending."
I know that lawsuits are never free but is anyone else disturbed by the way in which arbitration is assigned these flat fees? The idea of being a) prevented from using the court system which has oversight and b) being forced to pay a flat fee just to get my case herd bugs me. Somehow it removes all pretense that the registrar is interested in crerating a viable system and just enforces the idea that they want money, cash up front in fact.
It seems to me that what is really standing in the way of all of this is a simple agreement over who really "has" the right to tax. Take a for instance; I hop on the computer in Austin Texas. Look up a CD on Amazon (based in Seattle). I then have the CD Shipped to my friend in Brighton England.
Who has "the right" to tax that? You could make a legitimate argument that every city, county, state and country involved in that transaction can claim a peice of the pie. In that case either I or Amazon would be responsible for tracking all of those different agencies and laws and ensuring that everyone gets their share. The case gets even more complex if you start factoring in the fact that both servers and stock are colocated. For all I know the "Amazon.com" that I contacted may be served from somewhere in the midwest, and the CD may have been shipped from some Amazon warehouse in France.
Obviously that would stifle any and all internet commerce. One alternative is a moratorium on all taxation. I disagree with this because it gives Amazon and other online outlets an unfair advantage over their "bricks and mortar" competitors. It also exempts them from paying for the infrastructure that sales taxes are (or should be) spent on, infrastructure that they depend upon.
The problem with the middle ground where some people can tax but not others is that you have to make a convincing argument (or carry a big stick) to explain it. In the past I know that the U.S. Federal government has used its power to regulate interstate commerce as a means to control or "simplify" interstate taxes. I suppose that could be one with internet purhases in the U.S. but when it comes to international purchases thewre's only groups like the World Trade Organization (*Shudder*) or local elements such as NAFTA.
It is true that there exists a large bevy of non-us governments out there supporting linux but that may not be enough. Consider first off that many of these governments (such as China) have their own interests in controlling computer use. To some if not all of then DRM may be a viable alternative.
Now consider the fact that their support of Linux is mainly an opposition to Microsoft more than an embracement of "the people's needs". For China and other countries Linux is a proven way to get into the high-tech world and one that is significantly cheaper than any other. For Germany it was a way to have "their own" operating system, one that they could trust for security reasons. I must have missed the UK announcement because last time I checked their e-government portal was still Windows/MacOS only.
Now Consider this. There is nothing in the DRM standard that forbids you from producing your own operating system. In order for it to work howevber you must have it certified. So what's to stop someone like IBM from producing their own "official" GNU/Linux distribution. This distribution could be shipped to the users in the form of precompiled binaries, and updated just like Microsoft's. The system is robust, full featured and, because of all the work that other people have done, IBM (or whoever) can sell it for a nominal licencing fee and still make a profit.
I may just be waxing paranoid but I see this as one possible way for linux to be co-opted. Yes it is still free and GNU licenced but you need the "official copy" in order to run it. For other countries this may be a win. China has already shown their willingness to produce their own official OS (and chips). Countries like Peru might not mind this so much so long as the system is cheaper. And, if the U.S. and other major markets go this way the small "emerging countries" may have no real choice.
They were "progressive" once.
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I remember reading about them in "Architects of the Web". They were originally founded as Progressive Networks, and their stated mission was to be good citizens first and then good businessmen. They moved - proudly - into a low-rent neighborhood with the goal of helping to clean it up, and sought to provide useful tools with interesting applications. Then they had an IPO.
According to their website they still donate five percent of their income to charity. Rob Glaser is still their CEO (he founded it in 1994). But the President and Cheif Operating Officer is Larry Jacobson former President and COO of Ticketmaster (see here).
Personally I think that they have a right to develop the technology in the same way that we have a right to avoid it like the plague that it is. I'm curious to see how long it takes before they invoke the DMCA.
Whether they do or not, it seems that things have changed since they had that IPO.
