Oh please, a little creativity. Sure, it'll be harder to have lots of small, community-run links all meshed together, but you could have some massive ordinary links (satellite, existing underwater fibre etc.; they don't have to be run all by the same corporation, and could even be govt-funded) plus enough small ones to not depend totally on them (whatever the small ones might be - amateur satellites? 'hijacked' abandoned underwater cable? long-range AM radio? trained dolphins? use your imagination...)
It would harm the public good even worse than perpetual copyright.
Not to mention that laws prohibiting circumvention of copy control or DRM stuff would effectively create perpetual copyright - what good does it do to me when a copyright expires, but I'm still not allowed to crack the DRM, which obviously does not? If you allow public-domain works to be cracked, tools to do that will be published which would also work on still copyrighted material.
The only thing I can think of would be forcing companies to release an unprotected version after 28 years, but that's extremely unlikely, and whether it would work is another question - I tend to assume copyright owners would find a way around that.
So you download the controller core from GM's (or whoever's) site, load it into the FPGA on your PDA, and use it to drive to a service shop.
Yeah, but why would you need FPGA on this? I mean, I know next to nothing about the advantages/disadvantages of FPGA tech, but it strikes me that in this case, if it's just for an emergency, plain boring old *software* running on your PDA's generic CPU would do just fine (and make it Java for cross-platform support if it makes you happy...)
The digital/analogue stuff seems to make a lot more sense, but as I said I can't really judge.
You're right, I wouldn't say informative. But it is interesting, as the idea might be crazy enough to be doable (as some of the data-on-VHS posts suggest - actually, the video modem code could probably be adapted for this...?).
If you're feeling REALLY ambitious, you could put the decoding software for your steganography online and let anyone with access to the video stream decode the steganographied data from it, and thus run your own MP3 radio station or something...
Hmm... was anyone here at the HAL2001 conference? Peter Eckersley basically suggested someone like this. (His speech was about IP laws in general and what a corporate coup the WIPO/TRIPS stuff is.) The idea was, all art/entertainment stuff, such as music, is made available for free somewhere (be this P2P, government servers,...), together with some sort of rating system, i.e. how often something is downloaded, or asking users to rate a song they downloaded. Money from some kind of public fund would then be paid to the artists accordingly. What you're saying sounds a lot like that. Free-marketeers won't like it (isn't this a form of socialism or whatever... a friend of mine commented that this would make artists employees of the state), but it does sound interesting.
Because without the government, we all become heartless bastards who don't give a damn about our neighbors. Just like without religion and the fear of eternal damnation, we all would turn into homocidal maniacs.
Actually, yes, for the first part. 'Neighbours'? The general tendency as far as I can tell is that poor people and rich people tend to live in different neighbourhoods. And so you think my $10k-a-year neighbours would pay for my kid's $50k cancer therapy? And even if they did, I'd rather have a government-administered welfare system that I can *depend* on if I'm in trouble rather than having to hope for my neighbours' charity.
Anyway, an interesting thought crept into my brain here: Half-asses deregulation will always be a failure
Some people I know and have been around a fair bit recently are active in the anti-neoliberalism movement or whatever you want to call it, FWIW the far-left area of the spectrum. Some of those actually lean toward anarchism, obviously not in the sense of chaos and destruction, but in the sense of building a society where everyone will get along without any government. (While this sounds nice, my optimism about it being possible is rather limited.) The interesting bit is: Isn't that exactly the same thing that a) communism was originally about, and b) that radical capitalists like you are proposing - if the government keeps out of things (deregulation etc.) (and eventually, hopefully, disappears) people will just get along and everyone will be happy. I'm not saying your idea is bad, though I doubt it can work; what I want to point out is that this is really where right and left meet (well, certain types of right & left - not the anti-abortion anti-drug hard-line religious right, and not the Stalinist/IngSoc 'left', obviously). Something to think about, innit?
