I think walmart and the other guy need a good solid kick in the pants
Rather, I'd look at those who make law.. you know, those people you (assuming you are old enough) you get to vote on every now and then..
Honestly, I think they both do. Wal-Mart's got one coming because of this and a ton of other things (Like prominently posting decals on the doors saying "Service Animals Welcome" with the international Handicapped symbol on it- but then their people tell my wife and our housemate (who are both legitimately handicapped and have two smaller, but certified service dogs) that they can't have dogs in the store. "Is it a seeing eye dog? Are you blind?" Both questions are quite bogus to ask (and open you up to a Civil suit...) per the ADA- but we get this all the time in spite of the fact that the dogs have service animal vests on them.) And the politicians have one coming for all the frickin' stupid laws they've been passing of late. Much of the stuff's made us look the laughing stock to the rest of the world- or worse, made many countries that wouldn't have hated us to hate us now.
Indeed. But the problem is, trying to convince some that ease of human reading is an important technical distinction is not so easily done. Again, it's all down to us not understanding what the big deal is with Microsoft- unless they're trying to maintain a monopoly position, which might be problematic for them.
OpenXML is patent ridden and in a way that is problematic at best, compared to OpenDocument. ODF is also patent ridden, but unlike MS' offering, the patents have free licensing for conformant implementations and conformant means to the official stated spec, with the possibility of extensions becoming part thereof- unlike MS' offering which requires you to meet MS' shifting definition of what is/isn't compliant (i.e. it's not explicitly stated...) and you don't get to add improvements unless MS embraces and extends them themselves (i.e. if you've got extensions and MS doesn't approve of them, you're NOT at all compliant and can be sued for patent infringement...).
Technically, they're the same. This is the reason why people can't understand why MS is insistent on NOT supporting ODF as a format and trying to push OpenXML- unless they've got some ulterior motive. Now, they've little valid excuse for it.
...more profitable long-term. They should know the drill from the Casette Tape and VHS eras; and they massively profited from it and saved a big wodge of cash by going with the flow. But noooo, they have to try and "control" things... Well, it didn't work then and it's going to be difficult to make go now- but we're going to be forced to endure all this shite yet again (and again, and again...) until people quit putting money in these joker's pockets to keep making life miserable for the rest of us just so that they can be filthy stinking rich at our expense.
While it is filesystems involved, it's not the same kind- with Tridge involved with testimony, it'd be more networked filesystems and the servers that provide them. And, NO, MS isn't very open about any of that- to the point that they make it nigh impossible to do so. It's no surprise they don't attend Plugfest- it would show them to be as non-interoperable as we all know them to be on this front.
UPnP AV is a wireline protocol (Which has A/V components to it...) for device discovery and "use", not an API.
NMM is basically an API and is at a much higher level. To compare what we're talking about here you should really compare DirectShow, etc. with NMM, not UPnP.
UPnP is analogous to URB's, etc. within the USB spec. You typically do not see people coding for URB's and talking to the HID layer, etc. for USB devices- unless they're making device drivers or higher-level programmer API's for the devices.
The Computer Take-Back Campaign was canvassing this neighborhood for signatures and all just about a week or so ago.
They've been really aggressive about getting letters, etc. to Jobs and BOD members about doing take-backs on the computers (They already do them on iPods for free...) and to handle the returns in a responsible manner.
It's about networking and device discovery. While you need UPnP to find everything, it doesn't mesh the media playback, etc. seamlessly. NMM is more analogous to DirectPlay and probably HAS a backend for UPnP or can easily enough. If you'd have read up on what NMM was, you'd know this, though...
...and make sure it's an actual *LETTER* for more impact. But, expect them to not give a damn what you actually want.
Probably at this point the ONLY thing to do is to educate as much of the populace at this point and REMOVE people that are currently in office either by referendum or election. Not a single person in Congress really and honestly represents anything other than Corporations.
