The subs page shows how much I've paid for and how much I've used. Why stop there?
Involve us in the process. Show how many other subscribers have paid, and how much. Show how much Slashdot has pulled in through advertising this day/week/month/quarter, and how much you've payed out in bandwidth and in salaries in various areas, i.e. $A to editors, $B to admins, $C to lawyers and $D to whatever the hell Jon Katz is.
You want us to be understanding about the need to pay? Fine, but I need to understand. And as with software, "Just trust us" doesn't cut the mustard. Show us how buggy the source is, and we'll gladly help you fix it.
If you're a good poster, you're supplying content to the site. You're like an unpaid writer
What site are you talking about? This is Slashdot, where Jon Katz gets paid to troll!
This isn't a flippant comment: all of the posts that I've made that attracted a dozen or more replies (e.g. are valuable content) have also attracted a slew of mod points, and most ended up as net negatives. Controversy, not popularity or whoring, brings the most eyeballs (and advertising revenue) to Slashdot.
are enough trolls palying the oscillating karma game already
Wow, your momma said exactly the same thing last night while I was assraping her!
(Hmm, if I point out that I'm burning karma to reenforce the posters's point, would that stop the negative mods and defeat the purpose, which is to, er, burn karma to reenforce the poster's point? Let's find out!)
Welcome to our free site! We have a zillion readers, and we'll figure out a way to make money soon!
Sorry, we had to put adverts on, but the site is still free. We're now on two zillion readers, we must be able to make money soon!
Please click on our adverts to help support this free site! With three zillion readers, if only 1% of you do this, we'll be rich!
Damn, none of you bastards clicked through. We're going to have to put on huge adverts, because for some bizarre reason, really annoying adverts pay more. But we've got four zillion readers now, so if only 1% of you agree to pay just a tiny amount in lieu of adverts, we'll be insanely rich!
Hello? Is anyone out there? (tumbleweed)
I love Slashdot, I really do, and I know this was inevitable. But it's sad, because it indicates that Slashdot has burned the last of the venture capital and has now slipped into the realms of desparate self delusion.
Please understand that this isn't a troll. I truly want Slashdot to survive, but I can't help but think that the people who will pay up tomorrow are the same people who are already clicking through today. There's no new revenue stream here, there's just a deparate gamble that the ads can get bigger faster than the readership goes elsewhere. There's no evidence to show that this happens. We're fickle bastards, us net users.
Before you mod me or retort, please understand one thing: I'm not talking about you. You are one of the good guys, as evidenced by your finger hovering over the "Moderate" or the "Submit" button. You care about Slashdot. You're one of the ones contributing, one of the ones who will stay after the ads (or the missing images from blocked hosts) take up half the screen. But you're not the problem. The problem are the quarter of a million casual viewers who turn up, get served a small banner or two, then wander off to Tom's Hardware or The Register. And I'm not saying bigger ads will drive them away overnight, just that the announcement of bigger ads mean that Slashdot needs to make more money... and they simply won't make it from the vast majority of casual users. They need to make it from a small hardcore minority, from the posters and the responders and the modders, from you and me.
And much as I love Slashdot, I don't want to end paying for (guesstimate) 0.02% of it. Do you?:(
Don't let Taco fool you. He just wants to have a good wedding
Do subscribers get:
Invites?
Preferrential seating?
Dances with the bride?
Anything else (ahem) with the bride?
How the SSSCA will kill public domain
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Even assuming that copyright isn't extended indefinitely, which is a pretty big assumption, the SSSCA will effectively kill the public domain, and here's why.
Even when content comes out of copyright, how are you going to get access to it to use, modify and distribute it? Work through it with me. What you will have is (e.g.) a SSSCA-compliant DVD-2 disk containing an AV stream with a watermark that says "I belong to Disney" weaved in.
But it's out of copyright (let's ignore trademarks, although god knows that's a huge assumption), so now you can quite legally give a copy to your friends, or make your own edit of it, right?
Er, how?
You need to strip the watermark, or it will keep screaming that it belongs to Disney, and I very, very much doubt if any watermarks will have dates on them. No problem, you've got a quantum computer that can crack the pathetic 70 (90, 110, 130 or whatever it is by then) year old protection and remove it, right?
Not legally, you don't. You're allowed to do it, but you're not allowed the tools to do it. This is already the case under the DMCA. But the SSSCA just makes it worse because now you don't have (legal) access to any devices that will play any copied or modified versions unless you strip the watermark. Now you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
(Apologies for the re-use of the analogy, but it's a good one). The content is in a safe with a tiny window that means only you can view it. The clock has run out, and you're now legally allowed to open the safe and get access to the content. Only you don't know the combination. And you're not allowed to buy safe cracking tools, because the assumption is that you'll use them to crack open safes holding still copyrighted material.
One way or another, you have to break the law to create a copy or a modified version or to use such a copy, even though the act of making the copy is entirely legal. It's as simple as that.
Now consider that this also applies to fair use before the copyright expires. Bye bye using clips or images for parody, comment or review. Oh, you can copy the clip, it's just that owning anything that enables you to do so, or to view the copied clip, is illegal.
