The makers of rtmpDump don't seem any different then those of the vcr or camera to me.
If you actually read 12USC1201, you'd know that it is illegal to sell a VCR that does not respect the macrovision flag. In the exact same way, there are flags in RTMP media that control access to the underlying content. rtmpDump circumvents those flags.
and so long as they send the bytes to me they can have no complaint on how I use (display) those bits on my end (as a user).
I'm not sure why this is so obvious to everyone as an ethical proposition. If I want to show someone my family vacation photos, I feel like it's quite proper for me to say "look but don't copy" -- same for a draft of a novel I'm writing or a short piece of music I've composed.
Since you have no right in the first place to demand that someone send you a stream of bytes at all, it seems to me quite obvious that you have no right to require that they not attach conditions to those bytes. This reasoning is known in legal circles as a maiore ad minus -- from the stronger unto the weaker. If the BBC can refuse to give you the bytes in at all, they can give you the right to read the bytes but not copy them.
Now with the advent of the DMCA - an atrocious law that should be declared in part or whole as unconstitutional - there is a legal ground for attacking the neo-vcr and to that I say bullocks.
Is the DMCA unconstitutional because it violates a particular provision of the Constitution or just because it's atrocious? People don't like to hear this from lawyers, but the fact is that the Constitution allows many shitty things (it is, after all, manifestly imperfect).
With no contractual agreement between any of the parties why the fed. gov. need to get involved with everything?
They need to get involved because a majority of representatives, duly elected by The People, voted to get them involved.
What I should have said is, you can never rely on a corporation to stick to a promise. There are people I trust; there are not corporations I trust in that sense. Corporate inconsistency isn't like a person "changing his mind"; a corporation can hold two contradictory views concurrently in a way most people cannot, because it is not a single person with a single mind.
There are corporations that I trust to varying degrees. I let Google host all my personal mail, calendar and contact information (I have a mirror) even knowing that they could read it all and use it to reset my bank, credit card and etrade account password and basically wreck my life. There are corporations that I trust because I know the principals.
And there are many people I know that hold two contradictory views at the same time -- I do myself! I am Large, I contain Multitudes (Walt Whitman).
As for promissary estoppel... against a corporation? I do wish you luck with that, but I don't hold out much hope.
I have successfully asserted that a dental surgeon that told me that a particular operation was covered by my insurance was then barred by promissory estoppel from charging me for it. In the end, we settled for me paying him what I would have paid as a deductible. One anecdote doesn't make data, but promissory estoppel is alive an well in common law countries.
just to get the software to work properly, you may as well just move to linux
Option #1: Refactor the application to use a totally different set of OS APIs, display libraries and system calls.
Option #2: Refactor the application, removing all of a subset of "offending" API calls or wrapping them in a UAC-subroutine call.
Option #3: Provide a thin application compatibility layer that emulates the "offending" API calls in a non-offensive way.
I think that's in order from hardest to easiest, since you only have to do it once. Incidentally, given how well WoW64 works (and the answer is flawlessly), I don't see how they can't pull this off fairly well.
A corporation, legal euphamisms aside, is not a person. You can't rely on its sense of honor, even if you think it believed it was making a true promise. You can't rely on it to have a single, consistent mind on any given issue. In short, a "promise" from a corporation means zero (perhaps less if the "promise" was in a press release).
The same is true for people. People lie, they renege and they do dishonorable things. You can't rely on them not to change their mind or to keep their promises.
Licenses and contracts (in verifiable form - i.e. written and signed) can mean something, but without one you have no shield from liability if the company decides it didn't really promise what you think it promised.
Why do they not make the software such that the blocks of code than handle the rights restriction parts of the protocols are nested in an 'if' statement that checks for a BE_EVIL flag? By default the flag would be unset. The flag would be undocumented. But anybody who happened to open a header file and change it before compiling would bypass the rights restrictions.
Totally unsettled law, but if I may reason by analogy, the FCC allows people to sell kits and instruction on how to build non-conformant devices (jammers and such like), so probably OK. On the other hand, a court might see this as a transparent attempt to circumvent the anti-circumvention (hehehe) provision. In general, the law does not allow you to do something that is functionally equivalent to an illegal act but not covered due to some cosmetic reason.
Of course, any people that
Incidentally, this came up a while back when some folks wanted to make a patch to the Linux kernel and Sun ZFS kernel driver that allows them to be compiled together. Of course, actually compiling them together (technically the link phase) is in violation of license terms and therefore a violation of copyright. Not sure what happened, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that legal concerns scrapped the project.
You should be correct is 12USC1201 (et seq) referred to a product but actually, the statutes refers to technological measures. The no-copy-bit in the stream itself is not a product, but definitely a measure.
For the purposes of the DMCA, the measure itself "lives" inside the stream itself, not in the product meant to interpret that stream. A product is conformant if it does not circumvents (aka, respects) that measure and is in violation if it circumvents (aka, does not respect) that measure.
For instance, DeCSS does not circumvent the region-coding of DVD players, it simply implements the CSS algorithm in a way that circumvents the region-coding restriction (which is a "measure that effective controls access to a copyrighted work").
Its all really stupid because ultimately displayable content is copyable and thats what they refuse to realize.
What support do you have for the notion that because you can do something, you should be allowed to do that thing. The whole point of The Law is to restrict what we can but ought not to do -- passing laws that restrict actions that people cannot feasibly do ("It shall be illegal to eat the moon") is pointless. So, while I agree entirely on the technical point (displayable content is, in fact, copyable), I disagree very strenuously with the notion that this point alone proves that consumers ought to be able copy content marked 'display only' (perhaps there are other arguments for such an assertion, of course).
