It just pisses me off that trolling stories like this have to create a Great Demon to justify it. As the story itself goes on to admit, it's not about Jon the Brazen Music Thief, it's simply about economics. If it wasn't P2P that was generating the bandwidth, it would be usenet (still a big hog), porn, streaming Britney Spears Pepsi commercials, good old ftp, you name it. Give people an unmetered resource, and they'll use it.
The big joke is that the cableco's with interests in content provision kidded themselves that they could sell access and content. I'm still stunned that anyone actually pretended to believe that. I mean, if you've got a cable coming into your house and $3.50 to spend, are you going to spend it watching a crappy postage stamp sized movie on your little monitor, or are you going to spend it on sending the movie to your big screen TV? It's a no brainer.
This was always going to happen. The only part that pisses me off is that I've been a good responsible low bandwidth user, but now I'm going to get reamed just as bad as my friend who has been using 50% of his cable capacity every second since he got it (that's terrabytes, multiple. He has an entire wall full of tape archives). I can't decide if he's to blame for the situation, or if I was an idiot to not get my snout in the trough when I had a chance.
The only question now is how low are the caps going to be, how much is the extra bandwidth going to cost us, and will DSL providers follow suit.
much confusion in MS as to whether or not this is a good thing
You are joking, right? First, this requires a hardware mod, which Microsoft despises - hey, it's a Microsoft Xbox, packed full of juicy Microsoft intellectual property and trade secrets, right? They'll likely have mods prosecuteds as DMCA violation, because they bypasses DRM mechanisms.
But worse than that, it allows godless heathens to run FREE SOFTWARE on their hardware. Given the foaming-at-the-mouth FUD they vomit forth whenever the GPL is mentioned, expect them to suggest that Evil Pirates will run the notorious hacker OS Linux on it, allowing the viral GPL to spread throughout the whole Interweb, corrupting and assimilating all that it touches. ZDnet will faithfully reproduce pretty much any FUD they produce about this.
Further, given that PVR opponents seem to have escaped a mainstream press drubbing for describing ad-skipping as theft, expect them to assert that Xbox purchasers have an implied obligation to purchase Microsoft - and only Microsoft - games and add-ons for it, to support the subsidised initial purchase. I'll even predict the phrase, which will be spoken by a flat voiced, dead eyed corporate zombie: "Of course, the Xbox is about having fun, and we want legitimate Xbox purchasers to have fun. But they have to be responsible about it, and support legitimate software development. We think its very important that we educate legitimate Xbox gamers about this, and that we explain why hacking our Xbox and running pirate and viral GPL software kills legitimate developers. And their children, their beautiful golden haired children. Won't someone think of the legitimate software developers' golden haired children!" Er, OK, that last bit might just be implied (or feature as a ZDnet "editorial"), but you get the point.;-)
And lastly, what do they care about DivX? They are busy touting the DRM benefits of WMF and trying to persuade hardware manufacturers to support WMF alongside MPEG2. They do not want other players in this game. Note that their apologists at ZDnet invite you to infer that DivX is only useful for piracy. Yes, I know that de facto it is heavily used for distributing unlicensed copies, but that's because it's a damn efficient codec with cross platform implementations. If unlicensed copies switch to using WMF (with the DRM turned off) to distribute, will that become a "controversial" format? I think not.
No, I don't see that Microsoft will be in confusion about how to handle this. It's their box, containing their trade secrets, and we should keep our filthy commie hacker hands off of it. The hobbyist market is simply too small to make a difference to their income: in fact, every Xbox purchased by a hacker loses them money. They won't like this. They won't like it at all.
From the court, we find that the owners of Blacksnow did their trading in game. Now, argue all you like about most people not reading the EULA, but professional traders have no excuse for not reading it.
As regarding whether they did or not, and whether they clicked through and agreed to it, remember that this is civil litigation. The burden of proof is not beyond all reasonable doubt, but rather balance of probabilities. In deciding what is fact, the court only has to consider the most likely scenario. And the most likely scenario is that Blacksnow (if not the players) did read (or should have read) and did agree to the EULA. If they didn't, then the burden is on them to show that.
Also note that the issue is about the actions that they chose to perform on the service, not what use they made of the software.
Given all this, it looks pretty clear cut that Mythic are right, and Blacksnow are wrong. My only problem with this is that it feels wrong. Effectively, Mythic are saying that they have complete control over everything that happens on their servers, and that they will be the final arbitrator on who did what - and more importantly, why they did it.
The reason that this last point is important is that from the point of view of Mythic, what's the difference between these actions?