I disagree here. I don't know much about Windows internals (and I've *never* used WinXP...), but Explorer.exe is probably more equivalent to something like Konqueror (or even KDE as a whole) - integrated Browser/file manager/desktop environment. The window manager would probably be integrated in GDI or something. Hell, I've had (on Win98 though) Explorer.exe crashed and killed, but the system was still sort-of-running, with some windows open (well, the 'end task' box you get when you press Ctrl-alt-del).
we have a right to view/hear content under Linux and other OSs
Here I have to say, and I believe I am speaking for most of the media industry: You have fuck-all 'rights'. As you say, if Linux is to become mainstream, it has to be possible, but you don't really have any god-given/legal/whatever right. Though this is a hairy issue - anyone can read a book, but for any storage mechanism that requires complex devices to view the content (even vinyl if you will), what 'right' do you have to view it? More to the point, do you have a 'right' to choose your viewer, or is it 'use the viewer we give you if you want the content'? So perhaps you're right, certainly I think this is something that'll have to be considered, and possibly even requires some kind of legislation...
Anyway, as for the fair-use DRM system for Linux - you do have a point, but there is something like that, but I don't know any programmes that respect the 'copyright' flag in MP3 files. And either way, the basic point is, as you say, *trusting the user to follow the rules*. And I doubt the *AA is even able to do that.
Good point about trusting the user. I was going to post something similar - that I as a user demand to be trusted in the sense that I'm not going to give up control over my computer, which *any* working DRM would require (I wonder how well I'm known yet for my radical anti-DRM stance...), and that DRM (or 'trusted' computing in that sense) is fundamentally incompatible with open source/free software.
But I have to disagree with your idea of 'voluntary' DRM for Linux - the publicity aspect is interesting ('hey! look, we're trying'), but I don't think it matters much; and ultimately, what's the point of your proposition? Anyone who even thinks of copying something won't be stopped by this, whether you need to change a config file or patch the source - it's like having a dialog box pop up "This file is copy protected. Do you want to copy it anyway? Yes/No" when you try to e-mail it to someone, or upload it on Gnutella, or whatever - most people would just click Yes, like they click I Agree on any EULA that comes their way.
What I'm saying is that this is basically the same as no protection (or farce thereof) at all - even if it's totally uncontrolled, some people will always buy the stuff, others will always pirate it. I don't think it makes much of a difference.
As for the legal aspect - you certainly wouldn't be able to implement an existing DRM technology this way, you could only design your own and tell the media companies 'look, we've got protection too, release your content for our platform please'. If you basically 'cracked' MS' DRM and implemented a less-restrictive, easily circumventable (is that a word?) version on Linux, they'd just spin it as 'they broke it, arrest them'.
Still, I suppose it's worth thinking about, the publicity aspect might matter more than I think...
As others have pointed out, there does seem to be more substance in Sarah Flannery's claims & publications.
What this reminds me of, what with the award he won and probably rigged demonstrations, is a case some time ago in Germany where a guy of about that age claimed he could do 500 kbit/s or more over existing GSM networks (which AFAIK can do 9600 bps normally, most operators now offer 14400, and some offer a high-speed service with 43 kbits or so). This would have made the new UMTS networks that quite a lot of money's been spent on pretty much obsolete. He got massive media attention, various awards and whatnot, but his claims were apparently (and obviously) bogus; looking at the specs, he used channel bundling among other things, so his 'invention' would have overloaded the networks very quickly. I'm afraid I can't remember details like his name, but the story got a lot of attention, so someone might know.
What if I want to record my own compositions to an mp3? Go ahead - on a 'trusted' system. Because that will be able to verify that it *is* your own composition, with some sort of watermark technology. And, of course, to publish your creation, you'll have to register it with the RIAA to be encrypted and signed so it'll play on everyone's Palladium PC.
dreams concerning Mrs. Jennifer Lopez and her three twin sisters. Wouldn't that be quadruplets? (Sorry couldn't resist...) Not that I find JLO too impressive.
Or write an audio-CDROM which plays in any player - no soundcard involved. But only possible on a trusted computer and if you have the appropriate permissions/rights (in their wet-dreams scenario, of course).
