The other posts really said it all, but it's also worth pointing out that copyright law is not like property law. It's easy to confuse the two-- reading this transcript, it's clear that the MPAA would like the two to be more similar. But they're not.
Copyright law has always been a contract between artists/publishers and the public. We (the government, actually) agree to police ourselves, prevent unauthorized publication, and allow copyright holders the ability to enforce limited restrictions on how content may be used (performance, etc.) The flip side of the coin is that those limitations are very clearly spelled out. Anyone has the right to use copyright materials in a number of ways without breaking the law, and the copyright holder cannot simply add restrictions as he/she/it sees fit. If the customer agrees to a license, the situation changes. But I have never signed a license when purchasing a DVD, therefore the holders of those particular copyrights have a very limited ability to tell me how I can use that content.
The DMCA expands copyright holders' rights, but even that broad law specifically refused to impinge upon fair use and other existing aspects of copyright law. That's why this whole thing is in court. We'll see how it goes.
I have to agree that it looked like the justices were a whole lot easier on the gov't attorney and the MPAA than on the 2600 attorney. If I weren't a lazy sack, I'd go back and find some good examples-- suffice it to say that Sullivan really had to do battle, while the judges almost completed the gov't attorney's arguments for him.
On the other hand, often a judge will be harder on the side that he's leaning towards, in order to thoroughly test an argument he/she is considering using in an opinion.
I interned at Netscape last summer. I worked on the Mail/News client. Let me assure you that there are most definitely phases to the project, and its not just a bunch of engineers sticking in whatever they want.
It looks like he was talking about Mozilla, not Netscape itself (although he gave that a swipe at the beginning of his message.)
Well, now they're basically the software division of AOL, aren't they? How much do they really lose when a few non-AOL customers stop hitting their site?
Did Netscape get anything out of the Mozilla project that would have improved their close-source version? I assume the license would have prohibited that, but I've only skimmed it.
I'll give you a hint it has nothing to do with production.
Not just that, it has to do with California's unique production problems. There's plenty of energy in other parts of the country-- we're not out of resources. Cheney & Co's use of the California crisis to justify aggressive oil drilling is like using the crime rate in Newark to justify nationwide martial law.
On that subject, it's only a matter of time before content providers begin selling their wares with some kind of license (be it click-through or paper.) At that point, a lot of these issues become moot, don't they?
Hmm? I'm sorry, I thought it was 2600 that lost the first time around.
As the judges pointed out (and the MPAA probably wanted to shush them), this case is all about the next generation of encryption technology. They want to know that they have the law on their side before they start to release technology that can't be printed on the back of a t-shirt. And it looks like they may well win this one.
I'm not sure if the "point a camera at the videoscreen" suggestion impressed the judges much, however the availability of analog versions of the content did. I was really disappointed that Sullivan never mentioned the existence of material that simply does not exist in analog form-- thereby eliminating all possible fair use. Further, she might have suggested that this class of material is only going to expand in coming years.
"Horse and buggy vs. automobiles" was a silly analogy. Something like "printed books vs. illustrated manuscripts" would have been much more appropriate.
Your statement needs to be qualified. IF the super-refined stuff is fresh (i.e. never fissioned), then it is not dangerous from a radioactivity standpoint.
The real usefulness of a breeder reactor is its ability to reuse spent first-generation reactor fuel. Weapons-grade uranium is pretty damn expensive to use for power generation. Breeder reactors aren't fun to build, but they're useful because they essentially allow you to increase the amount of power we can get out of our limited supplies of mined uranium by many times. So I doubt we would use anything but refined spent reactor fuel to power them. I should point out that the breeder reactors built so far do use plutonium or spent fuel.
Even if the fuel isn't spent, it's dangerous in so many other ways. Anything potent enough to burn in a breeder reactor either has the potential to be used to make weapons, or is relatively easy to convert into a radioactive form. "Relatively" certainly needs to be qualified-- it's probably relatively easy compared to the same process using standard power-plant grade uranium.