I do believe that the DMCA and the SSSCA are primarily about stopping piracy. There's no sinister long term motive to stop all fair use dead, or to extend copyright (or copy-prevention) indefinitely. No, those are just nice side effects that polarise society into two groups: licensed content creators, and consumers. Nothing in the middle. No independent multimedia artists or satirists, no amateur editors, no Project Guttenberg, no public domain libraries... no public domain. Just corporate producers, good little consumers... and criminals.
I think I'll start buying my hardware overseas now
Guess again. Firstly, it's cheaper for manufacturers to conform to the strictest regulations for any territory they are going to sell in than to produce separate product lines. Examples are RF shielding and environmental/recyclability regulations. Exceptions are irreconcilable differences like RF broadcast frequencies in. Depending on the price, you might find that SSSCA gag-chips become a de facto global standard.
Second, even if manufacturers do split their product lines, US customs are already becoming unnervingly good at stopping imports based on the DMCA - with or without justification. I think you're missing the point of the DMCA and the SSSCA. By trying to obtain un-gagged hardware or ungagging tools, you are presumed guilty of being about to commit crimes. Until that aspect is overturned, you're going to find it increasingly difficult to get your hands on un-crippled hardware from anywhere.
So any pocket calculator with a M+ key on it is going to be illegal?
Arguably. I work for a telecomms company that produces converged voice/IP digital products. Some of our "phones" have simple web browsers built in, and are practically bristling with RJ-45 ports for passing data in, out and through them, including shuffling voicemail (or any arbitrary data) around from desktop PC's and LAN servers. If this monster passes, it's not inconceivable that we will have to incorporate gag-chips in our phones and watermark all "content" produced (i.e. by speaking into them) as "original, public domain". Further, to try and indemnify ourselves, no doubt we'd shrink-wrap our phones in EULA's that make customers agree to not use the phones to distribute (deliberately or inadvertently) copyrighted material.
Sure, that's probably not the intention, but you can't excuse a bad law by saying that it probably won't be used for stupid purposes. If you don't intend it to be used for that, re-write it to be more specific. At least include non-exhaustive lists of what it is intended to cover and to exempt.
What a bunch of assholes
Actually, I believe we're the ones getting buttfucked.
Re:THE BIG FREAKING POINT.
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Huge corporations stopping fair use and extending copyright limits for the length of several human lifetimes is unAmerican
Before anyone misinterprets this, the SSSCA is about indefinite copyright. Or rather, about de facto indefinite copy-control. Because even when the copyright on the content runs out (if it ever does), it will still be illegal to obtain the tools to extract, use and distribute the content. It's like putting copyrighted material in a locked safe with a tiny window in it, and saying "In 70 years, you can open the safe and put the contents into the public domain. Only we're not telling you the combination, and if you so much as enquire about safe-cracking kits, we'll assume in a very real and legally binding fashion that you actually want to crack open other safes, and have you prosecuted." Append a maniacal laugh, if you like.
Not kidding about how solid these things are
on
Iris Indigo Case Mod
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Ah, those were the days. Contrast with the latest PC case I just bought. The metal was so thin that when I put my fingers into the expension slots to pull it into place under my desk, I ended up with multiple deep incisions in my fingers, like the world's worst paper cuts. Ick.
The only case I've ever seen that's more solid that an Indigo was an IBM PC from about 1985, made in Greenock, Scotland, a famous shipbuilding town. I reckon that the fab had just swapped over from making plates for ships, and decided to re-use the last few, complete with water-tight bulkheads.;-)
But SGI's are amazingly robust (and heavy) as well. A workmate just bought an Indigo (the desktop orientation) on eBay. The seller noted that he'd package it up to his usual high standard, although there wasn't really any need. When it arrived, we saw what he meant. If the Indigo was a car, it would be a Mercedes. But not an ordinary Mercedes. It would be one of the "Diplomatic Specials", the ones that sneer at small arms, and give you a fair change against an RPG. It's that sort of construction. It's not just the thickness of the box, it's the redundant internal bracing, and that the components have multiple fixings, or are in snug caddys. You could probably go over Niagra Falls in one of these babies.;-)
As a game developer myself, I can tell you exactly how leading edge game AI is. Let's all say it together now... Table Lookups!
You lie! Sure, I also thought that I was coding opponent behaviour as a simple state machine, but my team leader, my development house project manager, the publishing house project manager, and the publisher's marketing people all insisted that our game had "Ground breaking neural net based adaptive AI!". Some of these people owned suits, for god's sake. What do people like you and I know about AI design and implementation compared to experts like that?;-)
the number one problem with online games is cheating
Let the mists of time roll back to the early 1990's. A open source X11 game called Netrek was all the rage. It involved little spaceships flying around shooting at each other and capturing planets.
Now, I loved Netrek, but I sucked badly at it. So I decided to crack it and write a cyborg client that did all the hard stuff for me. Netrek had (has) a fairly robust RSA authentication scheme to try and stop this, with some clever tricks that a most commercial games still haven't caught on to. But I perservered, and managed to insert a spoofing borg in between a blessed client and a server. Hurrah!
So then I added all my borg features. Cloaked ships showed up on the tactical screen. My torpedoes auto-aimed. My shields flicked up and down by themselves, and my phasers would get and keep a mortal lock with one keypress. I even coded up complex behaviour, like engaging a suicide attack that coordinated engines, helm, weapons, defences and tractors to practically guaranteed mutual destruction against a more valuable ship. And what was the net result?