I drop a Sword of Boinking because I agreed in an email conversation with Blacksnow that I would do so in return for money.
I drop a Sword of Boinking because I agreed in an email conversation with another player that I would do so in return for money.
I drop a Sword of Boinking because I agreed in an email conversation with another player that I would do so in return for them dropping an in game item.
I drop a Sword of Boinking because I agreed in an email conversation with another player that I would do so in return for beer.
I drop a Sword of Boinking because I agreed in a verbal conversation with my son that I would do so in return for him taking out the trash.
I drop a Sword of Boinking because I hit the wrong key.
I drop a Sword of Boinking because I'm drunk.
The answer is that from Mythic's point of view, there is no difference. The action that Mythic sees is: Player X wants to drop a Sword of Boinking.
Now, Mythic get to decide what the motivation was behind this action, and to punish me or terminate my account without possibility of appeal. In the case of Blacksnow, it looks clear cut, but that's because Blacksnow have been decent enough to be above board about what they have been doing. But now the precedent is set that Mythic and other online services can charge money to access content that they control and can deny access to at any time for any reason that they like, and your option is to suck it up or... actually, there is no "or".
Is that just? Well, actually yes, because it's Mythic's service, they can set the rules, and nobody is forced to play it. Is it enforcable? Demonstrably, yes. Does this kind of control freakery damage online games? Not really, it's rampant on EQ (down to them enforcing their own particular view on what's an appropriate "fantasy genre but non trademarked" name), but that's still going strong.
But does it feel right? Hell, no. Is there anything that we can do about it? Probably not. I wouldn't play such a horribly restrictive game in the first place, and so I don't even have the meagre threat of withholding my money, but the plain old fact is that most players simply don't know and don't care (enough) about it to leave. So, by the Great and Powerful Laws of Capitalism, Mythic is in the right here, and will continue to remain so until the money stops flowing in.
First, there is no proof you ever clicked the button. Remember the burden of proof is on the prosecution here.
Absolutely untrue. Civil litigation is decided on balance of probabilities, not beyond all reasonable doubt. It's highly probable that you clicked accept; in this case, the burden is on you to show that you didn't.
I didn't give Sun/MS/et all my tax dollars to make them richer. I want that research GPL'ed so that I know its available, that I, as a tax payer who paid for the R&D gets the benifits,
Do you normally get copies of the proprietary binaries that government departments use? No, you don't. So why exactly would you expect to be able to get the source to any GPL replacements that they end up using?
Oh, I understand the licensing, and that if they were using (completely) free open source versions, they could choose to give you the source. But why would they? Because you ask nicely? Bwah hahahaha!
Or perhaps you think that they will proactively feed back any modifications that they make to the originator and you'll get the benefit that way? Dream on. Most government departments that I've dealt with wouldn't lift a finger to do that without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. No, they'll make their mods and sit on them. They won't (if I guess correctly) even share the source to their mods them with rival departments in their own government.
I think we all need to take a cluecheck and stop fooling ourselves that We, the People will see any direct personal benefit from governments using open source (GPL or otherwise). The benefit will be more efficient and cheaper systems, and a possible financial boost for open source vendors. That's it. It won't result in a magical blossoming of open government.
NEITHER of the linked rebuttals qualifies as well written [both make] childish personal attacks.
I take your point, but I rather think that the point that the rebutters are making is that the AdTI article is so blatantly biased that it simply doesn't deserve to be treated seriously.
I suspect the problem that we're seeing here is really that news publications will run the most inflamatory rebuttals rather than the driest, most factual ones. It's easy to argue that rebutters should just stick to the facts, but then they'd vanish without trace and we'd just end up reading equally inflamatory replies from different sources. On balance, I believe that both rebuttals do a good job of balancing necessary publisher appeal with useful references.
it's a good thing [BSD is] such a liberal license, and a good thing that Microsoft chose to use it [for their closed TCP/IP stack]. Certain things should not be GPL'd, and I think Microsoft has this right
The FSF would of course disagree; they put ideology ahead of technology and have demonstrated that the "morality" of a project is more important than its success.
Absolutely true (unless we're talking about Linux, which RMS slates as being non-free, but continues to use to leverage GNU while claiming that the FSF uses no non-free software). But Microsoft is also guilty of putting principles before pragmatism. They (at the corporate level) absolutely will not compromise on their view that the GPL and the LGPL are utterly anathema. The indicator that they've lost the plot on this is that their recent licensing restrictions specifically ban use of the LGPL, while at the same time allowing (if you actually read the terms) the use of functionally equivelant licenses like Mozilla. That's a declaration of idealogical war, not a pragmatic move.