As an example, let me posit this:
What the GPL writers don't realize, of course, is that any program from which the source code is available can be modified and compiled into a closed source program. Because technological measures to prevent such a thing are impossible, I conclude that people that write GPL code are immoral/stupid/evil for insisting on terms that they cannot enforce by technological constraint.
It's a classic is/ought problem -- you start with a factual statement and then derive a normative statement when the two are utterly unconnected.
First, this is an unsettled area of law, so really anything anyone says about it should be taken with a grain of salt the size of a small automobile -- if we knew how the Federal Courts would rule in advance of doing so, we would scarcely need them as an institution.
That said, here's my take. The actual law says (whoa, citing a statute on/.)
[It shall be illegal to] circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work...
Now, the DRM flags in the official RTMP specification are a technological measure designed to control access to the copyrighted work in question -- specifically, the BBC has the right to say "you can watch this but you can't make a copy"*, which is a power granted to them by their copyright**. Insofar as rtmpDump (or whatever) circumvents that restriction by ignoring the DRM flags in the media, they have violated 12USC1201 et. seq.
One would think there is a difference between a tool used to circumvent copyright, and a tool that fails to enforce the copyright rules.
My reading of the statute is at variance with yours. The statute makes it illegal to circumvent technological measures, which is a breathtakingly broad term. It basically includes anything that controls access.
For example, if a DVD player fails to implement a region code, is that culpable under the DMCA? Or if a FOSS PDF reader does not have the code that checks for unprintable documents, a DMCA violation?
Yes and yes, although the DVD case is much easier since all DVD players have to license the IP and agree to the terms contractually.
I'm trying to get my head around this. If a specification demands certain restrictions, and those are not implemented, then the implementations can be taken down under the DMCA...
So if I make a DRM file system and someone implements a simple compatible version but fails to make the DRM work properly, this is illegal. Thus, anyone opening a MS-Office document with a product that does not respect the DRM rules in there is a criminal.
That was precisely the intent of 12USC120 et. seq. (see ** again) -- to prevent people from implementing versions that circumvent technological measures that control access to the underlying content.
* Yes, I'm well aware of the fact that technologically speaking, such a restriction is impossible to implement. Simply because a right is enforceable does not negate its existence as a right. This is normally understood in the context of traditional property rights -- I have the right to forbid people from littering on my property, but the fact that the wind blows trash around makes that impossible to enforce in practice and yet no one would claim unfettered right to litter onto private property.
** I've tried as much as possible to avoid normative claims for or against the laws in question. This post is a best-effort attempt to describe the state of affairs as they are, not as they should be. I have opinions on how things should be, but it is manifest folly to mix those opinions with a factual question of how things are. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-ought_problem.
How can a copyright law be used to take down a protocol implementation? What copyrights were infringed? This would normally fall under patent law.
It's not copyright law, it's the anti-circumvention provision. The reference RTMP implements various restrictions that the content provider can specify, for instance, marking it as streaming only. The open-source version, however, did not implement those restrictions and was, in fact, used in various projects whose entire purpose was to download media marked only as streamed -- get_iPlayer being the most notorious as used to rip BBC content.
Sure, but either way the core still sucks. You can make it be decent, but it still requires other software draining the battery.
The WinMo 6.5 core (which, as usual, is back-ported to my 2 year old device by the community) is fine and the "other software" doesn't drain the battery when the phone is in standby. I get better battery life that my roommates iPhone, although that's partly due to the fact that CDMA/EVDO eats GSM/UTMS any day of the week.
A) No multitouch, you wouldn't think it would be that big of a deal, but it multitouch makes touchscreens much more useful for day to day activities B) Resistive touchscreens are flexible, and therefore are more prone to breaking with misuse.
I've used multitouch, seemed like a neat feature but nothing to justify a "big deal". All my apps have gestures, including a version of Opera with a touch-zoom-bar that works just as well as the Safari version -- actually better, since I don't need to move another finger onto the screen but can one hand it with my thumb.
As for breaking, I've spent 2 years of putting my WinMo phone (HTC Titan) directly into my pocket with nothing but aplastic screen protector -- it's banged up and scratched to hell. I've dropped it so many times that the nicks and scratches aren't even distinct any more. The touchscreen works just fine -- it was never as accurate as the iphone but with good software it doesn't need to be.
So you're moving from oppresive Apple to oppresive Microsoft. Brilliant.
Microsoft's "oppression" is a lot less overbearing in this case. For starters, I am granted root access to my phone -- no exploits needed -- just pop open the file explorer and edit/replace/delete whatever you want. A necessary consequence of having root access is that I can install any application by simply transferring the file, as opposed to being beholden to an app store with ridiculous and (as we see in TFA) completely arbitrary restrictions.
Those applications, unlike in Android and iPhoneOS, can access the entire range of OS APIs and so we can create a real NAT router (http://www.wmwifirouter.com/ -- absolutely awesome app btw, wifi, bluetooth, activesync all supported) instead of having to make a half-baked proxy application because Google decided not to expose the raw socket API. Quote the makers of AndroidProxy
It's not really a true "tethering" app. Presently we don't have access to any low level packet APIs so it's impossible (without hacking the lower levels of the phone) to write something that does the kind of NAT connection possible with Windows Mobile phones.
