On the Fifth Amendment and due process argument, Elcomsoft argued that the DMCA is too vague because it doesn't explain which devices are legal (because they are primarily designed to enable allowed fair uses) and which are not. The Court recognised the difference (explicit in the DMCA) between bypassing protection to simply obtain raw access to content, and bypassing protection to make a specific fair use of the content. The distinction is that in the latter case, the act of bypassing is allowed. However, it is still (explicit in the DMCA) illegal to make or traffic in a device to do this. Now, there's a quandary. You can obtain a bypassing device, and you can use it to make a fair use of the content, but you can't make or supply the device.
The government argued that there was no vagueness because all tools that allow bypassing a protection mechanism are banned, even those which it would be legal to use. The judge (believe it or not) agreed!
"Thus, while it is not unlawful to circumvent for the purpose of engaging in fair use, it is unlawful to traffic in tools that allow fair use circumvention [...] Accordingly, there is no ambiguity in what tools are allowed and what tools are prohibited because the statute bans trafficking in or the marketing of all circumvention devices." [emphasis is in the original]
On the First Amendment, the court agreed that both source and object code is speech (nice), but then it gets nasty, citing from case history:
"[If a statute or regulation is content-neutral it] will be sustained if "it furthers an important or substantial governmental interest; if the governmental interest is unrelated to the suppression of free expression; and if the incidental restrictions on alleged First Amendment freedoms is no greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest."
Yes, there it is. "Governmental interest" trumps free expression. Or: "I think what the Consitution meant to say was...". For those who missed it, the Consitution is aimed primarily at limiting the powers of government. Government cannot trump the Consitution, and especially it cannot do it whenever it feels like it simply by passing a law. Bear in mind that any law passed by Congress must surely qualify as "substantial governmental interest" (otherwise why did they pass it? They were bored?), and so any law that does not directly limit freedom of expression trumps the First Amendment. Appalling.
As regards to lumping the rights of copyright holders and the promotion of electronic commerce together (as mentioned in the EFF report, which I assumed was hyperbole), the court does do this several times, and claims that Congress did as well. Yes, that's right, copyright is now merely a mechanism to further commerce (and not to put content into the public domain, the actual intention). Viewed like this, there is of course no reason why copyright should ever expire, or why there should be any fair use rights other than perhaps the right to produce commentary for positive review. Negative criticism, parody and academic study do not contribute to "furthering commerce".
Further, the court finds that the government has a "substantial and legitimate interest" in "promoting commerce" (note: "promoting", not "protecting"), and that "The absense of effective technological restrictions to prevent copyright infringement would inevitably result in even more rampant piracy, with a corresponding likely decrease in the willingness of authors and owners of copyrighted works to produce them in digital form or make the works available on-line.". This effectively validates the DMCA and confirms that "promoting commerce" trumps fair use. This is a speculative conclusion based purely on subjective unsubtantiated material provided by the government, a conclusion that a higher court could well rip to shreds.
Other spurious conclusions: the defendants argued that the DMCA "effectively eliminates fair use" (my emphasis). The court ruled that "the DMCA does not "eliminate" fair use", and goes on to say that fair use is still possible by transcribing by hand. But note that the court only considers fair use for written works, which are at issue here. How do you transcribe a video clip?
The court makes this assertion again when considering whether Congress exceeded its authority when drawing up the DMCA, and again asserts that the DMCA does not prohibit fair use - but again only gives a counter example for textual works. Even the point about the DMCA preventing copying once the work is in the public domain is rejected: the court agrees that it would still not be legal to make or traffic in (and therefore obtain) a device to access the content, but once again asserts that this does not prevent copying, which is true only for transcribable text.
Basically, Elcomsoft are boned, and they're boned right from the start here, because while denying the dismissal, the court has stated clearly that all circumvention devices are illegal, even if they are primarily designed for legal fair use purposes. This one's going to have to go to a higher court, and as an aside, we really need a DMCA challenge that's not based on text, so it can be shown more clearly that the DMCA does "effectively eliminate" both fair use while under copyright, and full use when in the public domain.
IANAL, but then again, bear in mind that lawyers (like judges) deal only in what's legal, not what is right. This court has pointed out that the DMCA is stupid, but then asserts that just because it's stupid, it's not wrong, because Congress fully intended for it to be exactly that stupid. Go figure.
For those who don't know, federal judges are political appointees. Of course, it's illegal for me and thee to employ people based on their political views, but political affiliation (aka loyalty) is the primary (de facto) criteria for the appointment of federal judges. Another nice example of "Do as we say, not as we do." from our political overclass.
(For those who can't be bothered reading the reference, i.e. 90% of/.) On the up side, they're partitioning the space sensibly. You're not buying a 2nd level domain (e.g. rogerborg.org), you're buying a third level, e.g. rogerborg.med.pro, so Mr Rogerborg the doctor and Ms Rogerborg the accountant can coexist without getting rogerborg.law.pro involved.
On the down side, they are extremely fuzzy.:
They are unclear on when and what other professions will be added (i.e. will they just spit out a new one and start a new gold rush whenever they need funds?).
They give no details (or even a hint) on how they will verify the "good standing" of the applicants, or what kind of certification evidence will be required ("Sure, I can fax you my diploma from the University of Wallamaloo. Just give me five minutes to type it, er I mean, find it.")