Slashdot Mirror
According to Salon (ad clickthrough required), John McCain has scheduled a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee for this Wednesday. All 5 commissioners including Powell will be there. Your opinions can be sent to Sen. McCain here. The Commerce Committee's listing is here. While it does include Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) It also includes such high-profile opponents as Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Ted Stevens (Alaska). Congress can still stall this. It isn't over yet.
try "The Fugitive Game". It was written about his life while he was on the run (with his help) and it is an excellent read, especially for skipping the FUD.
:).
For non-tech, you can't beat Shakespeare (well I admit that you might be able to but he doesn't suck that's for sure
There is a proposal on the table (in the U.S.) to mandate that rights-restricted products such as these cd's be labelled. This will make is possible for consumers to choose whether or nor they take rights-restrictions or not. You can register your support over at the EFF
You can send in a public statement and a letter to your reps. Go here.
"I think that any voting system, if it is programmed and used properly, can be very reliable," she added.
/. need to comment on. For good or ill we are the pople who know just how hard it is to ensure that systems are always programmed and used *properly* especially when you users include every regestered voter in the U.S.
/. Even if we think that this is a good thing I think that it is time for some good old fashined letters to the editor.
<rant>
I think that this, like many other issues, is something that we at
The fact that people feel more confident about them says nothing about how tamper-proof or accurate they really are. The fact that they are made by private companies means that they have economic interests behind them. Private companies have a tendency to care who does and does not win elections.
I think that it is incumbent upon us to speak out about this to the wider world beyond
</rant>
Microwave power transmission has been used before. Some tv companies use it to send power from base stations (saw a van) to remote feeds (say a camera crew up on a hill). That having been said I've never heard of anyone running something the size of a village before.
Miller: "What you're implying is that there is a way for a programmer to know where a candidate will be on the ballot to give that candidate a benefit. That's impossible."
Harris: "Regardless of who sets up the ballot, the ballot does identify who is a Republican and who is a Democrat. So there would be a way for the program to know that. Why couldn't a programmer, for example, set the machine to wait for a couple hundred votes and then put, say, one out of every 10 Democrat votes into the Republican bin?"
Miller: "It's not the programmer that programs the machine."
Harris: "But whoever does it identifies, for example, who is a Democrat and who is a Republican, so regardless of who inputs that, the machine would be able to read and identify that too."
Miller: "I'm not going to talk about proving a negative."
Harris: "But the positive, which can be proved, is that every election system that's ever been used in the USA has, at one time or another, been tampered with. And what we do know is that $800 million has gone toward contributions to candidates. So certainly we can predict that someone will try to tamper with a programmer. And therefore, what I'm asking, is what safeguards do we have in place to make sure that, if someone tampers with a program or a CD update --"
Miller: "I think we've gone as far as we can go."
Agreed. It's worrisome to see stuff like this being sad at the same time that the Bush Government moves to stifle all public inquiry into their activities.
"Innocent people have nothing to hide" -- John Ashcroft.
It makes you wonder what they're so scared of.
Apppently some people do see Slashdotting as a DOS attack.
It's sad to me that people like this can be so well educatied and still not know about programs like COINTELPRO.
In order to protect all of us the FBI did what it could to discredit Civil Rights groups, Unions, Teachers...
I find it hard to swallow this hogwash since we have such great examples of our "protecors" turning on us, hiding their activities, and launching messianic crusades in the wrong directions.
But perhaps I'm just a luddite...
Irvu.
Such as not wanting to click an "innocent-sounding" link and then see someone eating crap I think that this is an area where a simple law will not suffice.
.kids domain (legislation that has already passed the house BTW). In this case the law allows sites to opt-in and for parents to restrict their browsers if they wish. Going this route is like taking your kids to a private park or a publiuc one. In thje private park you can let them run free. In the public one you have to take a part but now parents know that they are getting into. Similarly the rest of us aren't forced to censor ourselves everywhere for fear of someone, somewhere seeing "adult" things.
The problem is that there are two issues under discussion here. The first is, what constituted "adult material?" and the second is "what constitutes misleading terms?"
Congress has tried again and again to define "Adult materials" but every attempt has been fraught with some difficulty. Most people would agree that pictures of one man eating crap or graphic sex are for adults but what about the New York Times? They print (sometimes) graphic pictures of war and violence and discuss topics such as HIV, Starvation, Karl Rove, and other things that could scar children. So must they register as an Adult site? All they say is "news." The same gor for protests sites, and indeed most of the world.