I was able to dedicate more time to read messages and become a better team player. And that was it. Because Netrek had been designed from day 1 to be cheat proof. There was simply very little advantage to be had from it.
Examples: I fired perfect vector torps, aimed precisely where my target was going to be. Only that was pointless against anyone halfway decent, because they would dodge them. Every time. Torpedoes in Netrek are used to deny areas of space, not just to destroy. I couldn't do that.
I could see cloaked ships on the tactical, sure, but the information I got from the server was bogus. Speed, direction and position were all wrong. The server only gave enough information to display vague ?? marks on the galactic map, so all I could do was to make myself more aware of an incoming cloaked ship.
I had defensive systems that were optimal at keeping me alive in a 1 on 1 duel, but Netrek is a team game. Sometimes you have to come in screaming at warp 9, yelling "Damn the torpedoes!" and take the bullet for your buddies. Or you drop shields to take a single hit on the hull, because you can repair hull and shields simultaneously. You don't always want to split damage though, it depends on the strategic situation, whether you think you can defeat your opponent and whether you need to keep your hull intact to maintain top speed to get somewhere else in a hurry. It's all about context.
Lesson learned. Each aspect of Netrek is simple. You shoot. You move. You carry armies. But the interactions are so complex as to make any automated response to any given situtation counterproductive. Add to that a paranoid server that trusts nothing, and tells the client the bare minimum (and occasionally lies) and you have a game that is effectively cheat proof. All that a hacked client could do was give a clueless player the illusion of being competent, and nothing more. It could make a small difference when used in the right place at the right time, but it couldn't get you to the right place at the right time, nor could it decide to hold fire and suck it up in preparation for getting you the hell out of there and off to somewhere more useful. Those decisions took skill and judgement. The best players still whipped my ass in personal combat, and the best teams absolutely creamed the teams that I played in.
And those of us who'd developed Netrek way back in the day read this article and fell about laughing. I mean, these guys could have saved themselves six months easy just by reading the change comments in socket.c;-)
... came the wonderful assertion that Windows is only as cheap as it is because Microsoft are such nice guys.
Their internal figures showed (they claimed) that the optimum price point was about $800. Sure, they'd lose most of their market to competitors or piracy(*), but they'd keep enough (in the lucrative corporate sector in businesses that are tied in) that they'd actually make more profit. Hands up who believes them.
(*) And now a bonus Piracy Pop quiz: If Microsoft lost 1 million x $100 Windows sales because they pushed the price to $800, how much would they claim that their losses to piracy would be:
$100,000,000
$800,000,000
Heck, maybe they should push the price to $100,000 a user, then they could claim to be losing trillions that they're rightfully owed, mostly in foreign markets, and the Dubyamint would have to step in and start kicking asses and taking names. Hmm, or perhaps we shouldn't put ideas like that in their heads.
said this could technically fall under the clause that states cannot make rules that apply to other states
Mmm, they have a point, but the solution would be to only oblige Microsoft to provide stripped down versions, or to license their IP to developers in the contesting states. That'd be inconvenient for Microsoft, but, well, cry me a fucking river. This is meant to be a penalty.
Also, it'd be a great reward for the states that have stuck to their guns: suddenly they're hot property for developers wanting a pound of Microsoft flesh.
Of course, Microsoft would claim this would be too complex to be workable. Lest we forget, Microsoft already sell their products worldwide. Splitting US into USA and USB (B for BASTARDS!) wouldn't kill them.
They never change their tune, do they? The "stable and consistent" quote is specifically in response to the requirement to strip middleware from the OS. Yes, yes, we've heard it before; there is no OS, it's all completely integrated, yadda yadda. I'm sure many of us are familiar with just how "unstable" (or otherwise) an OS without applications can be. That aside, it seems to me that if distros based on a stripped down OS and middleware from third parties really were to suck as much as Microsoft claims they would, then the principles of the free market would protect their fully featured version. Remember, nobody's asking them to stop selling their "all microsoft, all the way" distro, just to provide a stripped down version as well.
The states' call for an open-source version of Internet Explorer would destroy "any incentive for Microsoft to invest in the creation of such new versions," Microsoft said.
Sure, if they want to give up and let someone else take over the browser market, they can stop investing in IE. They're saying that if they can't play by their rules, they won't play at all. You can sort of see their point: having their IP forcibly open sourced isn't really fair. Well guess what: that's the idea. This is a punishment. Microsoft have been found guilty of using Internet Explorer as a weapon to destroy Netscape. The penalty is to disarm that weapon by making it available to everybody. It's not meant to be fair, it's meant to be a commensurate penalty. I also note that it's not a case of Microsoft giving the source away, just making it available for scrutiny and licensing. Heck, maybe nobody will want to license it after they've seen it.
In case anyone's interested, the actual States' proposal is here. It makes for pretty interesting reading, mandating the distribution of a Java VM with Windows, auctioning the rights to develop Office for other operating systems to a third party, and actually complying with standards, rather than just claiming that being 95% compliant is close enough (e.g. J++ versus Java).
Before you start reading it, remember one thing: Microsoft are guilty. They are convicted monopolists, and they have repeatedly ignored previous behaviour orders. This remedy is meant to punish them, and to help their competitors at their expense. They did the crime, now they have to do the time.