So we have an open source OS that refuses to give it's users root privileges and deliberately cripples the API versus a closed source OS with a full API and root access -- I'll call that a tie. Add in the huge application base already developed for WinMo and it's a cinch.
WinMo is not acceptable if you have any understanding of usability. I tried 2 different phones for 2 weeks with it and I'd rather use my cheapo Samsung than a phone with WinMo. Now, Blackberry/Android could be considered alternatives, but don't ever mention WinMo as usable. Please.
I actually said that WinMo is not usable out of the box, but quite usable after putting some time and effort into tweaking it how you like it. Most of all, there is a huge (xda,ppcgeeks) community of hackers constantly working at the devices. You used it for 2 weeks and, I'll bet dollars to donuts, didn't even try a custom ROM or a third-party today screen manager. Of course you put it away. I wouldn't use a stock WinMo phone either but my custom version is more usable that the iPhone by a large margin (and I'm using shitty 2 year old hardware that predates even the 2G iPhone).
Of course, this presumes that you like technology and enjoy fiddling with things to make them better. If you are a business guy that's too busy, get a Blackberry. If you are not technical enough to deal with flashing a device, transferring applications and editing settings, go for the iPhone.
Like I said, I'm watching Andriod, but the lack of a good bluetooth tethering solution (USB, lol) with real sockets is holding me back. A few years of application development and maybe we'll talk.
Unfortunately here in the US there are only one or two phones released with it officially and both are on T-Mobile. Windows Mobile doesn't support captive touch screens officially, and almost anyone who has used WinMo can tell you it basically sucks.
(1) You can move the G1 to AT&T (or any other GSM carrier). Of course AT&T costs a metric ass-ton more than TMO, so I don't know why would want to do it, but that's a different matter? http://www.unlock-tmobileg1.com/EN/procedures/activate.php
(2) WinMo sucks out of the box, but there is a massive community of people cooking up new ROMS and writing awesome applications. If you are a super-busy-important guy (why would you be posting on/.?) then it's not for you, but for anyone with free time that likes to play with gadgets and customize software, WinMo is an acceptable choice.
Also, what's all the fuss about capacitive touch screens? My >2-year old (yes, it predates the 1G iPhone) HTC Titan has a resistive touch screen that works fine without the stylus for any application designed for touch-use, including most of the WinMo interface since I upgraded to 6.5 (community built, naturally). The (past) lack of good touch applications on the WinMo side of things was a software problem carried over from the days of the stylus, not because of hardware that couldn't support it.
I still don't understand why prostitution is illegal. Regulate it, slap a sin tax on it.
I agree completely as a matter of policy, but in practice there will still be plenty of illegal and unregulated prostitution going on (which is still, IMO, a problem). First and foremost, many hookers will try to avoid taxes (they already get paid in cash, which means every dollar they make is like $1.35 in taxed salary) and pimps who rely on drug-addicted (or otherwise abused) hookers will want to stay off the radar. Girls that don't meet health standards will still turn to the black/gray market to make ends meet. Nevada's experiment with legal prostitution shows that, unless legal prostitution can compete on price with illegal prostitution, you still get plenty of street walkers. Your average working-class John cannot afford to pay for the regulatory overhead (hehehe) and taxes that it would take to legalize it and turns to the street.
After all that noise, Craigslist will still be vilified for helping prostitutes meet Johns outside the regulatory framework. Look the furor in Chicago regarding the discriminatory housing posts, which you see all the fucking time on Craigslist because many people have preferences that are illegal to advertise (not illegal to have though, in a bizarre twist of law). Many folks (thankfully not the courts) thought that Craigslist was responsible for the users that were using a legal service in a manner that violates housing advertising regulations. Think about the howls when Craigslist is advertising for sexual services that don't meet regulations.
Like I said, I agree totally from a policy point of view, but I'm just a lot more cynical about the results when that policy hits the real world.
This gives REI grounds to ask him to leave, and to have him arrested for trespassing should he fail to do so. It does not give them grounds to have him arrested.
Technically correct, but if they ask you to delete the pictures, it's advisable to do so. They can't require you to (or steal your camera) but they can sue you later, and if the picture was taken on their property without their permission, they will win the suit.
This really isn't anything that can't be resolved by adults speaking to each other cordially. Photographers generally accept that they don't have the right to take pictures on private property without consent, business owners generally accept that harassing photographers makes them look like asses. The fact that it didn't work in this instance is just a testament to how childish we've become.
The real truth is that per the Constitution of the United States you can take any photo you want so long as you are on public property at the time
Correct. Which is why this guy had no right to take a picture there without the consent of REI, who owns the store. REI is not public property, it's a privately owned store than is open the public.
This whole thing makes everyone involved look like an asshole.
Perhaps most importantly, is it even legal for them to force an existing employee into new terms of employment in his jurisdiction?
Unless he has a contract, why not? Employment-at-will means you can fired at any time, for any reason not specifically barred by law (alas, this reason is not).
If you demand that the terms of your employment be stable for a fixed period of time, get a contract.
Do US police helicopters not use this technology, or is there some other fundamental difference I've missed?
Oh, they use it all right. The point is that if they observe something ("accidentally" or otherwise), inside a private residence for which they do not have a warrant, that evidence is absolutely inadmissible in a court. Moreover, if an officer uses the IR and then, based on the IR, goes an applies for a warrant, that warrant is invalid and everything seized (including, for instance, dead bodies under the floorboards even if he was searched for dope) is not admissible in court.