Well, at least 'older' content (?) using WMP7 formats can be played back without any proprietary code. OK, so that's not enough, but you do see quite a lot of stuff in the older format simply because not everyone offering media on their website is going to re-encode it all every time MS releases a new codec.
Yes, but how are they going to do that under Linux? Shows that even without a comprehensive 'trusted' infrastructure, DRM and GPL just don't go together (if you know me, you'll be groaning now. Yes, I know I'm repeating myself.)
The only way I could imagine would be to send the stuff to the (USB or something) speakers in encrypted form and decode it there - so you'd have to get people to buy new hardware. The problems with binary-only drivers have been mentioned in other posts.
Nobody said that it is a good idea, the nice thing is that you can compile mplayer itself with plenty of hardware optimisation (and I'm extremely grateful for that - video on a K6-2 350 is not too much fun), but fall back to binary-only codecs (even win32 DLLs) for proprietary formats.
I will not install proprietary binaries on my computer.
Then that rules out any Windows Media, you have the choice between GPLed MPlayer plus proprietary binary codecs, or fully-proprietary Microsoft player possibly released sometime in the future.
Pretty easy choice for me, especially since I can use MPlayer's mencoder to recode the WMV/Quicktime/RealPlayer files into standard, open, clean MPEGs and then remove the proprietary binaries again.
As for semi-legal - for some real paranoia, if MS have their way, everything that doesn't have DRM will be illegal; for a more realistic view, do you watch DVDs under Linux? Illegal in the US, for what it's worth.
richieb's point is good, but I'd like to add something else.
IMO, the part that doesn't make sense is that these people are making those millions of dollars *from content they did not create*. I find the idea of copyright expiration weird in the first place - would it be more logical for copyright to expire the moment the creator of something dies? The point is not that Walt Disney isn't allowed to make money with his work just because he made it 50 or 70 or 90 years ago, the point is that he's been stone dead for that many years, and other people are making that money.
(Of course, to play Devil's advocate myself, you could compare the current situation to kids inheriting their parents' house and being kicked out after 70 (or whatever) years, and my proposal to abolishing inheritance (or what's the word?) entirely - then again, if you're going to be really radical, you could argue in favour of that.)
I'm surprised I couldn't find anything about this. OK, so it's not really Christmas anymore, but tomorrow (27th) I'm going to Berlin for the Chaos Communications Congress. Apart from that - spent the 24th at home (Luxembourg) with parents and sister, then went to Germany to grandmother for the usual family reunion stuff. Looking forward to Berlin very much.
Ah yes. 'your email read'? It's more than that, y'know. Tapping your phone, registering every purchase, basically knowing everything that you do and say is rather more essential in my book. And a little temporary safety - yes, because determined terrorists (which they obviously are) will adapt and still manage to hide. It's not going to stop them. You don't really believe that Having your email read will prevent you being incinerated in a nuclear fireball? It's not that easy...
Now, I could say that I'm glad I don't live in the US - but that would be very short-sighted, it's not like we haven't got it coming in Europe. Either our own governments introducing similar 'Anti-Terror' legislation (there is a reason I have a photo of the German interior minister staring down at me...), or the US govt. and international corporations watching us.
I think preventing piracy isn't the only important part (though perhaps for the BSA it is) - they also want more (total?) control, i.e. using DRM and all to make you pay per use of something, keep you from moving it onto other players, and especially enforcing region controls and such.
Another thing is: This will help stop casual piracy. Professional pirates make bit-copies of CSS'ed DVDs (or copy-protected CDs), but private users don't always have the possibility. A lot of private copying is not actually piracy - but they'd like to stop it anyway. And there simply is a *lot* of casual piracy, copying CDs or software for a friend. The old argument of 'I wouldn't have bought it anyway' comes in here - not in the moral sense 'it's still theft!!!' but because it raises the question whether stopping this copying would increase sales. I'm not so sure.
At a quick glance, you could read the BSA mouthpiece's name as "Ignorance".
I actually did.