As to toxicity - well - most reactor fuels are alloy or ceramic in there ready-for-use form - there will be little to no danger from inhalation, and very little danger due to ingestion, since the fuel is "trapped" in an insoluble form.
I've heard this before with regards to fuel storage, and I also heard that over time the ceramics tend to break down. But that's neither here nor there. What I'm concerned about is theft, not the stuff blowing out of the train.
From time to time, various European nations (usually Germany and France) ship a trainload of waste to a French processing plant on the coast. The train takes forever to get there because it moves about walking pace with an armada of military support above and around it. Governments recognize the potential for terrorism in the shipment of waste, and they take it very seriously. To increase the number of shipments, and to ship the material in more refined forms is very risky.
I don't know a whole lot about breeder reactors, but I did hear about the French "pheonix". In addition to burning plutonium (nasty stuff in a meltdown) it burned so hot it had to be cooled with liquid sodium, which is extremely flammable. Now that's just silly French design, but it makes the point that breeders are a more complicated beast than traditional reactors (and how many accidents have we had with those?) I believe similar problems were involved in the decision to shut down our reactor-- it wasn't just a political "we hate nuclear" thing.
Anyway, I'm not completely against nuclear, I just think we should pursue other alternatives and invest a little more in research before we head in this direction.
Really? The best part of my college experience was the trust our professors had for us, and that you could generally count on from your classmates. We left our code directories open, not because we liked to cheat-- simply because we were all responsible for our own actions and it made life easier.
Ideally, one of the best things about academia is not having to put locks all over the place. The only stupid people I see in that guy's story are the deans who were too lazy to look at the evidence.
This ruling does me good. Any way we can contact the judge and send him chocholates?
This is practically the only high-level court decision that Slashdot's ever followed where the court found against the criminal/unloveable/abusive big company. But don't worry, there's still an opportunity to appeal.
God knows what evil Rambus must have been working for federal judge and jury throw the book at them.
Well, of course companies seek to make a profit off of their "intellectual property".
It's not exactly that-- it's more things like Microsoft saying "Open Source will Stifle Innovation" or Rambus saying "Not Allowing Us to Break the Rules We Agreed To Will Stifle Innovation" that bug me. The original poster's right. Computer companies are beginning to use "innovation" the same way the government politicians use "national security" to justify so many of the silly things they do.
To produce CURRENT world energy requirements with conventional nuclear power-plant technology would deplete the world's uranium supply in about 20 years.
Of course, you assume that we won't allow that new uranium might be found, or god forbid, better technology
Actually, you could provide plenty of fissile material if you went to breeder reactors. Only problem is, we'd be creating a plutonium economy (a pleasant idea) and shipping all sorts of nasty stuff all over the country. That's a place that even the French don't want to go (and they love nuclear power.)
Wind technology is developing rapidly. To write it off by citing the capacity of existing equipment is silliness. Same with solar. Create a market for the tech, and it will come.
Anyway, I have to go now-- I have to load another batch of punch cards into the mainframe.
But even if that were true... has anyone stolen nuclear materiel from those labs? If not, your point is pretty much moot
The problem with such reactors is that in order to achieve any sort of significant benefit (ie, move from experiment to practical power source), we need to move a lot of weapons-grade material-- or extremely toxic waste-- around the country.
The French (and us) experimented with breeder reactors that "burned" radioactive biproducts and Plutonium. Aside from the fact that those things are pretty unpleasant to have in any sort of refined form anywhere, the problem is that you have to refine the stuff, then ship it around (unless you have a very small number of power plans, each colocated with a super-secure refining plant.)
That creates dangers that simply don't exist today. While power plants could be made very secure, transports aren't nearly as safe. It's also important to point out that traditional nuclear plants don't need to be as secure, because "traditional" nuclear waste materials aren't quite as dangerous as the super-refined stuff that these plants would burn.
In any case, I'm no expert. I'd be happy if someone could correct all the mistakes I probably just made.
But hey, a little hyperbole at the expense of reason and accuracy never hurt an argument, right?
There seems to be a lot of hyperbole going around on both sides of this argument...