There are scattered accusations that LEOs will illegally use the IR to find drug houses and then investigate them in other ways without ever mentioning or admitting the initial IR sweep. I don't doubt it happens (although I doubt it happens pervasively) but I don't see it as particularly different from most LEO rule-breaking.
So far there is no gadget that can actually see inside our houses, but even that's about to change.
First, IR cameras have existed for decades. They can see inside very well.
Second, in the US, police need a warrant to use it -- that is, the evidence they need to use anything that sees "inside" your house is no less that what they need to kick the door down and look inside themselves. Since the US Courts are very strict on the "fruit of the forbidden tree" doctrine, anything the police learn subsequent to such a search is going to be very hard to admit in court.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States and read the opinion for the difference between "through the wall" and "off the wall". Also of note, the two most "conservative" Justices (Scalia and Thomas) were in the majority along with three more "liberal" members. The 4 dissenters were all moderates on the Court.
Finally, an OT note, I'm consistently surprised that various countries that are considerably more liberal with respect to criminal law nevertheless allow the introduction of evidence that was obtained in violation of the law. In the US, the police have a bit more latitude, for sure, but any evidence they gather in violation of the law is absolutely inadmissible. By contrast, in Canada, the police have much less latitude but the courts have discretion on whether to admit evidence gathered in violation.
No. Once you stop paying me you don't have any right to tell me what to do. You don't want me to join a competing company for say a year, you can damn well pay me for a year to sit on my ass. I'm fairly sure that they are not allowed in the UK anyway, so I'm fine.
I hope that goes the other way for company-benefits that you plan on getting after retirement. One you stop working for them, they have no obligation to give you anything, right?
In the real world, of course, your pay now could reflect some sort of discount for an obligation the company will take later (pension, health-plan) or, conversely, your pay could reflect some sort of bonus for an obligation you will take later (non-compete, for instance). Would it help you to balance it out if your company gave you an itemized breakdown of your salary?
Base Pay: $50,000 / yr
12 Month Non-Compete +$15,000 / yr
50% final pay pension -$ 7,000 / yr
Health Plan -$ 5,000 / yr
Total: $53,000 / yr
I don't see how that's any different that offering a person $53k a year with a non-compete clause. You are paying them, in advance, for their time during the non-compete by increasing their base salary.
There is no requirement in any rational system of human agreements that payment and goods be delivered at exactly the same time. Farmer's sell their crops months ahead of them even being harvested. Futures are contracts to deliver at some later time goods that are paid for today. Non-competes are ways of valuing an employee more and paying for some time after he leaves, with that salary being paid today.
They don't want to learn how the distribution of ions in an IV bag breaks down, or what it even means, because "it will be on the bag and explained anyway" -- god forbid they ever get into a situation where they don't have everything written down, pre-measured out, chewed, and digested for them. They lack critical thinking or the desire to have any.
Being a nurse is like being a technician or mechanic -- follow the manual step-by-step because a lot of work has gone into delineating the SOP and best practices. . The last thing I want in a hospital in a nurse engaged in some critical thinking instead of doing the clinically-approved thing. Evidence-based medicine and all that.
which by my calculation would drop my bill from $65 a month to about $20 a month - an obvious boon for the average consumer.
(1) How do you know what your preferred channels will cost. Maybe they will be $10 each. No one has the slightest idea, including the cable companies, of how ala-carte pricing will come out in the end -- it will make for a hell of an interesting negotiation-time between the networks and the providers though!
(2) 40 channels? Seriously? The lowest tier plan here is like 250, proving only that "cost per channel" is a ridiculous metric that illuminates virtually nothing. The value of some channels (the ones with novel content that costs money, versus the syndication networks like Spike that are much cheaper to produce) can't be reduced like that.
I thought the problem was that the programming sucked.
Americans are a varied bunch -- a lot of us like a lot of very different things. For most people, the Food Network is a total waste of a channel, but I wouldn't trade it away. My old roommate loved the Golf Channel, about which I felt the kind of apathy that he probably felt for FoodTV. There is no/.ers seem overwhelmingly in favor of ala-carte pricing, but I'm quite skeptical that this will improve the quality of programming. Instead, I think it will move towards the same "top-10" mentality where money is poured into the small number of large earners while the bottom half is ignored, or worse. I would love to pay $5/mo "directly" for FoodTV (directly, in the sense that Verizon would see that cash flow and value FoodTV appropriately), but I fear the result.
Plus, I'm generally not a fan of the kind of balkinization that I feel this will produce -- people that view only the things they already know they like are unlikely to branch out and view something different. There's quite a bit of interesting wheat (in there with the chaff, of course) flipping through that large middle block of digital channels.
Yes, but you would have to prove a fairly strong ("proximate") causal link between the virus and the death. It's not enough to say "Well, the MRI machine was down because the tech was cleaning it and if we had gotten him scanned earlier we'd have seen a huge tumor but instead he died", it would have to "the MRI machine was infected with the virus and gave us wrong results so we opened his heart for nothing and he died on the table".
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The makers of rtmpDump don't seem any different then those of the vcr or camera to me.
If you actually read 12USC1201, you'd know that it is illegal to sell a VCR that does not respect the macrovision flag. In the exact same way, there are flags in RTMP media that control access to the underlying content. rtmpDump circumvents those flags.
and so long as they send the bytes to me they can have no complaint on how I use (display) those bits on my end (as a user).
