Just wanted to point out that privacy is a right (theoretically) guaranteed by the Constitution of the State of California.
Tomorrow I'm going to get on the phone and start asking around which legislators are willing to pass a law guaranteeing the right to use crypto to all Californians. Any groups willing to back something like this?
perdida's interpretation is a valid one. The problem in the Ask Slashdot is that the employee's contract give the employer legal hooks to try to appropriate something that the employee did outside of work. The issue is not one of the employee trying to use company time on their own project, but the company trying to own something that was built on the employee's personal time.
Also, I don't find it at all reasonable that if the employee FINISHES a project on company time, that the company should get _exclusive_ rights to the whole thing. This may be the way the law or the contract is interpreted, but it doesn't make it any less unreasonable.
In general, I think the contracts they make you sign these days stink to high heaven. They are designed less to represent the important interests of the company (being able to use what their employees produce, and in some cases preventing competitors from doing the same), and more intersted in grabbing as much intellectual "property" as is legally possible from the employee. It's less about profitability and productivity, and more about control.
Hey, perdida, I'm the one who moderated your first post down. And your second post up. If slashdot works as advertised, both of 'em will go away once I post this.
My thinking was this: I actually wanted an answer to the question in the topic, 'cause I could see myself in the same sort of situation. And your comment didn't do that. It expressed a general sentiment (that I agree with!) but was redundant to people who think the same as you, alienating to people who didn't ("labor should not be alienated"), and useless in terms of giving us any tools to actually do something about the situation. And you didn't even bother to proofread your post!
Your second post was what you should've done in the first place. Though, still, lay off the jargon (e.g. "pro creativity workspaces"). It's not gonna impress anyone who doesn't agree with you already. And don't attack your friends.:)
Going to DoubleClick's opt-out page is the lame way to handle this because you still end up playing by their rules.
They waste your time making you go to a page to opt out of a system they shouldn't have put you in in the first place, and then THEY STILL SHOW YOU ADS.
The right way to spend your time is setting up the JunkBuster HTTP proxy, which screens out both ads and cookies from offending sites such as doubleclick and anyone else you put on your list.
The JunkBuster HTTP proxy is GPL'ed. You can get it at http://www.junkbuster.com/.
Hm, LyX is okay, but doesn't deserve to call itself 1.x. For instance, a friend of mine made a document with tables in LyX 1.1.3. When I tried to view it in 1.1.4, LyX said it no longer supported that table format and SUGGESTED DOWNGRADING TO AN EARLIER VERSION! Then it segfaulted.
That and I think the xforms library should just die.
I don't think GPL is quite the right copyleft license for music. Releasing the source just isn't that important -- you can listen for lyrics, play along with the music, and even filter drum tracks and what not out of a finished recording. Unlike for a computer program, "wrong" interpretations of the music can lead to new works themselves.
I am slowly putting together a copyleft license for music called the Free Music Public License. When I have time (sometime next week), I'll have the terms up at http://gamh.cx/fmpl, and ask for comments from musicians, then turn it into a real license with the help of a lawyer. My band (God Ate My Homework) will be using this license. We hope others will follow us.
I'm from an online band called God Ate My Homework (http://www.gamh.cx).
As a band, we use Napster for two reasons.
1) To determine which of our songs is most popular. For instance, we see "Secret Asian Man" a lot, but hardly ever see "Target Audience".
2) To learn from other songs. For instance, Hobbes (fellow band member) downloaded Seven Days by Sting as an example of 5/4 time, after he heard it on his sister's CD.
And of course, we do get a lot of stuff off napster just 'cause we like it, including a lot of songs by Kristin Hersh (d'oh). Guess it's time to buy one of her CD's.
Anyways, it's refreshing to see a one-sided article about this situation that isn't total bullshit.
Shouldn't she be able to reprint the ads by permission of Fair Use? Much like news programs being able to re-broadcast campaign advertisements when they do a segment on them.