Nobody has clean hands on this one, but if we're talking about FUD, I think Microsoft is still leading the pack by a long way.
If we really want a good ICANN, reform UN and then put ICANN under their control
I realise that you said "reform", but bear in mind that UN-WIPO is the domain dispute resolution body of choice for large companies wanting to squash individuals with the temerity to tread on their turf.
Is there much wrong with having a global body run entirely by referenda of individual users, administrated by a minimal beaurocracy with the sole function of verifying one-voter-one-vote? I know that fraud would be tricky to prevent, but bear in mind that you started by saying "reform [the] UN".;-)
[Lord Mayor Frank Sartor] said under the council's Living City policy, the city cannot be empty on weekends, or business owners prevented from trading.
... unless sufficient amounts of cash are provided? Principles aside though, I simply can't see how paying a realistic amount to compensate each and every business and individual displaced by this activity could work out as less than doing a kick ass CGI version of it.
Unless of course Sydney is working on the "First one is free" principle (or second one in this case), to make themselves look like a great (i.e. cheap, compliant) location for foreign film companies. Fair enough, but I'm kind of picturing how we might respond if (e.g.) a Bollywood company thought it could just breeze in and pay to have most of Detroit forcibly evacuated. "Get lost," springs to mind, along with stronger objections and possible a slew of litigation against the City.
As I said, it's up to Sydney if they want to turn themselves into a giant movie location, but I'd be surprised if it does their reputation as a business location any good.
Actually, it's often a rental. Check out the EQ message boards and you'll see some horror stories about people "buying" characters, changing the password, then having the seller call up EQ customer support, say "I've forgotten my password," and having it reset, thereby reclaiming the character to be sold again. And there's not a damn thing that you can do about it, because EQ characters remain the property of EQ (Sony, actually) and can't be sold or transferred. All you can do is squeal that the seller is trading, get his EQ (and probably eBay) account pulled and try and get your money back (good luck).
You know, I'd pay a corporate copyright owner 50 cents - perhaps even a dollar - a track, if I could get a track that was:
Recorded as 160+ bps mp3.
Entire and untruncated.
Recorded at a sane volume level.
Not a radio edit.
Named and labelled with the artist and track name (screw the album and track number, and other throwbacks to vinyl).
As it is though, my choice is to pay $5 per decent track (plus a bunch of filler) on a shiny bit of plastic - and then gamble that I can rip them - or download half a dozen versions from gnutella, pick the least screwed up one, and name and label it correctly myself. The door's still open, guys.
That we've reached the situation where there is a sufficient concentration of idiocy, arrogance and financial interest to push for the removal or truncation of first sale rights on items that contain content, including books?
I know it sounds insane, but bear with me. I'm thinking about the Elcomsoft judge, and his assertion that because you can transcribe an eBook by hand, that satisfies the right to copy it in part for fair use rights of quotation, and in whole for eventually putting it into the public domain. So a court has said that it's both possible and practical to copy an eBook, and so by a close extrapolation, that applies (even more so because of OCR) to a text book.
So... (thinks an unscrupulous IP lawyer concerned that kiddies are actually sharing copies of Harry Potter and the Amazonian Gift Certificate or another lucrative movie tie in) if it's even easier to copy a paper book than a highly protected eBook, then why shouldn't some of those juicy DMCA criminal penalties apply to paper books?
Bear in mind that some eBooks are already tied to individual devices (my colleage has just bought a new PDA, but simply can't transfer his Microsoft licensed eBooks from his old one to the new one). They are treated as information licensed to you; you have no rights of first sale. Now, transferral of an eBook is copying of information, not a physical transfer, but look also at how hard it is to sell software on eBay. Publisher can and do have you shut down in an instant, even if you explicitely state that you are selling a boxed non-OEM copy that you have removed from your hardware. The very idea that you can own an object that contains copyrighted content is being challenged by habit and usage, and that's often a precursor to a change in the law.
I'm not saying that this will happen this year or the next. I'm thinking five or ten years, but I'm thinking that it can and will happen, after all digital content is locked down tight with mandatory DRM. I'm not proposing that it's Constitutional, or even that it's in any way workable, but that's not necessarily a bar to having a law passed that will take years of fighting up to the Supremes to have struck or modified.
I'm also thinking that it might be the issue that finally wakes up Joe Consumer regarding fair use and the balance of power in copyright, but that by then it might be too late to recover any of the rights that we've already lost to the publishers and distributors.