I'm not sure why this is so obvious to everyone as an ethical proposition. If I want to show someone my family vacation photos, I feel like it's quite proper for me to say "look but don't copy" -- same for a draft of a novel I'm writing or a short piece of music I've composed.
Since you have no right in the first place to demand that someone send you a stream of bytes at all, it seems to me quite obvious that you have no right to require that they not attach conditions to those bytes. This reasoning is known in legal circles as a maiore ad minus -- from the stronger unto the weaker. If the BBC can refuse to give you the bytes in at all, they can give you the right to read the bytes but not copy them.
Now with the advent of the DMCA - an atrocious law that should be declared in part or whole as unconstitutional - there is a legal ground for attacking the neo-vcr and to that I say bullocks.
Is the DMCA unconstitutional because it violates a particular provision of the Constitution or just because it's atrocious? People don't like to hear this from lawyers, but the fact is that the Constitution allows many shitty things (it is, after all, manifestly imperfect).
With no contractual agreement between any of the parties why the fed. gov. need to get involved with everything?
They need to get involved because a majority of representatives, duly elected by The People, voted to get them involved.
What I should have said is, you can never rely on a corporation to stick to a promise. There are people I trust; there are not corporations I trust in that sense. Corporate inconsistency isn't like a person "changing his mind"; a corporation can hold two contradictory views concurrently in a way most people cannot, because it is not a single person with a single mind.
There are corporations that I trust to varying degrees. I let Google host all my personal mail, calendar and contact information (I have a mirror) even knowing that they could read it all and use it to reset my bank, credit card and etrade account password and basically wreck my life. There are corporations that I trust because I know the principals.
And there are many people I know that hold two contradictory views at the same time -- I do myself! I am Large, I contain Multitudes (Walt Whitman).
As for promissary estoppel... against a corporation? I do wish you luck with that, but I don't hold out much hope.
I have successfully asserted that a dental surgeon that told me that a particular operation was covered by my insurance was then barred by promissory estoppel from charging me for it. In the end, we settled for me paying him what I would have paid as a deductible. One anecdote doesn't make data, but promissory estoppel is alive an well in common law countries.
just to get the software to work properly, you may as well just move to linux
Option #1: Refactor the application to use a totally different set of OS APIs, display libraries and system calls.
Option #2: Refactor the application, removing all of a subset of "offending" API calls or wrapping them in a UAC-subroutine call.
Option #3: Provide a thin application compatibility layer that emulates the "offending" API calls in a non-offensive way.
I think that's in order from hardest to easiest, since you only have to do it once. Incidentally, given how well WoW64 works (and the answer is flawlessly), I don't see how they can't pull this off fairly well.
A corporation, legal euphamisms aside, is not a person. You can't rely on its sense of honor, even if you think it believed it was making a true promise. You can't rely on it to have a single, consistent mind on any given issue. In short, a "promise" from a corporation means zero (perhaps less if the "promise" was in a press release).
The same is true for people. People lie, they renege and they do dishonorable things. You can't rely on them not to change their mind or to keep their promises.
Licenses and contracts (in verifiable form - i.e. written and signed) can mean something, but without one you have no shield from liability if the company decides it didn't really promise what you think it promised.
(1) Not quite right as a legal matter -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel, at least in common-law countries like the US.
(2) Also true of people.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I've seen just as nasty and noble behavior from individuals and corporations alike.
Why do they not make the software such that the blocks of code than handle the rights restriction parts of the protocols are nested in an 'if' statement that checks for a BE_EVIL flag? By default the flag would be unset. The flag would be undocumented. But anybody who happened to open a header file and change it before compiling would bypass the rights restrictions.
Totally unsettled law, but if I may reason by analogy, the FCC allows people to sell kits and instruction on how to build non-conformant devices (jammers and such like), so probably OK. On the other hand, a court might see this as a transparent attempt to circumvent the anti-circumvention (hehehe) provision. In general, the law does not allow you to do something that is functionally equivalent to an illegal act but not covered due to some cosmetic reason.
Of course, any people that
Incidentally, this came up a while back when some folks wanted to make a patch to the Linux kernel and Sun ZFS kernel driver that allows them to be compiled together. Of course, actually compiling them together (technically the link phase) is in violation of license terms and therefore a violation of copyright. Not sure what happened, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that legal concerns scrapped the project.
You should be correct is 12USC1201 (et seq) referred to a product but actually, the statutes refers to technological measures. The no-copy-bit in the stream itself is not a product, but definitely a measure.
For the purposes of the DMCA, the measure itself "lives" inside the stream itself, not in the product meant to interpret that stream. A product is conformant if it does not circumvents (aka, respects) that measure and is in violation if it circumvents (aka, does not respect) that measure.
For instance, DeCSS does not circumvent the region-coding of DVD players, it simply implements the CSS algorithm in a way that circumvents the region-coding restriction (which is a "measure that effective controls access to a copyrighted work").
Its all really stupid because ultimately displayable content is copyable and thats what they refuse to realize.
What support do you have for the notion that because you can do something, you should be allowed to do that thing. The whole point of The Law is to restrict what we can but ought not to do -- passing laws that restrict actions that people cannot feasibly do ("It shall be illegal to eat the moon") is pointless. So, while I agree entirely on the technical point (displayable content is, in fact, copyable), I disagree very strenuously with the notion that this point alone proves that consumers ought to be able copy content marked 'display only' (perhaps there are other arguments for such an assertion, of course).