The ideal of capitalism (although it rarely exists in real life) is that prices stay as low as possible because companies are constantly in competition. This creates efficiency.
Of course, we don't have anything approaching this in the software industry, and not even because vast portions of it are controlled by a single, very powerful company. The fact that Free Software can create high-quality software for a fraction of the cost (not the price, mind you, I said the cost-- Free Software uses programmers' spare cycles more efficiently and integrates them, preventing constant reinvention of the same code)-- should be a testament to the current system's failure in this area.
People working together in their common interest can often benefit all parties a lot more than not working together. This is as true in the most die-hard capitalist setting as it would be in a commune. That's essentially what Free Software does; people and companies contribute work that they often would have done anyway, and those few isolated lines of code become much more valuable when combined with everybody else's. If the same system were implemented with some sort of barter/monetary exchange (ie, you get money for contributing, pay money to take back), would it still be socialism? If so, then this is what modern companies already do in a thousand different ways every day, and I'm all for it.
That said, nowhere in my post did I say that Free Software didn't have the goal of sharing the (otherwise worthless) wealth. If you choose to call that socialist, it is.
My issue in the original post was simply that copyright law should not be associated with free capitalism. It has many different purposes, some of them useful to the free market, some of them exactly the opposite.
3) Patent - Has to be applied for. You can defend it at any time. last 25 years.
Did this change in the past few years? The USPTO web site says 20 years, although perhaps there are different expiration periods for different patents...?
Throw in filing time, and the time it took to approve the patent. 25 years just about makes sense.
Hmm, okay. Maybe not. Just checked this out. Patents should last twenty years from date of filing, although that can be up to a year after publication (or later if not published), and a Provisional Application can extend that another year... There could also be additional "fencing patents" that were filed later but are required in order to use the primary technology.
This whole patent thing is really getting out of hand. It seems as if the patenting really serves no good purpose anymore.
Honestly, I would agree with you completely if this were another case of a software company patenting web browsing or some such thing, but does anyone here actually know if this suit is bogus? If they have a genuine invention, and that invention was unique and non-obvious, they may have a good case-- especially if HP and Compaq knowingly used it without paying them. In that case, those additional prices are simply licensing fees they should have been paying all along.
That said, I could be totally wrong-- this could be an obvious invention with lots of prior art. Anyone know?
I assume you're trolling, or you would have come up with something better than that... But anyway:
A requirement that major governments use Free Software is an obvious step on the road to socializing software.
I think that would be a pretty great policy. Why should my tax dollars be sent en masse to Microsoft? If government switched to Free Software, they could save millions (billions?) AND they'd get a better (more thoroughly poked-at) system. My friend's NT server just got hacked the other day, through a classic Microsoft security hole. How much time and money do you think governments spent fixing "iloveyou" infected computers because the world's largest non-free software company couldn't be troubled to put reasonable security into their software? Why should we trust our government-run systems to a single, expensive, closed-source, company?
You're absolutely right that this would benefit RMS. Not financially, of course. I think it would just make him really happy. Well, seeing a lack of convincing argument against his idea, why not make a guy happy?
Just like magic, the government will hold a defacto monopoly on software development because the existance of Free Software developed by the government will drive competition from the market.
It costs the software industry billions of dollars to create the software they produce. If government is going to spend anything approaching that hiring programmers to work on Free Software, then forget about it, it's stupid. I'm not sure how it's better for tax dollars to be spent to subsidize an industry-- which is what's currently happening-- than to open the door for a new one. If modern software companies can't produce or exceed the quality level of Free Software at the prices they charge, then they're not efficient. Such is the nature of the market that they should be forced to adapt, NOT be coddled as you would have it.
It should be self-evident that "copyleft" is the use of copyright (the institution) to advance the cause of a community that operates according to a more socialist economic principle.
Um, copyright != capitalism. It's a pretty old system, goes back through some governments that you might well consider "socialist". I personally think the GPL is unnecessary as a legal document (it's certainly never been enforced.) It's more a matter of philosophy. And as an idea, it's a good one that has spread.
Am I a crass opportunist for purchasing socks made in a factory with my money? I don't think so.
