Of course, as pointed out below, US constitution is much more deferential, in theory, to the enforceability of treaties to which the US is a signatory in local law, so not really something constitution-loving Americans can be genuinely offended by...
I think this may actually not be a waste of time. A lot of the mess we see now is due to the inclusion of patented technology in international standards (be they ITU, ETSI, ISO-IEC, ANSI whatever). And the fact that there was so little oversight on this, the validity of patent claims and subsequent licensing, was due to the direct wishes of the telecom/technology companies themselves. The standard bodies were all to happy to accommodate their constituents in this point for years.
Now the companies, and the government who are in the awkward position of depriving their citizens of the latest cell phone because of some obscure patent law issue, are realizing that they are in the process of hanging themselves with the rope they had requested.
This is a very broad issue and the ITU has had a decent track record of elevating previously obscure tech issues into the international policy realm. If anyone expects overnight binding measures to come from this, they are deluded. But raising awareness of the issue and getting the various actors to take a position is the unavoidable first step in resolving any complex issue.
I see a lot of comments in this thread around the lines of "Well if you didn't want your name on a judgment, you shouldn't have done anything illegal". While this is a quesionable argument, it seems the slashdot crowd has not spent a significant amount of time looking at the crap some judges put in judgments.
I've been personally involved with that kind of work (putting legal decisions online) and some of the stuff, especially in child abuse or sexual assault cases is just heart churning.
Now think about how you'd feel as a teenager if whenever someone googles your name, they find out about what your uncle did to you when you were 6.
Yes, court decisions should be public. Yes, in principle names should remain in there. But in some cases, it is really not appropriate. Note that if you really want to find out the info, you can always request it from the clerk of that tribunal.
We have gone a long way from the days where the decisions were locked behind expensive proprietary databases, or dusty books. This have changed the effects of the principle of public availability of the law. Let's not go backward and realize that while the law needs to be public, associating some of the sordid details with an individual is not conducive to either the victim healing or the criminal being eventually rehabilitated. Its hard enough getting your life together with a criminal file when you have doe your time, making it even harder makes the whole concept of the sentencing futile.
BTW, there has been a big effort in educating judges in thinking about they decisions being available to a larger clerk than the legal scholars.
Did anyone notice all the Beatles songs displayed during the keynote? That, and the name change to Apple inc., suggest to me that they came to an agreement with Apple records on the long-standing name and distribution issues.
Personal information is personal information. From medical records to the brand of deodorant you use, there is a large scope of information that can be tied to you as am individual. That is personal information.
Making it available to a large number of people, inadvertently or on purpose, in a lawful or an unlawful way, does not change that fact.
What is private or not depends on your personal inclination. But personal information is a legal concept and is not at all like analogous to trade secrets, as you seem to imply.
Hey... Your phone line works to call anywhere in the world (think about it for a second). Modems and faxes too. Same for leased data lines. The bird your satellite TV comes from does not talk over its neighbourgh. Deregulation and uniform interconnection rates make you life easier and cheaper. H.264 is pretty neat. Cut them some slack...
ITu has a fairly good track record at making stuff work behind the scenes. It also has way more engineers in house than diplomats.
There are many good things to question in this article but UN bashing, ITU bashing or WSIS bashing (for the few who seem to be able to tell the difference), or even China bashing, just wastes electrons.
All of those who are so prompt to jump at power grabs by private compagnies over their beloved internet should think twice: maybe this level of oversight would reduce such interferences.
Dude, Anyone who has ever spent a winter in Montreal could tell you that the sky is blue and the air is crisp as soon at the weather goes below -15 C (5 F). Sunlight should not be the main problem. The main problem is how to avoid them remotely signaling to the little-green-men that my time is up.
Yeah. Pretty neat. Check out the litteracy rate in Kerala. It's above 95% IIRC. Quite an acheivement. Congress and some flavour of the CP have been in power there alternatively since the independance.
West Bengal also had quite a few communist governements in power over the years.
It's a tough question and both our positions are defendable.
The "making available to the public" part is very close to "distribution" or "public representation". Radio stations when broadcasting are not doing a one on one communication, they are merely broadcasting, offering the work to the public at large. There is no fixation until (or unless) you choose to record the signal. Not a perfect analogy to P2P but close enough to question the assumption that offering files to the world on Kazaa is not distribution.