As an example, let me posit this:
What the GPL writers don't realize, of course, is that any program from which the source code is available can be modified and compiled into a closed source program. Because technological measures to prevent such a thing are impossible, I conclude that people that write GPL code are immoral/stupid/evil for insisting on terms that they cannot enforce by technological constraint.
It's a classic is/ought problem -- you start with a factual statement and then derive a normative statement when the two are utterly unconnected.
First, this is an unsettled area of law, so really anything anyone says about it should be taken with a grain of salt the size of a small automobile -- if we knew how the Federal Courts would rule in advance of doing so, we would scarcely need them as an institution.
That said, here's my take. The actual law says (whoa, citing a statute on /.)
[It shall be illegal to] circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work ...
Now, the DRM flags in the official RTMP specification are a technological measure designed to control access to the copyrighted work in question -- specifically, the BBC has the right to say "you can watch this but you can't make a copy"*, which is a power granted to them by their copyright**. Insofar as rtmpDump (or whatever) circumvents that restriction by ignoring the DRM flags in the media, they have violated 12USC1201 et. seq.
One would think there is a difference between a tool used to circumvent copyright, and a tool that fails to enforce the copyright rules.
My reading of the statute is at variance with yours. The statute makes it illegal to circumvent technological measures, which is a breathtakingly broad term. It basically includes anything that controls access.
For example, if a DVD player fails to implement a region code, is that culpable under the DMCA? Or if a FOSS PDF reader does not have the code that checks for unprintable documents, a DMCA violation?
Yes and yes, although the DVD case is much easier since all DVD players have to license the IP and agree to the terms contractually.
I'm trying to get my head around this. If a specification demands certain restrictions, and those are not implemented, then the implementations can be taken down under the DMCA...
So if I make a DRM file system and someone implements a simple compatible version but fails to make the DRM work properly, this is illegal. Thus, anyone opening a MS-Office document with a product that does not respect the DRM rules in there is a criminal.
That was precisely the intent of 12USC120 et. seq. (see ** again) -- to prevent people from implementing versions that circumvent technological measures that control access to the underlying content.
* Yes, I'm well aware of the fact that technologically speaking, such a restriction is impossible to implement. Simply because a right is enforceable does not negate its existence as a right. This is normally understood in the context of traditional property rights -- I have the right to forbid people from littering on my property, but the fact that the wind blows trash around makes that impossible to enforce in practice and yet no one would claim unfettered right to litter onto private property.
** I've tried as much as possible to avoid normative claims for or against the laws in question. This post is a best-effort attempt to describe the state of affairs as they are, not as they should be. I have opinions on how things should be, but it is manifest folly to mix those opinions with a factual question of how things are. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-ought_problem.
How can a copyright law be used to take down a protocol implementation? What copyrights were infringed? This would normally fall under patent law.
It's not copyright law, it's the anti-circumvention provision. The reference RTMP implements various restrictions that the content provider can specify, for instance, marking it as streaming only. The open-source version, however, did not implement those restrictions and was, in fact, used in various projects whose entire purpose was to download media marked only as streamed -- get_iPlayer being the most notorious as used to rip BBC content.
Sure, but either way the core still sucks. You can make it be decent, but it still requires other software draining the battery.
The WinMo 6.5 core (which, as usual, is back-ported to my 2 year old device by the community) is fine and the "other software" doesn't drain the battery when the phone is in standby. I get better battery life that my roommates iPhone, although that's partly due to the fact that CDMA/EVDO eats GSM/UTMS any day of the week.
A) No multitouch, you wouldn't think it would be that big of a deal, but it multitouch makes touchscreens much more useful for day to day activities B) Resistive touchscreens are flexible, and therefore are more prone to breaking with misuse.
I've used multitouch, seemed like a neat feature but nothing to justify a "big deal". All my apps have gestures, including a version of Opera with a touch-zoom-bar that works just as well as the Safari version -- actually better, since I don't need to move another finger onto the screen but can one hand it with my thumb.
As for breaking, I've spent 2 years of putting my WinMo phone (HTC Titan) directly into my pocket with nothing but aplastic screen protector -- it's banged up and scratched to hell. I've dropped it so many times that the nicks and scratches aren't even distinct any more. The touchscreen works just fine -- it was never as accurate as the iphone but with good software it doesn't need to be.
So you're moving from oppresive Apple to oppresive Microsoft. Brilliant.
Microsoft's "oppression" is a lot less overbearing in this case. For starters, I am granted root access to my phone -- no exploits needed -- just pop open the file explorer and edit/replace/delete whatever you want. A necessary consequence of having root access is that I can install any application by simply transferring the file, as opposed to being beholden to an app store with ridiculous and (as we see in TFA) completely arbitrary restrictions.
Those applications, unlike in Android and iPhoneOS, can access the entire range of OS APIs and so we can create a real NAT router (http://www.wmwifirouter.com/ -- absolutely awesome app btw, wifi, bluetooth, activesync all supported) instead of having to make a half-baked proxy application because Google decided not to expose the raw socket API. Quote the makers of AndroidProxy
It's not really a true "tethering" app. Presently we don't have access to any low level packet APIs so it's impossible (without hacking the lower levels of the phone) to write something that does the kind of NAT connection possible with Windows Mobile phones.