I'd wager money they haven't even considered non-US, non-English speaking applicants (given that their site is in US English only), or non-US certification.
They're already treading on the toes of.com and.org by opening it up to "professional companies and associations" rather than individuals.
They don't segment the tld by territory or speciality, even though they're going to provide territory and speciality based search services.
Basically, this looks like a TLD for people who want a TLD that costs $300. I'm actually fine with that from a market point of view, but - lacking details - their claims regarding validation of certification simply aren't very credible. I'll stick with my.org, thanks very much.
[This bill] would quite simply regulate the ability of youngsters to obtain video games that contain the kind of thing we already don't let them observe in movies or talk about in public
No, this Bill would quite simply make some quick political capital for its supporters, while having exactly the same effect as current legislation on stopping children from obtaining pornography, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, weapons or anything else that they're not supposed to have. To wit, the nice kids who won't be damaged by it anyway won't obtain it much, while the bad kids(*) will treat any legislation as a joke and obtain it easily. Net effect, nil.
As far as your Constitutional points go, you are correct, but really you're just highlighting how farcical the Constitution is, and how much it needs continual reinterpretation. The Founders were a bunch of land owning slave owning white Christian men, who intended the freedoms of the Constitution to apply exactly as they wrote it: to land owning slave owning white Christian men. So many references to the Constitution need to be qualified with "Well, what I think the Founders would have written if they were writing it now is..." that both the original wording and intent becomes irrelevant. The sooner we stop nitpicking over the minutia of that crusty old document and deal with situations using a pragmatism analysis of the current socio-political climate, the better.
(* Re: "bad kids", insert any platitudes you feel necessary about bad parenting, bad genetics, bad environment, folic acid deficiencies or whatever you like as an apology for bad kids, but the plain old fact is that a bad kid at twelve is going to be a bad kid until at least eighteen, and they can do a hell of a lot of damage in those years)
Inform us then, how much did Oracle donate the the Republican candidate in California? And to every candidate in every other state? $25K each?"
You might consider doing a little quick research [google.com] on donations from Oracle to both republican and democratic candidates
Ah, the quick google link ploy. Always looks very informative, that. Unfortunately, none of the top ten hits from the link you provided actually answer the question I posed, and neither does your trite truism about bipartisan donations. Care to try again?
There's an article entitled "Courtney Love does the math" that talks about why Napster isn't the problem
The big eye opener for me is this line: "It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'."
Napster, uh, yeah, I remember them. The guys who tried to move up to the Big League with the labels, right? Didn't they used to run a P2P service?;-)
That's not to say she's completely getting it though. She's a bit confused about the ability of (e.g.) Gnutella to control the content that's being shared; girlie, there's no point exhorting a bunch of P2P developers to work with you. My god, Limewire (the most professional gnutella client development team that I know of) has six code monkeys and a web guy working on it. How can they negotiate deals with tens of thousands of artists? And that's just one solitary client running the gnutella protocol.
And the horrible thing is, Courtney is still stuck in litigation with Universal. See Hole's web site for the latest news. And notice that despite good intentions, Courtney is still not offering us what we want. You can download 60-some 128 bit MP3's right off the site (all live recordings rather than studio recordings, because lest we forget, the studio owns all rights to the music, and Courtney only owns limited rights to her performances of it), and you can click on a link to buy albums from CDNOW or Amazon. But you can't pay money for the MP3's, or pay for better quality ones. It's frustrating when even the champions of the e-distribution campaign don't give us the chance to show how lucrative sales of uncrippled, high quality, correctly labelled, untruncated, non-radio edit mp3's could be - if they were only given a chance.
Every time this subject is raised, people holler about cutting out the middle man and sending money direct to the artists through FairTunes or whatever.
Tiny point: most artists signed up to the Big 5 labels have no rights to the music. They either do it as work for hire (in which case they never owned it), or they explicitely agree to sell the rights to a publisher. And that's actual artists, let alone miming meat puppets like Ms Spears who are technically committing breach of copyright if they so much as hum "their" music without prior written consent from their label.
Now, I'm not saying that's right (it's not), but artists have a choice. They can choose to self publish. And those artists deserve support. But most artists choose to take what looks like the easy, lucrative route, let a publisher take the big risk to pay up front to record and promote their music, in return for a smaller reward. And sure, a lot of them get screwed, but they're (mostly) adults, and nobody's making them sign up with the Big 5. I'm not entirely clear on why we should be rewarding them for that... although I'm quite happy with punishing the Big 5 labels for their cartel abuse of the market.
8. Auto-detect large numbers of e-mails being sent at once and alert users before sending
Unfortunately, many virii include their own mini smtp server, so they don't actually send via Outlook. Incidentally, if you run a LAN, it's a good idea to have your firewall be paranoid about outgoing traffic as well as incoming. Instead of using SMTP servers on each desktop, or using your ISP's SMTP server, run a single SMTP server on the firewall (only visible from the LAN) using a non-standard port, set up all your desktops to use that server to send mail, and block (and log!) any LAN-WAN outgoing port 25 traffic.
2. Give sysadmins the ability to change e-mail setting for all users when a large-scale outbreak is going, to specifically turn off scripting, html reading, java, etc
But there's always a large scale outbreak going on! Or rather, there's a large scale outbreak going on over there, but that's OK, because your systems are perfectly clean... right up to the point where they're not.