I don't understand the ideas that I'm hearing.[...] standards offer clear benifits and improvements to commonly used items.
But the best standards are those arrived at by consensus, not fiat. That's the only objection this letter makes; they simply don't want the government to impose standards after 12 months if industry can't agree on them.
I see nothing that implies that they are against standard per se, and (despite what they say) I'm sure that each signatory would be delighted to have their standards made mandatory, with all the lovely licensing revenue that would generate.
But none of them are happy thinking that it might be the other guy's standard that gets used. They're rather do their deals in their own time and behind closed doors than to see the clock start running as soon as the SSSCA gets passed.
if Sen Hollings adds an exemption for systems development folks the question becomes "Who constitutes a legitimate developer?"
Easy. Anyone who works for a company that pays the correct amount of "campaign contributions".
I'm not being flippant. Industry and government interact via lobbyists at $1000 a seat lunches. Being able to buy access to government ears shows that you're a fully fledged patriotic member of the free market economy. I honestly believe that the EFF would be well served by brib- sorry - lobbying a few politicians directly, rather than focussing on legal fights or encouraging individuals to "write their Congressman".
600 word letter? I'd love to still the exact text of what they wrote
Uh, didn't you see the link at the start of the wired article?
Hold on there before you throw the party. The wired article many the issue clear that the hardware manufacturers don't support government legislated control on content delivery. It however also made it clear that the hardware manufacturer would support the introduction of such control hardware as part of an industry based standard
Exactly, and when you read the letter itself, you'll see that in spades. The only objection is to having a standard mandated (sec 104, they have 12 months to decide on one or the government steps in). All that means is that each signatory is scared that this will mean that their standard doesn't get used, so they miss out on all those lovely anti-trust exempt mandatory license fees ad infinitum.
They're 100% pro SSSCA, just anti the clause that might lead to government making a bone headed choice about which scheme(s) to go with. I mean, we are talking serious money here, this isn't something that they want left to inbred idiotic incumbent political animals.
[Do] HP Carly Fiorina and NCR Lars Nyberg) [...] have some ulterior motive in distancing themselves from a group that doesn't want the SSSCA passed
Again with this strange interpretation. Look, all that this letter is against is sec 104, the 12 month time limit to come to a consensus. Nothing else. They're pro the goals of the SSSCA, just anti having the wrong (read: not benefiting us) standard enforced.
I'd take a wild guess that NCR doesn't care, because they're not going to be part of setting any of the important (music, video) standards, and conversely that Carly reckons that HP is well placed to decide those very standards, so is happy for the clock to start running.
I very much doubt big hardware vendors would be in favor of the kind of copy protection SSSCA seems to demand
Then why don't they say so? This letter is a big old fudge that sort of implies that they think SSSCA is kinda unnecessary, but they couldn't even agree on just coming out and saying that.
If this watery, prevaricational letter represents their idea of a decisive consensus, then it actually goes a long way to justifying Holling's insane bill. SSSCA Sec 104 says that if industry can't agree on standards within 12 months, government will step in and sort it out.
And I think that's the only thing they're against. I believe that you're fundamentally wrong in saying that they're against mandatory copy protection per se, just that they don't want it dictated to them. That's all they're saying. If you're reading anything else into their letter, I think it's wishful thinking on your part. I wish that it weren't, but this letter is too late and far too little.
I'm making an assumption here, but I don't think the guys running the bnetd project don't have piles of money to take this thing to court
Not an un-nice double negative. Perhaps you could go over to bnetd.org and actually find out? I'll make the, er, assumption that you and most other Slashdotters are too lazy to even click a link, and that you need to be spoon fed the salient comments:
"This site has been disabled as requested by Blizzard Entertainment and it
will remain closed as we have no legal recourse other than to fight a
long protracted lawsuit against a large corporation [...] We have no choice but to comply until we can get some legal counsel to fight
them. We are very sorry for the inconvenience but there is nothing we can
do at this point. If you know of any lawyers who would be willing to take this
case on a pro-bono case, please forward their information to us"
It seems to me that Senators and Congressmen forget who they work for (the people who elect them) and just care about fundraising
Seems to me like our elected representatives are just following the highest principle of the free market economy. They work for the highest bidder. And that's not us.
Ooh, I know, let's encourage them to vote themselves higher salaries, to discourage corruption and bribe taking. Because as we all know, there is such a thing as having too much money. After you've bought your own personal island, and one for all your family and friends, and that guy you met on the street, you stop, right?
</sarcasm>
Or, we could shoot them in the head. And their children, so as not to have to put up with another generation of hereditary politicians. And their families, who are mostly lawyers, media moguls or industrialists. Politicians and their family (think: daughters) regularly walk away from crimes up to and including manslaughter, and we accept it, because, well, somehow they're different from us. They're better. They are them, and we are just us.
Remind me, wasn't the War of Independence about throwing off the shackles of an incumbent heriditary ruling class that taxed without representing?
What - exactly - is different now? That we are allowed the illusion of choosing between two equally corrupt, morally bankrupt career politicians? That only 90% of our incumbents stay in power rather than 100%? Or that we are no longer allowed access to the means to challenge the government, despite the explicit intent and wording of the second amendment?