What do you think? Am I delusional, or am I just following the money?
Given the ongoing uncertaintly over whether Red Hat's actions regarding patents will actually match its rhetoric, what is UnitedLinux's position on patents? Specifically which of the following will you do?
Eschew patents altogether.
Obtain your own patents.
License, trade or buy outright patents from other companies.
Oblige your members to hand over or license patents to UnitedLinux or to all other members.
Match Red Hat's current stated intent and express a non-binding intention to stay enforcement for a given type of open source development as long as it is convenient for you to do so.
Agree to explicitely license your patents at no cost, for a limited time or in perpetuity, to a given type of development (as sharply distinct from merely staying enforcement and leaving a Sword of Damocles danging over developers' heads).
Obtain and reserve the right to use patents freely against any target, as any other commercial software companies (e.g. Sun, Microsoft) would do.
Who will certify compliance for each vendor provided distro, and who will pick up the pieces when (not if) an application appears that borks on one or more of the distros? If it's UnitedLinux, is each vendor prepared to pay to fix snafus commited by the others? If it's the individual vendors, what happens when one of them screws it up and wrecks confidence in UnitedLinux?
47 USC 553 and 605 make cable theft a federal crime.
Hellfire and damnation. Every day is a lesson that Big Government is bigger than you can possibly imagine. You know, it must be tricky being an attorney for a content producer/distributor these days. You've got so many statutes to choose from. Hey, but on the bright side, the time you spend picking one is all billable.
Well, thanks for the references. Interesting point that they raise is that the maximum fine is explicitely $2000 for non-commercial violation, plus actual damages (lost revenue) plus statuatory damages up to $10,000. That doesn't come to $170,000. Oh, unless you include legal fees, which this statute very handily does. Then the sky's the limit (what with picking the right law to use, and all that). And of course you can always be jailed for six months as well, and Uncle Sam will pick up the bill for that.
OK, I'm going to go and sulk in my Y2K shelter now and wait for the revolution. I'm sticking to my guns on one thing though: I believe (although apparently Uncle Sam doesn't) that obtaining unpaid for cable access is quite clearly wrong, but that it should be a civil matter that government has no business interfering with or paying tax money to enforce. But apparently I'm not keeping up to date with just how many laws that brib^H^H^H^H campaign contributions have bought.:-(
No patents mentioned, for example, which kind of implies that even if this does play nicely in the contended 2.4Ghz band, it will be assimilated by an incumbent. Perhaps (being cynical or realistic as you prefer) that's the idea though: hype a "new" technology, then sell out to whichever Big Business offers you a cheque to go away and stop generating awkward questions from their customer base.
Kudos for providing a good laugh though:
Smart Spectrum(tm) enables a fully secure "unhackable" security layer
I take it that's "unhackable" in the Oracle "unbreakable" sense of (soto voce) "Claim is for advertising purposes only, has no basis in reality and should not be inferred to imply a warranty of unhackability or fitness for any particular purpose."
Hey ho. As they themselves say, seeing is believing. I'll believe it when I can either buy it or replicate it.
Anyone got any idea how credit cards work?
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I mean, I know that (e.g.) VISA charge vendors a flat 35 cents plus ~2.5% of the transaction, which makes them all but useless for small payments. However, I was wondering how much of this actually goes to VISA and how much to the intermediate issuer.
I'm thinking of a travel credit card issued by a consortium of bus, train, subway, even air companies, that doesn't bill participating companies the handling charge when its used to pay for fares. That gives you a card that you can use for other purchases, and which gets you on a bus with one swipe. The level of fraud would be so small as to not make it worth while sweating about validating the transactions (although you could download lists of cancelled or bad cards to the readers) and any money you do lose through fraud, you get back through not handling cash.
Failing that, is there room for a new card on the market? Transport is a big industry with a lot of customers; they should be able to leverage that to get vendors to accept a new TravelCard.
There's plenty of incentive for both sides. For vendors, it's no worse than standard credit cards (and it could be sweetened). For the travel businesses, it does away with a lot of cash handling, plus it gives them extra income from those fat 2.5% + 35 cents fees (or whatever they'd charge) when you use it to make purchases.
Anonymity is still an opt-out here. You can get a personalized card if you wish
Get back to us in a couple of years, and let us know if everything is still rosy, or whether they've gone down this route:
All the cards are anonymous. Why would anyone want a personalised one?
Hey, personalised cards are available. Try one. It's for your benefit, because of mumble mumble mumble.
Why would anyone want an anonymous card now that personalised ones are available? What have you got to hide?