With that in mind lets turn to the notion of fale advertising. Personally I support laws that oppose it and I am incredibly pissed that Nike is claiming the right to lie. But, all those laws deal strictly with factual statements. When Nike says that they do not employ slave labor or ford says that their Pinto does not fishtail and explode in flames then those are factual statements that can be independently verified.
When a domain name such as Whitehouse.com is put up then the question of whether or not it is misleading is one of opinion. I personally have entered it in by accident and been annoyed but, at the same time I recognize that ".com" signifies a different domain than ".gov" and expect it to be different. As other posters have pointed out witehousecom has been around for a while and is highly generic.
Therefore any court case on the issue would devolve into the owners claiming that they don't see it as misleading and some parent's group claiming that it is. The courts would be forced to decide between two opinions. This is, of course something that they do all the time but it is always fraught with landmines.
Moreover, opinions change over time, as do names. Consider "XXX." That string has long signified strong porn. Now that Vin Diesel has made a movie of the same name however that is open for debate. What do you say when some pre-teen Diesel fan enters XXX-fans.com or some other name and finds something that their parents don't want them to see. All of a sudden the porn distributors have a new legal challenge on their hands.
This is why I favor greenspaces such as the
I wonder if this is motivated by the fact that some browsers treat "foo" on the URL line as "foo.com" automatically thus making a child's entry of "whitehouse" into "Whitehouse.com"?
Irvu.
omething that can be done
It also helps that the Grammys are not based upon sales. You win an award at the Grammys byb eing voted on by "other music professionals" not everyone who watches MTV. So what it really says is that the music professionsals love what they do so much that the vote for other people.
In short, Britney may be well marketed but she really isn't a hit with her peers.
It sounds so much like a tent revival, or a televangelist's show. Perhap the two industries have finally realized that the difference is religious. The tech industry exists to create interesting new tools for the general public. The media companies think that the general public are the spawn of Satan, or at least that we should be treated that way.
Not if The FCC has its way.
And the lack of them is a smoke screen for the RIAA's slump.
Which would be meaningful if I was under the impression that he was going to do something about the health insurance problem. Parhaps he's subtly arguing for Lessig's side. Congress has generally agreed, that health insurance is an issue, they have also solidly failed to do anything about it. Perhaps this is a congressional way of finding the middle ground by devoting all rhetoric to one side and all action to none.
Probably not, but it's nice to think.
And yet they still participate. According to Opensecrets.org the movie industry donated $20,172,249 to Democrats in 2002 and $713,874 to Republicans in 2002. Most of that money came in the form of soft contributions, the primary targets of the Mcain Feingold bill. See here for details. The Star player in the industry Disney came in at #66 in the all-time top donors list at opensecrets. See here for the list and here for their profile. They too favor a lot of soft money. Jack's own opensecrets link is here.
And yet he favors censoring technologies and code when his clients' profits are at stake. It's obvious that he doesn't consider code or engineering to be speech but still it seems odd to take this kind of firm line on one area of human endeavor and yet to be so closed off in another. Perhaps his speech is more important than other peoples' speech.
However:
In Jack's world of course we would all be happy to pay for new copies whenever this occurs. Here on earth however my wallet and I object to re-purchasing the same thing.
The same way that we always have with books, cd's and movies, by relying on sensible laws. And accepting the fact that the profit models just have to take a hit now and again.
Not completely true. It is illegal for me to copy the Spider man videotape and to share it with a million friends. It is not illegal for me to copy excerpts from it for activities covered under fair use restrictions. I agree with Jack that you cannot legally make backup copied of your tapes (unlike cassette tapes) but I would argue that this is wronmg and that this restriction, in light of the fair-use provisions, exists soley to guarantee a stream of new customers as tapes wear out and to permit hollywood to adopt a two-tier model of pricing whereby video stores pay more than the rest of us for each copy.
Just how old does he think video tapes are?
Seriously, Would I find one if I looked through my grandparent's house?