I quite often pretty much ignore the names of people like this, so when I read 'Mingorance said... ' later in the article, I thought 'Ignorance said? Doesn't compute... oh, it says 'Mignorance said' - they even misspelled it! Ah, it's Mingorance. Must be some kind of spokesperson or whatever.'
I agree that most applications are bad but, at least for me, if there is at least one application that isn't then it isn't inherently bad, just its use.
It's too late for such complex thinking really, but I'll try. I think it can still be inherently bad; in the case of DRM, because it requires a 'trusted computing' infrastructure, and 'trusted' means others can trust my computer to obey certain rules while I can't trust it to obey me and don't fully control it, and I think that *is* inherently bad.
That being said, because of the overwhelming number of misuse possible I think it is better to do without it at all than to have to deal with all the problems. AOL!AOL! (me too)
BTW, I'm not American, but I'm sure that whatever nation I'm from and whatever nation you're from there are some info that our respective nation would prefer to keep for themselves. I'll admit that I am influenced by my youthful pacifistic ideals here - i.e. I dream of a world where we don't need to have these secrets. I realise that in some cases they are *probably* neccessary, but in many ways the world would be a better place without them. For example, Bush is saying to Saddam 'tell us *everything* about your weapons of mass destruction', while he certainly wouldn't want to release his secrets. Does this make sense? Anyway, as for espionage, there's still nothing to keep a spy from scribbling the DRM-protected text on his screen onto a paper notepad and smuggling that out. Or memorising it if he can't use physical media. Except of course if we mount all computers with cameras that check whether the user is doing anything naughty...
(Oh, and for us Germans, DRM wouldn't help keep our secrets, with a defense minister who just directly describes secret marching routes to the press. He's had to go after some more of that stuff, but still...)
Disclaimer: The links you included are on my to-do list, but I'm not going to read them now. It's too late, I have to get up (relatively) early tomorrow, and my net connection is currently metered.
Anyway, thanks for making probably the first positive response to a/. posting of mine;-)
I still don't think open-source DRM is possible. The basic point, as far as I understand it (and I know next to nothing about specifics of technology - but I like to think I understand principles quite well), is that as soon as you have open-source code handling the data, you can modify that code to do anything you like, and that *will* happen.
Basically, the open-source client code can authenticate itself all it likes, you still can't *trust* it in the sense of 'trusted computing'. Of course you could encode the 'rights' somewhere - but you can't force open code to obey them.
(One possibility might be what's always thrown around as a worst/best-case scenario - keeping the data encrypted all the way to the speakers/soundcard/monitor: that way the CPU never gets to see the unencrypted data and thus has no chance to copy it. But that doesn't really qualify as 'open', does it?)
I think DRM/trusted computing is inherently evil.
I think you and I and about 99% of the Slashdot community are in agreement on this.
I hope so, but I'm not sure. Either way, I'm constantly spreading the propaganda.
And this for people who drink jolt (or various other kinds of) cola and eat junk food? Come on...
(and if you're referring to spiritual purity - coca cola, McDo's etc. are all popular and all evil international empires, one might argue)
But for those geeks who eat only organically grown health food, this might be an option. I think I saw *one* around here sometime...
(BTW, I'm somewhere in the middle. I eat very little take-out fast food, as much quality stuff including organic as possible but not enough, and far too much sweets etc.)
by Greg Egan? I've got that one in German (they translated the title as 'CyberCity'...). Kind of borders between interesting and total nonsense, either way quite entertaining.
The story started off in a world where, for enough cash, you could have a copy of your mind made and run that on the worldwide network (i.e. all computers in the world clustered) in 1/17th real time. One guy had the idea that you'd use a real computer to emulate a machine that contained several 'people' who wanted to be immortal and then, after just a few seconds, you'd stop the emulation and the emulated machine would continue 'existing', sort of reassembled from noise by rearranging 'time-slices' of the universe or something weird, but that existence would be entirely separate from the reality we know. But I'm going too far off-topic. Read the book if you're sufficiently bored;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, a little creativity. Sure, it'll be harder to have lots of small, community-run links all meshed together, but you could have some massive ordinary links (satellite, existing underwater fibre etc.; they don't have to be run all by the same corporation, and could even be govt-funded) plus enough small ones to not depend totally on them (whatever the small ones might be - amateur satellites? 'hijacked' abandoned underwater cable? long-range AM radio? trained dolphins? use your imagination...)