Whoa, sorry. Got a bit carried away there. I'll get back to my bread and circusses now, like a loyal and most importantly silent patriot should.
You make a great argument, but here's my counter argument explaining why this will get passed into law:
a) What's the penalty for passing unconstitutional laws? None.
b) 90% of incumbent politicians in the USA are re-elected. What's the penalty for being a corrupt, bought-and-paid for mouthpiece of businesses at both local and national level? Apparently, none. Campaign contributions are bribes. We all know it. We just (en masse) don't care.
b) 50% of both Congress and the Senate are members of the American Bar Association. Crazy, unconstitutional laws are great for lawyers, whatever the outcome.
c) A roofied starlet with 2oz of quality cocaine in her navel. Picture that. What can you offer?
d) Guns, eh? The 2nd amendment specifically allows the ownership of "arms" for the formation of "a well ordered militia" against enemies both foreign and domestic. Not for hunting. Not for home or personal defence. Why, in that case, is it increasingly hard to purchase weapons that are actually useful for their primary, explicit, constitutionally intended purpose: killing the Man in Charge. Both foreign and domestic. We are granted a tiny semblance of the rights guaranteed in the contitution, enough to stop us questioning whether the bread and circusses is really enough.
e) Because they can, and they don't care about We, the People. Not one bit. Not an iota.
Slashdot Mirror
The subs page shows how much I've paid for and how much I've used. Why stop there?
Involve us in the process. Show how many other subscribers have paid, and how much. Show how much Slashdot has pulled in through advertising this day/week/month/quarter, and how much you've payed out in bandwidth and in salaries in various areas, i.e. $A to editors, $B to admins, $C to lawyers and $D to whatever the hell Jon Katz is.
You want us to be understanding about the need to pay? Fine, but I need to understand. And as with software, "Just trust us" doesn't cut the mustard. Show us how buggy the source is, and we'll gladly help you fix it.
What site are you talking about? This is Slashdot, where Jon Katz gets paid to troll!
This isn't a flippant comment: all of the posts that I've made that attracted a dozen or more replies (e.g. are valuable content) have also attracted a slew of mod points, and most ended up as net negatives. Controversy, not popularity or whoring, brings the most eyeballs (and advertising revenue) to Slashdot.
Wow, your momma said exactly the same thing last night while I was assraping her!
(Hmm, if I point out that I'm burning karma to reenforce the posters's point, would that stop the negative mods and defeat the purpose, which is to, er, burn karma to reenforce the poster's point? Let's find out!)
Does this sound familiar?
I love Slashdot, I really do, and I know this was inevitable. But it's sad, because it indicates that Slashdot has burned the last of the venture capital and has now slipped into the realms of desparate self delusion.
Please understand that this isn't a troll. I truly want Slashdot to survive, but I can't help but think that the people who will pay up tomorrow are the same people who are already clicking through today. There's no new revenue stream here, there's just a deparate gamble that the ads can get bigger faster than the readership goes elsewhere. There's no evidence to show that this happens. We're fickle bastards, us net users.
Before you mod me or retort, please understand one thing: I'm not talking about you. You are one of the good guys, as evidenced by your finger hovering over the "Moderate" or the "Submit" button. You care about Slashdot. You're one of the ones contributing, one of the ones who will stay after the ads (or the missing images from blocked hosts) take up half the screen. But you're not the problem. The problem are the quarter of a million casual viewers who turn up, get served a small banner or two, then wander off to Tom's Hardware or The Register. And I'm not saying bigger ads will drive them away overnight, just that the announcement of bigger ads mean that Slashdot needs to make more money... and they simply won't make it from the vast majority of casual users. They need to make it from a small hardcore minority, from the posters and the responders and the modders, from you and me.
And much as I love Slashdot, I don't want to end paying for (guesstimate) 0.02% of it. Do you? :(
Do subscribers get:
Even assuming that copyright isn't extended indefinitely, which is a pretty big assumption, the SSSCA will effectively kill the public domain, and here's why.
Even when content comes out of copyright, how are you going to get access to it to use, modify and distribute it? Work through it with me. What you will have is (e.g.) a SSSCA-compliant DVD-2 disk containing an AV stream with a watermark that says "I belong to Disney" weaved in.
But it's out of copyright (let's ignore trademarks, although god knows that's a huge assumption), so now you can quite legally give a copy to your friends, or make your own edit of it, right?
Er, how?
You need to strip the watermark, or it will keep screaming that it belongs to Disney, and I very, very much doubt if any watermarks will have dates on them. No problem, you've got a quantum computer that can crack the pathetic 70 (90, 110, 130 or whatever it is by then) year old protection and remove it, right?
Not legally, you don't. You're allowed to do it, but you're not allowed the tools to do it. This is already the case under the DMCA. But the SSSCA just makes it worse because now you don't have (legal) access to any devices that will play any copied or modified versions unless you strip the watermark. Now you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
(Apologies for the re-use of the analogy, but it's a good one). The content is in a safe with a tiny window that means only you can view it. The clock has run out, and you're now legally allowed to open the safe and get access to the content. Only you don't know the combination. And you're not allowed to buy safe cracking tools, because the assumption is that you'll use them to crack open safes holding still copyrighted material.