Er, considering those socks were probably made in a sweatshop in a underdeveloped Asian country, by people (some children) who have worked harder than you or I for their entire lives, can we really afford to be sanctimonious? People who sit home all day collecting welfare checks are better off than the hardest-working people in most of the countries that produce our goods for us.
I'm not a socialist, but I do feel a little bit guilty every time I see "made in malaysia" on some little trinket I'm blowing my money on. Especially after hearing about how we get these countries to provide such cheap labor...
I agree that we need to find some alternatives, or at least find ways to use what we have more efficiently.
That said, gas prices have actually decreased by something like 40%+ over the past decades, when indexed for inflation. It's probably about time we see them go back up...
Yes, but this technique seems to be tailored both to a particular file format and a very particular set of encodings. I'm no expert, but the techniques commonly used today (in the steganography programs mentioned in your link) aren't designed to really outwit sophisticated searches; they're generally a cool way to hide information when you're hoping nobody's going to even try sniffing for it. No program ever will be able to completely hide information (unless it's very very random, generated by a one-time pad), but it's certainly possible to make the detection process a whole lot more time consuming and a whole lot less certain.
Also, many JPEG encoders could begin embedding random steganographic information either to confuse these detectors, or-- more likely-- as a way to embed watermarks of various sorts. This could also result in a whole lot of false positives.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright law has always been a contract between artists/publishers and the public. We (the government, actually) agree to police ourselves, prevent unauthorized publication, and allow copyright holders the ability to enforce limited restrictions on how content may be used (performance, etc.) The flip side of the coin is that those limitations are very clearly spelled out. Anyone has the right to use copyright materials in a number of ways without breaking the law, and the copyright holder cannot simply add restrictions as he/she/it sees fit. If the customer agrees to a license, the situation changes. But I have never signed a license when purchasing a DVD, therefore the holders of those particular copyrights have a very limited ability to tell me how I can use that content.
The DMCA expands copyright holders' rights, but even that broad law specifically refused to impinge upon fair use and other existing aspects of copyright law. That's why this whole thing is in court. We'll see how it goes.
On the other hand, often a judge will be harder on the side that he's leaning towards, in order to thoroughly test an argument he/she is considering using in an opinion.
We can only hope.
It looks like he was talking about Mozilla, not Netscape itself (although he gave that a swipe at the beginning of his message.)
Did Netscape get anything out of the Mozilla project that would have improved their close-source version? I assume the license would have prohibited that, but I've only skimmed it.
Not just that, it has to do with California's unique production problems. There's plenty of energy in other parts of the country-- we're not out of resources. Cheney & Co's use of the California crisis to justify aggressive oil drilling is like using the crime rate in Newark to justify nationwide martial law.
On that subject, it's only a matter of time before content providers begin selling their wares with some kind of license (be it click-through or paper.) At that point, a lot of these issues become moot, don't they?
Hmm? I'm sorry, I thought it was 2600 that lost the first time around.
As the judges pointed out (and the MPAA probably wanted to shush them), this case is all about the next generation of encryption technology. They want to know that they have the law on their side before they start to release technology that can't be printed on the back of a t-shirt. And it looks like they may well win this one.
"Horse and buggy vs. automobiles" was a silly analogy. Something like "printed books vs. illustrated manuscripts" would have been much more appropriate.
The real usefulness of a breeder reactor is its ability to reuse spent first-generation reactor fuel. Weapons-grade uranium is pretty damn expensive to use for power generation. Breeder reactors aren't fun to build, but they're useful because they essentially allow you to increase the amount of power we can get out of our limited supplies of mined uranium by many times. So I doubt we would use anything but refined spent reactor fuel to power them. I should point out that the breeder reactors built so far do use plutonium or spent fuel.
Even if the fuel isn't spent, it's dangerous in so many other ways. Anything potent enough to burn in a breeder reactor either has the potential to be used to make weapons, or is relatively easy to convert into a radioactive form. "Relatively" certainly needs to be qualified-- it's probably relatively easy compared to the same process using standard power-plant grade uranium.
As to toxicity - well - most reactor fuels are alloy or ceramic in there ready-for-use form - there will be little to no danger from inhalation, and very little danger due to ingestion, since the fuel is "trapped" in an insoluble form.
I've heard this before with regards to fuel storage, and I also heard that over time the ceramics tend to break down. But that's neither here nor there. What I'm concerned about is theft, not the stuff blowing out of the train.
From time to time, various European nations (usually Germany and France) ship a trainload of waste to a French processing plant on the coast. The train takes forever to get there because it moves about walking pace with an armada of military support above and around it. Governments recognize the potential for terrorism in the shipment of waste, and they take it very seriously. To increase the number of shipments, and to ship the material in more refined forms is very risky.
I don't know a whole lot about breeder reactors, but I did hear about the French "pheonix". In addition to burning plutonium (nasty stuff in a meltdown) it burned so hot it had to be cooled with liquid sodium, which is extremely flammable. Now that's just silly French design, but it makes the point that breeders are a more complicated beast than traditional reactors (and how many accidents have we had with those?) I believe similar problems were involved in the decision to shut down our reactor-- it wasn't just a political "we hate nuclear" thing.
Anyway, I'm not completely against nuclear, I just think we should pursue other alternatives and invest a little more in research before we head in this direction.
Ideally, one of the best things about academia is not having to put locks all over the place. The only stupid people I see in that guy's story are the deans who were too lazy to look at the evidence.
This is practically the only high-level court decision that Slashdot's ever followed where the court found against the criminal/unloveable/abusive big company. But don't worry, there's still an opportunity to appeal.
God knows what evil Rambus must have been working for federal judge and jury throw the book at them.
It's not exactly that-- it's more things like Microsoft saying "Open Source will Stifle Innovation" or Rambus saying "Not Allowing Us to Break the Rules We Agreed To Will Stifle Innovation" that bug me. The original poster's right. Computer companies are beginning to use "innovation" the same way the government politicians use "national security" to justify so many of the silly things they do.
Of course, you assume that we won't allow that new uranium might be found, or god forbid, better technology
Actually, you could provide plenty of fissile material if you went to breeder reactors. Only problem is, we'd be creating a plutonium economy (a pleasant idea) and shipping all sorts of nasty stuff all over the country. That's a place that even the French don't want to go (and they love nuclear power.)
Wind technology is developing rapidly. To write it off by citing the capacity of existing equipment is silliness. Same with solar. Create a market for the tech, and it will come.
Anyway, I have to go now-- I have to load another batch of punch cards into the mainframe.
The problem with such reactors is that in order to achieve any sort of significant benefit (ie, move from experiment to practical power source), we need to move a lot of weapons-grade material-- or extremely toxic waste-- around the country.
The French (and us) experimented with breeder reactors that "burned" radioactive biproducts and Plutonium. Aside from the fact that those things are pretty unpleasant to have in any sort of refined form anywhere, the problem is that you have to refine the stuff, then ship it around (unless you have a very small number of power plans, each colocated with a super-secure refining plant.)
That creates dangers that simply don't exist today. While power plants could be made very secure, transports aren't nearly as safe. It's also important to point out that traditional nuclear plants don't need to be as secure, because "traditional" nuclear waste materials aren't quite as dangerous as the super-refined stuff that these plants would burn.
In any case, I'm no expert. I'd be happy if someone could correct all the mistakes I probably just made.
But hey, a little hyperbole at the expense of reason and accuracy never hurt an argument, right?
There seems to be a lot of hyperbole going around on both sides of this argument...
Where is that point, roughly?
Of course, we don't have anything approaching this in the software industry, and not even because vast portions of it are controlled by a single, very powerful company. The fact that Free Software can create high-quality software for a fraction of the cost (not the price, mind you, I said the cost-- Free Software uses programmers' spare cycles more efficiently and integrates them, preventing constant reinvention of the same code)-- should be a testament to the current system's failure in this area.
People working together in their common interest can often benefit all parties a lot more than not working together. This is as true in the most die-hard capitalist setting as it would be in a commune. That's essentially what Free Software does; people and companies contribute work that they often would have done anyway, and those few isolated lines of code become much more valuable when combined with everybody else's. If the same system were implemented with some sort of barter/monetary exchange (ie, you get money for contributing, pay money to take back), would it still be socialism? If so, then this is what modern companies already do in a thousand different ways every day, and I'm all for it.
That said, nowhere in my post did I say that Free Software didn't have the goal of sharing the (otherwise worthless) wealth. If you choose to call that socialist, it is.
My issue in the original post was simply that copyright law should not be associated with free capitalism. It has many different purposes, some of them useful to the free market, some of them exactly the opposite.
Did this change in the past few years? The USPTO web site says 20 years, although perhaps there are different expiration periods for different patents...?
Hmm, okay. Maybe not. Just checked this out. Patents should last twenty years from date of filing, although that can be up to a year after publication (or later if not published), and a Provisional Application can extend that another year... There could also be additional "fencing patents" that were filed later but are required in order to use the primary technology.
Throw in filing time, and the time it took to approve the patent. 25 years just about makes sense.
Honestly, I would agree with you completely if this were another case of a software company patenting web browsing or some such thing, but does anyone here actually know if this suit is bogus? If they have a genuine invention, and that invention was unique and non-obvious, they may have a good case-- especially if HP and Compaq knowingly used it without paying them. In that case, those additional prices are simply licensing fees they should have been paying all along.
That said, I could be totally wrong-- this could be an obvious invention with lots of prior art. Anyone know?
A requirement that major governments use Free Software is an obvious step on the road to socializing software.
I think that would be a pretty great policy. Why should my tax dollars be sent en masse to Microsoft? If government switched to Free Software, they could save millions (billions?) AND they'd get a better (more thoroughly poked-at) system. My friend's NT server just got hacked the other day, through a classic Microsoft security hole. How much time and money do you think governments spent fixing "iloveyou" infected computers because the world's largest non-free software company couldn't be troubled to put reasonable security into their software? Why should we trust our government-run systems to a single, expensive, closed-source, company?
You're absolutely right that this would benefit RMS. Not financially, of course. I think it would just make him really happy. Well, seeing a lack of convincing argument against his idea, why not make a guy happy?
Just like magic, the government will hold a defacto monopoly on software development because the existance of Free Software developed by the government will drive competition from the market.
It costs the software industry billions of dollars to create the software they produce. If government is going to spend anything approaching that hiring programmers to work on Free Software, then forget about it, it's stupid. I'm not sure how it's better for tax dollars to be spent to subsidize an industry-- which is what's currently happening-- than to open the door for a new one. If modern software companies can't produce or exceed the quality level of Free Software at the prices they charge, then they're not efficient. Such is the nature of the market that they should be forced to adapt, NOT be coddled as you would have it.
It should be self-evident that "copyleft" is the use of copyright (the institution) to advance the cause of a community that operates according to a more socialist economic principle.
Um, copyright != capitalism. It's a pretty old system, goes back through some governments that you might well consider "socialist". I personally think the GPL is unnecessary as a legal document (it's certainly never been enforced.) It's more a matter of philosophy. And as an idea, it's a good one that has spread.
Er, considering those socks were probably made in a sweatshop in a underdeveloped Asian country, by people (some children) who have worked harder than you or I for their entire lives, can we really afford to be sanctimonious? People who sit home all day collecting welfare checks are better off than the hardest-working people in most of the countries that produce our goods for us.
I'm not a socialist, but I do feel a little bit guilty every time I see "made in malaysia" on some little trinket I'm blowing my money on. Especially after hearing about how we get these countries to provide such cheap labor...
That said, gas prices have actually decreased by something like 40%+ over the past decades, when indexed for inflation. It's probably about time we see them go back up...
Also, many JPEG encoders could begin embedding random steganographic information either to confuse these detectors, or-- more likely-- as a way to embed watermarks of various sorts. This could also result in a whole lot of false positives.
One-time pad cryptography, if done correctly, can produce a signal that is indistinguishable from noise. Noise buried in noise is... noise.