The above isn't a link. It is just a URL. It's
trivial to automatically make a link of it, though. Something many systems and applications (such as
gnome-terminal) do automatically.
Should that be considered linking, or speech?
What about "You can find it on Slashdot". Is that
linking, or speech? It would be trivial with gnome-terminal for instance to define a regex that
matches any such reference, and creates links to
slashdot.org/.net/.com.
The effect is the same. And with the help of applications, it will in many cases be indistinguishable for the end user.
The critical part is that if you are legally obligated not to link to sites containing illegal
material, many will not dare link at all, since
a site may change at any point, and it may be
impossible for you to prove later that the illegal
material weren't there when you linked.
Also, for you Americans, your courts has time and time again defended news sources rights to publish material that was either aquired by illegal means (the Pentagon papers spring to mind), or to paraphrase libelous material or other material where the original publication was deemed illegal,
because censoring it would prevent the free dissemination also about criticism about the work.
What if free sale of Mein Kampf were forbidden, as
it is in Germany (you can get hold of it, but you
are required to have a "legitimate" interest in it,
for instance for research purposes), and you were not allowed to quote even to illustrate your arguments against nazism? It would strike not only
the publishers of the book and those supporting it,
but also those opposing the banned work.
In this case the work in question has been deemed
illegal by the lower court. And even those opposing
it and it's use will risc breaking the law if they
link to it even for the purpose of illustrating what they are talking about.
Linking in this respect is akin to quoting, or to
giving an ISBN number, or tell that "you can go
to that store, and they will have it", all of which
is legal.
The really interesting part of this, is that judge Kaplans justification for banning the linking is so thin that there's a good chance a printed newspaper could publish all the links it wanted to
decss without the risc of any repercussions, while
a website can not (at least not in the form of an
actual link).
But the real issue here is that the court is trying
to censor what should be protected speech - the
decss program itself.
That he doesn't like natural selection, does not
make that statement "refute" it. If anything, there's plenty of examples of intermediate steps
between no eyesight and the quality of eyesight of
humans in nature.
If they'd delete as much as a single article, it would seriously diminish the value of the archive for historic and sociological research, for instance, as it would start raising the question of whether the archives could be seen as a representative presentation of culture on Usenet
and the Internet in it's "early" years (yes, I know the internet is a lot older than what's archived, but for all practical purposes, it really started affecting "normal" people in the 90's).
I seriously hope they wouldn't delete a thing. In a way I'm really ambivalent about honoring the X-No-Archive too...
Sure, it would be great if they could present a "washed" version as well without much of the junk, but only if a full version is availble for those who are interested. After all, we can't expect the LOC to prioritize the same as the entire public.
What about the Canter and Seagal Green Card spams and the resulting "wars", for instance? Would they be removed as spam and flamewars, or kept because they are an important part of internet history? (Namely the first really major spam incident and the start of a long series of high profile spammers
and the fight against them).
Well, your definition is that articles are
supposed to expire. But no standards document requires articles to expire, and it is naive of you to assume that everyone else expects them to expire. In fact many hierarchies are being archive many places. For instance the no.* hierarchy is being archived by the national archives in Norway (Norways equivalent of Library of Congress).
If you don't want your posts to be archived, there's a specific documented way of doing so: X-No-Archive: yes in your headers.
Since it's well known that Usenet posts are being archives, and the above is a well known way to avoid it, any judge would likely throw out any case related to copyright infringement by archiving Usenet posts on the basis that the posters are implicitly giving a license to do so by not using the header.
Uhhm. Read the article, will you. He is not giving his name because he don't want to reveal who he
is before he's actually done something to deserve
any publicity.
If he was concerned about becoming famous, wouldn't
giving his name accomplish more than insisting to
not be identified?
And further, it isn't the owners of the archive (Google) that want the government to run it, it is a lot of people that got concerned when Google bought it, that want an independent copy of it, considering that the archive is becoming an increasingly important part of internet history.
You're wrong. First of all, a work doesn't become
public domain by the mere act of publication for
free. Secondly, a work can't both be copyrighted
and public domain. That a work is in the public domain means that it is NOT copyrighted in any form.
