I thought that line about protocols was interesting also. Remembering the article a month or so back when they were talking about patented password update schemes:P. Do you think the EU would specifically outlaw enforcement of these kinds of patents? I wonder if they know what's really going on with that. And, I wonder if this would be a good way to encourage them to not allow patents on pure thought.:)
Re:Will the recorders get banned via the DMCA?
on
RIAA To Target CD-R
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· Score: 1
Big companies can't attack other big companies. It's in section 3412(b) Par. 4 of the DMCA.
Eventually even the CD burners that the RIAA members use to make THEIR CDs will wear out, and all of the companies in the industry will go out of business, thereby destroying the RIAA.:)
But of course, the article should have read "We are concerned about CD-R's in the hands of people other than the approved RIAA members."
Look, so some free email site got hacked. Big deal. It isn't like this is some huge central database with all of the private financial and personal information for everyone on the internet. And I know whoever's running this "hotmail" site isn't stupid enough to try to set up such a database since it would be such a massive target for crackers and screw over so many customer, so what's the big deal?
They can't have a valid patent. It is a patent on a pure idea or the use of a generic machine. Those should never be valid patents. Make your ATMs with computers inside and patent them for all I care. Just don't patent pure mathematics.
The simple fact of the matter is, that Linux is for 'rocket scientist' types, and geeks. The ordinary man in the street simply cannot get past the first hurdle of Linux usage.
The moment you try to explaing 'fdisk' and 'lilo' to a non-technical user they run screaming back to their cosy Microsoft
world.
But I think that's a good thing. I've been using Linux for years and years now, I switched from NetBSD 0.8 (which gives you a clue how long). I do not like the idea that Linux is dumbing itself down to compete with Windows.
I disagree.
GUIs and systems that are easy to start using are not inherently evil. I despise this attitude that because "I know something very well because I have been there from the start and learned as I went along, all others who follow must suffer as I did." or "If you're stupid, please go away and use your stupid-person OS."
That's a great way to make sure that your little secret discovery will never be embraced by anyone outside of a tiny proportion of the population. If you think, as I do, that almost everyone would be better off if they used an OS other than MS or Mac or even Solaris (which I'm using right now), then you ought to be trying to make things easier for people to get started.
Not everyone needs to compile their own kernel and truthfully I have only looked at the kernel code once, and I never bothered trying to compile or configure it. Why? I just don't care. It works, and it lets me do what I want. I can write programs and documents and do all the things I love to do, and I get to do it in a cheap UNIX where noone is going to come and break down my door to let me participate in a "special license validation service offer", or get sent to jail.
When I installed it, I just plopped in the disk and the CD and it basically did everything for me. I think having used various types of UNIX over the years made it easier, but it was still easy.
Truthfully, the Linux GUIs look a lot like Windows. Sure the buttons look different and the colors are different, but a great deal of it is very similar. There's nothing wrong with this because you shouldn't look at it as "You're trying to look like Windows", but "You're trying to make your GUI look like the standards that have evolved over the past 15 years". There's nothing wrong with taking what other people have done in terms of making GUIs easier to use and trying to implement those ideas.
The key here is that Linux must be made in such a way that the casual user can get far enough into it to get hooked, without making them stray too far from the familiar. Then, they will be able to use their standard tools (email/browser/word processing/spreadsheet/etc...) in a familiar environment that will crash on them a lot less than their old one did. There is nothing wrong with using Linux like this.
There will be those who get interested and want to go deeper into the system and start trying other things. Most geeks who would go this far have already heard of Linux and are using it. That means there have to be ways for the casual user to start to poke around at some of the more obscure things after he/she is comfortable with the basics of getting work done. But, the process should not be set up so that they have to learn everything all at once and have to feel stupid because everyone else using Linux knows everything already. That's the mark of arrogance and/or poor design, and it will be doing the work of Microsoft for them.