Other people have pointed this out already but just to rub his face in it the law is here. Since we haven't been using the Internet for generations he may not be used to it. In his testemony before Congress on the VCR he stated "I am suggesting that the copyright royalty fee lives under the canopy of fair use."
Actually he was opposed to the VCR and what he felt that it would do. The presentation before congress is a beautiful read in which he quotes excerpts from peoples' diaries as evidence not unlike the recording industry's current work with phone surveys. He also decries the first sale doctrine as a route to an unstable marketplace, spends time discussing the greed of Japenese companies and his desire to help the American Consumer. He even admits to infringing himself and asserts that the only purpose of VCR's is to "is to copy coyrighted material that belongs to other people".
He predicted:
Where the hell can you download >700mb in a matter of minutes?
Although this isn't in his article but in the testimony above I feel it should be commented on too:
If that is the case, then he has a lot of explaining to do about the DVD Reigon Encoding system.
Final quotes from Jack:
If you read the article that I linked tyou will see that the patent was granted on the cell line taken from Moore's body a cell line that can be used for research purposes. While you are correct in asserting that he doesn't pay a tax for the continued right to use his body I think that you are missing the overall point.
Cells were extracted from John Moore, copied and patented without his consent. Because of that he cannot freely share his cells with other researchers or otherwise make use of his cells. If you wanted to take a property comparison its as if someone snuck into his house in the middle of the night, discovered gold in the basement, and got the legal right to continue mining it without his consent. In that sense his body is no longer completely his own.
Seriosuly given how well things have gone with SBC's patent perhaps its time to collect prior art examples of this and post them onto /. Can anyone think of a test that (in their humble opinion) occured online and met the standards of this patent before February 11th 1999?
There is a case in which something similar occured. John Moore woke up one day to discover that he had been patented without his consent and that his genes, according to the USPTO were no longer his own. Esquire magazine did a supprisingly good peice on the subject that you can find as a PDF or as HTML from Google. He tried to get the patent revoked on the grounds that he, the object in question, did not consent. He was refused but, as a consolation proze he was offered the chance to sue his doctor for failing to tell him how valuable he was as a product not for going ahead and patenting him when he chose not to.
While I agree that the U.S. Military is not always perfect or always blessed with the all the brains that they purport to have I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. Note that in the article they said that the system was "...based on the IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN standard." They also pointed out that this is part of a longer term project that they have been running not the initiative of the month. While I doubt that they've got it perfect I also doubt that they've just equipped the 3'rd fleet with a poorly controlled destroyer ready to be hacked by any idiot with a pc.
Keep in mind that, despite how little the artists make there is still money to pay out to:
Ultimately I think that asessing things on a per-cd cost is the wrong way to go. The RIAA Like everyone else is not just into CD's they are into "Brands." Each band isn't just woth the fees for CD's but also the revenue from concert tours (that Ticketmaster doesn't take), the Revenue for Music Videos (minus the cost of getting them made), T-Shirts, Magazine appearences, benefit shows, movie spinoffs (I'm certain that Britney's manager got a cut of her acting fees), etc.
So the real question is, is the amount that I kick in to the brand with my cd price of 20USD "fair" or am I getting shafted by the same people who claim that I'm screwing them because I have an internet connection and a CD burner and therefore must be stealing Mettalica's crap?
I say its not. Even though Clearchannel owns enough radio stations to dictate the rules there, and MTV/VH1 are in the same sets of hands, thus forcing the record companies to play by their rules, I still think that they're doing well. I belive this because The costs of CDs has risen faster (so far as I can tell) than the rate of inflation. In order for this to be a survival move it would mean that:
At then end of the day though I have little sympathy for them because:
To Quote Paul Wolofowitz "Companies come, companies go that's the genius of capitalism."
They Quote the police Cheif saying that it is too costly and ineffective. They also mention the ACLU's objections to it as unreliable, if not worse than useless, and a vast privasy invasion. Then they spend the bulk of the article taking quotes from the makers of the systems and discussing how popular it is.