Yeah, Mplayer can dump the media streams, but unfortunately, if it's DRMed (which is WHY they're mandating the damn format in the first place- so it can be locked down...), you get nada.
Thankfully for me, I've all but given up on the labels shite and the only streams I listen to are things like RenRadio, which don't get impacted by this garbage and won't have to change formats (and I know the broadcaster for RenRadio, we'd find a way to keep from needing to...). I'm sure there's some indie stuff out there as well. As it stands, I've gotten where I like Pop music less and less- and it's all RIAA and their member Lablels' doing. (Why listen to a band when the Label that represents them views me as being worse than a murderer or rapist- never mind that I never did anything to them...)
As it stands, anyone listening to any of the Labels stuff should probably stop now- they obviously don't really want to have you as a customer (only a consumer, which is a different beast- if you want to be one of those, just open up your wallet, they'll be by shortly to lighten it at every opportunity...) and listening to it or buying it only pays for this garbage. I've quit. So should you all.
Though I dislike the fact that this bill is indeed restricting a form of speech, at the same, it is also trying to get parents to pay attention to what their children are doing which is a good idea. They are just going about it the wrong way.
It's NOT trying to do anything of the sort. Doing an ad campaign about it like the anti-drug stuff would be trying to get parents to pay attention to what their children are doing. This, this is all about pandering for votes ("I'm doing all kinds of 'good' stuff for kids...") and asserting control. Do not think for one moment that the populace at large is going to remember this law more than a month out from it being voted into law- they won't because it's not in their minds and they've other things to worry about. What this law will get (because of it's poor drafting and definition) is mis-used on people that the LEOs don't like- it'll get selectively enforced.
Are you sure? I've witnessed first hand checkers at target refuseing to sell movies to underage kids siteing that it was illegal. While I understand that this does not make it true, I've also seen kids get turned away from movie theatres.
Pretty sure. It's some checker shifting blame (either on their own or under instructions from a manager...) for a policy set in place by Target so that the State's to blame on it- this stupidity happens all the time at Target and Wal-Mart (You can't buy any kinds of knife unless you're 18 or older- no law in Texas that applies to that, Wal-Mart chooses to do so all the same. As an aside, there's enough innocuous things they choose to block the sale of without a CSR override on the self-checks to make them almost worthless. Crazy, isn't it?). If this were the case, you'd not need laws like this one in place, because the law would pretty much apply to ESRB ratings and there'd be no need for a new law.
Say you've moved into Tuttle from somewhere else (I know, I know...but accept it for argument's sake for a moment...) and you're selling off some of your old videogame titles. They're rated "T" and you're selling to a minor, so it's okay. Problem is, the game falls under the definitions of a violent game, and the Police Chief doesn't like you- he arrests you for violating the law, where it'd probably never get enforced that way in, nearby Moore or Norman.
It's a stupid, poorly written, and dangerous law. It's just a bunch of legislators grandstanding for votes when they should be removed and replaced (They did say they'd uphold the State and US Constitution in their oaths of office- they're in violation of their oath for having voted for this...). Parents should be protecting the kids, not the government- the only time they should step in is when the parents are derilict in that responsibility and this isn't one of those times.
Nooo... But, you're looking at the wrong answer here...
That sum is sufficient (I'd say that what I've described would cost them a burn rate of about $3M or so, give or take, per month)- but then you don't factor in that the bean counters are the one that made that decision, not the engineers. I can guarantee you they saw something that worked in a similar manner, would probably not fail them (whereas this would be nearly as fault tolerant as the phone system...) and cost them a HELL of a lot less.
Also keep in mind that they did NOT expect to rake in $35M/month in revenues off of this service- something more along the lines of $4-8M/month is what I would have bet on and planned for. If that was the case, $3M just ate a hell of a lot of my profits for redundancy that "wasn't needed".
"You don't get to do it that way- the Co-Lo option gives us the same bandwidth and latency for a lot less money. We're doing it THAT way.