I do take your point though. Last time we got a dose of Code Red and Nimda, the office sysadmins pulled the network cables and isolated every office from each other and from the 'net, and kept us down for two days, while they cleaned and labelled every machine by hand. It would be nice if they had somewhere to go before reaching that stage.;-)
Isn't it odd that the only Java security exploit to be used in the wild is in the VM produced by Microsoft that didn't obey the Java spec.
Yeah, I posted it elsewhere, but it bears repeating that the "Microsoft® virtual machine (Microsoft VM)" is not a Java Virtual Machine (JVM, the old name), and Microsoft are no longer allowed to call it that after being bitchslapped around a few courts by Sun. Let's keep the Microsoft VM and the Sun JRE clear and distinct in our minds.
Correction: the Microsoft VM is not a Java Virtual Machine. It is a Virtual Machine that supports Java. Lest we forget, Sun had to fight long and hard to have a court uphold this. Check out the Microsoft security bulletin about this flaw and note that it is the "Microsoft® virtual machine (Microsoft VM)". Let's not tar JVM's with the same brush.
The best thing you could do for the DMCA, and copyright law in general, is to go down the hall and beat the crap out of Senator Fritz Hollings!
That's a pretty atavistic attitude. Civilised people (even you colonial fellows) have evolved much more genteel methods to settle disputes: we debate them. It's simple and elegant: you pay someone to tell you what to say, you pay someone to tell the press what you said and how they should report it, and if all else fails, you pay someone to change the law to make you right. Er, wait, or perhaps that's the problem. Maybe you're onto something after all.;)
In the US of A, it is perfectly legal for any American to purchase any politician. You don't need to be from Virgina to contribute
But US of A laws like the DMCA and it's hellspawn children have international impacts (under the Berne Convention, and in the ways they effect provision of content coming out of the US of A). Given that, it's highly frustrating that "Corporate contributions or contributions from foreign nationals are prohibited by law.". All I want to do is to give the guy some money, anonymously. Would that hurt so very much?
Shouldn't it be legal for me to make a backup copy of my CD in case I drop the original in the lake while on my boat? With the DMCA as it stands, if that disk is copy protected, it is ILLEGAL for me to do that.
Strangely enough, it isn't. It's illegal for you to create or traffic in (i.e. make available to others) the tools to do it, but it's not illegal for you to obtain them or even to use them. That's one of the things that's so screwy about the DMCA, it targets the supply and not the use (like that's been working so well in cutting down on the amount of untaxed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H illegal drugs coming in to the country).
If anyone really thinks that a $25k donation would have anything to do with a $95,000,000.00 deal for software, they need to get reacquainted with reality [...]It's a Red Herring, and doesn't belong in an informed discussion on the Oracle/California mess
Nice to hear from someone informed. Inform us then, how much did Oracle donate the the Republican candidate in California? And to every candidate in every other state? $25K each?
What's that you say? You don't know? Or are you just saying that it's not only right but expected for companies to give small "thank you" kickbacks after being given a lot of business?
I hope you're just uninformed and not actually idiotic enough to be saying the latter. Because $25K for $95M might not sound like a lot, but how many billions are in the Californian budget? How quickly could a bunch of $25K kickbacks add up? Go inform yourself, and let us know, will you?
... or did the visual FX in this movie suck donkey dong? And the trailers for AOTC look really ropey as well.
This isn't uninformed griping, I used to work with CGI artists in a games company. A typical conversation with a client would go something like this:
Client: Can you...
Artists: Sure, we just need to double the size of the render farm. You can afford that, right?
Client: Uh, I haven't told you what I need yet.
Artists: Bah, we can do anything you want, exactly as you want it, and as realistic as you want it. All we need to do is throw enough hardware at it, and buy enough third party lightwave plugins.
Client: Uh, OK. Here's a bushel of money.
... time passes...
Client: Deadline time, hand it over.
Artists: Uh, the thing is, we were planning on just buying all the models, but they all sucked, so we had to do our own. And then we had some trouble with the animation paths. And there was a bit of an overcommitment on the render farm, so we had to prune a few million poly's on some of the scenes, but if you just give us another two weeks, we can buy more hardware and re-render...
Client: The fuck? We go gold tomorrow! What part of "deadline" didn't you understand? Aaargh! You know what this'll cost us in reviewer kickbacks?
OK, I'm over generalising. They sometimes got it just right, but a lot of the time they vastly over commited themselves and ended up with a final product that nobody really liked, least of all themselves.
The problem as I see it is that the answer is always "yes". Models and stop motion put a well understood limit on what was achievable, and scenes were set and shot around those limits. Even when pushing the envelope like in SW:ANH, they didn't over stretch themselves or try anything that they knew they couldn't achieve.
Contrast with SW:TPW, SW:AOTC and Spider-Man. The answer was always "yes". Go ahead, give us anything to do, and we'll do it. Let your imagination go wild.
And what did we get? Ropey looking integration of CGI into live action scenes, ropey looking integration of live action into CGI scenes, 100% CGI scenes that jar badly with the live action.
You can counter with Ray Harryhausen, but then I'll just have to roll out Alien, Aliens and Blade Runner. Do less, but do it well. Learn to say "no", guys.