Here's the e-mail I put together, use if it you like. Hey, I ripped part of it from RMS myself.:)
It has come to my attention that Amazon has obtained a US patent (5,960,411) on an important and obvious idea for E-commerce: the idea that your command in a web browser to buy a certain item can carry along information about your identity. This alone would be simply an annoyance; the U.S. Patent office is regularly misled into granting obvious patents. But Amazon has used the patent aggressively, to damage a competitor's business. This is unacceptable.
I was planning to do some of my Christmas shopping on Amazon.com. I also run a fairly high-traffic web site, and was hoping to make a little extra money for band by joining the Associates Program.
Instead, as of today, I am boycotting amazon.com. My boycott will continue until (A) the patent gets declared invalid in court, (B) Amazon drops the patent itself (C) Amazon goes out of business. (B) is clearly the most honorable course to take. If it takes the court system to show Amazon that its actions are wrong, I will have serious reservations about shopping there in the future.
Though I've come to accept that slashdot headlines are usually pretty inexact. If you really want to know what the article is about, you have to read the article.
Requiring people to submit their changes goes against their right to privacy. This was one of the two problems with the ASPL (the other was the termination clause).
For practical reasons, sometimes it's nice to be able to distribute binaries without source code. The primary issue is that the source code is available.
Simplicity isn't as much of an issue for older licenses like the GPL, simply because they're old and we trust them. However, it seems like it is an important selling point for a new license (because it's new, so we don't trust it).
It just seems that you're not a member of it. Pity.:)
The interesting thing about GPL'ed software is that someone making money off it was never a difficult issue to begin with. Money was made the first time an FSF Deluxe Distribution was sold.
The FSF owns the copyrights to many of the programs whose GPL Corel has infringed. The FSF presumably has enough money to successfully sue them. It'd be nice to see this tested in court.
Remember, free software IS the real world, as it has been from the beginning. Just some people are too clouded by illusion to find it.:)
What about forming a massive grass-roots media? You could film politicians in their offices, corporate board meetings, operations of secret government agencies, all undetected and, if you're careful, anonymously.
IMHO my question is not what happens when the bad guys can take pictures of everybody, but what happens when the good guys start taking pictures of THEM.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wanted to point out that privacy is a right (theoretically) guaranteed by the Constitution of the State of California.
Tomorrow I'm going to get on the phone and start asking around which legislators are willing to pass a law guaranteeing the right to use crypto to all Californians. Any groups willing to back something like this?
perdida's interpretation is a valid one. The problem in the Ask Slashdot is that the employee's contract give the employer legal hooks to try to appropriate something that the employee did outside of work. The issue is not one of the employee trying to use company time on their own project, but the company trying to own something that was built on the employee's personal time.
Also, I don't find it at all reasonable that if the employee FINISHES a project on company time, that the company should get _exclusive_ rights to the whole thing. This may be the way the law or the contract is interpreted, but it doesn't make it any less unreasonable.
In general, I think the contracts they make you sign these days stink to high heaven. They are designed less to represent the important interests of the company (being able to use what their employees produce, and in some cases preventing competitors from doing the same), and more intersted in grabbing as much intellectual "property" as is legally possible from the employee. It's less about profitability and productivity, and more about control.
Hey, perdida, I'm the one who moderated your first post down. And your second post up. If slashdot works as advertised, both of 'em will go away once I post this.
:)
My thinking was this: I actually wanted an answer to the question in the topic, 'cause I could see myself in the same sort of situation. And your comment didn't do that. It expressed a general sentiment (that I agree with!) but was redundant to people who think the same as you, alienating to people who didn't ("labor should not be alienated"), and useless in terms of giving us any tools to actually do something about the situation. And you didn't even bother to proofread your post!
Your second post was what you should've done in the first place. Though, still, lay off the jargon (e.g. "pro creativity workspaces"). It's not gonna impress anyone who doesn't agree with you already. And don't attack your friends.
Well, you certainly have Chutzpah... :)
Going to DoubleClick's opt-out page is the lame way to handle this because you still end up playing by their rules.
They waste your time making you go to a page to opt out of a system they shouldn't have put you in in the first place, and then THEY STILL SHOW YOU ADS.
The right way to spend your time is setting up the JunkBuster HTTP proxy, which screens out both ads and cookies from offending sites such as doubleclick and anyone else you put on your list.