Keep in mind that I didn't talk against multihoming- it's just you're not going to find it easily available at the level of bandwidth and latency Blizzard's needing for WoW AND have a datacenter that's going to provide it to you.
Sprint's Tier-1 facility in Richardson, TX only provides connectivity to Sprint's backbone. Ditto for the AT&T Tier-1 facility that resides in Allen, TX.- you get to go ONLY on AT&T's backbone directly from the facility.
Tier-2 providers go out of their way to be multi-homed to provide redundancy (which is nice), but the Tier-1's don't multihome their facilities unless it's also being a peering point (Why am I bringing in a primary feed from my competitors backbone without a peering arrangement for this facility?!?). But, keep in mind that the Tier-2's typically don't handle enough bandwidth for something like this (It'd swallow the damn thing whole on them if they did it out of the facility... Typically, a Tier-2 doesn't have any more than an OC-3 feed's worth of bandwidth to the backbone(s) for one of their datacenters.). You just don't see that sort of thing unless you're building your own facility or sit on a peering point.
Just because it's relatively "easy" to multihome (I know, I've helped DO that for a former employer...) doesn't mean you want do it- it's not cheap or practical past the T3/DS3 level of bandwidth unless you actually NEED to set up your own datacenter that way. Basically, Blizzard went down the Tier-1 colo option path to save costs on getting access to backbone bandwidth levels and got bit because their provider couldn't give 'em what they needed 100% of the time (IF Blizzard's claims AT&T caused WoW connectivity problems are at least partly true- since they didn't respond immediately with a denial, there's probably at least some truth to it...).
...while you're not an idiot, I can understand where they could end up with one supplier for bandwidth.
1) You need a SLA with each ISP you pull backbone level feed from. You can use InterNAP and hook into the peering points in the US and a few other places, but it's got it's own issues- and if you just use them, you're still with only one ISP; if they fail, you're still up a creek without a paddle.
2) You'd need to frame the servers into one massive data center with a HUGE honking data-pipe from each ISP with BGP routing on the inbound routers from the ISPs to your DMZ to establish one IP address range for the front-facing servers
OR
Come up with some sort of nasty DNS trick to hopefully make the server front-ends transparent to the clients and spread them across multiple IP blocks (Which is what epicRealm did to make their CDN actually completely transparent to client and customer- and to be able to handle dynamic HTTP content...)- but be prepared, because in order for this to work right, you either need to trust the client's state, share state across server pools on different IP blocks, be stateless, or somesuch like the previous.
There's a bunch more, but those above two and the first item will hopefully show you why someone (a bean counter, most likely...) will make the decision to just simply hold the ISP or Tier-1 host (Which is the most likely case here- they're very probably colocated at an AT&T Tier-1 facility...) to the SLA they promised- because it's cheaper and waaay simpler if everything goes right and they're "not to blame" if things go wrong. If you went an alternate route and had a mishap that wasn't server related, then you'd be to blame and have nobody to point fingers at when it all broke (And you just KNOW it will at some point- it always does...:-)
In the US, that concept only applies to Trademarks. You have to explicitly, in writing, abandon your rights to Copyright in the US for it to pass into Public Domain that way if the work originated in this country (Which, sadly, Freespace2 happens to be from) or was specifically registered in this country- and YES, I am very familiar with the concepts involved. I'm an SF Author, accomplished software engineer, and Patent holding inventor. While I don't hold the same understandings as an "IP" attorney, I DO know something about what I'm talking about when it comes to Copyright, Patent, and Trademark Law and how they actually work in this country (Elsewhere may be a different matter, but if they follow the Berne Convention, they all largely work the same way...)
Sorry, it's wishful thinking, but legally speaking, your claim of "abandonment" doesn't apply here- if the successors in interest to Freespace2 sought to pursue the people passing it around, they could legitimately get takedowns (And possibly damage settlements or outright lawsuits...) without a license grant or an official document passing the game content into the Public Domain since it was separate from the game code and the studio explicitly licensed only the code. I suspect that the successors in interest for the PC version that everyone is passing around would be the original publisher of the game, Interplay, such as they are. Chances are, they're more of a shell with Lawyers behind most of the machinations. Something you DEFINITELY don't want attentions from.