It would harm the public good even worse than perpetual copyright.
Not to mention that laws prohibiting circumvention of copy control or DRM stuff would effectively create perpetual copyright - what good does it do to me when a copyright expires, but I'm still not allowed to crack the DRM, which obviously does not? If you allow public-domain works to be cracked, tools to do that will be published which would also work on still copyrighted material.
The only thing I can think of would be forcing companies to release an unprotected version after 28 years, but that's extremely unlikely, and whether it would work is another question - I tend to assume copyright owners would find a way around that.
So you download the controller core from GM's (or whoever's) site, load it into the FPGA on your PDA, and use it to drive to a service shop.
Yeah, but why would you need FPGA on this? I mean, I know next to nothing about the advantages/disadvantages of FPGA tech, but it strikes me that in this case, if it's just for an emergency, plain boring old *software* running on your PDA's generic CPU would do just fine (and make it Java for cross-platform support if it makes you happy...)
The digital/analogue stuff seems to make a lot more sense, but as I said I can't really judge.
You're right, I wouldn't say informative. But it is interesting, as the idea might be crazy enough to be doable (as some of the data-on-VHS posts suggest - actually, the video modem code could probably be adapted for this...?).
If you're feeling REALLY ambitious, you could put the decoding software for your steganography online and let anyone with access to the video stream decode the steganographied data from it, and thus run your own MP3 radio station or something...
Hmm... was anyone here at the HAL2001 conference? Peter Eckersley basically suggested someone like this. (His speech was about IP laws in general and what a corporate coup the WIPO/TRIPS stuff is.) The idea was, all art/entertainment stuff, such as music, is made available for free somewhere (be this P2P, government servers, ...), together with some sort of rating system, i.e. how often something is downloaded, or asking users to rate a song they downloaded. Money from some kind of public fund would then be paid to the artists accordingly. What you're saying sounds a lot like that. Free-marketeers won't like it (isn't this a form of socialism or whatever... a friend of mine commented that this would make artists employees of the state), but it does sound interesting.
Because without the government, we all become heartless bastards who don't give a damn about our neighbors. Just like without religion and the fear of eternal damnation, we all would turn into homocidal maniacs.
Actually, yes, for the first part. 'Neighbours'? The general tendency as far as I can tell is that poor people and rich people tend to live in different neighbourhoods. And so you think my $10k-a-year neighbours would pay for my kid's $50k cancer therapy? And even if they did, I'd rather have a government-administered welfare system that I can *depend* on if I'm in trouble rather than having to hope for my neighbours' charity.
Anyway, an interesting thought crept into my brain here:
Half-asses deregulation will always be a failure
Some people I know and have been around a fair bit recently are active in the anti-neoliberalism movement or whatever you want to call it, FWIW the far-left area of the spectrum. Some of those actually lean toward anarchism, obviously not in the sense of chaos and destruction, but in the sense of building a society where everyone will get along without any government. (While this sounds nice, my optimism about it being possible is rather limited.) The interesting bit is: Isn't that exactly the same thing that a) communism was originally about, and b) that radical capitalists like you are proposing - if the government keeps out of things (deregulation etc.) (and eventually, hopefully, disappears) people will just get along and everyone will be happy. I'm not saying your idea is bad, though I doubt it can work; what I want to point out is that this is really where right and left meet (well, certain types of right & left - not the anti-abortion anti-drug hard-line religious right, and not the Stalinist/IngSoc 'left', obviously). Something to think about, innit?