It would be much more meaningful to pay attention to how many actual tickets were sold
Very insightful. Another thing that is no doubt screwing the figures is the curse that is season tickets. I simply will not go to a theatre that has any kind of weekly/monthly/annual ticket option any more. It's bad enough trying to pick the slot with the fewest mall rats without having to worry about people who haven't even paid to see the film, have absolutely no interest in actually watching it, and who are treating the theatre as a convenient spot to gather, chat and (god help us) breed. Grrr.
Incidentally, the CGI in the trailers for both this film and AOTC really sucks. I mean, there were better looking FX in Ghostbusters. Maybe we could do with a little less of pushing the animators' limits, and start doing less, but really well. I like animation and all, but I like it as animation, not as shoddy ersatz psuedo-reality.
all that talk about "forgivenenss" that [priests have] been going on about for 2,000 years really is just PR
Given that you say 2,000 years, I assume you're talking about the new fangled cult of Christianity. In that case, the story is "Hey! Did you hear about Original Sin? You're burning in hell, buddy. But wait! We've also got the solution! Forgiveness, at a surprisingly reasonable price."
Yeah, there are probably a few good priests, in the same way that there are probably a few good lawyers, good traffic cops, or (relevant to this story) a few good patent office clerks. But I really do believe that there are some professions where it's a good idea to keep the practitioners as far away from you as humanly possible. It's not right, but pragmatism rarely is. It's simply pragmatic.
These things are endemic in the UK, both lights and speed cameras. Some consequences and quirks:
Drivers learn where they are and how sensitive they are extremely quickly. The major effect they have is to produce zones where drivers brake frantically, creep along for fifty yards (for speed cameras), then accelerate sharply away in annoyance.
They are used discretionally. The older flash-and-film cameras only have film put in depending on whether they need to meet quota this month (just as the police used to do random blitzes with radar guns on the last day of the month to make quota). The newer digital ones can be tweaked remotely to crank up the tickets, and the really new image recognition ones are pretty smart. They read license plates, and flash them up on big signs along with the speed as a warning.
Here's an interesting angle to try: plead the fifth. If you're sent a letter saying you've been caught and ticketed, insist that they prove that it was you driving. When they demand you identify yourself, roll out that good old amendment. This defence is currently going through the European courts.
Mostly, don't sweat it. The cameras only hand out the same number of tickets as the police (they're carefully tweaked to ensure that), while at the same time being less discriminatory. They don't (yet) ticket people on the basis of "Driving while black", or let them off for being "Hot and flirty in charge of a vehicle.". That's a good thing, right?
The GPL does not impact users of the software, only distributors.
Huh? I don't need to be told that the distributor must provide the source at minimal cost if asked? I'd call that pretty darn important.
And when I do get the source, I don't need to read the license to find that the "free" source is copyrighted and strictly licensed? I can do whatever I like with it and only worry about the license terms after I become a distributor?
Haven't we seen enough examples of newbie distributors shipping GPL binaries and when asked where the source is, saying "Oh, we'll get around to that. Give us a few days/weeks/months/versions." That is simply not acceptable, ever. If you don't follow the license terms to the letter, you are commiting theft.
I agree that the GPL is easy to understand - if you read it. Far too many people look at the length of it and say "Phwah, it's free. What do I need to know?" I'd suggest that we need to grab their attention on the very first line, by saying "Stop! Copyrighted code! All rights reserved, except as specified below. Use of this code without reading and following the license terms is theft, and can and will be prosecuted."
Basically, there is a prevailing attitude that GPL and open source code in general is something for nothing, and there's no cost associated with using it. That's simply not true, and it's something I'd like to see us addressing at every opportunity.
That said, Microsoft is going a fair way to helping out in that respect, by screaming about how viral the GPL is. Well, sure, that's rather the point.;-)
As the resident office open source nut, a major part of my (non paid) role is stopping my employer stealing open source code. I have lost count of the number of times that I have found stolen open source code in our products. I say "stolen" advisedly, and it's the word I use when confronting the culprits.
The problem is that many of them simply do not understand that there is a cost associated with using "free" software. Sure, it's their fault for not reading it, but it would make my life a lot easier if we stopped wielding the word "free" like a weapon (it means too many things to too many people), and if the GPL (and other open source licenses) opened like this:
(C) Original developer
This code is copyrighted. It is not "free to use". You may not copy or use it in any way, including for non-commercial purposes, unless you follow strictly the enclosed license terms. If you do not read or follow the license terms, you will be in breach of copyright, and can and will be prosecuted for theft.
I'd say that a clear statement like this is way more important than the DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY that we tend to splash first. The disclaimer is there to protect the author, but a clear warning that open source code is copyrighted and strictly licensed protects the recipient from doing something stupid and causing grief to both parties. I'd say that it's more in the spirit of open source development to prioritise the copyright/license warning than the disclaimer.
The fact is that there is some return on investment for advertising or else they wouldn't do it.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? You're really saying "because they do it, it must work".
OK, I'm over generalising. Advertising does build awareness, but there's no particular reason to suppose that translates into sales. You say yourself that in the case of McDonalds, it's the real estate that matters. You're not going to drive half a mile past a Burger King to get to a McDonalds, no matter how succulent they make their 100% ground beef patties look in their adverts (and they are 100% ground beef, because they're 100% of the cow, ground into paste).