Loaning a copied CD: this I agree with. Second generation private copy seems in line with the letter of the act.
It's a tough question but my reading of 80.1 is that the person making the private copy does not have the burden to verify that the song they are copying was offered (as with a CD), broadcasted (it works for taping songs off the radio too) or accessed in a way that is not in itself an infringement.
I'm allowed to copy my own CDs for my own use, so CD to HD is ok. Then someone can copy a song under 80.1 too, even it that song itelf is a generation away from the original media. Offering the file for the whole world to download is a problem though.
Check out Michael Geist answer to the application of 80.1 to P2P : " I'm inclined to think that you'd have a pretty good argument as an individual user--that personal, noncommercial copying is permitted by the exemption.
The one caveat--and this is where there have been many myths--is that there is little doubt under Canadian copyright law that making those same songs available to others is not permissible. "
Microsoft technology powers the navigation feature used in BMW's innovative new iDrive telematics system. (Click for high-resolution image) REDMOND, Wash. -- March 4, 2002 -- Microsoft Corp. today announced that the BMW 7 Series, the line of cars introduced last month in the United States, features Microsoft's robust, real-time embedded operating system, Windows(R) CE. This announcement comes shortly after Microsoft's Automotive Business Unit launched Windows CE for Automotive v3.5, the newest version of its telematics software platform based on Windows CE, and announced an end-to-end solution to enable the auto industry to cost-effectively implement and maintain advanced automotive telematics.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but Mac have had seriel number accessible by software for a LONG time.
On OS X, check out the system profiler. It's usually there unless you did a complete reformating of your original partitions. I think (please correct me if I'm wrong)that this mechanism is also used for the DRM attached to the files from the iTunes store.
I've played around a bit with the store, and I think the principal reason for the partial catalog are licensing issues.
On some albums, some songs have different copyright owners. Depending on the licensing contracts, distribution contracts, relations between labels and rights owners, there might be some tracks or albums for which it was not practical to clear the rights required to make them available on Apple's music store.
I fully expect that if the mostly positive response to the service translates into sales, you'll see that everyone will want a piece of it and the catalog will grow very quickly.
Similarly, I'd love to see Apple offer a spot for independent musicians, but if they signed the five majors on the deal, I'd expect the labels' lawyers took care of that possibility already...
As for the Beatles, I think Michael Jackson owns the rights to most of their albums, but there also was that trademark lawsuit by Apple Records... I'd be curious to know if the settlement still that reportedly prevented Apple computers to get in the music business still stands.
The thing is, we don't know. I'm sure there is some algae somewhere that is just craving for more solar input and more CO2. And maybe that algae is the solutions to hunger in the world. I don't know, and I don't believe anyone does.
It's hard to predict how our actions influence on the environement on a large scale. But the fact is the system worked fine before we started trying to improve/mess/play/have a significant effect on it.
I'm mostly saying, let's be smart and not draw definitive conclusions through observations that are not supported by any understanding of the situation.
As a side note, I think SUV culture is more than the mere driving of a gaz guzzling behemoth (which, I'm the first to admit, is fun on many different levels). To me it's that mindset of "I don't care and to hell everyone else". That mindset brings on issues what will do harm way before any (potential) environemental issue does.
I've spent a few months in China. And I trully enjoyed every moment.
However, I've seen more trademark along the lines of Red Flag, Yellow Star and such. Or animal-themed brands, or virtue based (I'm trying to remember the cigarette brands here).
Communist in name: I know. It was fun listening to chinese law teachers explaining the current doctrine and current factual context...
Well, the "communist system with chinese elements" may be closer to good old facism, but I doubt they'd use feudal terms to name products, esp. if they're going to have exposure abroad.
The article quotes SG Utsumi saying that the Internet should be considered a public utility.
On one hand, this bring me the image of PSTN monopolies of the 70's, with the abuses and inefficiencies.
On the other hand, regulated QoS levels, mandatory public access and connectivity mandate, common carrier obligation are all things that the broadband industry could use right now.
I wonder if the Internet is not mature enough to desserve the status of public utility, like the power grid, the water network, sewers, etc.
I think it would help to put emphasis on the "common good infrastructure" bit. it would prevent AOL or other providers to use their provider business to leverage their content business. It would ultimately help competition on the service provider side by giving an even playing field on the connectivity providing side.