Window Manager -> Explorer.exe
I disagree here. I don't know much about Windows internals (and I've *never* used WinXP...), but Explorer.exe is probably more equivalent to something like Konqueror (or even KDE as a whole) - integrated Browser/file manager/desktop environment. The window manager would probably be integrated in GDI or something. Hell, I've had (on Win98 though) Explorer.exe crashed and killed, but the system was still sort-of-running, with some windows open (well, the 'end task' box you get when you press Ctrl-alt-del).
we have a right to view/hear content under Linux and other OSs
Here I have to say, and I believe I am speaking for most of the media industry: You have fuck-all 'rights'. As you say, if Linux is to become mainstream, it has to be possible, but you don't really have any god-given/legal/whatever right. Though this is a hairy issue - anyone can read a book, but for any storage mechanism that requires complex devices to view the content (even vinyl if you will), what 'right' do you have to view it? More to the point, do you have a 'right' to choose your viewer, or is it 'use the viewer we give you if you want the content'? So perhaps you're right, certainly I think this is something that'll have to be considered, and possibly even requires some kind of legislation...
Anyway, as for the fair-use DRM system for Linux - you do have a point, but there is something like that, but I don't know any programmes that respect the 'copyright' flag in MP3 files.
And either way, the basic point is, as you say, *trusting the user to follow the rules*. And I doubt the *AA is even able to do that.
Good point about trusting the user. I was going to post something similar - that I as a user demand to be trusted in the sense that I'm not going to give up control over my computer, which *any* working DRM would require (I wonder how well I'm known yet for my radical anti-DRM stance...), and that DRM (or 'trusted' computing in that sense) is fundamentally incompatible with open source/free software.
But I have to disagree with your idea of 'voluntary' DRM for Linux - the publicity aspect is interesting ('hey! look, we're trying'), but I don't think it matters much; and ultimately, what's the point of your proposition? Anyone who even thinks of copying something won't be stopped by this, whether you need to change a config file or patch the source - it's like having a dialog box pop up "This file is copy protected. Do you want to copy it anyway? Yes/No" when you try to e-mail it to someone, or upload it on Gnutella, or whatever - most people would just click Yes, like they click I Agree on any EULA that comes their way.
What I'm saying is that this is basically the same as no protection (or farce thereof) at all - even if it's totally uncontrolled, some people will always buy the stuff, others will always pirate it. I don't think it makes much of a difference.
As for the legal aspect - you certainly wouldn't be able to implement an existing DRM technology this way, you could only design your own and tell the media companies 'look, we've got protection too, release your content for our platform please'. If you basically 'cracked' MS' DRM and implemented a less-restrictive, easily circumventable (is that a word?) version on Linux, they'd just spin it as 'they broke it, arrest them'.
Still, I suppose it's worth thinking about, the publicity aspect might matter more than I think...
As others have pointed out, there does seem to be more substance in Sarah Flannery's claims & publications.
What this reminds me of, what with the award he won and probably rigged demonstrations, is a case some time ago in Germany where a guy of about that age claimed he could do 500 kbit/s or more over existing GSM networks (which AFAIK can do 9600 bps normally, most operators now offer 14400, and some offer a high-speed service with 43 kbits or so). This would have made the new UMTS networks that quite a lot of money's been spent on pretty much obsolete. He got massive media attention, various awards and whatnot, but his claims were apparently (and obviously) bogus; looking at the specs, he used channel bundling among other things, so his 'invention' would have overloaded the networks very quickly. I'm afraid I can't remember details like his name, but the story got a lot of attention, so someone might know.
What if I want to record my own compositions to an mp3?
Go ahead - on a 'trusted' system. Because that will be able to verify that it *is* your own composition, with some sort of watermark technology. And, of course, to publish your creation, you'll have to register it with the RIAA to be encrypted and signed so it'll play on everyone's Palladium PC.
dreams concerning Mrs. Jennifer Lopez and her three twin sisters.
Wouldn't that be quadruplets? (Sorry couldn't resist...) Not that I find JLO too impressive.
Or write an audio-CDROM which plays in any player - no soundcard involved.
But only possible on a trusted computer and if you have the appropriate permissions/rights (in their wet-dreams scenario, of course).
make custom hardware
Ever heard of TCPA?