Do you have figures to support the idea that advertising leads to sales?
Great, Linux is better because I can replace the GUI shell.
You know better than that. You said so yourself. Linux is the kernel, and only the kernel. It's not the shell, and it's not the GUI. The shell (and command line applications) is not the kernel, and it's not the GUI. The GUI is not the kernel, and it's not the shell. A KDE/gnu/linux system is modular. There are many solutions from many vendors.
Is it fair for the DOJ to force Microsoft to allow users to replace the MM? Well, I guess that's the question, isn't it?
No, actually that's a straw man. The actual question is whether Microsoft can force (I use the word advisedly) OEM's to install the kernel, shell and GUI, or whether they should be made to modularise parts of this whole. Nobody has (to my knowledge) suggested that they open up the kernel.
But as a hardware guy, I am happy to see that software guys are finally going to be held to some sort of standard.
As a software engineer, I for one would be delighted to see mandatory legal requirements on software engineering.
That way, when my latest Bungie Boss swings into the office shrieking that we have to forget everything we've been doing and hack the product completely differently for a new potential customer, I can suck my teeth and say "Ooh, love to, but if you change the requirements, I have to go back to design stage and re-write my test suites. It's the law".
Or when a module turns up from an Indian sweatshop with uncommented code, one character variable names, no design and no test suite or results, I can just laugh softly and send it to/dev/null.
I would love to have those protections. But until it happens, I'll go right on doing what I've been doing, which is to hack and slash away in good faith, with no requirements, wrong requirements and changing requirements, and building systems that the sales guys insist on giving to customers, sometimes before we've even done unit testing let alone integration or regression. Yes, I do mean that. I mean a sales guy and my Bungie Boss stand over my shoulder, and when the code compiles and passes a basic sanity test, they take it and integrate it, because dammit, they have stock options on the line here.
Believe me, I really don't want to write bad software, but right now I'm left with two choices: write bad software to meet the artificial short term goals of my latest Bungie Boss, or join the "mobility pool". I'd love to have legal protection for sticking to my guns. Bring it on.
You can see where Clinton got his ideas about the semantics of sex from, and where Gates got off arguing over the meaning of the word "the". We intercepted most of the scuds, we just didn't stop any.
Slashdot Mirror
On the Fifth Amendment and due process argument, Elcomsoft argued that the DMCA is too vague because it doesn't explain which devices are legal (because they are primarily designed to enable allowed fair uses) and which are not. The Court recognised the difference (explicit in the DMCA) between bypassing protection to simply obtain raw access to content, and bypassing protection to make a specific fair use of the content. The distinction is that in the latter case, the act of bypassing is allowed. However, it is still (explicit in the DMCA) illegal to make or traffic in a device to do this. Now, there's a quandary. You can obtain a bypassing device, and you can use it to make a fair use of the content, but you can't make or supply the device.
The government argued that there was no vagueness because all tools that allow bypassing a protection mechanism are banned, even those which it would be legal to use. The judge (believe it or not) agreed!
On the First Amendment, the court agreed that both source and object code is speech (nice), but then it gets nasty, citing from case history:
Yes, there it is. "Governmental interest" trumps free expression. Or: "I think what the Consitution meant to say was...". For those who missed it, the Consitution is aimed primarily at limiting the powers of government. Government cannot trump the Consitution, and especially it cannot do it whenever it feels like it simply by passing a law. Bear in mind that any law passed by Congress must surely qualify as "substantial governmental interest" (otherwise why did they pass it? They were bored?), and so any law that does not directly limit freedom of expression trumps the First Amendment. Appalling.
As regards to lumping the rights of copyright holders and the promotion of electronic commerce together (as mentioned in the EFF report, which I assumed was hyperbole), the court does do this several times, and claims that Congress did as well. Yes, that's right, copyright is now merely a mechanism to further commerce (and not to put content into the public domain, the actual intention). Viewed like this, there is of course no reason why copyright should ever expire, or why there should be any fair use rights other than perhaps the right to produce commentary for positive review. Negative criticism, parody and academic study do not contribute to "furthering commerce".
Further, the court finds that the government has a "substantial and legitimate interest" in "promoting commerce" (note: "promoting", not "protecting"), and that "The absense of effective technological restrictions to prevent copyright infringement would inevitably result in even more rampant piracy, with a corresponding likely decrease in the willingness of authors and owners of copyrighted works to produce them in digital form or make the works available on-line.". This effectively validates the DMCA and confirms that "promoting commerce" trumps fair use. This is a speculative conclusion based purely on subjective unsubtantiated material provided by the government, a conclusion that a higher court could well rip to shreds.
Other spurious conclusions: the defendants argued that the DMCA "effectively eliminates fair use" (my emphasis). The court ruled that "the DMCA does not "eliminate" fair use", and goes on to say that fair use is still possible by transcribing by hand. But note that the court only considers fair use for written works, which are at issue here. How do you transcribe a video clip?
The court makes this assertion again when considering whether Congress exceeded its authority when drawing up the DMCA, and again asserts that the DMCA does not prohibit fair use - but again only gives a counter example for textual works. Even the point about the DMCA preventing copying once the work is in the public domain is rejected: the court agrees that it would still not be legal to make or traffic in (and therefore obtain) a device to access the content, but once again asserts that this does not prevent copying, which is true only for transcribable text.