One way or another, you have to break the law to create a copy or a modified version or to use such a copy, even though the act of making the copy is entirely legal. It's as simple as that.
Now consider that this also applies to fair use before the copyright expires. Bye bye using clips or images for parody, comment or review. Oh, you can copy the clip, it's just that owning anything that enables you to do so, or to view the copied clip, is illegal.
I do believe that the DMCA and the SSSCA are primarily about stopping piracy. There's no sinister long term motive to stop all fair use dead, or to extend copyright (or copy-prevention) indefinitely. No, those are just nice side effects that polarise society into two groups: licensed content creators, and consumers. Nothing in the middle. No independent multimedia artists or satirists, no amateur editors, no Project Guttenberg, no public domain libraries... no public domain. Just corporate producers, good little consumers... and criminals.
That's not a world I relish living in.
Guess again. Firstly, it's cheaper for manufacturers to conform to the strictest regulations for any territory they are going to sell in than to produce separate product lines. Examples are RF shielding and environmental/recyclability regulations. Exceptions are irreconcilable differences like RF broadcast frequencies in. Depending on the price, you might find that SSSCA gag-chips become a de facto global standard.
Second, even if manufacturers do split their product lines, US customs are already becoming unnervingly good at stopping imports based on the DMCA - with or without justification. I think you're missing the point of the DMCA and the SSSCA. By trying to obtain un-gagged hardware or ungagging tools, you are presumed guilty of being about to commit crimes. Until that aspect is overturned, you're going to find it increasingly difficult to get your hands on un-crippled hardware from anywhere.
Arguably. I work for a telecomms company that produces converged voice/IP digital products. Some of our "phones" have simple web browsers built in, and are practically bristling with RJ-45 ports for passing data in, out and through them, including shuffling voicemail (or any arbitrary data) around from desktop PC's and LAN servers. If this monster passes, it's not inconceivable that we will have to incorporate gag-chips in our phones and watermark all "content" produced (i.e. by speaking into them) as "original, public domain". Further, to try and indemnify ourselves, no doubt we'd shrink-wrap our phones in EULA's that make customers agree to not use the phones to distribute (deliberately or inadvertently) copyrighted material.
Sure, that's probably not the intention, but you can't excuse a bad law by saying that it probably won't be used for stupid purposes. If you don't intend it to be used for that, re-write it to be more specific. At least include non-exhaustive lists of what it is intended to cover and to exempt.
Actually, I believe we're the ones getting buttfucked.
Before anyone misinterprets this, the SSSCA is about indefinite copyright. Or rather, about de facto indefinite copy-control. Because even when the copyright on the content runs out (if it ever does), it will still be illegal to obtain the tools to extract, use and distribute the content. It's like putting copyrighted material in a locked safe with a tiny window in it, and saying "In 70 years, you can open the safe and put the contents into the public domain. Only we're not telling you the combination, and if you so much as enquire about safe-cracking kits, we'll assume in a very real and legally binding fashion that you actually want to crack open other safes, and have you prosecuted." Append a maniacal laugh, if you like.
Ah, those were the days. Contrast with the latest PC case I just bought. The metal was so thin that when I put my fingers into the expension slots to pull it into place under my desk, I ended up with multiple deep incisions in my fingers, like the world's worst paper cuts. Ick.
The only case I've ever seen that's more solid that an Indigo was an IBM PC from about 1985, made in Greenock, Scotland, a famous shipbuilding town. I reckon that the fab had just swapped over from making plates for ships, and decided to re-use the last few, complete with water-tight bulkheads. ;-)
But SGI's are amazingly robust (and heavy) as well. A workmate just bought an Indigo (the desktop orientation) on eBay. The seller noted that he'd package it up to his usual high standard, although there wasn't really any need. When it arrived, we saw what he meant. If the Indigo was a car, it would be a Mercedes. But not an ordinary Mercedes. It would be one of the "Diplomatic Specials", the ones that sneer at small arms, and give you a fair change against an RPG. It's that sort of construction. It's not just the thickness of the box, it's the redundant internal bracing, and that the components have multiple fixings, or are in snug caddys. You could probably go over Niagra Falls in one of these babies. ;-)
You lie! Sure, I also thought that I was coding opponent behaviour as a simple state machine, but my team leader, my development house project manager, the publishing house project manager, and the publisher's marketing people all insisted that our game had "Ground breaking neural net based adaptive AI!". Some of these people owned suits, for god's sake. What do people like you and I know about AI design and implementation compared to experts like that? ;-)
Let the mists of time roll back to the early 1990's. A open source X11 game called Netrek was all the rage. It involved little spaceships flying around shooting at each other and capturing planets.
Now, I loved Netrek, but I sucked badly at it. So I decided to crack it and write a cyborg client that did all the hard stuff for me. Netrek had (has) a fairly robust RSA authentication scheme to try and stop this, with some clever tricks that a most commercial games still haven't caught on to. But I perservered, and managed to insert a spoofing borg in between a blessed client and a server. Hurrah!
So then I added all my borg features. Cloaked ships showed up on the tactical screen. My torpedoes auto-aimed. My shields flicked up and down by themselves, and my phasers would get and keep a mortal lock with one keypress. I even coded up complex behaviour, like engaging a suicide attack that coordinated engines, helm, weapons, defences and tractors to practically guaranteed mutual destruction against a more valuable ship. And what was the net result?