It's a topic I haven't seen addressed on/. yet, maybe because many people seem allergic to any regulation of the networks. But I do beleive in the multilateral process and maybe it's time to see what it can do for the Internet.
Microsoft themselves have been burned many times by leaked, and maybe falsified, documents. I have no idea how reliable all this will be without a TCPA, but I can totally understand why they'd want that kind of features.
Quite frankly, above all the abuse possibilities, I must confess that I can think of a zillion uses for rights management in document in my daily practice that are more fine grained that "can't modify" or "don't print".
And it's a feature with a double upgrad incentive: upgrade to use the feature and, oh look at that, the document format changed again! I thought they swore that would not happen anymore!
I have a.int email. I also have two.ca email (ISP and University), a couple.com (yahoo, hotmail, a bunch of redirects to manage spam and mailing lists, and a website of mine) and I registered my name as a.name.
Why? Well first, despite what I've read so far in this thread, I like the concept of registering (and owning) a domain that is neither a vanity domain, a corp email or an ISP dependant email. There IS a growing need for that as people start to realize that keeping a presence is important. Just like phone numbers or physical address, it is important to be able not to vanish in thin air when you change jobs/move/don't log in for more than 45 days.
My.name is my own for my personal mail (and eventually a personal non anonymous web presence). I was bitten by many free providers going non free (iNames, mail.com, iTools) and I decided that if I was going to pay to get a stable email addy, I might as well get my own name and actually "own" something. I don't think it'll look silly in 5 years (well, that is if they don't go bankrupt).
I like the idea of.name, it's probably the smartest of the new TLDs or rebranded ccTLDs (.biz?.ws?! Gimme a break...) and if it was not that ridiculously expensive, it might sell better.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the International Teleocmmunications Regulations, revision of which fall within the ITU mandate, are one of the few binding treaties out there.
Of course, as pointed out below, US constitution is much more deferential, in theory, to the enforceability of treaties to which the US is a signatory in local law, so not really something constitution-loving Americans can be genuinely offended by...
I think this may actually not be a waste of time. A lot of the mess we see now is due to the inclusion of patented technology in international standards (be they ITU, ETSI, ISO-IEC, ANSI whatever). And the fact that there was so little oversight on this, the validity of patent claims and subsequent licensing, was due to the direct wishes of the telecom/technology companies themselves. The standard bodies were all to happy to accommodate their constituents in this point for years.
Now the companies, and the government who are in the awkward position of depriving their citizens of the latest cell phone because of some obscure patent law issue, are realizing that they are in the process of hanging themselves with the rope they had requested.
This is a very broad issue and the ITU has had a decent track record of elevating previously obscure tech issues into the international policy realm. If anyone expects overnight binding measures to come from this, they are deluded. But raising awareness of the issue and getting the various actors to take a position is the unavoidable first step in resolving any complex issue.
Good luck to them.
I see a lot of comments in this thread around the lines of "Well if you didn't want your name on a judgment, you shouldn't have done anything illegal". While this is a quesionable argument, it seems the slashdot crowd has not spent a significant amount of time looking at the crap some judges put in judgments.
I've been personally involved with that kind of work (putting legal decisions online) and some of the stuff, especially in child abuse or sexual assault cases is just heart churning.
Now think about how you'd feel as a teenager if whenever someone googles your name, they find out about what your uncle did to you when you were 6.
Yes, court decisions should be public. Yes, in principle names should remain in there. But in some cases, it is really not appropriate. Note that if you really want to find out the info, you can always request it from the clerk of that tribunal.
We have gone a long way from the days where the decisions were locked behind expensive proprietary databases, or dusty books. This have changed the effects of the principle of public availability of the law. Let's not go backward and realize that while the law needs to be public, associating some of the sordid details with an individual is not conducive to either the victim healing or the criminal being eventually rehabilitated. Its hard enough getting your life together with a criminal file when you have doe your time, making it even harder makes the whole concept of the sentencing futile.
BTW, there has been a big effort in educating judges in thinking about they decisions being available to a larger clerk than the legal scholars.
Did anyone notice all the Beatles songs displayed during the keynote? That, and the name change to Apple inc., suggest to me that they came to an agreement with Apple records on the long-standing name and distribution issues.