Personalise your card. Now. But you can still use cash, if you want to be a burden on the economy, and you've got something to hide.
Only criminals use cash. Get a card. Now
Incidentally, I do agree with you about the utility of these things, I'm just not clear about the benefit of making them identifiable, nor why any well intentioned authority would want to do so.
Credit cards, for example, have your info attached through the credit card company. Has the world gone haywire yet?
And a gun pointed at your head is perfectly safe and no cause for alarm, as long as it's wielded by a sane, trustyworthy individual with your best interests at heart.
Unfortunately, once you get used to that situation, you're in deep shit when that individual is replaced by someone who doesn't fulfill those criteria.
In other words: don't give power or authority to good men that you wouldn't want to see wielded by the bad men that might replace them. Because when the bad men take over (which history teaches us that they do with alarming regularity) it's a little too late to start clamouring for an increase in your liberties.
Incidentally, one warning sign that you might have Bad Men in charge is that they start gifting themselves powers or information that have no readily apparent uses for good purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
It just pisses me off that trolling stories like this have to create a Great Demon to justify it. As the story itself goes on to admit, it's not about Jon the Brazen Music Thief, it's simply about economics. If it wasn't P2P that was generating the bandwidth, it would be usenet (still a big hog), porn, streaming Britney Spears Pepsi commercials, good old ftp, you name it. Give people an unmetered resource, and they'll use it.
The big joke is that the cableco's with interests in content provision kidded themselves that they could sell access and content. I'm still stunned that anyone actually pretended to believe that. I mean, if you've got a cable coming into your house and $3.50 to spend, are you going to spend it watching a crappy postage stamp sized movie on your little monitor, or are you going to spend it on sending the movie to your big screen TV? It's a no brainer.
This was always going to happen. The only part that pisses me off is that I've been a good responsible low bandwidth user, but now I'm going to get reamed just as bad as my friend who has been using 50% of his cable capacity every second since he got it (that's terrabytes, multiple. He has an entire wall full of tape archives). I can't decide if he's to blame for the situation, or if I was an idiot to not get my snout in the trough when I had a chance.
The only question now is how low are the caps going to be, how much is the extra bandwidth going to cost us, and will DSL providers follow suit.
You are joking, right? First, this requires a hardware mod, which Microsoft despises - hey, it's a Microsoft Xbox, packed full of juicy Microsoft intellectual property and trade secrets, right? They'll likely have mods prosecuteds as DMCA violation, because they bypasses DRM mechanisms.
But worse than that, it allows godless heathens to run FREE SOFTWARE on their hardware. Given the foaming-at-the-mouth FUD they vomit forth whenever the GPL is mentioned, expect them to suggest that Evil Pirates will run the notorious hacker OS Linux on it, allowing the viral GPL to spread throughout the whole Interweb, corrupting and assimilating all that it touches. ZDnet will faithfully reproduce pretty much any FUD they produce about this.
Further, given that PVR opponents seem to have escaped a mainstream press drubbing for describing ad-skipping as theft, expect them to assert that Xbox purchasers have an implied obligation to purchase Microsoft - and only Microsoft - games and add-ons for it, to support the subsidised initial purchase. I'll even predict the phrase, which will be spoken by a flat voiced, dead eyed corporate zombie: "Of course, the Xbox is about having fun, and we want legitimate Xbox purchasers to have fun. But they have to be responsible about it, and support legitimate software development. We think its very important that we educate legitimate Xbox gamers about this, and that we explain why hacking our Xbox and running pirate and viral GPL software kills legitimate developers. And their children, their beautiful golden haired children. Won't someone think of the legitimate software developers' golden haired children!" Er, OK, that last bit might just be implied (or feature as a ZDnet "editorial"), but you get the point. ;-)
And lastly, what do they care about DivX? They are busy touting the DRM benefits of WMF and trying to persuade hardware manufacturers to support WMF alongside MPEG2. They do not want other players in this game. Note that their apologists at ZDnet invite you to infer that DivX is only useful for piracy. Yes, I know that de facto it is heavily used for distributing unlicensed copies, but that's because it's a damn efficient codec with cross platform implementations. If unlicensed copies switch to using WMF (with the DRM turned off) to distribute, will that become a "controversial" format? I think not.
No, I don't see that Microsoft will be in confusion about how to handle this. It's their box, containing their trade secrets, and we should keep our filthy commie hacker hands off of it. The hobbyist market is simply too small to make a difference to their income: in fact, every Xbox purchased by a hacker loses them money. They won't like this. They won't like it at all.