I was able to dedicate more time to read messages and become a better team player. And that was it. Because Netrek had been designed from day 1 to be cheat proof. There was simply very little advantage to be had from it.
Examples: I fired perfect vector torps, aimed precisely where my target was going to be. Only that was pointless against anyone halfway decent, because they would dodge them. Every time. Torpedoes in Netrek are used to deny areas of space, not just to destroy. I couldn't do that.
I could see cloaked ships on the tactical, sure, but the information I got from the server was bogus. Speed, direction and position were all wrong. The server only gave enough information to display vague ?? marks on the galactic map, so all I could do was to make myself more aware of an incoming cloaked ship.
I had defensive systems that were optimal at keeping me alive in a 1 on 1 duel, but Netrek is a team game. Sometimes you have to come in screaming at warp 9, yelling "Damn the torpedoes!" and take the bullet for your buddies. Or you drop shields to take a single hit on the hull, because you can repair hull and shields simultaneously. You don't always want to split damage though, it depends on the strategic situation, whether you think you can defeat your opponent and whether you need to keep your hull intact to maintain top speed to get somewhere else in a hurry. It's all about context.
Lesson learned. Each aspect of Netrek is simple. You shoot. You move. You carry armies. But the interactions are so complex as to make any automated response to any given situtation counterproductive. Add to that a paranoid server that trusts nothing, and tells the client the bare minimum (and occasionally lies) and you have a game that is effectively cheat proof. All that a hacked client could do was give a clueless player the illusion of being competent, and nothing more. It could make a small difference when used in the right place at the right time, but it couldn't get you to the right place at the right time, nor could it decide to hold fire and suck it up in preparation for getting you the hell out of there and off to somewhere more useful. Those decisions took skill and judgement. The best players still whipped my ass in personal combat, and the best teams absolutely creamed the teams that I played in.
Those really were the days, my friends.
And those of us who'd developed Netrek way back in the day read this article and fell about laughing. I mean, these guys could have saved themselves six months easy just by reading the change comments in socket.c ;-)
... came the wonderful assertion that Windows is only as cheap as it is because Microsoft are such nice guys.
Their internal figures showed (they claimed) that the optimum price point was about $800. Sure, they'd lose most of their market to competitors or piracy(*), but they'd keep enough (in the lucrative corporate sector in businesses that are tied in) that they'd actually make more profit. Hands up who believes them.
(*) And now a bonus Piracy Pop quiz: If Microsoft lost 1 million x $100 Windows sales because they pushed the price to $800, how much would they claim that their losses to piracy would be:
Heck, maybe they should push the price to $100,000 a user, then they could claim to be losing trillions that they're rightfully owed, mostly in foreign markets, and the Dubyamint would have to step in and start kicking asses and taking names. Hmm, or perhaps we shouldn't put ideas like that in their heads.
Bollocks, mate. Microsoft already sell worldwide, and have to deal with local legal issues (like Germany demanding clear instructions on removing Defrag in Win2K because it's written by a company headed by a Scientologist). This would only add one more region to their markets: US-B (for BASTARDS!).
Mmm, they have a point, but the solution would be to only oblige Microsoft to provide stripped down versions, or to license their IP to developers in the contesting states. That'd be inconvenient for Microsoft, but, well, cry me a fucking river. This is meant to be a penalty.
Also, it'd be a great reward for the states that have stuck to their guns: suddenly they're hot property for developers wanting a pound of Microsoft flesh.
Of course, Microsoft would claim this would be too complex to be workable. Lest we forget, Microsoft already sell their products worldwide. Splitting US into USA and USB (B for BASTARDS!) wouldn't kill them.
They never change their tune, do they? The "stable and consistent" quote is specifically in response to the requirement to strip middleware from the OS. Yes, yes, we've heard it before; there is no OS, it's all completely integrated, yadda yadda. I'm sure many of us are familiar with just how "unstable" (or otherwise) an OS without applications can be. That aside, it seems to me that if distros based on a stripped down OS and middleware from third parties really were to suck as much as Microsoft claims they would, then the principles of the free market would protect their fully featured version. Remember, nobody's asking them to stop selling their "all microsoft, all the way" distro, just to provide a stripped down version as well.
Sure, if they want to give up and let someone else take over the browser market, they can stop investing in IE. They're saying that if they can't play by their rules, they won't play at all. You can sort of see their point: having their IP forcibly open sourced isn't really fair. Well guess what: that's the idea. This is a punishment. Microsoft have been found guilty of using Internet Explorer as a weapon to destroy Netscape. The penalty is to disarm that weapon by making it available to everybody. It's not meant to be fair, it's meant to be a commensurate penalty. I also note that it's not a case of Microsoft giving the source away, just making it available for scrutiny and licensing. Heck, maybe nobody will want to license it after they've seen it.
In case anyone's interested, the actual States' proposal is here. It makes for pretty interesting reading, mandating the distribution of a Java VM with Windows, auctioning the rights to develop Office for other operating systems to a third party, and actually complying with standards, rather than just claiming that being 95% compliant is close enough (e.g. J++ versus Java).
Before you start reading it, remember one thing: Microsoft are guilty. They are convicted monopolists, and they have repeatedly ignored previous behaviour orders. This remedy is meant to punish them, and to help their competitors at their expense. They did the crime, now they have to do the time.