Has been done. A couple years too early perhaps...
http://www.lowendmac.com/roadapples/mactv.shtml
Mhh. No.
Personal information is personal information. From medical records to the brand of deodorant you use, there is a large scope of information that can be tied to you as am individual. That is personal information.
Making it available to a large number of people, inadvertently or on purpose, in a lawful or an unlawful way, does not change that fact.
What is private or not depends on your personal inclination. But personal information is a legal concept and is not at all like analogous to trade secrets, as you seem to imply.
Hey... Your phone line works to call anywhere in the world (think about it for a second). Modems and faxes too. Same for leased data lines. The bird your satellite TV comes from does not talk over its neighbourgh. Deregulation and uniform interconnection rates make you life easier and cheaper. H.264 is pretty neat. Cut them some slack...
ITu has a fairly good track record at making stuff work behind the scenes. It also has way more engineers in house than diplomats.
There are many good things to question in this article but UN bashing, ITU bashing or WSIS bashing (for the few who seem to be able to tell the difference), or even China bashing, just wastes electrons.
All of those who are so prompt to jump at power grabs by private compagnies over their beloved internet should think twice: maybe this level of oversight would reduce such interferences.
Excellent. Then you won't have any interference when you need HAM radios for emergency purposes.
Dude,
Anyone who has ever spent a winter in Montreal could tell you that the sky is blue and the air is crisp as soon at the weather goes below -15 C (5 F). Sunlight should not be the main problem.
The main problem is how to avoid them remotely signaling to the little-green-men that my time is up.
Yeah. Pretty neat. Check out the litteracy rate in Kerala. It's above 95% IIRC. Quite an acheivement. Congress and some flavour of the CP have been in power there alternatively since the independance.
West Bengal also had quite a few communist governements in power over the years.
It's a tough question and both our positions are defendable.
The "making available to the public" part is very close to "distribution" or "public representation". Radio stations when broadcasting are not doing a one on one communication, they are merely broadcasting, offering the work to the public at large. There is no fixation until (or unless) you choose to record the signal. Not a perfect analogy to P2P but close enough to question the assumption that offering files to the world on Kazaa is not distribution.
Loaning a copied CD: this I agree with. Second generation private copy seems in line with the letter of the act.
This thread is fun. But I don't agree with you.
It's a tough question but my reading of 80.1 is that the person making the private copy does not have the burden to verify that the song they are copying was offered (as with a CD), broadcasted (it works for taping songs off the radio too) or accessed in a way that is not in itself an infringement.
I'm allowed to copy my own CDs for my own use, so CD to HD is ok. Then someone can copy a song under 80.1 too, even it that song itelf is a generation away from the original media. Offering the file for the whole world to download is a problem though.
Check out Michael Geist answer to the application of 80.1 to P2P : " I'm inclined to think that you'd have a pretty good argument as an individual user--that personal, noncommercial copying is permitted by the exemption. The one caveat--and this is where there have been many myths--is that there is little doubt under Canadian copyright law that making those same songs available to others is not permissible. "
Microsoft Technology Hits the Road in BMW 7 Series:
It's Legal Information Institute (LII), not "legal law institute".
You'll find that Cornell got the ball rolling for LIIs: CanLII, Austlii, etcLII.
Good places to go to for free legal info. Think of them as the FSF of the legal world.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but Mac have had seriel number accessible by software for a LONG time.
On OS X, check out the system profiler. It's usually there unless you did a complete reformating of your original partitions.
I think (please correct me if I'm wrong)that this mechanism is also used for the DRM attached to the files from the iTunes store.
Woah.. I just re-read that post thinking that if you replace criminals by terrorists, you get an interresting take on the current US foreign policy..
I've played around a bit with the store, and I think the principal reason for the partial catalog are licensing issues.
On some albums, some songs have different copyright owners. Depending on the licensing contracts, distribution contracts, relations between labels and rights owners, there might be some tracks or albums for which it was not practical to clear the rights required to make them available on Apple's music store.
I fully expect that if the mostly positive response to the service translates into sales, you'll see that everyone will want a piece of it and the catalog will grow very quickly.
Similarly, I'd love to see Apple offer a spot for independent musicians, but if they signed the five majors on the deal, I'd expect the labels' lawyers took care of that possibility already...