Basically, Elcomsoft are boned, and they're boned right from the start here, because while denying the dismissal, the court has stated clearly that all circumvention devices are illegal, even if they are primarily designed for legal fair use purposes. This one's going to have to go to a higher court, and as an aside, we really need a DMCA challenge that's not based on text, so it can be shown more clearly that the DMCA does "effectively eliminate" both fair use while under copyright, and full use when in the public domain.
IANAL, but then again, bear in mind that lawyers (like judges) deal only in what's legal, not what is right. This court has pointed out that the DMCA is stupid, but then asserts that just because it's stupid, it's not wrong, because Congress fully intended for it to be exactly that stupid. Go figure.
For those who don't know, federal judges are political appointees. Of course, it's illegal for me and thee to employ people based on their political views, but political affiliation (aka loyalty) is the primary (de facto) criteria for the appointment of federal judges. Another nice example of "Do as we say, not as we do." from our political overclass.
(For those who can't be bothered reading the reference, i.e. 90% of /.) On the up side, they're partitioning the space sensibly. You're not buying a 2nd level domain (e.g. rogerborg.org), you're buying a third level, e.g. rogerborg.med.pro, so Mr Rogerborg the doctor and Ms Rogerborg the accountant can coexist without getting rogerborg.law.pro involved.
On the down side, they are extremely fuzzy.:
Basically, this looks like a TLD for people who want a TLD that costs $300. I'm actually fine with that from a market point of view, but - lacking details - their claims regarding validation of certification simply aren't very credible. I'll stick with my .org, thanks very much.
No, this Bill would quite simply make some quick political capital for its supporters, while having exactly the same effect as current legislation on stopping children from obtaining pornography, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, weapons or anything else that they're not supposed to have. To wit, the nice kids who won't be damaged by it anyway won't obtain it much, while the bad kids(*) will treat any legislation as a joke and obtain it easily. Net effect, nil.
As far as your Constitutional points go, you are correct, but really you're just highlighting how farcical the Constitution is, and how much it needs continual reinterpretation. The Founders were a bunch of land owning slave owning white Christian men, who intended the freedoms of the Constitution to apply exactly as they wrote it: to land owning slave owning white Christian men. So many references to the Constitution need to be qualified with "Well, what I think the Founders would have written if they were writing it now is..." that both the original wording and intent becomes irrelevant. The sooner we stop nitpicking over the minutia of that crusty old document and deal with situations using a pragmatism analysis of the current socio-political climate, the better.
(* Re: "bad kids", insert any platitudes you feel necessary about bad parenting, bad genetics, bad environment, folic acid deficiencies or whatever you like as an apology for bad kids, but the plain old fact is that a bad kid at twelve is going to be a bad kid until at least eighteen, and they can do a hell of a lot of damage in those years)
- Inform us then, how much did Oracle donate the the Republican candidate in California? And to every candidate in every other state? $25K each?"
You might consider doing a little quick research [google.com] on donations from Oracle to both republican and democratic candidatesAh, the quick google link ploy. Always looks very informative, that. Unfortunately, none of the top ten hits from the link you provided actually answer the question I posed, and neither does your trite truism about bipartisan donations. Care to try again?
The big eye opener for me is this line: "It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'."
Napster, uh, yeah, I remember them. The guys who tried to move up to the Big League with the labels, right? Didn't they used to run a P2P service? ;-)
That's not to say she's completely getting it though. She's a bit confused about the ability of (e.g.) Gnutella to control the content that's being shared; girlie, there's no point exhorting a bunch of P2P developers to work with you. My god, Limewire (the most professional gnutella client development team that I know of) has six code monkeys and a web guy working on it. How can they negotiate deals with tens of thousands of artists? And that's just one solitary client running the gnutella protocol.
And the horrible thing is, Courtney is still stuck in litigation with Universal. See Hole's web site for the latest news. And notice that despite good intentions, Courtney is still not offering us what we want. You can download 60-some 128 bit MP3's right off the site (all live recordings rather than studio recordings, because lest we forget, the studio owns all rights to the music, and Courtney only owns limited rights to her performances of it), and you can click on a link to buy albums from CDNOW or Amazon. But you can't pay money for the MP3's, or pay for better quality ones. It's frustrating when even the champions of the e-distribution campaign don't give us the chance to show how lucrative sales of uncrippled, high quality, correctly labelled, untruncated, non-radio edit mp3's could be - if they were only given a chance.
Every time this subject is raised, people holler about cutting out the middle man and sending money direct to the artists through FairTunes or whatever.
Tiny point: most artists signed up to the Big 5 labels have no rights to the music. They either do it as work for hire (in which case they never owned it), or they explicitely agree to sell the rights to a publisher. And that's actual artists, let alone miming meat puppets like Ms Spears who are technically committing breach of copyright if they so much as hum "their" music without prior written consent from their label.