There's two key words there, "Congress" and "President".
Congress is the one that's supposed to come up with the laws, including the verbiage, based on their own perceptions and input from their constituents.
That's not the President's job nor is he supposed to be allowed to do so.
But, here we are, with the President and his Administration acting like they're the sole rulers of this country- and effectively, they might be, but the law says different.
Never mind that it's one of the more draconian Copyright enforcement laws ever. (Why did we need a new one, the DMCA didn't do what it was intended to do and made things worse by doing unintended things in the process- this is liable to be even worse...)
Never mind that they're using the lamest damn reason (C'mon Gonzalez, provide us PROOF of claims of it supporting terrorism before making those sorts of claims!)
It's that they're not following the proper procedures and they're openly admitting that a lot of what passes for lawmaking isn't at this point with them claiming that Bush drafted the law.
I'd be upset about that. I'd be asking questions about that.
On whether it makes to the drop-dead date before they enact another "Sonny Bono" on us...
(They should have been honest with us, it really was a "Mickey Mouse(tm)" reason for the expiration extention- the real reason why the law got enacted was to protect Disney's interests in Mickey Mouse(tm)...)
The law's got some specifics, and it covers this one. I believe you actually have to KNOW the person in question for starters, and this doesn't get you even close.
It doesn't really comply with the terms of the EULA, therefore it devolves to Copyright law- which makes it an infringement to provide it. Just because nobody's ordered a takedown, doesn't make it legal.
Yeah, but, that's not the same as...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 2, Informative
...what they're trying for. Unless I have an actual friend that has it, I can't legally obtain the data to PLAY it on my Linux machine, as much as I'd like to do so. What they're trying to do is get the license grant ammended so that it's legit under specific circumstances (i.e. You can't make money off of it, you can resell it, etc...) to distribute the game data with the Open Sourced engine or FOR the same.
Abandonware is NOT legal to copy around as it's NOT legally public domain.
Something goes into the public domain when:
1) The rights owner explicitly places it there.
2) The rights duration expires.
Unless either of those two happens, it's still Copyrighted and the rights to publish (i.e. make and distribute copies) belongs to the rights holder or their successors in interest.
It's infringement, through and through. What the "abandonware campaign" seeks to do is to get the status changed on those titles or get a publishing permission so that they can be distributed legally under whatever conditions they can manage to get the rights holders to grant distribution rights on.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. But the problem is, trying to convince some that ease of human reading is an important technical distinction is not so easily done. Again, it's all down to us not understanding what the big deal is with Microsoft- unless they're trying to maintain a monopoly position, which might be problematic for them.
Not all Chapter 11 filings end up coming out of the Bankruptcy- many end up being converted into a Chapter 7 filing.
Which is SGI going to be?
OpenXML is patent ridden and in a way that is problematic at best, compared to OpenDocument. ODF is also patent ridden, but unlike MS' offering, the patents have free licensing for conformant implementations and conformant means to the official stated spec, with the possibility of extensions becoming part thereof- unlike MS' offering which requires you to meet MS' shifting definition of what is/isn't compliant (i.e. it's not explicitly stated...) and you don't get to add improvements unless MS embraces and extends them themselves (i.e. if you've got extensions and MS doesn't approve of them, you're NOT at all compliant and can be sued for patent infringement...).
Technically, they're the same. This is the reason why people can't understand why MS is insistent on NOT supporting ODF as a format and trying to push OpenXML- unless they've got some ulterior motive. Now, they've little valid excuse for it.
...more profitable long-term. They should know the drill from the Casette Tape and VHS eras; and they massively profited from it and saved a big wodge of cash by going with the flow. But noooo, they have to try and "control" things... Well, it didn't work then and it's going to be difficult to make go now- but we're going to be forced to endure all this shite yet again (and again, and again...) until people quit putting money in these joker's pockets to keep making life miserable for the rest of us just so that they can be filthy stinking rich at our expense.