So, "making it easier to start" is not the same as "dumbing down". There will always be terminals and source code and compilers if people want to use them, but you shouldn't force people to use them just because you happen to know how to use it, or because you had to learn the hard way. There is no "right way" or "wrong way" to use Linux, and you shouldn't attack people who choose to do things differently than you do, or who aren't interested in the things you're interested in. Linux can be much more than a hobbyist toy, but people need to stop acting so high and mighty and figure out ways to let the rest of the world join in.
Nod, it's true. You just haven't heard it because they found a candy bar wrapper at a dump outside of Cincinatti that could be related to the Chandra Levy case, and the news media has its priorities straight.
Microsoft has just reported on its website that the hotmail/passport servers will be down indefinitely because the programmers and technicians who are supposed to fix them can't log into their passport accounts to access their tools to fix the problem.
But that's not true. Every time a new protocol/machine for sending/receiving bits of information comes along everything that's been patented can be repatented. Think about it...people get patents for doing things over wireless networks that they could never get patents for on a single computer. Heck, people get patents for "do a well-known thing" "on the internet" or "with pictures".
So, it won't ever stop, and not only that, but people can ALWAYS find ways to trivially extend a current patented idea to get another 20 years out of it. Just take any software patent and figure out ways to improve it. Chances are, you could come up with some patentable improvements within an hour or two, and if enough people patent enough trivial advances over time the patents never really wear out.
Ummm...they should be able to copyright it, but not patent it. What they did was patent a piece of pure mathematics.
They found a way to map an element of l^2 to another element of l^2 in such a way that the second sequence uses fewer bits to store the most important data.
Then, they created an inverse map which took the most important data in the second representation of l^2 and mapped it back to the original l^2.
It is just pure math. Numbers get mapped to numbers using a function, and then something close to the original numbers are recovered using the inverse map.
That's it. So, they solved a hard math problem. Great. So they solved a word problem (a math problem where the numbers represent things in the real world). The algorithm is still a pure math problem. Do you remember in school how math books introduced a formula and gave you about 20 problems using pure numbers and then a bunch with words that related to the real world? There is no difference between solving the purely numerical problems and the word problems. It's all still pure math.
Does this mean that if I solve RH I should get a patent on my proof if I say "And I can do this proof on the internet."?
You shouldn't be able to patent pure ideas, and every software patent ever created is a pure idea. You can say what you want about tying things to machines and whatnot, but when you apply math to real-world cases, you're still solving word problems, which are still pure math problems.
Math is damn hard, but just because coming up with a pure idea is hard doesn't mean you should be able to patent it because you managed to fool the court system.
Ok, I didn't mean literally any old random connection like a port scan or something...but still the idea that you can connect to something intentionally and the fact that they want you to connect can make it so that someone has to shuffle source code to someone else is still scary to me.
As I wrote in the post a few posts down, you can't make this optional. This is a HUGE change, and it would require that programs with GPL and NGPL code (network GPL -- with the extra requirement) be licensed under NGPL. One of the reasons that the GPL has worked so well is that there's only one of it.
What if I write a program and I want it under the GPL and not the NGPL, then can I specify that you can never use this in an NGPL'ed program? Maybe I never want public performances of my program to force someone to do something. Now what? You will need three licenses:
1. Public performances with no source release are ok but you can add the other requirement later.
2. Public performances with no code release are ok and you can never change this to make public performances require code release.
3. Public performances require you to release the source.
That's just f*cking great. Now every major project can get into a flamewar over whether this is a good idea, and there can be huge forks of every major OS/FS endeavor as people pick sides and start writing duplicate code under every version of the license. I can't imagine that an optional requirement like this could ever be a good thing. Do it, or don't do it, but don't have this being optional.
This kind of logic like "there's a problem so we need to *do* something about it" is why there are so many f*cked up laws in this country. Think things through and don't make drastic changes unless it's completely necessary. Sort of like how "the big bad internet" is letting people "steal our valuable IP" so we better "do something about it", and viola, DMCA. Nice.
Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this is a bad idea. But the thought that merely setting up a listen socket, and having someone connect to that socket can force me to give them the code is scary.
The problem is that MUDs don't work the way other types of software seem to. There are usually a few programs in a certain category, and people tend to stick to those main programs without forking much.
MUDs are very different. Most people don't write their own code from scratch. They will use a program that already exists, and they will take the program and modify it. Those modifications are what make the games unique and interesting. People also don't want to share those modifications with their players or else they lose that unique and itneresting factor. I don't blame people for not wanting to keep the code secret. So, I think the "Reduced freedom" actually leads to more interesting programs in this case.
So, if someone comes along and wants to use a premade starting codebase, they would stay away from anything using the new GPL version if they intend to have surprises and unique features in their game, because once they connect it to the internet and let people log in, they will be forced to give out the code to anyone who connects. So, the utility of a "generic" MUD under this type of a license would be very limited.
Also, I have a feeling that any 'public performance' distribution requirement will be an optional clause in the GPL, rather than an across-the-board requirement.
How do you make an optional clause out of this? Is it that the author or authors get to pick if they want this requirement or not? If it's never possible to require this extra feature because it's truly optional, then why bother? If it isn't optional, you fork the license into GPL and NGPL (network GPL) and you have to pick one of them. Based on how the license would have to work, GPL + NGPL = NGPL, so eventually everything could get drawn into NGPL. One of the reasons that the GPL has worked so well is that there's only one of it, so having two licenses cannot be good. This would not be a trivial fork of the license. The FSF has argued over much smaller points before, so I doubt that the clause can be made optional.
So, are you saying that if I write a MUD under the GPL, and someone telnets to it, I will have to give them the sourcecode for my MUD?
This doesn't sound too good to me. It will kill the GPL as a viable license for writing MUD codebases (and probably other kinds of games where you don't want the users to know all the secrets).
And plz don't tell me to put all of the information into data files and just have a GPLed driver. If the license is making major design decisions for you, then there's something wrong.
According to section 1343.4(d) of the DMCA, I quote: "...an entity may initiate a lawsuit regarding something in CyberSpace: The _Dangerous_ Internet, only if said entity has a net worth of over $500million, is on the list of Government Approved Plaintiffs, they're suing so they can "protect our children from pR0n and h4X0rz", and has brib^H^H^H^H contributed at least $4million to congressional and presidential campaigns during the last two election cycles..." and so forth and so on. You may be SOL unless you work for something on the approved list like the RIAA or MPAA. Sorry:(
Wouldn't this fall under the law of patents where you patent everything ever invented but you say that "it gets made with nanotech". Kind of like patenting every idea imagined by saying "it gets done on the internet."
Unless you make Patent void when the inventor dies, it'll keep on happening.
Cool. Then the cost of defending against a patent lawsuit is reduced to the cost of hiring a hitman to kill the patent holder. That's gotta be cheaper than a million bucks.
The thing that bugs me about this is that Microsoft is basically telling OEMs how to use the software that they have paid for.
ROFL...you don't have the right to use your property. If you did, software patents wouldn't exist.
Except that all MS will have to do is charge drastically different rates to sites that are exclusively working with MS and those which work with different sources.
No. No. No. There are different costs involved in getting creations to you. There is a) producing the art/music/pictures/software/books...whatever.. this includes paying for the time the creator spends making the stuff, and the materials used, and other ancillary expenses like advertising, and b) the costs of distributing the creations.
Even though part b) now costs (almost) nothing, somehow you still have to pay for part a). What that means effectively is that you have to make distribution harder, or else part a) will never get paid off, since as soon as part b) is started, noone else will pay.
I don't see any good way to get around this. The people who make stuff must be paid somehow for their time and work. But, the only ways I can think of involve nerfing machines and tightening the screws to stamp out freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
Now wait a fucking minute.
Getting the bits sent to your computer doesn't constitute getting a "material" copy of the work,
but having those same bits stored in RAM is considered a "tangible" copy in a fixed medium?