Now, I'm not saying that's right (it's not), but artists have a choice. They can choose to self publish. And those artists deserve support. But most artists choose to take what looks like the easy, lucrative route, let a publisher take the big risk to pay up front to record and promote their music, in return for a smaller reward. And sure, a lot of them get screwed, but they're (mostly) adults, and nobody's making them sign up with the Big 5. I'm not entirely clear on why we should be rewarding them for that... although I'm quite happy with punishing the Big 5 labels for their cartel abuse of the market.
Unfortunately, many virii include their own mini smtp server, so they don't actually send via Outlook. Incidentally, if you run a LAN, it's a good idea to have your firewall be paranoid about outgoing traffic as well as incoming. Instead of using SMTP servers on each desktop, or using your ISP's SMTP server, run a single SMTP server on the firewall (only visible from the LAN) using a non-standard port, set up all your desktops to use that server to send mail, and block (and log!) any LAN-WAN outgoing port 25 traffic.
But there's always a large scale outbreak going on! Or rather, there's a large scale outbreak going on over there, but that's OK, because your systems are perfectly clean... right up to the point where they're not.
I do take your point though. Last time we got a dose of Code Red and Nimda, the office sysadmins pulled the network cables and isolated every office from each other and from the 'net, and kept us down for two days, while they cleaned and labelled every machine by hand. It would be nice if they had somewhere to go before reaching that stage. ;-)
Yeah, I posted it elsewhere, but it bears repeating that the "Microsoft® virtual machine (Microsoft VM)" is not a Java Virtual Machine (JVM, the old name), and Microsoft are no longer allowed to call it that after being bitchslapped around a few courts by Sun. Let's keep the Microsoft VM and the Sun JRE clear and distinct in our minds.
Correction: the Microsoft VM is not a Java Virtual Machine. It is a Virtual Machine that supports Java. Lest we forget, Sun had to fight long and hard to have a court uphold this. Check out the Microsoft security bulletin about this flaw and note that it is the "Microsoft® virtual machine (Microsoft VM)". Let's not tar JVM's with the same brush.
That's a pretty atavistic attitude. Civilised people (even you colonial fellows) have evolved much more genteel methods to settle disputes: we debate them. It's simple and elegant: you pay someone to tell you what to say, you pay someone to tell the press what you said and how they should report it, and if all else fails, you pay someone to change the law to make you right. Er, wait, or perhaps that's the problem. Maybe you're onto something after all. ;)
But US of A laws like the DMCA and it's hellspawn children have international impacts (under the Berne Convention, and in the ways they effect provision of content coming out of the US of A). Given that, it's highly frustrating that "Corporate contributions or contributions from foreign nationals are prohibited by law.". All I want to do is to give the guy some money, anonymously. Would that hurt so very much?
Strangely enough, it isn't. It's illegal for you to create or traffic in (i.e. make available to others) the tools to do it, but it's not illegal for you to obtain them or even to use them. That's one of the things that's so screwy about the DMCA, it targets the supply and not the use (like that's been working so well in cutting down on the amount of untaxed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H illegal drugs coming in to the country).
Nice to hear from someone informed. Inform us then, how much did Oracle donate the the Republican candidate in California? And to every candidate in every other state? $25K each?
What's that you say? You don't know? Or are you just saying that it's not only right but expected for companies to give small "thank you" kickbacks after being given a lot of business?
I hope you're just uninformed and not actually idiotic enough to be saying the latter. Because $25K for $95M might not sound like a lot, but how many billions are in the Californian budget? How quickly could a bunch of $25K kickbacks add up? Go inform yourself, and let us know, will you?
... or did the visual FX in this movie suck donkey dong? And the trailers for AOTC look really ropey as well.
This isn't uninformed griping, I used to work with CGI artists in a games company. A typical conversation with a client would go something like this:
OK, I'm over generalising. They sometimes got it just right, but a lot of the time they vastly over commited themselves and ended up with a final product that nobody really liked, least of all themselves.
The problem as I see it is that the answer is always "yes". Models and stop motion put a well understood limit on what was achievable, and scenes were set and shot around those limits. Even when pushing the envelope like in SW:ANH, they didn't over stretch themselves or try anything that they knew they couldn't achieve.
Contrast with SW:TPW, SW:AOTC and Spider-Man. The answer was always "yes". Go ahead, give us anything to do, and we'll do it. Let your imagination go wild.
And what did we get? Ropey looking integration of CGI into live action scenes, ropey looking integration of live action into CGI scenes, 100% CGI scenes that jar badly with the live action.
You can counter with Ray Harryhausen, but then I'll just have to roll out Alien, Aliens and Blade Runner. Do less, but do it well. Learn to say "no", guys.
Very insightful. Another thing that is no doubt screwing the figures is the curse that is season tickets. I simply will not go to a theatre that has any kind of weekly/monthly/annual ticket option any more. It's bad enough trying to pick the slot with the fewest mall rats without having to worry about people who haven't even paid to see the film, have absolutely no interest in actually watching it, and who are treating the theatre as a convenient spot to gather, chat and (god help us) breed. Grrr.
Incidentally, the CGI in the trailers for both this film and AOTC really sucks. I mean, there were better looking FX in Ghostbusters. Maybe we could do with a little less of pushing the animators' limits, and start doing less, but really well. I like animation and all, but I like it as animation, not as shoddy ersatz psuedo-reality.