From the court, we find that the owners of Blacksnow did their trading in game. Now, argue all you like about most people not reading the EULA, but professional traders have no excuse for not reading it.
As regarding whether they did or not, and whether they clicked through and agreed to it, remember that this is civil litigation. The burden of proof is not beyond all reasonable doubt, but rather balance of probabilities. In deciding what is fact, the court only has to consider the most likely scenario. And the most likely scenario is that Blacksnow (if not the players) did read (or should have read) and did agree to the EULA. If they didn't, then the burden is on them to show that.
Also note that the issue is about the actions that they chose to perform on the service, not what use they made of the software.
Given all this, it looks pretty clear cut that Mythic are right, and Blacksnow are wrong. My only problem with this is that it feels wrong. Effectively, Mythic are saying that they have complete control over everything that happens on their servers, and that they will be the final arbitrator on who did what - and more importantly, why they did it.
The reason that this last point is important is that from the point of view of Mythic, what's the difference between these actions?
The answer is that from Mythic's point of view, there is no difference. The action that Mythic sees is: Player X wants to drop a Sword of Boinking.
Now, Mythic get to decide what the motivation was behind this action, and to punish me or terminate my account without possibility of appeal. In the case of Blacksnow, it looks clear cut, but that's because Blacksnow have been decent enough to be above board about what they have been doing. But now the precedent is set that Mythic and other online services can charge money to access content that they control and can deny access to at any time for any reason that they like, and your option is to suck it up or... actually, there is no "or".
Is that just? Well, actually yes, because it's Mythic's service, they can set the rules, and nobody is forced to play it. Is it enforcable? Demonstrably, yes. Does this kind of control freakery damage online games? Not really, it's rampant on EQ (down to them enforcing their own particular view on what's an appropriate "fantasy genre but non trademarked" name), but that's still going strong.
But does it feel right? Hell, no. Is there anything that we can do about it? Probably not. I wouldn't play such a horribly restrictive game in the first place, and so I don't even have the meagre threat of withholding my money, but the plain old fact is that most players simply don't know and don't care (enough) about it to leave. So, by the Great and Powerful Laws of Capitalism, Mythic is in the right here, and will continue to remain so until the money stops flowing in.
Absolutely untrue. Civil litigation is decided on balance of probabilities, not beyond all reasonable doubt. It's highly probable that you clicked accept; in this case, the burden is on you to show that you didn't.
If it is, what would your point be?-
this "Think Tank" can't even correctly write American Engish.
Isn't that a split infinitive?That it's rather amusing. Sorry, did you need an emoticon to understand that? Here it is: ;-)
Insert your own laugh track.
Do you normally get copies of the proprietary binaries that government departments use? No, you don't. So why exactly would you expect to be able to get the source to any GPL replacements that they end up using?
Oh, I understand the licensing, and that if they were using (completely) free open source versions, they could choose to give you the source. But why would they? Because you ask nicely? Bwah hahahaha!
Or perhaps you think that they will proactively feed back any modifications that they make to the originator and you'll get the benefit that way? Dream on. Most government departments that I've dealt with wouldn't lift a finger to do that without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. No, they'll make their mods and sit on them. They won't (if I guess correctly) even share the source to their mods them with rival departments in their own government.
I think we all need to take a cluecheck and stop fooling ourselves that We, the People will see any direct personal benefit from governments using open source (GPL or otherwise). The benefit will be more efficient and cheaper systems, and a possible financial boost for open source vendors. That's it. It won't result in a magical blossoming of open government.
Isn't that a split infinitive?
I take your point, but I rather think that the point that the rebutters are making is that the AdTI article is so blatantly biased that it simply doesn't deserve to be treated seriously.
I suspect the problem that we're seeing here is really that news publications will run the most inflamatory rebuttals rather than the driest, most factual ones. It's easy to argue that rebutters should just stick to the facts, but then they'd vanish without trace and we'd just end up reading equally inflamatory replies from different sources. On balance, I believe that both rebuttals do a good job of balancing necessary publisher appeal with useful references.
I take your point, but if it's that important as a standard, what's Microsoft's problem with disclosing that one particular piece of source, so that everyone can verify that it is based on BSD, and that it's still fully compatible with the open source BSD derivatives out there? I'm only talking about that one specific piece of code, and I'm not talking about licensing it, but neither am I talking about disclosing it only to select groups under NDA. That's what copyright is for. You just publish the source, say "© Microsoft, all rights reserved" and everybody wins.