While it is filesystems involved, it's not the same kind- with Tridge involved with testimony, it'd be more networked filesystems and the servers that provide them. And, NO, MS isn't very open about any of that- to the point that they make it nigh impossible to do so. It's no surprise they don't attend Plugfest- it would show them to be as non-interoperable as we all know them to be on this front.
UPnP AV is a wireline protocol (Which has A/V components to it...) for device discovery and "use", not an API.
NMM is basically an API and is at a much higher level. To compare what we're talking about here you should really compare DirectShow, etc. with NMM, not UPnP.
UPnP is analogous to URB's, etc. within the USB spec. You typically do not see people coding for URB's and talking to the HID layer, etc. for USB devices- unless they're making device drivers or higher-level programmer API's for the devices.
The Computer Take-Back Campaign was canvassing this neighborhood for signatures and all just about a week or so ago.
They've been really aggressive about getting letters, etc. to Jobs and BOD members about doing take-backs on the computers (They already do them on iPods for free...) and to handle the returns in a responsible manner.
Shouldn't post this early in the morning without my IV bottle of coffee...
It's about networking and device discovery. While you need UPnP to find everything, it doesn't mesh the media playback, etc. seamlessly. NMM is more analogous to DirectPlay and probably HAS a backend for UPnP or can easily enough. If you'd have read up on what NMM was, you'd know this, though...
...and make sure it's an actual *LETTER* for more impact. But, expect them to not give a damn what you actually want.
Probably at this point the ONLY thing to do is to educate as much of the populace at this point and REMOVE people that are currently in office either by referendum or election. Not a single person in Congress really and honestly represents anything other than Corporations.
Yeah, Mplayer can dump the media streams, but unfortunately, if it's DRMed (which is WHY they're mandating the damn format in the first place- so it can be locked down...), you get nada.
Thankfully for me, I've all but given up on the labels shite and the only streams I listen to are things like RenRadio, which don't get impacted by this garbage and won't have to change formats (and I know the broadcaster for RenRadio, we'd find a way to keep from needing to...). I'm sure there's some indie stuff out there as well. As it stands, I've gotten where I like Pop music less and less- and it's all RIAA and their member Lablels' doing. (Why listen to a band when the Label that represents them views me as being worse than a murderer or rapist- never mind that I never did anything to them...)
As it stands, anyone listening to any of the Labels stuff should probably stop now- they obviously don't really want to have you as a customer (only a consumer, which is a different beast- if you want to be one of those, just open up your wallet, they'll be by shortly to lighten it at every opportunity...) and listening to it or buying it only pays for this garbage. I've quit. So should you all.
It's NOT trying to do anything of the sort. Doing an ad campaign about it like the anti-drug stuff would be trying to get parents to pay attention to what their children are doing. This, this is all about pandering for votes ("I'm doing all kinds of 'good' stuff for kids...") and asserting control. Do not think for one moment that the populace at large is going to remember this law more than a month out from it being voted into law- they won't because it's not in their minds and they've other things to worry about. What this law will get (because of it's poor drafting and definition) is mis-used on people that the LEOs don't like- it'll get selectively enforced.
Pretty sure. It's some checker shifting blame (either on their own or under instructions from a manager...) for a policy set in place by Target so that the State's to blame on it- this stupidity happens all the time at Target and Wal-Mart (You can't buy any kinds of knife unless you're 18 or older- no law in Texas that applies to that, Wal-Mart chooses to do so all the same. As an aside, there's enough innocuous things they choose to block the sale of without a CSR override on the self-checks to make them almost worthless. Crazy, isn't it?). If this were the case, you'd not need laws like this one in place, because the law would pretty much apply to ESRB ratings and there'd be no need for a new law.