As for the Beatles, I think Michael Jackson owns the rights to most of their albums, but there also was that trademark lawsuit by Apple Records... I'd be curious to know if the settlement still that reportedly prevented Apple computers to get in the music business still stands.
The thing is, we don't know. I'm sure there is some algae somewhere that is just craving for more solar input and more CO2. And maybe that algae is the solutions to hunger in the world. I don't know, and I don't believe anyone does.
It's hard to predict how our actions influence on the environement on a large scale. But the fact is the system worked fine before we started trying to improve/mess/play/have a significant effect on it.
I'm mostly saying, let's be smart and not draw definitive conclusions through observations that are not supported by any understanding of the situation.
As a side note, I think SUV culture is more than the mere driving of a gaz guzzling behemoth (which, I'm the first to admit, is fun on many different levels). To me it's that mindset of "I don't care and to hell everyone else". That mindset brings on issues what will do harm way before any (potential) environemental issue does.
Ok, there is more than one factor at play here. It's not as if anyone really expected climate to depend only on human CO2 emissions, right?
But I don't think anyone should take this as an excuse to say "see? SUV culture is not bad for the planet".
Were affecting the equilibrium of a really complex system and we don't really know where that will bring us.
I've spent a few months in China. And I trully enjoyed every moment.
However, I've seen more trademark along the lines of Red Flag, Yellow Star and such. Or animal-themed brands, or virtue based (I'm trying to remember the cigarette brands here).
Communist in name: I know. It was fun listening to chinese law teachers explaining the current doctrine and current factual context...
Not a very communist name though.
Well, the "communist system with chinese elements" may be closer to good old facism, but I doubt they'd use feudal terms to name products, esp. if they're going to have exposure abroad.
Or have I missed a change in trademark trends?
The article quotes SG Utsumi saying that the Internet should be considered a public utility.
/. yet, maybe because many people seem allergic to any regulation of the networks. But I do beleive in the multilateral process and maybe it's time to see what it can do for the Internet.
On one hand, this bring me the image of PSTN monopolies of the 70's, with the abuses and inefficiencies.
On the other hand, regulated QoS levels, mandatory public access and connectivity mandate, common carrier obligation are all things that the broadband industry could use right now.
I wonder if the Internet is not mature enough to desserve the status of public utility, like the power grid, the water network, sewers, etc.
I think it would help to put emphasis on the "common good infrastructure" bit. it would prevent AOL or other providers to use their provider business to leverage their content business. It would ultimately help competition on the service provider side by giving an even playing field on the connectivity providing side.
It's a topic I haven't seen addressed on
I'm sorry to inform you that, while I like my OS X, QuickTime has had DRM built-in for a while.
Microsoft themselves have been burned many times by leaked, and maybe falsified, documents. I have no idea how reliable all this will be without a TCPA, but I can totally understand why they'd want that kind of features.
Quite frankly, above all the abuse possibilities, I must confess that I can think of a zillion uses for rights management in document in my daily practice that are more fine grained that "can't modify" or "don't print".
And it's a feature with a double upgrad incentive: upgrade to use the feature and, oh look at that, the document format changed again! I thought they swore that would not happen anymore!
I have a .int email. I also have two .ca email (ISP and University), a couple .com (yahoo, hotmail, a bunch of redirects to manage spam and mailing lists, and a website of mine) and I registered my name as a .name.
.name is my own for my personal mail (and eventually a personal non anonymous web presence). I was bitten by many free providers going non free (iNames, mail.com, iTools) and I decided that if I was going to pay to get a stable email addy, I might as well get my own name and actually "own" something. I don't think it'll look silly in 5 years (well, that is if they don't go bankrupt).
.name, it's probably the smartest of the new TLDs or rebranded ccTLDs (.biz? .ws?! Gimme a break...) and if it was not that ridiculously expensive, it might sell better.
Why? Well first, despite what I've read so far in this thread, I like the concept of registering (and owning) a domain that is neither a vanity domain, a corp email or an ISP dependant email. There IS a growing need for that as people start to realize that keeping a presence is important. Just like phone numbers or physical address, it is important to be able not to vanish in thin air when you change jobs/move/don't log in for more than 45 days.
My
I like the idea of