However, it could likely be argued that since a poster can exclude him/herself from the archive by using the "X-No-Archive: yes", and that header has been widely publicized, the copyright holder is implicitly giving a license to archive and make available copies of any article they post without
such a header.
And since USENET itself rely on copy-store propagation, it could likewise be said that by the mere act of posting you are granting a license for
free distribution of the material.
An undetectable watermark is useless. The whole
point of a watermark is that it must be easy to
detect reliably, while it must be difficult to
remove. Unfortunately, the detector has to be available to prevent copying (because it has to be
part of the player), which means that someone will reverse engineer. If for nothing else, then someone will do it for the pleasure of pissing of the RIAA.
If you'd read the announcement, you should have
known that no, it is not yet another package
manager for a specific environment. It is a package manager that is not restricted to a specific package system (can for instance use both deb's and
RPMs), and is not restricted to a specific distribution. As long as there's a channel available for your distribution or environent, you should be able to update almost anything with it.
But they rarely do if they can avoid it, unless
specific remedies are specified in the law - which
it often is (don't know about the US) when it comes
down to appartment rental etc., which is treated
specially in most countries.
A judge is also much more likely to look at the circumstances, and decide either to just invalidate the contracts, and let the parties negotiate a new one, or delay any decision until the parties have
spent some real effort into agreeing on modifications.
In this case there's two additional deterrents for
a judge to strike down parts of the contract:
It would be entirely a matter of striking down restrictions, thereby widening the licenses given,
allthough it would be a completely legal choice for the copyright holder to refuse to license to anyone if his preferred license is unenforcable.
That is even if the license was found blatantly
illegal - which is unlikely, since copyright law
lets the copyright holder pick and choose who to
license to in most cases (you'd get problems if you discriminate based on personal traits, such as race or gender, though), and even if the judge thought you were discriminating against commercial companies, there's no law requiring you to treat
non-commercial and commercial entities the same.
But that is also moot, since the GPL does treat
non-commercial and commercial entities the same. It is just that some people think that it is harder to make a profit of taking the copyright holders product and selling it if it's under GPL. That applies to commercial and non-profit entities alike.
However, there's nothing in copyright law
that says that you are required to let people profit from your work - any judge trying to say otherwise would specifically counter the very purpose of copyright: To spur innovation and dissemination of information by encouraging people to invent and create, by creating an artificial government granted monopoly wherein the copyright
holder is the sole person allowed to grant licenses
to the work.
Before copyright laws, people were able to
profit from your work, and it was deemed to be
a problem for innovation, because you could invest
a lot of time and money into creating something,
and have someone else undercut you when selling.
If anything, the GPL is one of the most noble expressions of that right, as it give many people
a protection that makes them willing to make their
work publicly available (but not public domain).
The second deterrent I hinted at is that the work
is freely available. The licensees haven't paid,
and received a work that was to heavily restricted.
They are freely taking someone elses work, and expecting to use it without paying, and then complaining about not being able to do with it as
they please. Considering that several companies release code under GPL, but requires payment to get the code under another license, requiring paid license under a less restrictive license might also
be a less invasive option for a judge concerned
about having a future...
They may be free to determine that that is the
intent, but invalidating the GPL does not make the
software public domain. It would take a judge willing to say "yes, I could do what I'm supposed
to do, and invalidate the license, but I prefer to
take this persons copyright away from him instead,
so he can't choose a new license of his choice".
Keep in mind that copyright
inherently is about restricting freedom, and leaving any permissions up to the holder of the
copyright to grant.
If you strike down any exceptions from the permissions in a license, you
are widening the permissions given - in other words
you are taking protection away from the person that the copyright law is there to protect.
I'm no lawyer, but I've never heard of a copyright
case where anyone has chosen to widen the permissions given, except as specifically mandated by law (specific clauses).
Also, your example about appartment rental contracts is flawed, since most countries have specific laws dealing with contracts that are dealing with things like appartment rental because
it's so critical for ordinary people, and the law
restricts the form of such contracts and what restrictions may legally be put in them. In most cases, such laws also clearly specify that the specific restrictions not allowed will be null and
void, but not the contract.
Many countries have similar statements in their copyright laws, or related laws, restricting what
you can or cannot require in a license grant. For instance, many countries in Europe specifically declare anti-reverse engineering clauses null and void in most cases, but specifcially do not invalidate the contracts.
In other words, in cases like that, the law specifically authorize certain limited actions (nullify the clauses in question).
But the legal side is unimportant. No judge would
dare invalidating only the restrictions, as they'd
have to deal with the wrath of the MPAA, the RIAA,
Microsoft, and any other copyright behemoths that
would suddenly be scared to death about the prospect of everyone and their grandma suing over
"illegal" licenses in order to have the restrictions stricken down.
No they don't. You don't lose copyright by not
protecting it. You're thinking about trademark
rights. Copyright is only limited by fair use,
what licenses you grant, and a time period - which when it comes to Disney seems to be neverending (Congress seems to have a tendency to extend copyright in general whenever any of Disneys major copyrights are about to expire)
If the GPL doesn't hold, wouldn't that mean that
you would have NO license to the GPL'd
product, not that it would revert to public domain?
Keep in mind that you don't need to slap a license
on anything for it to be copyright'ed, the mere act
of publishing it is enough. And by default, only
the copyright holder has the right of publishing -
any rights to publish and redistribute the work
except as under fair use provisions are limited to
what has been granted you by the copyright holder.
The whole point of the algorithm is that the
random data stream must be so huge that it is cost
prohibitive, or "impossible", to store a large enough window of it that you can break encryption
of the sync message fast enough.
The problem with this is that you can attack it in
many ways: If you're after a specific message, you
know that you can discard all parts of the stream
that was sent before the sync message was received
by the receiving party (since otherwise, the receiving party would also be unable to decrypt,
and conceivably the message will be retransmitted).
You can also attempt to feed the relevant parties
with "forged" data streams, to make sure you have
the datastream used as a pad.
However, both of those assume that the snooping party knows what the data stream being used as input is.
What if the sync message contains the frequency of
a more or less randomly chosen radio band, or
whatever other source that it would be hard, or impossible to obtain a copy of after the fact? In
that case it would work (again provided that the
sync message is sent in a way that ensures it is not compromised until after it's to late to get hold of the data). Of course, you'd have problems
to overcome related to getting the correct stream
of bits from the same radio band in two different locations (due to noise, broadcast range of the
radio stations etc.), but the main point is:
There's nothing that limits this system to one transmitter, and nothing that limits this system to
an intentional transmission of random bits, and nothing that limits it to a source of bits that the
adversary knows about or have access to.
You could use anything which both parties can sample at the same time and get the same results
for.
The whole point is to make the possible data set impossibly large and difficult to record long enough to break the sync message while you're still
keeping the data set.
This isn't any more unbreakable than current algorithms. It just relies on scarcity of storage
instead of scarcity of processing power. (that it
isn't unbreakable doesn't mean that it couldn't possibly be a lot harder, however, if properly implemented)
With regards to contractions, lots of people don't
use them when they talk, even though they'd likely
do so when writing - I'm one of them.
And I'm even more likely to not use contractions when talking about something where I want to make sure that someone is getting everything I'm saying, like in an interview situation. In that case, it would be the interviewers discretion whether to represent it accurately, or to contract where suitable.
Another thing to keep in mind is that people that
doesn't speak English as their first language often
are taught English without contractions first, and
then learn to use them, and often will be less at
home with using contractions than a kid growing up
with English with contractions from the outset.
Except that it's quite possible that a tool to
do nano-assembly well will be bigger than one that
could do micro-assembly well.
To make a simple analogy: For magnifying a few
times, we can easily use a pair of glasses, or
a single lens. For magnifying a few hundred times,
a trivial, but larger, microscope bought in a toy store could do. To see things at the atomic level,
you'll likely use a relatively large and bulky
electron microscope or similar.
This isn't just because it's convenient for us,
but because the task gets more complex: It is
harder to work with something that is so small
that environmental changes that is irellevant
for normal-sized operations can have a huge impact.
Things that would stay still because of it's
sheer mass normally, would in the world of nano-tech be small enough that someone stomping
hard nearby could screw up everything. Compensating
for whats in effect a working environment that is
relatively speaking a lot harsher will be a large
part of dealing with minituriasation.
Do you mean how for instance Haydn stopped composing because he was paid a crappy salary, and his work wasn't copyrighted? Or how van Gogh stopped painting because he only sold a single
painting in his lifetime, and no copyright existed
to protect people from copying him if he ever
had gotten successful?
Uh... Oh.. Guess that didn't happen. They actually
kept on producing art.
And there's thousands upon thousands of stories like that. Only a small minority of artists get rich. And only an even smaller minority of those both get rich and remembered over time as great artists (as opposed to good business people that managed to
milk a fad).
Hello? He is a songwriter himself. He is also
the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, and
has written, co-written or sponsored most of the
changes to copright law in recent years. If anything, this is at the very core of his field
of interests.
I think Orrin Hatch know very well what position
copyright has - he has written, co-written or sponsored most recent additions and amendments to
US copyright law. Remember he is the chairman of
the Senate judiciary committee.
Copyright is a limited grant of government licensed
monopoly to promote innovation and creativity. The
US constitution especially limits congress to only
passing copyright related laws that promotes those
values. If the copyright holders restricts the use
of their material to an extent where it can no longer be seen as giving the public anything in
return for that license, then copyright law has
failed, and should be modified.
The people who recorded the music has only the time limited, restricted rights to it that congress grants it to spur creativity, and innovation for
the public good, and the limitations were placed on
it because it is a limitation on public liberties.
This is the main difference between property law
and copyright law: Copyright is seen as a restriction of the publics liberties, as it takes
away their access to something that they could have
full access to without depriving someone else of
the same access. Property ownership, on the other
hand is about arbitrating who have the right of
access to a scarce resource.
Copyright is an artificial scarcity created by
the government on behalf of the public to award
those who innovate and create, not to award people
for stifling innovation by refusing to license their content.
Actually, Lawrence Lessig used exactly the US
constitutions view on copyright as his main justification for why the DMCA is unconstitutional.
The US constitution, he said, clearly limits what
rights congress can grant copyright holders, because copyright was in the US contitution, and
in US history and law, always seen as a restriction
on personal freedom that was insituted only because
granting some protection to intellectual work could stimulate innovation.
Actually, he went on at length to explain the history of US copyright and patent law, and how
the constitution expressly forbid congress from
passing any law that grants copyright holders rights unless they clearly advance innovation, and
at the same time strike a balance with providing
the public with a reasonable access to the copyrighted works (hence things like the fair use
provisions in current copyright law).
If anything, this is as "American" as it could be. It has roots to your nations founding fathers, and
there is substantial precedence supporting that
copyright is a limited right granted by the government that is meant not to serve the copyright holders, but innovation that the public
gains from.
If copyright ends up restricting the
publics right so much that it is not worth it, then
the government is full within its rights to revoke
those privileges, and stop restricting personal
liberties in that area.
If anything "unamerican" idea is to use laws to
restrict personal liberties by stopping people from
copying in the first place, and by that restricting
the market in the copyrighted material to only those granted a government licensed monopoly to
a work via copyright law.
Copyright law is not a restriction of the rights
of the persons that creates something, it's
an extension of them. Until copyright laws were
created, no restrictions existed on copying
ideas or works.
Copyright law in it's current form was deviced to
increase innovation, not to protect the people that create. Protecting the copyright holders was just
a side effect.
In this case, the music industry is fighting against innovative new technologies.
Keep in mind that this is not about an artists
right to choose not to publish, but about requiring
that works that are already being published be
available for licensing on the internet as well.
And it was cited as an alternative if the music industry itself fails to follow through on
licensing content for the internet.
The copyright holder has only the rights granted
by copyright law, no more, no less. Music was composed, books written, paintings painted centuries before copyright law was conceived.
And this wouldn't stop anyone from getting paid,
just from not licensing their music for the web
if they're already publishing it through other
means.
You seem to believe that most musicians create music only because they want to, but forget that
through history, countless of the most famous
music was written by composers on fixed salaries,
which had no control over what kind of music they
wrote, for what occasions, or even how long, or
for what instruments. Some of them wrote music for
the same people for decades, without much to show
for it. Artists have to eat too.
And lack of control didn't stop them from producing
great works.
If you're willing to pay, then pay. Donate to
the numerous organizations supporting open source
projects. Or support the companies that are packaging and supporting open source software, by
buying their packaged versions, or their support
services. Don't complain about people that, by
their own choice, decide to release their software
for free. People have widely differing motives.
Everything from pride, to not wanting the hassle
of commercializing something, to actually wanting
to make money of services, and wanting to help the
uptake of their products.
As for users seldom making use of the source code
directly, sure. But what if the maintainer dies?
Or just doesn't care anymore? With a closed source
product, your wife would risc never seeing another
update again, even if she does find fatal flaws, or does need a new feature. With an open source product, chances are someone else will take over,
and resume development, or if worst comes to worst,
and fixing that bug is really important to her,
she could hire someone to do it for her.
So even if she never touches the source code herself, open source give her a kind of security
that she practically never has with closed source.
If there is no more demand of question for manufactured items, then those parts of industry is of no use. And if people already had what they
need, they'll start using money on something else,
whether on working less, or on buying other products or services, either of which will cover
for the shortfall in manufacturing.
We're not consuming goods to make anyone rich,
we're consuming goods because we have needs and
wants (some created by advertizing, mind you). Longer lasting objects would be bad for some manufacturers, but good for people that would prefer to spend money on other things.
Slashdot Mirror
http://slashdot.org/
The above isn't a link. It is just a URL. It's trivial to automatically make a link of it, though. Something many systems and applications (such as gnome-terminal) do automatically.
Should that be considered linking, or speech?
What about "You can find it on Slashdot". Is that linking, or speech? It would be trivial with gnome-terminal for instance to define a regex that matches any such reference, and creates links to slashdot.org/.net/.com.
The effect is the same. And with the help of applications, it will in many cases be indistinguishable for the end user.
The critical part is that if you are legally obligated not to link to sites containing illegal material, many will not dare link at all, since a site may change at any point, and it may be impossible for you to prove later that the illegal material weren't there when you linked.
Also, for you Americans, your courts has time and time again defended news sources rights to publish material that was either aquired by illegal means (the Pentagon papers spring to mind), or to paraphrase libelous material or other material where the original publication was deemed illegal, because censoring it would prevent the free dissemination also about criticism about the work.
What if free sale of Mein Kampf were forbidden, as it is in Germany (you can get hold of it, but you are required to have a "legitimate" interest in it, for instance for research purposes), and you were not allowed to quote even to illustrate your arguments against nazism? It would strike not only the publishers of the book and those supporting it, but also those opposing the banned work.
In this case the work in question has been deemed illegal by the lower court. And even those opposing it and it's use will risc breaking the law if they link to it even for the purpose of illustrating what they are talking about.
Linking in this respect is akin to quoting, or to giving an ISBN number, or tell that "you can go to that store, and they will have it", all of which is legal.
The really interesting part of this, is that judge Kaplans justification for banning the linking is so thin that there's a good chance a printed newspaper could publish all the links it wanted to decss without the risc of any repercussions, while a website can not (at least not in the form of an actual link).
But the real issue here is that the court is trying to censor what should be protected speech - the decss program itself.
That he doesn't like natural selection, does not make that statement "refute" it. If anything, there's plenty of examples of intermediate steps between no eyesight and the quality of eyesight of humans in nature.
I seriously hope they wouldn't delete a thing. In a way I'm really ambivalent about honoring the X-No-Archive too...
Sure, it would be great if they could present a "washed" version as well without much of the junk, but only if a full version is availble for those who are interested. After all, we can't expect the LOC to prioritize the same as the entire public.
What about the Canter and Seagal Green Card spams and the resulting "wars", for instance? Would they be removed as spam and flamewars, or kept because they are an important part of internet history? (Namely the first really major spam incident and the start of a long series of high profile spammers and the fight against them).
If you don't want your posts to be archived, there's a specific documented way of doing so: X-No-Archive: yes in your headers.
Since it's well known that Usenet posts are being archives, and the above is a well known way to avoid it, any judge would likely throw out any case related to copyright infringement by archiving Usenet posts on the basis that the posters are implicitly giving a license to do so by not using the header.
If he was concerned about becoming famous, wouldn't giving his name accomplish more than insisting to not be identified?
And further, it isn't the owners of the archive (Google) that want the government to run it, it is a lot of people that got concerned when Google bought it, that want an independent copy of it, considering that the archive is becoming an increasingly important part of internet history.
However, it could likely be argued that since a poster can exclude him/herself from the archive by using the "X-No-Archive: yes", and that header has been widely publicized, the copyright holder is implicitly giving a license to archive and make available copies of any article they post without such a header.
And since USENET itself rely on copy-store propagation, it could likewise be said that by the mere act of posting you are granting a license for free distribution of the material.
An undetectable watermark is useless. The whole point of a watermark is that it must be easy to detect reliably, while it must be difficult to remove. Unfortunately, the detector has to be available to prevent copying (because it has to be part of the player), which means that someone will reverse engineer. If for nothing else, then someone will do it for the pleasure of pissing of the RIAA.
That case has nothing to do with the DMCA.
If you'd read the announcement, you should have known that no, it is not yet another package manager for a specific environment. It is a package manager that is not restricted to a specific package system (can for instance use both deb's and RPMs), and is not restricted to a specific distribution. As long as there's a channel available for your distribution or environent, you should be able to update almost anything with it.
A judge is also much more likely to look at the circumstances, and decide either to just invalidate the contracts, and let the parties negotiate a new one, or delay any decision until the parties have spent some real effort into agreeing on modifications.
In this case there's two additional deterrents for a judge to strike down parts of the contract:
It would be entirely a matter of striking down restrictions, thereby widening the licenses given, allthough it would be a completely legal choice for the copyright holder to refuse to license to anyone if his preferred license is unenforcable.
That is even if the license was found blatantly illegal - which is unlikely, since copyright law lets the copyright holder pick and choose who to license to in most cases (you'd get problems if you discriminate based on personal traits, such as race or gender, though), and even if the judge thought you were discriminating against commercial companies, there's no law requiring you to treat non-commercial and commercial entities the same.
But that is also moot, since the GPL does treat non-commercial and commercial entities the same. It is just that some people think that it is harder to make a profit of taking the copyright holders product and selling it if it's under GPL. That applies to commercial and non-profit entities alike.
However, there's nothing in copyright law that says that you are required to let people profit from your work - any judge trying to say otherwise would specifically counter the very purpose of copyright: To spur innovation and dissemination of information by encouraging people to invent and create, by creating an artificial government granted monopoly wherein the copyright holder is the sole person allowed to grant licenses to the work.
Before copyright laws, people were able to profit from your work, and it was deemed to be a problem for innovation, because you could invest a lot of time and money into creating something, and have someone else undercut you when selling.
If anything, the GPL is one of the most noble expressions of that right, as it give many people a protection that makes them willing to make their work publicly available (but not public domain).
The second deterrent I hinted at is that the work is freely available. The licensees haven't paid, and received a work that was to heavily restricted. They are freely taking someone elses work, and expecting to use it without paying, and then complaining about not being able to do with it as they please. Considering that several companies release code under GPL, but requires payment to get the code under another license, requiring paid license under a less restrictive license might also be a less invasive option for a judge concerned about having a future...
Keep in mind that copyright inherently is about restricting freedom, and leaving any permissions up to the holder of the copyright to grant.
If you strike down any exceptions from the permissions in a license, you are widening the permissions given - in other words you are taking protection away from the person that the copyright law is there to protect.
I'm no lawyer, but I've never heard of a copyright case where anyone has chosen to widen the permissions given, except as specifically mandated by law (specific clauses).
Also, your example about appartment rental contracts is flawed, since most countries have specific laws dealing with contracts that are dealing with things like appartment rental because it's so critical for ordinary people, and the law restricts the form of such contracts and what restrictions may legally be put in them. In most cases, such laws also clearly specify that the specific restrictions not allowed will be null and void, but not the contract.
Many countries have similar statements in their copyright laws, or related laws, restricting what you can or cannot require in a license grant. For instance, many countries in Europe specifically declare anti-reverse engineering clauses null and void in most cases, but specifcially do not invalidate the contracts.
In other words, in cases like that, the law specifically authorize certain limited actions (nullify the clauses in question).
But the legal side is unimportant. No judge would dare invalidating only the restrictions, as they'd have to deal with the wrath of the MPAA, the RIAA, Microsoft, and any other copyright behemoths that would suddenly be scared to death about the prospect of everyone and their grandma suing over "illegal" licenses in order to have the restrictions stricken down.
No they don't. You don't lose copyright by not protecting it. You're thinking about trademark rights. Copyright is only limited by fair use, what licenses you grant, and a time period - which when it comes to Disney seems to be neverending (Congress seems to have a tendency to extend copyright in general whenever any of Disneys major copyrights are about to expire)
If the GPL doesn't hold, wouldn't that mean that you would have NO license to the GPL'd product, not that it would revert to public domain? Keep in mind that you don't need to slap a license on anything for it to be copyright'ed, the mere act of publishing it is enough. And by default, only the copyright holder has the right of publishing - any rights to publish and redistribute the work except as under fair use provisions are limited to what has been granted you by the copyright holder.
The problem with this is that you can attack it in many ways: If you're after a specific message, you know that you can discard all parts of the stream that was sent before the sync message was received by the receiving party (since otherwise, the receiving party would also be unable to decrypt, and conceivably the message will be retransmitted). You can also attempt to feed the relevant parties with "forged" data streams, to make sure you have the datastream used as a pad.
However, both of those assume that the snooping party knows what the data stream being used as input is.
What if the sync message contains the frequency of a more or less randomly chosen radio band, or whatever other source that it would be hard, or impossible to obtain a copy of after the fact? In that case it would work (again provided that the sync message is sent in a way that ensures it is not compromised until after it's to late to get hold of the data). Of course, you'd have problems to overcome related to getting the correct stream of bits from the same radio band in two different locations (due to noise, broadcast range of the radio stations etc.), but the main point is:
There's nothing that limits this system to one transmitter, and nothing that limits this system to an intentional transmission of random bits, and nothing that limits it to a source of bits that the adversary knows about or have access to.
You could use anything which both parties can sample at the same time and get the same results for.
The whole point is to make the possible data set impossibly large and difficult to record long enough to break the sync message while you're still keeping the data set.
This isn't any more unbreakable than current algorithms. It just relies on scarcity of storage instead of scarcity of processing power. (that it isn't unbreakable doesn't mean that it couldn't possibly be a lot harder, however, if properly implemented)
And I'm even more likely to not use contractions when talking about something where I want to make sure that someone is getting everything I'm saying, like in an interview situation. In that case, it would be the interviewers discretion whether to represent it accurately, or to contract where suitable.
Another thing to keep in mind is that people that doesn't speak English as their first language often are taught English without contractions first, and then learn to use them, and often will be less at home with using contractions than a kid growing up with English with contractions from the outset.
To make a simple analogy: For magnifying a few times, we can easily use a pair of glasses, or a single lens. For magnifying a few hundred times, a trivial, but larger, microscope bought in a toy store could do. To see things at the atomic level, you'll likely use a relatively large and bulky electron microscope or similar.
This isn't just because it's convenient for us, but because the task gets more complex: It is harder to work with something that is so small that environmental changes that is irellevant for normal-sized operations can have a huge impact.
Things that would stay still because of it's sheer mass normally, would in the world of nano-tech be small enough that someone stomping hard nearby could screw up everything. Compensating for whats in effect a working environment that is relatively speaking a lot harsher will be a large part of dealing with minituriasation.
Uh... Oh.. Guess that didn't happen. They actually kept on producing art.
And there's thousands upon thousands of stories like that. Only a small minority of artists get rich. And only an even smaller minority of those both get rich and remembered over time as great artists (as opposed to good business people that managed to milk a fad).
Hello? He is a songwriter himself. He is also the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, and has written, co-written or sponsored most of the changes to copright law in recent years. If anything, this is at the very core of his field of interests.
I think Orrin Hatch know very well what position copyright has - he has written, co-written or sponsored most recent additions and amendments to US copyright law. Remember he is the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee.
The people who recorded the music has only the time limited, restricted rights to it that congress grants it to spur creativity, and innovation for the public good, and the limitations were placed on it because it is a limitation on public liberties.
This is the main difference between property law and copyright law: Copyright is seen as a restriction of the publics liberties, as it takes away their access to something that they could have full access to without depriving someone else of the same access. Property ownership, on the other hand is about arbitrating who have the right of access to a scarce resource.
Copyright is an artificial scarcity created by the government on behalf of the public to award those who innovate and create, not to award people for stifling innovation by refusing to license their content.
Excuse me? Not taken seriously? He is the chairman of the senate judiciary comittee, dammit. How is that "not being taken seriously"?
The US constitution, he said, clearly limits what rights congress can grant copyright holders, because copyright was in the US contitution, and in US history and law, always seen as a restriction on personal freedom that was insituted only because granting some protection to intellectual work could stimulate innovation.
Actually, he went on at length to explain the history of US copyright and patent law, and how the constitution expressly forbid congress from passing any law that grants copyright holders rights unless they clearly advance innovation, and at the same time strike a balance with providing the public with a reasonable access to the copyrighted works (hence things like the fair use provisions in current copyright law).
If anything, this is as "American" as it could be. It has roots to your nations founding fathers, and there is substantial precedence supporting that copyright is a limited right granted by the government that is meant not to serve the copyright holders, but innovation that the public gains from.
If copyright ends up restricting the publics right so much that it is not worth it, then the government is full within its rights to revoke those privileges, and stop restricting personal liberties in that area.
If anything "unamerican" idea is to use laws to restrict personal liberties by stopping people from copying in the first place, and by that restricting the market in the copyrighted material to only those granted a government licensed monopoly to a work via copyright law.
Copyright law in it's current form was deviced to increase innovation, not to protect the people that create. Protecting the copyright holders was just a side effect.
In this case, the music industry is fighting against innovative new technologies.
Keep in mind that this is not about an artists right to choose not to publish, but about requiring that works that are already being published be available for licensing on the internet as well.
And it was cited as an alternative if the music industry itself fails to follow through on licensing content for the internet.
The copyright holder has only the rights granted by copyright law, no more, no less. Music was composed, books written, paintings painted centuries before copyright law was conceived.
And this wouldn't stop anyone from getting paid, just from not licensing their music for the web if they're already publishing it through other means.
You seem to believe that most musicians create music only because they want to, but forget that through history, countless of the most famous music was written by composers on fixed salaries, which had no control over what kind of music they wrote, for what occasions, or even how long, or for what instruments. Some of them wrote music for the same people for decades, without much to show for it. Artists have to eat too.
And lack of control didn't stop them from producing great works.
Everything from pride, to not wanting the hassle of commercializing something, to actually wanting to make money of services, and wanting to help the uptake of their products.
As for users seldom making use of the source code directly, sure. But what if the maintainer dies? Or just doesn't care anymore? With a closed source product, your wife would risc never seeing another update again, even if she does find fatal flaws, or does need a new feature. With an open source product, chances are someone else will take over, and resume development, or if worst comes to worst, and fixing that bug is really important to her, she could hire someone to do it for her.
So even if she never touches the source code herself, open source give her a kind of security that she practically never has with closed source.
We're not consuming goods to make anyone rich, we're consuming goods because we have needs and wants (some created by advertizing, mind you). Longer lasting objects would be bad for some manufacturers, but good for people that would prefer to spend money on other things.