Say you've moved into Tuttle from somewhere else (I know, I know...but accept it for argument's sake for a moment...) and you're selling off some of your old videogame titles. They're rated "T" and you're selling to a minor, so it's okay. Problem is, the game falls under the definitions of a violent game, and the Police Chief doesn't like you- he arrests you for violating the law, where it'd probably never get enforced that way in, nearby Moore or Norman.
It's a stupid, poorly written, and dangerous law. It's just a bunch of legislators grandstanding for votes when they should be removed and replaced (They did say they'd uphold the State and US Constitution in their oaths of office- they're in violation of their oath for having voted for this...). Parents should be protecting the kids, not the government- the only time they should step in is when the parents are derilict in that responsibility and this isn't one of those times.
That sum is sufficient (I'd say that what I've described would cost them a burn rate of about
$3M or so, give or take, per month)- but then you don't factor in that the bean counters are
the one that made that decision, not the engineers. I can guarantee you they saw something
that worked in a similar manner, would probably not fail them (whereas this would be nearly
as fault tolerant as the phone system...) and cost them a HELL of a lot less.
Also keep in mind that they did NOT expect to rake in $35M/month in revenues off of this service-
something more along the lines of $4-8M/month is what I would have bet on and planned for. If that
was the case, $3M just ate a hell of a lot of my profits for redundancy that "wasn't needed".
That, my friend, is why they didn't do it. >:-D
Keep in mind that I didn't talk against multihoming- it's just you're not going to find it easily
available at the level of bandwidth and latency Blizzard's needing for WoW AND have a datacenter that's going to provide it to you.
Sprint's Tier-1 facility in Richardson, TX only provides connectivity to Sprint's backbone.
Ditto for the AT&T Tier-1 facility that resides in Allen, TX.- you get to go ONLY on AT&T's backbone directly from the facility.
Tier-2 providers go out of their way to be multi-homed to provide redundancy (which is nice), but the Tier-1's don't multihome their facilities unless it's also being a peering point (Why am I bringing in a primary feed from my competitors backbone without a peering arrangement for this facility?!?). But, keep in mind that the Tier-2's typically don't handle enough bandwidth for something like this (It'd swallow the damn thing whole on them if they did it out of the facility... Typically, a Tier-2 doesn't have any more than an OC-3 feed's worth of bandwidth to the backbone(s) for one of their datacenters.). You just don't see that sort of thing unless you're building your own facility or sit on a peering point.
Just because it's relatively "easy" to multihome (I know, I've helped DO that for a former employer...) doesn't mean you want do it- it's not cheap or practical past the T3/DS3 level of bandwidth unless you actually NEED to set up your own datacenter that way. Basically, Blizzard went down the Tier-1 colo option path to save costs on getting access to backbone bandwidth levels and got bit because their provider couldn't give 'em what they needed 100% of the time (IF Blizzard's claims AT&T caused WoW connectivity problems are at least partly true- since they didn't respond immediately with a denial, there's probably at least some truth to it...).
...while you're not an idiot, I can understand where they could end up with one supplier for bandwidth.
:-)
1) You need a SLA with each ISP you pull backbone level feed from. You can use InterNAP and hook into the peering points in the US and a few other places, but it's got it's own issues- and if you just use them, you're still with only one ISP; if they fail, you're still up a creek without a paddle.
2) You'd need to frame the servers into one massive data center with a HUGE honking data-pipe from each ISP with BGP routing on the inbound routers from the ISPs to your DMZ to establish one IP address range for the front-facing servers
OR
Come up with some sort of nasty DNS trick to hopefully make the server front-ends transparent to the clients and spread them across multiple IP blocks (Which is what epicRealm did to make their CDN actually completely transparent to client and customer- and to be able to handle dynamic HTTP content...)- but be prepared, because in order for this to work right, you either need to trust the client's state, share state across server pools on different IP blocks, be stateless, or somesuch like the previous.