---->
I thought that line about protocols was interesting also. Remembering the article a month or so back when they were talking about patented password update schemes :P. Do you think the EU would specifically outlaw enforcement of these kinds of patents? I wonder if they know what's really going on with that. And, I wonder if this would be a good way to encourage them to not allow patents on pure thought. :)
Big companies can't attack other big companies. It's in section 3412(b) Par. 4 of the DMCA.
The difference is that it's "digital" this time, and that makes all of the difference.
Eventually even the CD burners that the RIAA members use to make THEIR CDs will wear out, and all of the companies in the industry will go out of business, thereby destroying the RIAA. :)
But of course, the article should have read "We are concerned about CD-R's in the hands of people other than the approved RIAA members."
Look, so some free email site got hacked. Big deal. It isn't like this is some huge central database with all of the private financial and personal information for everyone on the internet. And I know whoever's running this "hotmail" site isn't stupid enough to try to set up such a database since it would be such a massive target for crackers and screw over so many customer, so what's the big deal?
They can't have a valid patent. It is a patent on a pure idea or the use of a generic machine. Those should never be valid patents. Make your ATMs with computers inside and patent them for all I care. Just don't patent pure mathematics.
The simple fact of the matter is, that Linux is for 'rocket scientist' types, and geeks. The ordinary man in the street simply cannot get past the first hurdle of Linux usage.
The moment you try to explaing 'fdisk' and 'lilo' to a non-technical user they run screaming back to their cosy Microsoft world.
But I think that's a good thing. I've been using Linux for years and years now, I switched from NetBSD 0.8 (which gives you a clue how long). I do not like the idea that Linux is dumbing itself down to compete with Windows.
I disagree.
GUIs and systems that are easy to start using are not inherently evil. I despise this attitude that because "I know something very well because I have been there from the start and learned as I went along, all others who follow must suffer as I did." or "If you're stupid, please go away and use your stupid-person OS."
That's a great way to make sure that your little secret discovery will never be embraced by anyone outside of a tiny proportion of the population. If you think, as I do, that almost everyone would be better off if they used an OS other than MS or Mac or even Solaris (which I'm using right now), then you ought to be trying to make things easier for people to get started.
Not everyone needs to compile their own kernel and truthfully I have only looked at the kernel code once, and I never bothered trying to compile or configure it. Why? I just don't care. It works, and it lets me do what I want. I can write programs and documents and do all the things I love to do, and I get to do it in a cheap UNIX where noone is going to come and break down my door to let me participate in a "special license validation service offer", or get sent to jail.
When I installed it, I just plopped in the disk and the CD and it basically did everything for me. I think having used various types of UNIX over the years made it easier, but it was still easy.
Truthfully, the Linux GUIs look a lot like Windows. Sure the buttons look different and the colors are different, but a great deal of it is very similar. There's nothing wrong with this because you shouldn't look at it as "You're trying to look like Windows", but "You're trying to make your GUI look like the standards that have evolved over the past 15 years". There's nothing wrong with taking what other people have done in terms of making GUIs easier to use and trying to implement those ideas.
The key here is that Linux must be made in such a way that the casual user can get far enough into it to get hooked, without making them stray too far from the familiar. Then, they will be able to use their standard tools (email/browser/word processing/spreadsheet/etc...) in a familiar environment that will crash on them a lot less than their old one did. There is nothing wrong with using Linux like this.
There will be those who get interested and want to go deeper into the system and start trying other things. Most geeks who would go this far have already heard of Linux and are using it. That means there have to be ways for the casual user to start to poke around at some of the more obscure things after he/she is comfortable with the basics of getting work done. But, the process should not be set up so that they have to learn everything all at once and have to feel stupid because everyone else using Linux knows everything already. That's the mark of arrogance and/or poor design, and it will be doing the work of Microsoft for them.