Absolutely true (unless we're talking about Linux, which RMS slates as being non-free, but continues to use to leverage GNU while claiming that the FSF uses no non-free software). But Microsoft is also guilty of putting principles before pragmatism. They (at the corporate level) absolutely will not compromise on their view that the GPL and the LGPL are utterly anathema. The indicator that they've lost the plot on this is that their recent licensing restrictions specifically ban use of the LGPL, while at the same time allowing (if you actually read the terms) the use of functionally equivelant licenses like Mozilla. That's a declaration of idealogical war, not a pragmatic move.
Nobody has clean hands on this one, but if we're talking about FUD, I think Microsoft is still leading the pack by a long way.
A minimal beaurocracy with responsibility for nothing other than running user supplied referenda on which one internet user gets one vote?
Sure, tricky to administrate, but I'll pick a flawed democracy to a perfect dictatorship any day.
I realise that you said "reform", but bear in mind that UN-WIPO is the domain dispute resolution body of choice for large companies wanting to squash individuals with the temerity to tread on their turf.
Is there much wrong with having a global body run entirely by referenda of individual users, administrated by a minimal beaurocracy with the sole function of verifying one-voter-one-vote? I know that fraud would be tricky to prevent, but bear in mind that you started by saying "reform [the] UN". ;-)
Listen to Rick Berman. Rick is good, Rick is wise. Obey the Word of Rick. Obey. OBEY!
Kind of how it went? ;-)
... unless sufficient amounts of cash are provided? Principles aside though, I simply can't see how paying a realistic amount to compensate each and every business and individual displaced by this activity could work out as less than doing a kick ass CGI version of it.
Unless of course Sydney is working on the "First one is free" principle (or second one in this case), to make themselves look like a great (i.e. cheap, compliant) location for foreign film companies. Fair enough, but I'm kind of picturing how we might respond if (e.g.) a Bollywood company thought it could just breeze in and pay to have most of Detroit forcibly evacuated. "Get lost," springs to mind, along with stronger objections and possible a slew of litigation against the City.
As I said, it's up to Sydney if they want to turn themselves into a giant movie location, but I'd be surprised if it does their reputation as a business location any good.
When you take the cat out of the freezer, try buttering its back to get the desired antigravity effect.
It's not a "sale", it's a "share". ;-)
Actually, it's often a rental. Check out the EQ message boards and you'll see some horror stories about people "buying" characters, changing the password, then having the seller call up EQ customer support, say "I've forgotten my password," and having it reset, thereby reclaiming the character to be sold again. And there's not a damn thing that you can do about it, because EQ characters remain the property of EQ (Sony, actually) and can't be sold or transferred. All you can do is squeal that the seller is trading, get his EQ (and probably eBay) account pulled and try and get your money back (good luck).
You know, I'd pay a corporate copyright owner 50 cents - perhaps even a dollar - a track, if I could get a track that was:
As it is though, my choice is to pay $5 per decent track (plus a bunch of filler) on a shiny bit of plastic - and then gamble that I can rip them - or download half a dozen versions from gnutella, pick the least screwed up one, and name and label it correctly myself. The door's still open, guys.
That we've reached the situation where there is a sufficient concentration of idiocy, arrogance and financial interest to push for the removal or truncation of first sale rights on items that contain content, including books?
I know it sounds insane, but bear with me. I'm thinking about the Elcomsoft judge, and his assertion that because you can transcribe an eBook by hand, that satisfies the right to copy it in part for fair use rights of quotation, and in whole for eventually putting it into the public domain. So a court has said that it's both possible and practical to copy an eBook, and so by a close extrapolation, that applies (even more so because of OCR) to a text book.
So... (thinks an unscrupulous IP lawyer concerned that kiddies are actually sharing copies of Harry Potter and the Amazonian Gift Certificate or another lucrative movie tie in) if it's even easier to copy a paper book than a highly protected eBook, then why shouldn't some of those juicy DMCA criminal penalties apply to paper books?
Bear in mind that some eBooks are already tied to individual devices (my colleage has just bought a new PDA, but simply can't transfer his Microsoft licensed eBooks from his old one to the new one). They are treated as information licensed to you; you have no rights of first sale. Now, transferral of an eBook is copying of information, not a physical transfer, but look also at how hard it is to sell software on eBay. Publisher can and do have you shut down in an instant, even if you explicitely state that you are selling a boxed non-OEM copy that you have removed from your hardware. The very idea that you can own an object that contains copyrighted content is being challenged by habit and usage, and that's often a precursor to a change in the law.