There's a bunch more, but those above two and the first item will hopefully show you why someone (a bean counter, most likely...) will make the decision to just simply hold the ISP or Tier-1 host (Which is the most likely case here- they're very probably colocated at an AT&T Tier-1 facility...) to the SLA they promised- because it's cheaper and waaay simpler if everything goes right and they're "not to blame" if things go wrong. If you went an alternate route and had a mishap that wasn't server related, then you'd be to blame and have nobody to point fingers at when it all broke (And you just KNOW it will at some point- it always does...
In the US, that concept only applies to Trademarks. You have to explicitly, in writing, abandon your rights to Copyright in the US for it to pass into Public Domain that way if the work originated in this country (Which, sadly, Freespace2 happens to be from) or was specifically registered in this country- and YES, I am very familiar with the concepts involved. I'm an SF Author, accomplished software engineer, and Patent holding inventor. While I don't hold the same understandings as an "IP" attorney, I DO know something about what I'm talking about when it comes to Copyright, Patent, and Trademark Law and how they actually work in this country (Elsewhere may be a different matter, but if they follow the Berne Convention, they all largely work the same way...)
Sorry, it's wishful thinking, but legally speaking, your claim of "abandonment" doesn't apply here- if the successors in interest to Freespace2 sought to pursue the people passing it around, they could legitimately get takedowns (And possibly damage settlements or outright lawsuits...) without a license grant or an official document passing the game content into the Public Domain since it was separate from the game code and the studio explicitly licensed only the code. I suspect that the successors in interest for the PC version that everyone is passing around would be the original publisher of the game, Interplay, such as they are. Chances are, they're more of a shell with Lawyers behind most of the machinations. Something you DEFINITELY don't want attentions from.
There's two key words there, "Congress" and "President".
Congress is the one that's supposed to come up with the laws, including the verbiage, based on their own perceptions and input from their constituents.
That's not the President's job nor is he supposed to be allowed to do so.
But, here we are, with the President and his Administration acting like they're the sole rulers of this country- and effectively, they might be, but the law says different.
Never mind that it's one of the more draconian Copyright enforcement laws ever. (Why did we need a new one, the DMCA didn't do what it was intended to do and made things worse by doing unintended things in the process- this is liable to be even worse...)
Never mind that they're using the lamest damn reason (C'mon Gonzalez, provide us PROOF of claims of it supporting terrorism before making those sorts of claims!)
It's that they're not following the proper procedures and they're openly admitting that a lot of what passes for lawmaking isn't at this point with them claiming that Bush drafted the law.
I'd be upset about that. I'd be asking questions about that.
On whether it makes to the drop-dead date before they enact another "Sonny Bono" on us...
(They should have been honest with us, it really was a "Mickey Mouse(tm)" reason for the expiration extention- the real reason why the law got enacted was to protect Disney's interests in Mickey Mouse(tm)...)
The law's got some specifics, and it covers this one. I believe you actually have to KNOW the person in question for starters, and this doesn't get you even close.
It doesn't really comply with the terms of the EULA, therefore it devolves to Copyright law- which makes it an infringement to provide it. Just because nobody's ordered a takedown, doesn't make it legal.
...what they're trying for. Unless I have an actual friend that has it, I can't legally obtain the data to PLAY it on my Linux machine, as much as I'd like to do so. What they're trying to do is get the license grant ammended so that it's legit under specific circumstances (i.e. You can't make money off of it, you can resell it, etc...) to distribute the game data with the Open Sourced engine or FOR the same.
Abandonware is NOT legal to copy around as it's NOT legally public domain.
Something goes into the public domain when:
1) The rights owner explicitly places it there.
2) The rights duration expires.
Unless either of those two happens, it's still Copyrighted and the rights to publish (i.e. make and distribute copies) belongs to the rights holder or their successors in interest.
It's infringement, through and through. What the "abandonware campaign" seeks to do is to get the status changed on those titles or get a publishing permission so that they can be distributed legally under whatever conditions they can manage to get the rights holders to grant distribution rights on.