Well, at least 'older' content (?) using WMP7 formats can be played back without any proprietary code. OK, so that's not enough, but you do see quite a lot of stuff in the older format simply because not everyone offering media on their website is going to re-encode it all every time MS releases a new codec.
Yes, but how are they going to do that under Linux? Shows that even without a comprehensive 'trusted' infrastructure, DRM and GPL just don't go together (if you know me, you'll be groaning now. Yes, I know I'm repeating myself.)
The only way I could imagine would be to send the stuff to the (USB or something) speakers in encrypted form and decode it there - so you'd have to get people to buy new hardware. The problems with binary-only drivers have been mentioned in other posts.
Nobody said that it is a good idea, the nice thing is that you can compile mplayer itself with plenty of hardware optimisation (and I'm extremely grateful for that - video on a K6-2 350 is not too much fun), but fall back to binary-only codecs (even win32 DLLs) for proprietary formats.
I will not install proprietary binaries on my computer.
Then that rules out any Windows Media, you have the choice between GPLed MPlayer plus proprietary binary codecs, or fully-proprietary Microsoft player possibly released sometime in the future.
Pretty easy choice for me, especially since I can use MPlayer's mencoder to recode the WMV/Quicktime/RealPlayer files into standard, open, clean MPEGs and then remove the proprietary binaries again.
As for semi-legal - for some real paranoia, if MS have their way, everything that doesn't have DRM will be illegal; for a more realistic view, do you watch DVDs under Linux? Illegal in the US, for what it's worth.
richieb's point is good, but I'd like to add something else.
IMO, the part that doesn't make sense is that these people are making those millions of dollars *from content they did not create*. I find the idea of copyright expiration weird in the first place - would it be more logical for copyright to expire the moment the creator of something dies? The point is not that Walt Disney isn't allowed to make money with his work just because he made it 50 or 70 or 90 years ago, the point is that he's been stone dead for that many years, and other people are making that money.
(Of course, to play Devil's advocate myself, you could compare the current situation to kids inheriting their parents' house and being kicked out after 70 (or whatever) years, and my proposal to abolishing inheritance (or what's the word?) entirely - then again, if you're going to be really radical, you could argue in favour of that.)
I'm surprised I couldn't find anything about this. OK, so it's not really Christmas anymore, but tomorrow (27th) I'm going to Berlin for the Chaos Communications Congress.
Apart from that - spent the 24th at home (Luxembourg) with parents and sister, then went to Germany to grandmother for the usual family reunion stuff. Looking forward to Berlin very much.
Ah yes. 'your email read'? It's more than that, y'know. Tapping your phone, registering every purchase, basically knowing everything that you do and say is rather more essential in my book. And a little temporary safety - yes, because determined terrorists (which they obviously are) will adapt and still manage to hide. It's not going to stop them. You don't really believe that Having your email read will prevent you being incinerated in a nuclear fireball? It's not that easy...
Now, I could say that I'm glad I don't live in the US - but that would be very short-sighted, it's not like we haven't got it coming in Europe. Either our own governments introducing similar 'Anti-Terror' legislation (there is a reason I have a photo of the German interior minister staring down at me...), or the US govt. and international corporations watching us.
I think preventing piracy isn't the only important part (though perhaps for the BSA it is) - they also want more (total?) control, i.e. using DRM and all to make you pay per use of something, keep you from moving it onto other players, and especially enforcing region controls and such.
Another thing is: This will help stop casual piracy. Professional pirates make bit-copies of CSS'ed DVDs (or copy-protected CDs), but private users don't always have the possibility. A lot of private copying is not actually piracy - but they'd like to stop it anyway. And there simply is a *lot* of casual piracy, copying CDs or software for a friend. The old argument of 'I wouldn't have bought it anyway' comes in here - not in the moral sense 'it's still theft!!!' but because it raises the question whether stopping this copying would increase sales. I'm not so sure.
At a quick glance, you could read the BSA mouthpiece's name as "Ignorance".