The feeling that I get from the article is that this is really a nonissue, yes one of the makers mentions "privacy concerns" but there is little mention made of the consequences of "False Positives" or even of how many false positives there were in Tampa Bay.
Interesting.
I'm not sure if that's a threat, or an Advertisement or both. Either way it doesn't smack of legalese so much as marketspeak.
I know that lawsuits are never free but is anyone else disturbed by the way in which arbitration is assigned these flat fees? The idea of being a) prevented from using the court system which has oversight and b) being forced to pay a flat fee just to get my case herd bugs me. Somehow it removes all pretense that the registrar is interested in crerating a viable system and just enforces the idea that they want money, cash up front in fact.
It seems to me that what is really standing in the way of all of this is a simple agreement over who really "has" the right to tax. Take a for instance; I hop on the computer in Austin Texas. Look up a CD on Amazon (based in Seattle). I then have the CD Shipped to my friend in Brighton England.
Who has "the right" to tax that? You could make a legitimate argument that every city, county, state and country involved in that transaction can claim a peice of the pie. In that case either I or Amazon would be responsible for tracking all of those different agencies and laws and ensuring that everyone gets their share. The case gets even more complex if you start factoring in the fact that both servers and stock are colocated. For all I know the "Amazon.com" that I contacted may be served from somewhere in the midwest, and the CD may have been shipped from some Amazon warehouse in France.
Obviously that would stifle any and all internet commerce. One alternative is a moratorium on all taxation. I disagree with this because it gives Amazon and other online outlets an unfair advantage over their "bricks and mortar" competitors. It also exempts them from paying for the infrastructure that sales taxes are (or should be) spent on, infrastructure that they depend upon.
The problem with the middle ground where some people can tax but not others is that you have to make a convincing argument (or carry a big stick) to explain it. In the past I know that the U.S. Federal government has used its power to regulate interstate commerce as a means to control or "simplify" interstate taxes. I suppose that could be one with internet purhases in the U.S. but when it comes to international purchases thewre's only groups like the World Trade Organization (*Shudder*) or local elements such as NAFTA.
It is true that there exists a large bevy of non-us governments out there supporting linux but that may not be enough. Consider first off that many of these governments (such as China) have their own interests in controlling computer use. To some if not all of then DRM may be a viable alternative.
Now consider the fact that their support of Linux is mainly an opposition to Microsoft more than an embracement of "the people's needs". For China and other countries Linux is a proven way to get into the high-tech world and one that is significantly cheaper than any other. For Germany it was a way to have "their own" operating system, one that they could trust for security reasons. I must have missed the UK announcement because last time I checked their e-government portal was still Windows/MacOS only.
Now Consider this. There is nothing in the DRM standard that forbids you from producing your own operating system. In order for it to work howevber you must have it certified. So what's to stop someone like IBM from producing their own "official" GNU/Linux distribution. This distribution could be shipped to the users in the form of precompiled binaries, and updated just like Microsoft's. The system is robust, full featured and, because of all the work that other people have done, IBM (or whoever) can sell it for a nominal licencing fee and still make a profit.
I may just be waxing paranoid but I see this as one possible way for linux to be co-opted. Yes it is still free and GNU licenced but you need the "official copy" in order to run it. For other countries this may be a win. China has already shown their willingness to produce their own official OS (and chips). Countries like Peru might not mind this so much so long as the system is cheaper. And, if the U.S. and other major markets go this way the small "emerging countries" may have no real choice.
I remember reading about them in "Architects of the Web". They were originally founded as Progressive Networks, and their stated mission was to be good citizens first and then good businessmen. They moved - proudly - into a low-rent neighborhood with the goal of helping to clean it up, and sought to provide useful tools with interesting applications. Then they had an IPO.
According to their website they still donate five percent of their income to charity. Rob Glaser is still their CEO (he founded it in 1994). But the President and Cheif Operating Officer is Larry Jacobson former President and COO of Ticketmaster (see here).
Personally I think that they have a right to develop the technology in the same way that we have a right to avoid it like the plague that it is. I'm curious to see how long it takes before they invoke the DMCA.
Whether they do or not, it seems that things have changed since they had that IPO.