The latest proposal, from September 2000, is available here.
Here is where the latest news regarding this proposal will be posted.
And this isn't just a row over digital music, this is the European counterpart of the DMCA. To say that it has been hotly debated is an understatement. Especially concerning Article 5 and 6. 6.4 was added after May'99, btw.
The most important issue is weither 'circumvention devices' should be available to the general public or not. We need a better name for 'circumvention device', though. 'Tool that can be used for piracy, but is also required to exercise fair use rights that involve copying' would be more appropriate.
If a machine takes speech (or even textual English for instance) as input then processes that data, the machine isn't running object code derived from human language... it's data processing, based on some other code the machine happens to be running.
This 'data processing' is also done when you run code written in other interpreted languages. Are you saying that the perl script I just wrote isn't a program?
Also, there is nothing that prevents you from writing a compiler that takes structured english as input and produce object code.
If nothing else, someone can simulate a display/sound card on a virtual machine, and grab the data at that point.
The problem is that most of these devices are going to be tagged "circumvention device", and thus be hunted down by law enforcement where the DMCA or WCT is in effect.
And not all data can be accessed like this, either. For example, extra DVD subtitles.
"The commands as described below may be included in a device without license obligations. However, to be useful in a copy protection environment, the commands need keys, keying material, and intellectual property requiring a license. This license is available from 4C Entity, LLC, and is administered by License Management International, LLC, in California(http://www.lmicp.com/)."
So the keys and crypto algoritms are available through a license. This license will of course contain a lot of requirements (like never exposing the content in cleartext, etc).
One way of avoiding it is to make the ide driver in the operating system ditch the CPRM spesific commands, or fake "operation not supported" replies. You also want to disable raw access to the drive from applications.
I'd expect CPRM enabled software players/downloaders to complain if the feature is unavailable, though. "Your storage medium does not support content protection. You are not allowed to store the music album you just purchased."
The proposed changes are to the ATA, not the ATAPI spec.
The two specs are closely related, but ATA is generally used for hard drives while ATAPI is used for most removable media (Zip, CD, DVD, etc).
Hard drives are ATA devices. CompactFlash and
a few other are ATA devices with certain device-specific extentions.
If they wanted CPRM support for non-hard drive ATA devices, the sensible approach would be to add a device-specific extention. Instead they try to make it an optional part of the general ATA spec, which makes no sense unless they want it to apply to hard drives.
Windows NT has had a journaled file system forever
Unless they did som heavy changes in NTFS5, it is still log-based. Think of it as a circular buffer, usually 2-4MB size, where file system transactions are logged.
It usually works just as well as a full journalled FS - 2 second "fsck" and a consistent fs. Under heavy disk activity you do however run the risk of exhausting the size of the log, and end up with an inconsistent file system if you crash.
Other features of NTFS are cool, though. The fs attributes are a superset of posix and vms', so it can emulate both. It also has several metadata files, which provided 3rd parties the hooks needed to add quotas and other features to NT4.
If the creator wants to hide his work in a vault and never publish it, he is of course entitled to do so.
However, if it is published the creator benefits from the limited time monopoly that copyright law grants him/her. Then the author also has to abide by the other parts of the law, including the limited time clause and "fair use".
I don't see you claiming that abandonware sites should break into old software houses and steal unpublished games, so where is your point?
Further, the owner of the copyrighted work has every right to force upgrading, if they so wish.
Which part of the copyright law says so?
Also, statues and paintings are usually only made in one copy, which is vastly different from widely published old games.
Why is it on Slashdot that many of the same people who think its okay to break copyright laws in cases of emulation, 'free' music and abadonware are the same people who would scream the loudest if a company were to run afoul of the GPL?
They are usually two different sets of people, but whatever..
The GPL is built upon copyright law. Copyright law is the foundation of the GPL (or any other license you care to mention). Take it or leave it.
Please keep in mind that the Copyright law has two sides.
On one hand, it provides an incentive to produce and distribute IP. Whoever creates a work is given a time limited monopoly on sale and distribution.
On the other hand, the society should benefit to the fullest extent from the ideas, thoughts and experiences embodied in the work. That is why we have the notion of "fair use". Also, the work enters the public domain after the copyright expires.
What is happening, though, is that the copyright owners are not upholding their part of the deal. Old works that have not entered the public domain yet is rotting away. We see this happening with old movie classics, with books, with old computer games. The media that many of these works are stored on will turn to dust, and as a result of that we'll loose a considerable amount of our society's history.
It should really be the duty of the original author or publisher (or arguably, the libraries) to maintain these works until they enter the public domain.
According to the law, abandonware sites are illegal. According to morality and the original intent of the Copyright law, they are preserving an important piece of the histroy of computing.
And for people that really care, go read Eldred vs Reno.
From the way this article reads, it sounds like the anti-circumvention measures of the DMCA don't go into effect until the 28th. IANAL, but it sounds like this would mean that any uses of it as a defense in court cases before that time would be considered an attempt to apply the law ex post facto, which is explicitly unconstitutional.
The "illegal to distribute circumvention tools" part of DMCA has been active for a while, and is what was used in the MPAA vs 2600 lawsuit.
I'm afraid it is going to be international law soon.
The whole DMCA debacle started with the World Intellectual Property Organization signing the WIPO Copyright Treaty in December 1996. Article 11 in that treaty states:
"Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law. "
The result in the US was the DMCA, and we'll see similar laws soon in the EU.
Anyway, the point is - we'll soon have a lot of hardware with content protection measures built-in and laws protecting those measures.
FireWire and other transport buses support, or in the near future will support "content protection mechanisms". The goal is end-to-end content protection all the way to your monitor or speakers.
Just do a patent lookup on content protection measures, and you'll see Intel and the other large hardware manufacturers up there.
On the implementation of DVD:
"Even at this ideal stage of introduction of a new format, limitations still exist. For example, to succeed in the marketplace DVD players needed to be compatible with the existing installed base of television sets. Therefore, the copy protection technology adopted had to provide that DVD discs played on legitimate players would be viewable on existing television sets."
So, the only reason why DVD players provide an unprotected analog output (well, "only" Macrovision protected) is because the current installed base of TV sets don't provide content protection mechanisms. Reading between the lines, it is easy to see that they want to ditch analog output once there is a large enough base of HDTVs with CPM.
On recording devices:
"Recording devices will be licensed to record using an authorized encryption system to protect the content on an authorized copy. As a condition of such license, the recording product must read and respond to copy protection information in the form of the watermark in any legacy interface and the digital information contained in any copy protected digital interface. In order to properly respond, the recorder must determine whether the input signal itself originated from the original of the recording or from a copy of the content that was already made using the copy protection system (in which case the copy protection
information would so indicate);"
Devices with analog output must support digital watermarks. Recording devices with analog inputs must recognize these. Notice that they dance around the question of authorized vs lawful - it is the local copyright law that should determine weither taking a copy is legal or not, while the content protection measure might impose further limitations. So, while some action might be legal in my country the CPM might decide that I'm not authorized to do so. They are claiming that authorization is provided by the CPM, thus circumventing local IP law!
Reading more about local law:
"Each country has its own particular concerns regarding exceptions and limitations. We believe that such concerns need to be considered carefully. Technical measures and circumvention devices are blind as to whether the circumventing purpose is lawful or unlawful. Any possible exceptions and limitations to the anti-circumvention rule should apply to certain types of defined, individual conduct. Prohibitions against circumvention devices and services need to remain firm and cannot be undercut. To date technical protection measures have not prevented fair use or fair practice with respect to works and there has been no demonstration that such measures will have this effect in the future. Our work in the area of technical protections has led us to conclude that anti-circumvention laws must provide effective deterrence against and sufficient remedies to redress circumvention. Strong and effective laws in this area are essential because technical measures can do no more than serve as obstacles to unauthorized use and such measures will always be subject to defeat."
They want few - or no - exceptions to the anti-circumvention rule, which will further ensure that our rights will be dictated by the CPM instead of the law. That Fair Use has not been damaged is an incredible bold claim. One needs to look no further than Jack Valenti's testimony in the MPAA vs 2600 case to see that (he claimed that taking an excerpt from a DVD for fair use purposes is illegal because it requires circumvention of CSS). Also, the US libraries have shown concern about the DMCA, claiming that the protection measures are making it difficult for them to provide their services to the public.
On hardware manufacturers:
"Therefore, to work properly copy protection technologies must be bilateral - the technologies applied by content owners need to function with consumer electronics and computer devices used by consumers and these devices need to respect and respond to the technologies applied. This bilateral requirement means that solutions are not simply a matter of technological innovation. Rather, effective copy protection technology requires a high level of agreement and implementation by both content providers and manufacturers of consumer electronics and computer products. This can be achieved by legislation, whereby certain types of devices are required to respond to a particular copy protection technology, or by negotiated cross-industry agreements."
They want to control what you are allowed to do with the player in your own house. They want to control player manufacturers to comply with their protection mechanisms - either by law, or by restrictive licensing regimes. Read: No open source video and music players for their formats! No open source reader for their eBooks!
There is a lot more in that report, but I guess this is enough to make my point.:-/
What's the solution? Is there a solution? Should we be worried? I'm not quite sure. All I know is that as a community, I think we aughta recognize the threat and realize that RedHat and other larger corporate Linux distros are not our friends. Those at the foundation of Linux development aughta keep their eyes on this and make sure software isn't written for Linux 6.2.
This is basically just the same problem one had with the old fragmentation of Unix. That is, market share fighting make the distribution players "differentiate" their offerings.
Now, from a commercial point of view a single Linux distribution makes sense. Make the program run on a single target platform and you're covered.
If you want to make a program work on more than one distribution, you need to at least cover these differences:
- compiler versions
- libc versions
- init script layout
- config file layout
- package management system
- other library versions
My hope is that LSB can get a proper standard out for this, so that ISVs can say "this program should run on any LSB 1.1 compliant distribution". If that doesn't happen, we'll just see more of the current trend - commercial applications will come with a sticker that says "runs on $CURRENTLY_MOST_POPULAR_DISTRIBUTION".
What nobody has mentioned yet, is that in the Mac Emulation Community, nobody is taking him seriously.
Meanwhile Microcode Solutions is working on iFusion which will be a Macintosh PPC Emulator which will emulate an iMac on first the PPC Amigas, and then PCs. http://www.microcode-solutions.com
Microcode Solutions? That would be Jim Drew of Emplant fame, no?
He is also an old-timer. Made hardware emulation boards, diskette drive controllers to read different floppy formats, software emulators.
There is many a flamewar to find in old archives of comp.sys.amiga.emulators over delayed products, wild claims and the like. Seems like he has got his act together with Fusion, though.
It strikes me that whenever a company comes out with something where they intend to make their profits from after-sale mechanisms, the first thing that people want to do is to try and avoid this.
Why the heck not? If there is no law or license agreement or contract that says I have to act according to their business plan, why should I?
To me, all of this seems like trying to rip off companies that are providing something which people obviously want.
To me, all of this seems like some companies that think we are gullible. They try to make it look like they are giving you something for little or no cost (cuecat, freepc, whatever), while what they really want is to force you to use their services and sic lawyers on you if you don't.
And if people succeed, then these companies are going to suffer, which means no more deals for people. Is this what we want?
No, it isn't.
If the:CueCat was given away with a prominent sticker saying "all use of this device except with our service is prohibited", I would have no problem with it.
Every time a new service is hacked into so that the company fails to be able to make a profit, it just discourages other companies from being so generous, or encourages them to follow the MPAA/RIAA in slapping restrictive laws or licenses on the technology.
For crying out loud - they already have the laws they need to bundle their razors with their blade-service. All it taskes is a simple 4 page license signed when you pick up one of the free CureCats at RadioShack.
So, why didn't D:C do this from the get-go? Could it be that people actually would be _scared away_ from the "free razor" when they are told the terms up front?
Do we really want a situation where every new technology comes out hand in hand with restrictive legislation to give the companies a chance to make a profit?
What is it with this restrictive legislation? Contract law is perfectly adequate for razor/blade bundling.
If they want some new legislation, it is for only one purpose - to still be able to hide the terms from the normal consumer, while making it illegal for us to play with the free toys we are "given".
Slashdot Mirror
The latest proposal, from September 2000, is available here.
Here is where the latest news regarding this proposal will be posted.
And this isn't just a row over digital music, this is the European counterpart of the DMCA. To say that it has been hotly debated is an understatement. Especially concerning Article 5 and 6. 6.4 was added after May'99, btw.
The most important issue is weither 'circumvention devices' should be available to the general public or not. We need a better name for 'circumvention device', though. 'Tool that can be used for piracy, but is also required to exercise fair use rights that involve copying' would be more appropriate.
If a machine takes speech (or even textual English for instance) as input then processes that data, the machine isn't running object code derived from human language... it's data processing, based on some other code the machine happens to be running.
This 'data processing' is also done when you run code written in other interpreted languages. Are you saying that the perl script I just wrote isn't a program?
Also, there is nothing that prevents you from writing a compiler that takes structured english as input and produce object code.
Thanks - since I'm the lawyer who wrote the brief. ;-)
Very good work, and understandable to laymen also.
The EFF brief is excellent reading also.
When can we expect a ruling on the appeal, btw?
Also there can be problems with stale data being cached.
Then the proxy or the webserver is broken.
HTTP allows the webserver to say "don't cache this", and webproxies that don't honour that are seriously broken.
It pronounces as Force Entity
. html
Check out Hedrick's proposal for a disable command (AC 4C pronounce as....):
http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/briefs/0074
"New Command Pair:
Set Features CPRM Lock. 0x4C and 0xAC
(Yes I cleverly picked the pair to reflect their true nature)"
comes out decrypted,
It comes out _encrypted_.
If nothing else, someone can simulate a display/sound card on a virtual machine, and grab the data at that point.
The problem is that most of these devices are going to be tagged "circumvention device", and thus be hunted down by law enforcement where the DMCA or WCT is in effect.
And not all data can be accessed like this, either. For example, extra DVD subtitles.
From the spec:
"The commands as described below may be included in a device without license obligations. However, to be useful in a copy protection environment, the commands need keys, keying material, and intellectual property requiring a license. This license is available from 4C Entity, LLC, and is administered by License Management International, LLC, in California(http://www.lmicp.com/)."
So the keys and crypto algoritms are available through a license. This license will of course contain a lot of requirements (like never exposing the content in cleartext, etc).
Is this in the controler itself?
No. It is implemented in the harddrive.
One way of avoiding it is to make the ide driver in the operating system ditch the CPRM spesific commands, or fake "operation not supported" replies. You also want to disable raw access to the drive from applications.
I'd expect CPRM enabled software players/downloaders to complain if the feature is unavailable, though. "Your storage medium does not support content protection. You are not allowed to store the music album you just purchased."
Don't know about SCSI, though...
SCSI has them as part of MMC. As far as I know, it is only implemented in DVD players at the moment (to support CSS).
spec
Was this all a misunderstanding?
The proposed changes are to the ATA, not the ATAPI spec.
The two specs are closely related, but ATA is generally used for hard drives while ATAPI is used for most removable media (Zip, CD, DVD, etc).
Hard drives are ATA devices. CompactFlash and
a few other are ATA devices with certain device-specific extentions.
If they wanted CPRM support for non-hard drive ATA devices, the sensible approach would be to add a device-specific extention. Instead they try to make it an optional part of the general ATA spec, which makes no sense unless they want it to apply to hard drives.
Windows NT has had a journaled file system forever
Unless they did som heavy changes in NTFS5, it is still log-based. Think of it as a circular buffer, usually 2-4MB size, where file system transactions are logged.
It usually works just as well as a full journalled FS - 2 second "fsck" and a consistent fs. Under heavy disk activity you do however run the risk of exhausting the size of the log, and end up with an inconsistent file system if you crash.
Other features of NTFS are cool, though. The fs attributes are a superset of posix and vms', so it can emulate both. It also has several metadata files, which provided 3rd parties the hooks needed to add quotas and other features to NT4.
and "encrypted" is subject to interpretation.
Doesn't need to be encrypted, even.
The DMCA protects "security measures that protect a work".
The measure might be encryption, or it might be a flag in a streamed video that means "displaying ok, saving to file not ok".
Are there other countries that have implemented their own versions of the DMCA?
All the countries that have signed the WCT has, or are going to get something similar to DMCA.
This explains the frequent reposts on /.
If the creator wants to hide his work in a vault and never publish it, he is of course entitled to do so.
However, if it is published the creator benefits from the limited time monopoly that copyright law grants him/her. Then the author also has to abide by the other parts of the law, including the limited time clause and "fair use".
I don't see you claiming that abandonware sites should break into old software houses and steal unpublished games, so where is your point?
Further, the owner of the copyrighted work has every right to force upgrading, if they so wish.
Which part of the copyright law says so?
Also, statues and paintings are usually only made in one copy, which is vastly different from widely published old games.
Why is it on Slashdot that many of the same people who think its okay to break copyright laws in cases of emulation, 'free' music and abadonware are the same people who would scream the loudest if a company were to run afoul of the GPL?
They are usually two different sets of people, but whatever..
The GPL is built upon copyright law. Copyright law is the foundation of the GPL (or any other license you care to mention). Take it or leave it.
Please keep in mind that the Copyright law has two sides.
On one hand, it provides an incentive to produce and distribute IP. Whoever creates a work is given a time limited monopoly on sale and distribution.
On the other hand, the society should benefit to the fullest extent from the ideas, thoughts and experiences embodied in the work. That is why we have the notion of "fair use". Also, the work enters the public domain after the copyright expires.
What is happening, though, is that the copyright owners are not upholding their part of the deal. Old works that have not entered the public domain yet is rotting away. We see this happening with old movie classics, with books, with old computer games. The media that many of these works are stored on will turn to dust, and as a result of that we'll loose a considerable amount of our society's history.
It should really be the duty of the original author or publisher (or arguably, the libraries) to maintain these works until they enter the public domain.
According to the law, abandonware sites are illegal. According to morality and the original intent of the Copyright law, they are preserving an important piece of the histroy of computing.
And for people that really care, go read Eldred vs Reno.
From the way this article reads, it sounds like the anti-circumvention measures of the DMCA don't go into effect until the 28th. IANAL, but it sounds like this would mean that any uses of it as a defense in court cases before that time would be considered an attempt to apply the law ex post facto, which is explicitly unconstitutional.
The "illegal to distribute circumvention tools" part of DMCA has been active for a while, and is what was used in the MPAA vs 2600 lawsuit.
Fortunately, DMCA is not international (yet).
:-/
I'm afraid it is going to be international law soon.
The whole DMCA debacle started with the World Intellectual Property Organization signing the WIPO Copyright Treaty in December 1996. Article 11 in that treaty states:
"Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law. "
The result in the US was the DMCA, and we'll see similar laws soon in the EU.
Anyway, the point is - we'll soon have a lot of hardware with content protection measures built-in and laws protecting those measures.
FireWire and other transport buses support, or in the near future will support "content protection mechanisms". The goal is end-to-end content protection all the way to your monitor or speakers.
Just do a patent lookup on content protection measures, and you'll see Intel and the other large hardware manufacturers up there.
For those who think I'm alarmist, please read the 1999 WIPO workshop report on the status and implementation of protection measures. It basically covers DVDs, SDMI, protecting content when transported, etc. Reading the report is a nice exercise in understanding the mindset of our opponents in this fight for Fair Use.
A couple of choice quotes:
On the implementation of DVD:
"Even at this ideal stage of introduction of a new format, limitations still exist. For example, to succeed in the marketplace DVD players needed to be compatible with the existing installed base of television sets. Therefore, the copy protection technology adopted had to provide that DVD discs played on legitimate players would be viewable on existing television sets."
So, the only reason why DVD players provide an unprotected analog output (well, "only" Macrovision protected) is because the current installed base of TV sets don't provide content protection mechanisms. Reading between the lines, it is easy to see that they want to ditch analog output once there is a large enough base of HDTVs with CPM.
On recording devices:
"Recording devices will be licensed to record using an authorized encryption system to protect the content on an authorized copy. As a condition of such license, the recording product must read and respond to copy protection information in the form of the watermark in any legacy interface and the digital information contained in any copy protected digital interface. In order to properly respond, the recorder must determine whether the input signal itself originated from the original of the recording or from a copy of the content that was already made using the copy protection system (in which case the copy protection
information would so indicate);"
Devices with analog output must support digital watermarks. Recording devices with analog inputs must recognize these. Notice that they dance around the question of authorized vs lawful - it is the local copyright law that should determine weither taking a copy is legal or not, while the content protection measure might impose further limitations. So, while some action might be legal in my country the CPM might decide that I'm not authorized to do so. They are claiming that authorization is provided by the CPM, thus circumventing local IP law!
Reading more about local law:
"Each country has its own particular concerns regarding exceptions and limitations. We believe that such concerns need to be considered carefully. Technical measures and circumvention devices are blind as to whether the circumventing purpose is lawful or unlawful. Any possible exceptions and limitations to the anti-circumvention rule should apply to certain types of defined, individual conduct. Prohibitions against circumvention devices and services need to remain firm and cannot be undercut. To date technical protection measures have not prevented fair use or fair practice with respect to works and there has been no demonstration that such measures will have this effect in the future. Our work in the area of technical protections has led us to conclude that anti-circumvention laws must provide effective deterrence against and sufficient remedies to redress circumvention. Strong and effective laws in this area are essential because technical measures can do no more than serve as obstacles to unauthorized use and such measures will always be subject to defeat."
They want few - or no - exceptions to the anti-circumvention rule, which will further ensure that our rights will be dictated by the CPM instead of the law. That Fair Use has not been damaged is an incredible bold claim. One needs to look no further than Jack Valenti's testimony in the MPAA vs 2600 case to see that (he claimed that taking an excerpt from a DVD for fair use purposes is illegal because it requires circumvention of CSS). Also, the US libraries have shown concern about the DMCA, claiming that the protection measures are making it difficult for them to provide their services to the public.
On hardware manufacturers:
"Therefore, to work properly copy protection technologies must be bilateral - the technologies applied by content owners need to function with consumer electronics and computer devices used by consumers and these devices need to respect and respond to the technologies applied. This bilateral requirement means that solutions are not simply a matter of technological innovation. Rather, effective copy protection technology requires a high level of agreement and implementation by both content providers and manufacturers of consumer electronics and computer products. This can be achieved by legislation, whereby certain types of devices are required to respond to a particular copy protection technology, or by negotiated cross-industry agreements."
They want to control what you are allowed to do with the player in your own house. They want to control player manufacturers to comply with their protection mechanisms - either by law, or by restrictive licensing regimes. Read: No open source video and music players for their formats! No open source reader for their eBooks!
There is a lot more in that report, but I guess this is enough to make my point.
What's the solution? Is there a solution? Should we be worried? I'm not quite sure. All I know is that as a community, I think we aughta recognize the threat and realize that RedHat and other larger corporate Linux distros are not our friends. Those at the foundation of Linux development aughta keep their eyes on this and make sure software isn't written for Linux 6.2.
This is basically just the same problem one had with the old fragmentation of Unix. That is, market share fighting make the distribution players "differentiate" their offerings.
Now, from a commercial point of view a single Linux distribution makes sense. Make the program run on a single target platform and you're covered.
If you want to make a program work on more than one distribution, you need to at least cover these differences:
- compiler versions
- libc versions
- init script layout
- config file layout
- package management system
- other library versions
My hope is that LSB can get a proper standard out for this, so that ISVs can say "this program should run on any LSB 1.1 compliant distribution". If that doesn't happen, we'll just see more of the current trend - commercial applications will come with a sticker that says "runs on $CURRENTLY_MOST_POPULAR_DISTRIBUTION".
Most users arn't concerned with privacy anyway; lets face it, 99.9% of all users are not doing anything illegal anyway.
What has privacy got to do with illegal activities?
There are a lot of completely legitimate reasons for wanting privacy.
Also, don't confuse privacy and anonymity.
What nobody has mentioned yet, is that in the Mac Emulation Community, nobody is taking him seriously.
Meanwhile Microcode Solutions is working on iFusion which will be a Macintosh PPC Emulator which will emulate an iMac on first the PPC Amigas, and then PCs. http://www.microcode-solutions.com
Microcode Solutions? That would be Jim Drew of Emplant fame, no?
He is also an old-timer. Made hardware emulation boards, diskette drive controllers to read different floppy formats, software emulators.
There is many a flamewar to find in old archives of comp.sys.amiga.emulators over delayed products, wild claims and the like. Seems like he has got his act together with Fusion, though.
What I really want to know is why it's called "Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format", when it's obvious that it does matter which transport you use.
:)
The transport is nothing, the endpoints everything.
What I would really like to see, is a format that can be parsed by all endpoints (i.e. mail clients) out there.
The patent then, only applies to a version of NAT that uses an adaptive security algorithm.
You mean, like an ipmasq ftp-module that does some sanity checks to see if the incoming packets are not forged? (claim35)
Or a NAT implementation where you can choose which ICMP packets you want to let through? (claim29/30)
I'm not an experienced patent reader, but to my reading it seems like many firewalls that include NAT would be covered by this.
it looks like a method for re-using normal IP addresses
No, it isn't. Claim2 is just ordinary many-to-many NAT (many private internal can be translated to many public external).
It strikes me that whenever a company comes out with something where they intend to make their profits from after-sale mechanisms, the first thing that people want to do is to try and avoid this.
:CueCat was given away with a prominent sticker saying "all use of this device except with our service is prohibited", I would have no problem with it.
Why the heck not? If there is no law or license agreement or contract that says I have to act according to their business plan, why should I?
To me, all of this seems like trying to rip off companies that are providing something which people obviously want.
To me, all of this seems like some companies that think we are gullible. They try to make it look like they are giving you something for little or no cost (cuecat, freepc, whatever), while what they really want is to force you to use their services and sic lawyers on you if you don't.
And if people succeed, then these companies are going to suffer, which means no more deals for people. Is this what we want?
No, it isn't.
If the
Every time a new service is hacked into so that the company fails to be able to make a profit, it just discourages other companies from being so generous, or encourages them to follow the MPAA/RIAA in slapping restrictive laws or licenses on the technology.
For crying out loud - they already have the laws they need to bundle their razors with their blade-service. All it taskes is a simple 4 page license signed when you pick up one of the free CureCats at RadioShack.
So, why didn't D:C do this from the get-go? Could it be that people actually would be _scared away_ from the "free razor" when they are told the terms up front?
Do we really want a situation where every new technology comes out hand in hand with restrictive legislation to give the companies a chance to make a profit?
What is it with this restrictive legislation? Contract law is perfectly adequate for razor/blade bundling.
If they want some new legislation, it is for only one purpose - to still be able to hide the terms from the normal consumer, while making it illegal for us to play with the free toys we are "given".