... ' later in the article, I thought 'Ignorance said? Doesn't compute... oh, it says 'Mignorance said' - they even misspelled it! Ah, it's Mingorance. Must be some kind of spokesperson or whatever.'
I actually did.
I quite often pretty much ignore the names of people like this, so when I read 'Mingorance said
I agree that most applications are bad but, at least for me, if there is at least one application that isn't then it isn't inherently bad, just its use.
It's too late for such complex thinking really, but I'll try. I think it can still be inherently bad; in the case of DRM, because it requires a 'trusted computing' infrastructure, and 'trusted' means others can trust my computer to obey certain rules while I can't trust it to obey me and don't fully control it, and I think that *is* inherently bad.
That being said, because of the overwhelming number of misuse possible I think it is better to do without it at all than to have to deal with all the problems.
AOL!AOL! (me too)
BTW, I'm not American, but I'm sure that whatever nation I'm from and whatever nation you're from there are some info that our respective nation would prefer to keep for themselves.
I'll admit that I am influenced by my youthful pacifistic ideals here - i.e. I dream of a world where we don't need to have these secrets. I realise that in some cases they are *probably* neccessary, but in many ways the world would be a better place without them. For example, Bush is saying to Saddam 'tell us *everything* about your weapons of mass destruction', while he certainly wouldn't want to release his secrets. Does this make sense? Anyway, as for espionage, there's still nothing to keep a spy from scribbling the DRM-protected text on his screen onto a paper notepad and smuggling that out. Or memorising it if he can't use physical media. Except of course if we mount all computers with cameras that check whether the user is doing anything naughty...
(Oh, and for us Germans, DRM wouldn't help keep our secrets, with a defense minister who just directly describes secret marching routes to the press. He's had to go after some more of that stuff, but still...)
Disclaimer: The links you included are on my to-do list, but I'm not going to read them now. It's too late, I have to get up (relatively) early tomorrow, and my net connection is currently metered.
/. posting of mine ;-)
Anyway, thanks for making probably the first positive response to a
I still don't think open-source DRM is possible. The basic point, as far as I understand it (and I know next to nothing about specifics of technology - but I like to think I understand principles quite well), is that as soon as you have open-source code handling the data, you can modify that code to do anything you like, and that *will* happen.
Basically, the open-source client code can authenticate itself all it likes, you still can't *trust* it in the sense of 'trusted computing'. Of course you could encode the 'rights' somewhere - but you can't force open code to obey them.
(One possibility might be what's always thrown around as a worst/best-case scenario - keeping the data encrypted all the way to the speakers/soundcard/monitor: that way the CPU never gets to see the unencrypted data and thus has no chance to copy it. But that doesn't really qualify as 'open', does it?)
I think DRM/trusted computing is inherently evil.
I think you and I and about 99% of the Slashdot community are in agreement on this.
I hope so, but I'm not sure. Either way, I'm constantly spreading the propaganda.
Good Night.
And this for people who drink jolt (or various other kinds of) cola and eat junk food? Come on...
(and if you're referring to spiritual purity - coca cola, McDo's etc. are all popular and all evil international empires, one might argue)
But for those geeks who eat only organically grown health food, this might be an option. I think I saw *one* around here sometime...
(BTW, I'm somewhere in the middle. I eat very little take-out fast food, as much quality stuff including organic as possible but not enough, and far too much sweets etc.)
by Greg Egan? I've got that one in German (they translated the title as 'CyberCity'...). Kind of borders between interesting and total nonsense, either way quite entertaining.
;-)
The story started off in a world where, for enough cash, you could have a copy of your mind made and run that on the worldwide network (i.e. all computers in the world clustered) in 1/17th real time. One guy had the idea that you'd use a real computer to emulate a machine that contained several 'people' who wanted to be immortal and then, after just a few seconds, you'd stop the emulation and the emulated machine would continue 'existing', sort of reassembled from noise by rearranging 'time-slices' of the universe or something weird, but that existence would be entirely separate from the reality we know. But I'm going too far off-topic. Read the book if you're sufficiently bored