But the best standards are those arrived at by consensus, not fiat. That's the only objection this letter makes; they simply don't want the government to impose standards after 12 months if industry can't agree on them.
I see nothing that implies that they are against standard per se, and (despite what they say) I'm sure that each signatory would be delighted to have their standards made mandatory, with all the lovely licensing revenue that would generate.
But none of them are happy thinking that it might be the other guy's standard that gets used. They're rather do their deals in their own time and behind closed doors than to see the clock start running as soon as the SSSCA gets passed.
Easy. Anyone who works for a company that pays the correct amount of "campaign contributions".
I'm not being flippant. Industry and government interact via lobbyists at $1000 a seat lunches. Being able to buy access to government ears shows that you're a fully fledged patriotic member of the free market economy. I honestly believe that the EFF would be well served by brib- sorry - lobbying a few politicians directly, rather than focussing on legal fights or encouraging individuals to "write their Congressman".
Uh, didn't you see the link at the start of the wired article?
Exactly, and when you read the letter itself, you'll see that in spades. The only objection is to having a standard mandated (sec 104, they have 12 months to decide on one or the government steps in). All that means is that each signatory is scared that this will mean that their standard doesn't get used, so they miss out on all those lovely anti-trust exempt mandatory license fees ad infinitum.
They're 100% pro SSSCA, just anti the clause that might lead to government making a bone headed choice about which scheme(s) to go with. I mean, we are talking serious money here, this isn't something that they want left to inbred idiotic incumbent political animals.
Again with this strange interpretation. Look, all that this letter is against is sec 104, the 12 month time limit to come to a consensus. Nothing else. They're pro the goals of the SSSCA, just anti having the wrong (read: not benefiting us) standard enforced.
I'd take a wild guess that NCR doesn't care, because they're not going to be part of setting any of the important (music, video) standards, and conversely that Carly reckons that HP is well placed to decide those very standards, so is happy for the clock to start running.
Then why don't they say so? This letter is a big old fudge that sort of implies that they think SSSCA is kinda unnecessary, but they couldn't even agree on just coming out and saying that.
If this watery, prevaricational letter represents their idea of a decisive consensus, then it actually goes a long way to justifying Holling's insane bill. SSSCA Sec 104 says that if industry can't agree on standards within 12 months, government will step in and sort it out.
And I think that's the only thing they're against. I believe that you're fundamentally wrong in saying that they're against mandatory copy protection per se, just that they don't want it dictated to them. That's all they're saying. If you're reading anything else into their letter, I think it's wishful thinking on your part. I wish that it weren't, but this letter is too late and far too little.
Not an un-nice double negative. Perhaps you could go over to bnetd.org and actually find out? I'll make the, er, assumption that you and most other Slashdotters are too lazy to even click a link, and that you need to be spoon fed the salient comments:
Seems to me like our elected representatives are just following the highest principle of the free market economy. They work for the highest bidder. And that's not us.
Ooh, I know, let's encourage them to vote themselves higher salaries, to discourage corruption and bribe taking. Because as we all know, there is such a thing as having too much money. After you've bought your own personal island, and one for all your family and friends, and that guy you met on the street, you stop, right?
</sarcasm>
Or, we could shoot them in the head. And their children, so as not to have to put up with another generation of hereditary politicians. And their families, who are mostly lawyers, media moguls or industrialists. Politicians and their family (think: daughters) regularly walk away from crimes up to and including manslaughter, and we accept it, because, well, somehow they're different from us. They're better. They are them, and we are just us.
Remind me, wasn't the War of Independence about throwing off the shackles of an incumbent heriditary ruling class that taxed without representing?
What - exactly - is different now? That we are allowed the illusion of choosing between two equally corrupt, morally bankrupt career politicians? That only 90% of our incumbents stay in power rather than 100%? Or that we are no longer allowed access to the means to challenge the government, despite the explicit intent and wording of the second amendment?
Whoa, sorry. Got a bit carried away there. I'll get back to my bread and circusses now, like a loyal and most importantly silent patriot should.
You make a great argument, but here's my counter argument explaining why this will get passed into law:
a) What's the penalty for passing unconstitutional laws? None.
b) 90% of incumbent politicians in the USA are re-elected. What's the penalty for being a corrupt, bought-and-paid for mouthpiece of businesses at both local and national level? Apparently, none. Campaign contributions are bribes. We all know it. We just (en masse) don't care.
b) 50% of both Congress and the Senate are members of the American Bar Association. Crazy, unconstitutional laws are great for lawyers, whatever the outcome.
c) A roofied starlet with 2oz of quality cocaine in her navel. Picture that. What can you offer?
d) Guns, eh? The 2nd amendment specifically allows the ownership of "arms" for the formation of "a well ordered militia" against enemies both foreign and domestic. Not for hunting. Not for home or personal defence. Why, in that case, is it increasingly hard to purchase weapons that are actually useful for their primary, explicit, constitutionally intended purpose: killing the Man in Charge. Both foreign and domestic. We are granted a tiny semblance of the rights guaranteed in the contitution, enough to stop us questioning whether the bread and circusses is really enough.
e) Because they can, and they don't care about We, the People. Not one bit. Not an iota.