So, "making it easier to start" is not the same as "dumbing down". There will always be terminals and source code and compilers if people want to use them, but you shouldn't force people to use them just because you happen to know how to use it, or because you had to learn the hard way. There is no "right way" or "wrong way" to use Linux, and you shouldn't attack people who choose to do things differently than you do, or who aren't interested in the things you're interested in. Linux can be much more than a hobbyist toy, but people need to stop acting so high and mighty and figure out ways to let the rest of the world join in.
Nod, it's true. You just haven't heard it because they found a candy bar wrapper at a dump outside of Cincinatti that could be related to the Chandra Levy case, and the news media has its priorities straight.
Microsoft has just reported on its website that the hotmail/passport servers will be down indefinitely because the programmers and technicians who are supposed to fix them can't log into their passport accounts to access their tools to fix the problem.
More on this at 11.
But that's not true. Every time a new protocol/machine for sending/receiving bits of information comes along everything that's been patented can be repatented. Think about it...people get patents for doing things over wireless networks that they could never get patents for on a single computer. Heck, people get patents for "do a well-known thing" "on the internet" or "with pictures".
So, it won't ever stop, and not only that, but people can ALWAYS find ways to trivially extend a current patented idea to get another 20 years out of it. Just take any software patent and figure out ways to improve it. Chances are, you could come up with some patentable improvements within an hour or two, and if enough people patent enough trivial advances over time the patents never really wear out.
Ummm...they should be able to copyright it, but not patent it. What they did was patent a piece of pure mathematics.
They found a way to map an element of l^2 to another element of l^2 in such a way that the second sequence uses fewer bits to store the most important data.
Then, they created an inverse map which took the most important data in the second representation of l^2 and mapped it back to the original l^2.
It is just pure math. Numbers get mapped to numbers using a function, and then something close to the original numbers are recovered using the inverse map.
That's it. So, they solved a hard math problem. Great. So they solved a word problem (a math problem where the numbers represent things in the real world). The algorithm is still a pure math problem. Do you remember in school how math books introduced a formula and gave you about 20 problems using pure numbers and then a bunch with words that related to the real world? There is no difference between solving the purely numerical problems and the word problems. It's all still pure math.
Does this mean that if I solve RH I should get a patent on my proof if I say "And I can do this proof on the internet."?
You shouldn't be able to patent pure ideas, and every software patent ever created is a pure idea. You can say what you want about tying things to machines and whatnot, but when you apply math to real-world cases, you're still solving word problems, which are still pure math problems.
Math is damn hard, but just because coming up with a pure idea is hard doesn't mean you should be able to patent it because you managed to fool the court system.
I never thought I would say this, but I hope Microsoft gets sued, fights this patent, and wins.
Ok, I didn't mean literally any old random connection like a port scan or something...but still the idea that you can connect to something intentionally and the fact that they want you to connect can make it so that someone has to shuffle source code to someone else is still scary to me.
As I wrote in the post a few posts down, you can't make this optional. This is a HUGE change, and it would require that programs with GPL and NGPL code (network GPL -- with the extra requirement) be licensed under NGPL. One of the reasons that the GPL has worked so well is that there's only one of it.
What if I write a program and I want it under the GPL and not the NGPL, then can I specify that you can never use this in an NGPL'ed program? Maybe I never want public performances of my program to force someone to do something. Now what? You will need three licenses:
1. Public performances with no source release are ok but you can add the other requirement later.
2. Public performances with no code release are ok and you can never change this to make public performances require code release.
3. Public performances require you to release the source.
That's just f*cking great. Now every major project can get into a flamewar over whether this is a good idea, and there can be huge forks of every major OS/FS endeavor as people pick sides and start writing duplicate code under every version of the license. I can't imagine that an optional requirement like this could ever be a good thing. Do it, or don't do it, but don't have this being optional.
This kind of logic like "there's a problem so we need to *do* something about it" is why there are so many f*cked up laws in this country. Think things through and don't make drastic changes unless it's completely necessary. Sort of like how "the big bad internet" is letting people "steal our valuable IP" so we better "do something about it", and viola, DMCA. Nice.
Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this is a bad idea. But the thought that merely setting up a listen socket, and having someone connect to that socket can force me to give them the code is scary.
The problem is that MUDs don't work the way other types of software seem to. There are usually a few programs in a certain category, and people tend to stick to those main programs without forking much.
MUDs are very different. Most people don't write their own code from scratch. They will use a program that already exists, and they will take the program and modify it. Those modifications are what make the games unique and interesting. People also don't want to share those modifications with their players or else they lose that unique and itneresting factor. I don't blame people for not wanting to keep the code secret. So, I think the "Reduced freedom" actually leads to more interesting programs in this case.
So, if someone comes along and wants to use a premade starting codebase, they would stay away from anything using the new GPL version if they intend to have surprises and unique features in their game, because once they connect it to the internet and let people log in, they will be forced to give out the code to anyone who connects. So, the utility of a "generic" MUD under this type of a license would be very limited.
Also, I have a feeling that any 'public performance' distribution requirement will be an optional clause in the GPL, rather than an across-the-board requirement.
How do you make an optional clause out of this? Is it that the author or authors get to pick if they want this requirement or not? If it's never possible to require this extra feature because it's truly optional, then why bother? If it isn't optional, you fork the license into GPL and NGPL (network GPL) and you have to pick one of them. Based on how the license would have to work, GPL + NGPL = NGPL, so eventually everything could get drawn into NGPL. One of the reasons that the GPL has worked so well is that there's only one of it, so having two licenses cannot be good. This would not be a trivial fork of the license. The FSF has argued over much smaller points before, so I doubt that the clause can be made optional.
So, are you saying that if I write a MUD under the GPL, and someone telnets to it, I will have to give them the sourcecode for my MUD?
This doesn't sound too good to me. It will kill the GPL as a viable license for writing MUD codebases (and probably other kinds of games where you don't want the users to know all the secrets).
And plz don't tell me to put all of the information into data files and just have a GPLed driver. If the license is making major design decisions for you, then there's something wrong.
According to section 1343.4(d) of the DMCA, I quote: "...an entity may initiate a lawsuit regarding something in CyberSpace: The _Dangerous_ Internet, only if said entity has a net worth of over $500million, is on the list of Government Approved Plaintiffs, they're suing so they can "protect our children from pR0n and h4X0rz", and has brib^H^H^H^H contributed at least $4million to congressional and presidential campaigns during the last two election cycles..." and so forth and so on. You may be SOL unless you work for something on the approved list like the RIAA or MPAA. Sorry :(
Wouldn't this fall under the law of patents where you patent everything ever invented but you say that "it gets made with nanotech". Kind of like patenting every idea imagined by saying "it gets done on the internet."
Unless you make Patent void when the inventor dies, it'll keep on happening.
Cool. Then the cost of defending against a patent lawsuit is reduced to the cost of hiring a hitman to kill the patent holder. That's gotta be cheaper than a million bucks.
The thing that bugs me about this is that Microsoft is basically telling OEMs how to use the software that they have paid for. ROFL...you don't have the right to use your property. If you did, software patents wouldn't exist.
Bah, just get rid of the government's intervention by allowing unconstitutional software patents to exist, then let anyone code anything they want.
If this message doesn't make sense either, then I'm too sleepy to type straight, so you will have to decipher it yourself.
Bah, just get rid of the government's intervention through unconstitutional software patents to exist, then let anyone put code anything they want.
Except that all MS will have to do is charge drastically different rates to sites that are exclusively working with MS and those which work with different sources.
Even though part b) now costs (almost) nothing, somehow you still have to pay for part a). What that means effectively is that you have to make distribution harder, or else part a) will never get paid off, since as soon as part b) is started, noone else will pay.
I don't see any good way to get around this. The people who make stuff must be paid somehow for their time and work. But, the only ways I can think of involve nerfing machines and tightening the screws to stamp out freedom.