Now now, less of the hyperbole. I won't have financed the RIAA until I've done my fiduciary duty by buying the soundtrack as well. :p
Given that you say 2,000 years, I assume you're talking about the new fangled cult of Christianity. In that case, the story is "Hey! Did you hear about Original Sin? You're burning in hell, buddy. But wait! We've also got the solution! Forgiveness, at a surprisingly reasonable price."
Yeah, there are probably a few good priests, in the same way that there are probably a few good lawyers, good traffic cops, or (relevant to this story) a few good patent office clerks. But I really do believe that there are some professions where it's a good idea to keep the practitioners as far away from you as humanly possible. It's not right, but pragmatism rarely is. It's simply pragmatic.
These things are endemic in the UK, both lights and speed cameras. Some consequences and quirks:
Huh? I don't need to be told that the distributor must provide the source at minimal cost if asked? I'd call that pretty darn important.
And when I do get the source, I don't need to read the license to find that the "free" source is copyrighted and strictly licensed? I can do whatever I like with it and only worry about the license terms after I become a distributor?
Haven't we seen enough examples of newbie distributors shipping GPL binaries and when asked where the source is, saying "Oh, we'll get around to that. Give us a few days/weeks/months/versions." That is simply not acceptable, ever. If you don't follow the license terms to the letter, you are commiting theft.
I agree that the GPL is easy to understand - if you read it. Far too many people look at the length of it and say "Phwah, it's free. What do I need to know?" I'd suggest that we need to grab their attention on the very first line, by saying "Stop! Copyrighted code! All rights reserved, except as specified below. Use of this code without reading and following the license terms is theft, and can and will be prosecuted."
Basically, there is a prevailing attitude that GPL and open source code in general is something for nothing, and there's no cost associated with using it. That's simply not true, and it's something I'd like to see us addressing at every opportunity.
That said, Microsoft is going a fair way to helping out in that respect, by screaming about how viral the GPL is. Well, sure, that's rather the point. ;-)
As the resident office open source nut, a major part of my (non paid) role is stopping my employer stealing open source code. I have lost count of the number of times that I have found stolen open source code in our products. I say "stolen" advisedly, and it's the word I use when confronting the culprits.
The problem is that many of them simply do not understand that there is a cost associated with using "free" software. Sure, it's their fault for not reading it, but it would make my life a lot easier if we stopped wielding the word "free" like a weapon (it means too many things to too many people), and if the GPL (and other open source licenses) opened like this:
This code is copyrighted. It is not "free to use". You may not copy or use it in any way, including for non-commercial purposes, unless you follow strictly the enclosed license terms. If you do not read or follow the license terms, you will be in breach of copyright, and can and will be prosecuted for theft.
I'd say that a clear statement like this is way more important than the DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY that we tend to splash first. The disclaimer is there to protect the author, but a clear warning that open source code is copyrighted and strictly licensed protects the recipient from doing something stupid and causing grief to both parties. I'd say that it's more in the spirit of open source development to prioritise the copyright/license warning than the disclaimer.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? You're really saying "because they do it, it must work".
OK, I'm over generalising. Advertising does build awareness, but there's no particular reason to suppose that translates into sales. You say yourself that in the case of McDonalds, it's the real estate that matters. You're not going to drive half a mile past a Burger King to get to a McDonalds, no matter how succulent they make their 100% ground beef patties look in their adverts (and they are 100% ground beef, because they're 100% of the cow, ground into paste).
Do you have figures to support the idea that advertising leads to sales?
You know better than that. You said so yourself. Linux is the kernel, and only the kernel. It's not the shell, and it's not the GUI. The shell (and command line applications) is not the kernel, and it's not the GUI. The GUI is not the kernel, and it's not the shell. A KDE/gnu/linux system is modular. There are many solutions from many vendors.
No, actually that's a straw man. The actual question is whether Microsoft can force (I use the word advisedly) OEM's to install the kernel, shell and GUI, or whether they should be made to modularise parts of this whole. Nobody has (to my knowledge) suggested that they open up the kernel.
As a software engineer, I for one would be delighted to see mandatory legal requirements on software engineering.
That way, when my latest Bungie Boss swings into the office shrieking that we have to forget everything we've been doing and hack the product completely differently for a new potential customer, I can suck my teeth and say "Ooh, love to, but if you change the requirements, I have to go back to design stage and re-write my test suites. It's the law".
Or when a module turns up from an Indian sweatshop with uncommented code, one character variable names, no design and no test suite or results, I can just laugh softly and send it to /dev/null.
I would love to have those protections. But until it happens, I'll go right on doing what I've been doing, which is to hack and slash away in good faith, with no requirements, wrong requirements and changing requirements, and building systems that the sales guys insist on giving to customers, sometimes before we've even done unit testing let alone integration or regression. Yes, I do mean that. I mean a sales guy and my Bungie Boss stand over my shoulder, and when the code compiles and passes a basic sanity test, they take it and integrate it, because dammit, they have stock options on the line here.
Believe me, I really don't want to write bad software, but right now I'm left with two choices: write bad software to meet the artificial short term goals of my latest Bungie Boss, or join the "mobility pool". I'd love to have legal protection for sticking to my guns. Bring it on.
You can see where Clinton got his ideas about the semantics of sex from, and where Gates got off arguing over the meaning of the word "the". We intercepted most of the scuds, we just didn't stop any.