I'm not saying that this will happen this year or the next. I'm thinking five or ten years, but I'm thinking that it can and will happen, after all digital content is locked down tight with mandatory DRM. I'm not proposing that it's Constitutional, or even that it's in any way workable, but that's not necessarily a bar to having a law passed that will take years of fighting up to the Supremes to have struck or modified.
I'm also thinking that it might be the issue that finally wakes up Joe Consumer regarding fair use and the balance of power in copyright, but that by then it might be too late to recover any of the rights that we've already lost to the publishers and distributors.
What do you think? Am I delusional, or am I just following the money?
Who will certify compliance for each vendor provided distro, and who will pick up the pieces when (not if) an application appears that borks on one or more of the distros? If it's UnitedLinux, is each vendor prepared to pay to fix snafus commited by the others? If it's the individual vendors, what happens when one of them screws it up and wrecks confidence in UnitedLinux?
Hellfire and damnation. Every day is a lesson that Big Government is bigger than you can possibly imagine. You know, it must be tricky being an attorney for a content producer/distributor these days. You've got so many statutes to choose from. Hey, but on the bright side, the time you spend picking one is all billable.
Well, thanks for the references. Interesting point that they raise is that the maximum fine is explicitely $2000 for non-commercial violation, plus actual damages (lost revenue) plus statuatory damages up to $10,000. That doesn't come to $170,000. Oh, unless you include legal fees, which this statute very handily does. Then the sky's the limit (what with picking the right law to use, and all that). And of course you can always be jailed for six months as well, and Uncle Sam will pick up the bill for that.
OK, I'm going to go and sulk in my Y2K shelter now and wait for the revolution. I'm sticking to my guns on one thing though: I believe (although apparently Uncle Sam doesn't) that obtaining unpaid for cable access is quite clearly wrong, but that it should be a civil matter that government has no business interfering with or paying tax money to enforce. But apparently I'm not keeping up to date with just how many laws that brib^H^H^H^H campaign contributions have bought. :-(
References?
No patents mentioned, for example, which kind of implies that even if this does play nicely in the contended 2.4Ghz band, it will be assimilated by an incumbent. Perhaps (being cynical or realistic as you prefer) that's the idea though: hype a "new" technology, then sell out to whichever Big Business offers you a cheque to go away and stop generating awkward questions from their customer base.
Kudos for providing a good laugh though:
I take it that's "unhackable" in the Oracle "unbreakable" sense of (soto voce) "Claim is for advertising purposes only, has no basis in reality and should not be inferred to imply a warranty of unhackability or fitness for any particular purpose."
Hey ho. As they themselves say, seeing is believing. I'll believe it when I can either buy it or replicate it.
I mean, I know that (e.g.) VISA charge vendors a flat 35 cents plus ~2.5% of the transaction, which makes them all but useless for small payments. However, I was wondering how much of this actually goes to VISA and how much to the intermediate issuer.
I'm thinking of a travel credit card issued by a consortium of bus, train, subway, even air companies, that doesn't bill participating companies the handling charge when its used to pay for fares. That gives you a card that you can use for other purchases, and which gets you on a bus with one swipe. The level of fraud would be so small as to not make it worth while sweating about validating the transactions (although you could download lists of cancelled or bad cards to the readers) and any money you do lose through fraud, you get back through not handling cash.
Failing that, is there room for a new card on the market? Transport is a big industry with a lot of customers; they should be able to leverage that to get vendors to accept a new TravelCard.
There's plenty of incentive for both sides. For vendors, it's no worse than standard credit cards (and it could be sweetened). For the travel businesses, it does away with a lot of cash handling, plus it gives them extra income from those fat 2.5% + 35 cents fees (or whatever they'd charge) when you use it to make purchases.
Get back to us in a couple of years, and let us know if everything is still rosy, or whether they've gone down this route:
Incidentally, I do agree with you about the utility of these things, I'm just not clear about the benefit of making them identifiable, nor why any well intentioned authority would want to do so.
And a gun pointed at your head is perfectly safe and no cause for alarm, as long as it's wielded by a sane, trustyworthy individual with your best interests at heart.
Unfortunately, once you get used to that situation, you're in deep shit when that individual is replaced by someone who doesn't fulfill those criteria.
In other words: don't give power or authority to good men that you wouldn't want to see wielded by the bad men that might replace them. Because when the bad men take over (which history teaches us that they do with alarming regularity) it's a little too late to start clamouring for an increase in your liberties.
Incidentally, one warning sign that you might have Bad Men in charge is that they start gifting themselves powers or information that have no readily apparent uses for good purposes.