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:q-oBbuzOHAwJ:graha.ms/androidproxy/+androidproxy
So we have an open source OS that refuses to give it's users root privileges and deliberately cripples the API versus a closed source OS with a full API and root access -- I'll call that a tie. Add in the huge application base already developed for WinMo and it's a cinch.
WinMo is not acceptable if you have any understanding of usability. I tried 2 different phones for 2 weeks with it and I'd rather use my cheapo Samsung than a phone with WinMo. Now, Blackberry/Android could be considered alternatives, but don't ever mention WinMo as usable. Please.
I actually said that WinMo is not usable out of the box, but quite usable after putting some time and effort into tweaking it how you like it. Most of all, there is a huge (xda,ppcgeeks) community of hackers constantly working at the devices. You used it for 2 weeks and, I'll bet dollars to donuts, didn't even try a custom ROM or a third-party today screen manager. Of course you put it away. I wouldn't use a stock WinMo phone either but my custom version is more usable that the iPhone by a large margin (and I'm using shitty 2 year old hardware that predates even the 2G iPhone).
Of course, this presumes that you like technology and enjoy fiddling with things to make them better. If you are a business guy that's too busy, get a Blackberry. If you are not technical enough to deal with flashing a device, transferring applications and editing settings, go for the iPhone.
Like I said, I'm watching Andriod, but the lack of a good bluetooth tethering solution (USB, lol) with real sockets is holding me back. A few years of application development and maybe we'll talk.
Unfortunately here in the US there are only one or two phones released with it officially and both are on T-Mobile. Windows Mobile doesn't support captive touch screens officially, and almost anyone who has used WinMo can tell you it basically sucks.
(1) You can move the G1 to AT&T (or any other GSM carrier). Of course AT&T costs a metric ass-ton more than TMO, so I don't know why would want to do it, but that's a different matter? http://www.unlock-tmobileg1.com/EN/procedures/activate.php
(2) WinMo sucks out of the box, but there is a massive community of people cooking up new ROMS and writing awesome applications. If you are a super-busy-important guy (why would you be posting on /.?) then it's not for you, but for anyone with free time that likes to play with gadgets and customize software, WinMo is an acceptable choice.
Also, what's all the fuss about capacitive touch screens? My >2-year old (yes, it predates the 1G iPhone) HTC Titan has a resistive touch screen that works fine without the stylus for any application designed for touch-use, including most of the WinMo interface since I upgraded to 6.5 (community built, naturally). The (past) lack of good touch applications on the WinMo side of things was a software problem carried over from the days of the stylus, not because of hardware that couldn't support it.
I still don't understand why prostitution is illegal. Regulate it, slap a sin tax on it.
I agree completely as a matter of policy, but in practice there will still be plenty of illegal and unregulated prostitution going on (which is still, IMO, a problem). First and foremost, many hookers will try to avoid taxes (they already get paid in cash, which means every dollar they make is like $1.35 in taxed salary) and pimps who rely on drug-addicted (or otherwise abused) hookers will want to stay off the radar. Girls that don't meet health standards will still turn to the black/gray market to make ends meet. Nevada's experiment with legal prostitution shows that, unless legal prostitution can compete on price with illegal prostitution, you still get plenty of street walkers. Your average working-class John cannot afford to pay for the regulatory overhead (hehehe) and taxes that it would take to legalize it and turns to the street.
After all that noise, Craigslist will still be vilified for helping prostitutes meet Johns outside the regulatory framework. Look the furor in Chicago regarding the discriminatory housing posts, which you see all the fucking time on Craigslist because many people have preferences that are illegal to advertise (not illegal to have though, in a bizarre twist of law). Many folks (thankfully not the courts) thought that Craigslist was responsible for the users that were using a legal service in a manner that violates housing advertising regulations. Think about the howls when Craigslist is advertising for sexual services that don't meet regulations.
Like I said, I agree totally from a policy point of view, but I'm just a lot more cynical about the results when that policy hits the real world.
This gives REI grounds to ask him to leave, and to have him arrested for trespassing should he fail to do so. It does not give them grounds to have him arrested.
Technically correct, but if they ask you to delete the pictures, it's advisable to do so. They can't require you to (or steal your camera) but they can sue you later, and if the picture was taken on their property without their permission, they will win the suit.
This really isn't anything that can't be resolved by adults speaking to each other cordially. Photographers generally accept that they don't have the right to take pictures on private property without consent, business owners generally accept that harassing photographers makes them look like asses. The fact that it didn't work in this instance is just a testament to how childish we've become.
The real truth is that per the Constitution of the United States you can take any photo you want so long as you are on public property at the time
Correct. Which is why this guy had no right to take a picture there without the consent of REI, who owns the store. REI is not public property, it's a privately owned store than is open the public.
This whole thing makes everyone involved look like an asshole.
Perhaps most importantly, is it even legal for them to force an existing employee into new terms of employment in his jurisdiction?
Unless he has a contract, why not? Employment-at-will means you can fired at any time, for any reason not specifically barred by law (alas, this reason is not).
If you demand that the terms of your employment be stable for a fixed period of time, get a contract.
Do US police helicopters not use this technology, or is there some other fundamental difference I've missed?
Oh, they use it all right. The point is that if they observe something ("accidentally" or otherwise), inside a private residence for which they do not have a warrant, that evidence is absolutely inadmissible in a court. Moreover, if an officer uses the IR and then, based on the IR, goes an applies for a warrant, that warrant is invalid and everything seized (including, for instance, dead bodies under the floorboards even if he was searched for dope) is not admissible in court.