The JunkBuster HTTP proxy is GPL'ed. You can get it at http://www.junkbuster.com/.
Hm, LyX is okay, but doesn't deserve to call itself 1.x. For instance, a friend of mine made a document with tables in LyX 1.1.3. When I tried to view it in 1.1.4, LyX said it no longer supported that table format and SUGGESTED DOWNGRADING TO AN EARLIER VERSION! Then it segfaulted.
That and I think the xforms library should just die.
I don't think GPL is quite the right copyleft license for music. Releasing the source just isn't that important -- you can listen for lyrics, play along with the music, and even filter drum tracks and what not out of a finished recording. Unlike for a computer program, "wrong" interpretations of the music can lead to new works themselves.
I am slowly putting together a copyleft license for music called the Free Music Public License. When I have time (sometime next week), I'll have the terms up at http://gamh.cx/fmpl, and ask for comments from musicians, then turn it into a real license with the help of a lawyer. My band (God Ate My Homework) will be using this license. We hope others will follow us.
I'm from an online band called God Ate My Homework (http://www.gamh.cx).
As a band, we use Napster for two reasons.
1) To determine which of our songs is most popular. For instance, we see "Secret Asian Man" a lot, but hardly ever see "Target Audience".
2) To learn from other songs. For instance, Hobbes (fellow band member) downloaded Seven Days by Sting as an example of 5/4 time, after he heard it on his sister's CD.
And of course, we do get a lot of stuff off napster just 'cause we like it, including a lot of songs by Kristin Hersh (d'oh). Guess it's time to buy one of her CD's.
Anyways, it's refreshing to see a one-sided article about this situation that isn't total bullshit.
Shouldn't she be able to reprint the ads by permission of Fair Use? Much like news programs being able to re-broadcast campaign advertisements when they do a segment on them.
Here's the e-mail I put together, use if it you like. Hey, I ripped part of it from RMS myself. :)
It has come to my attention that Amazon has obtained a US patent (5,960,411)
on an important and obvious idea for E-commerce: the idea that your command
in a web browser to buy a certain item can carry along information about your
identity. This alone would be simply an annoyance; the U.S. Patent office
is regularly misled into granting obvious patents. But Amazon has used the
patent aggressively, to damage a competitor's business. This is unacceptable.
I was planning to do some of my Christmas shopping on Amazon.com. I also run a
fairly high-traffic web site, and was hoping to make a little extra money for
band by joining the Associates Program.
Instead, as of today, I am boycotting amazon.com. My boycott will continue
until (A) the patent gets declared invalid in court, (B) Amazon drops the patent
itself (C) Amazon goes out of business. (B) is clearly the most honorable
course to take. If it takes the court system to show Amazon that its actions
are wrong, I will have serious reservations about shopping there in the future.
On closer inspection, no.
Good point.
Though I've come to accept that slashdot headlines are usually pretty inexact. If you really want to know what the article is about, you have to read the article.
Two issues with the SPL:
Requiring people to submit their changes goes against their right to privacy. This was one of the two problems with the ASPL (the other was the termination clause).
For practical reasons, sometimes it's nice to be able to distribute binaries without source code. The primary issue is that the source code is available.
Simplicity isn't as much of an issue for older licenses like the GPL, simply because they're old and we trust them. However, it seems like it is an important selling point for a new license (because it's new, so we don't trust it).
Also, is the SPL compatible with the GPL?
It just seems that you're not a member of it. Pity. :)
:)
The interesting thing about GPL'ed software is that someone making money off it was never a difficult issue to begin with. Money was made the first time an FSF Deluxe Distribution was sold.
The FSF owns the copyrights to many of the programs whose GPL Corel has infringed. The FSF presumably has enough money to successfully sue them. It'd be nice to see this tested in court.
Remember, free software IS the real world, as it has been from the beginning. Just some people are too clouded by illusion to find it.
What about forming a massive grass-roots media? You could film politicians in their offices, corporate board meetings, operations of secret government agencies, all undetected and, if you're careful, anonymously.
IMHO my question is not what happens when the bad guys can take pictures of everybody, but what happens when the good guys start taking pictures of THEM.
-ensor