There are scattered accusations that LEOs will illegally use the IR to find drug houses and then investigate them in other ways without ever mentioning or admitting the initial IR sweep. I don't doubt it happens (although I doubt it happens pervasively) but I don't see it as particularly different from most LEO rule-breaking.
So far there is no gadget that can actually see inside our houses, but even that's about to change.
First, IR cameras have existed for decades. They can see inside very well.
Second, in the US, police need a warrant to use it -- that is, the evidence they need to use anything that sees "inside" your house is no less that what they need to kick the door down and look inside themselves. Since the US Courts are very strict on the "fruit of the forbidden tree" doctrine, anything the police learn subsequent to such a search is going to be very hard to admit in court.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States and read the opinion for the difference between "through the wall" and "off the wall". Also of note, the two most "conservative" Justices (Scalia and Thomas) were in the majority along with three more "liberal" members. The 4 dissenters were all moderates on the Court.
Finally, an OT note, I'm consistently surprised that various countries that are considerably more liberal with respect to criminal law nevertheless allow the introduction of evidence that was obtained in violation of the law. In the US, the police have a bit more latitude, for sure, but any evidence they gather in violation of the law is absolutely inadmissible. By contrast, in Canada, the police have much less latitude but the courts have discretion on whether to admit evidence gathered in violation.
I get 20/20 from FIOS and it's damn good. No caps, no overages (15TB in 6 months), and I could get 50/20 but I'd rather save the $$$.
No. Once you stop paying me you don't have any right to tell me what to do. You don't want me to join a competing company for say a year, you can damn well pay me for a year to sit on my ass. I'm fairly sure that they are not allowed in the UK anyway, so I'm fine.
I hope that goes the other way for company-benefits that you plan on getting after retirement. One you stop working for them, they have no obligation to give you anything, right?
In the real world, of course, your pay now could reflect some sort of discount for an obligation the company will take later (pension, health-plan) or, conversely, your pay could reflect some sort of bonus for an obligation you will take later (non-compete, for instance). Would it help you to balance it out if your company gave you an itemized breakdown of your salary?
Base Pay: $50,000 / yr
12 Month Non-Compete +$15,000 / yr
50% final pay pension -$ 7,000 / yr
Health Plan -$ 5,000 / yr
Total: $53,000 / yr
I don't see how that's any different that offering a person $53k a year with a non-compete clause. You are paying them, in advance, for their time during the non-compete by increasing their base salary.
There is no requirement in any rational system of human agreements that payment and goods be delivered at exactly the same time. Farmer's sell their crops months ahead of them even being harvested. Futures are contracts to deliver at some later time goods that are paid for today. Non-competes are ways of valuing an employee more and paying for some time after he leaves, with that salary being paid today.
They don't want to learn how the distribution of ions in an IV bag breaks down, or what it even means, because "it will be on the bag and explained anyway" -- god forbid they ever get into a situation where they don't have everything written down, pre-measured out, chewed, and digested for them. They lack critical thinking or the desire to have any.
Being a nurse is like being a technician or mechanic -- follow the manual step-by-step because a lot of work has gone into delineating the SOP and best practices. . The last thing I want in a hospital in a nurse engaged in some critical thinking instead of doing the clinically-approved thing. Evidence-based medicine and all that.
PS. The cable companies pay HBO more than $1 per subscriber. You'll have to up your offer if you want anyone to take you seriously.
PPS. (Really should have reread my original before posting, oh well), American Idol and Desperate Housewives are both available for free OTA.
which by my calculation would drop my bill from $65 a month to about $20 a month - an obvious boon for the average consumer.
(1) How do you know what your preferred channels will cost. Maybe they will be $10 each. No one has the slightest idea, including the cable companies, of how ala-carte pricing will come out in the end -- it will make for a hell of an interesting negotiation-time between the networks and the providers though!
(2) 40 channels? Seriously? The lowest tier plan here is like 250, proving only that "cost per channel" is a ridiculous metric that illuminates virtually nothing. The value of some channels (the ones with novel content that costs money, versus the syndication networks like Spike that are much cheaper to produce) can't be reduced like that.
I thought the problem was that the programming sucked.
Americans are a varied bunch -- a lot of us like a lot of very different things. For most people, the Food Network is a total waste of a channel, but I wouldn't trade it away. My old roommate loved the Golf Channel, about which I felt the kind of apathy that he probably felt for FoodTV. There is no /.ers seem overwhelmingly in favor of ala-carte pricing, but I'm quite skeptical that this will improve the quality of programming. Instead, I think it will move towards the same "top-10" mentality where money is poured into the small number of large earners while the bottom half is ignored, or worse. I would love to pay $5/mo "directly" for FoodTV (directly, in the sense that Verizon would see that cash flow and value FoodTV appropriately), but I fear the result.
Plus, I'm generally not a fan of the kind of balkinization that I feel this will produce -- people that view only the things they already know they like are unlikely to branch out and view something different. There's quite a bit of interesting wheat (in there with the chaff, of course) flipping through that large middle block of digital channels.
Yes, but you would have to prove a fairly strong ("proximate") causal link between the virus and the death. It's not enough to say "Well, the MRI machine was down because the tech was cleaning it and if we had gotten him scanned earlier we'd have seen a huge tumor but instead he died", it would have to "the MRI machine was infected with the virus and gave us wrong results so we opened his heart for nothing and he died on the table".
See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause