That would just show utter disregard for the law, and would make us no friends in the legal departments.
Those who read Kaplan's ruling knows what his view of the Open Source community is. Acts like this will just solidify the perception that we disregard any law as long as we are able to circumvent it, and will make it a lot harder for our arguments to be taken seriously in a court of law.
The fight is not about "can we circumvent this?", it is about "how can we show that this law is bad, and get it removed".
And you don't have to "agree" to Real's terms and conditions when you install the software?
Sure I do. Actually, when i install RealPlayer 7 on a Linux box, it just drops a license file in/usr/lib/realplayer.
This is what that license file has to say about the content that i view through realplayer:
"2
b) You agree that you shall only use
the Software and Documentation in a
manner that complies with all
applicable laws in the jurisdictions in
which you use the Software and
Documentation, including, but not
limited to, applicable restrictions
concerning copyright and other
intellectual property rights.
c) You may only use the Software for
your private, non-commercial use. You
may not use the Software in any way to
provide, or as part of, any commercial
service or application. Copies of
content files, including, but not
limited to songs and other audio
recordings, which are downloaded or
copied using the Software, and which
are protected by the copyright laws or
related laws of any jurisdiction, are
for your own personal use only and may
not be distributed to third parties or
performed outside your normal circle of
family and social acquaintances.
d) You may not use the Software in an
attempt to, or in conjunction with, any
device, program or service designed to
circumvent technological measures
employed to control access to, or the
rights in, a content file or other work
protected by the copyright laws of any
jurisdiction."
From what I can see, it only says that I am required to follow copyright law on the content received through realplayer.
Also, what rights I have to a certain work distributed through a realvideo stream is granted by the copyright owner, and not by Real.
Last I hear, click-wrap agreements were not unconstitutional or even on shaky ground.
The clickwrap license itself is not, as far as I know. However, you can not add any term you like to a clickwrap license and believe that it is legally binding. For example, reverse engineering is explicitly allowed in many countries even if a term in the clickwrap should claim otherwise.Also, a clickwrap is basically a non-negotiable contract so that would possibly also limit what terms are legally binding in a clickwrap compared to standard contract law.
I don't have time to hunt for case law at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that I would be able to find court rulings where terms in a clickwrap have been overuled.
If clickwrap is already dried and cut, why did the content and software producers push the UCITA so hard?
No, Realmedia video is available to a select group of people. Those who a) have an internet connection, b) have agreed to Real's terms for using their RealVideo software, and c) that choose to login to a certain site and request the stream.
In my opinion, that would be like saying that a certain public broadcast is only available to the select few who have a) a TV, and b) choose to tune in to a praticular channel at a particular time.
Once the FCC regulates Real content, then I'll agree with fair use/time shifting arguments but until then, it is a proprietary data feed bound to Real's terms and conditions.
So you are only guaranteed fair use rights if the work is distributed over a distribution channel regulated by the FCC?
I find that strange, but I don't know enough about the FCC to provide counter arguments on that one.
Perhaps I should have used audio CDs as an example instead.
They are not modifying copyright laws at all, they are determining how they want THEIR proprietary data utilized.
The protection offered to IP by law is either governed by copyright or contract law. If I don't need to click through a license or sign a contract to watch a certain realmedia video stream, I would assume that it is covered by normal copyright law - including fair use.
... does that mean DVD manufacturers are "modifying copyright" simply because you can't copy a DVD without special equipment that is on the fringe of legality?
I'm sure you have read Kaplan's ruling in MPAA vs 2600. If not, I'd advise you to.
Kaplan found that a customer is entitled to fair use of the work contained on a DVD. However, it is illegal to actually exercise this right, as it requires the circumvention of an access control.
You have the right to fair use, but performing the act of fair use is illegal. If that isn't modifying copyright law, I don't know what is.
Real's feeds are NOT like the government subsidized airwaves that have been deemed a minimal communication's mechanism that should be afforded to all Americans. It is a proprietary data feed, Real owns it.. they can determine exactly how it can be used, and you as an end user only have two options... agree, or don't. You have no fair use rights in this case.
You are confusing distribution mechanism and content.
Real owns the format, i.e. the distribution mechanism. They do not, however, own most of the content distributed in realmedia format.
It is the copyright owner of the work, not Real, that determines the terms. The terms either has to be a contract, or plain copyright.
the player manufacturers are not producing hardware "that can remove the copy protection on your work. "
Ah, but the DMCA says "circumvention". And circumvention is defined as gaining access without the authority of the copyright owner.
If I publish a DVD and say that any DVDCCA licensed player is not authorized to play it, then surely that nice Sony box is a circumvention device.
This idea has already been thrown around on the openlaw mailinglist and rejected. Basically, any sane judge would throw out a case like this because it is clearly constructed.
Furthermore, by producing a DVD you implicitly allow it to be viewed on a DVD player.
Ah, it gets better than that. The MPAA claims that they implicitly authorise the disc to be played on DVDCCA-licensed DVD-players only.
This is really about controlling the players through a licensing regime. The cool thing is that they can add a lot of player restrictions through that license - restrictions that don't allow us many of the fair use rights we used to have.
Btw, here's a nice quote from Kaplan's ruling:
"The fact that Congress elected to leave technologically unsophisticated persons who wish to make fair use of encrypted copyrighted works without the technical means of doing so is a matter for Congress"
So - we are allowed fair use, but we are not allowed to perform the act of fair use if it requires circumventing some access control.
While I certainly see broadcast and cable TV being considered in time shifting arguments, I can't see the same when it comes to streamed content via the Internet
I'm not a fan of "one time use" entertainment (i.e. Divx)
Ah, but with DivX you actually sign a _contract_ saying that you enter into a PayPerView arrangement. Thus, the sale/rental is covered by contract law, not copyright law.
A Realmedia video available to anyone is for all practical purposes equal to a TV broadcast. Why shouldn't the content be covered by normal copyright law?
I can't see the same when it comes to streamed content via the Internet, especially when that streaming is via proprietary format at the originating company's expense.
What has the expense got to do with it? TV broadcasts also cost. Publishing a webzine costs.
They publish it. Ergo, the content should be covered by copyright law.
The way I see it, you play by Real's rules (watch it when it's streamed real-time) or don't watch it at all. No one is forcing you to use the technology, God knows Real has huge competition in this area anyway and if their business model is so evil, you can rest assured it will fail due to consumer backlash in the end.
Sorry, but I find that bullshit.
Why should companies be allowed to modify copyright law to suit their business model?
Streambox allowed access to work that was never purchased. This makes a big difference in the fair use analysis.
It simply time-shifts it, doesn't it?
I mean - I don't purchase public television but I'm still allowed to record a movie on my VCR.
To me, this seems like an over-ruling of the time-shifting fair use right upheld in the BetaMax case (which Congress specifically mentioned that DMCA _should not_ overrule when they hashed out the law).
Anyway, since this was settled out of court, it won't produce much legal precedent.
Norway's economic and environmental crime investigation and prosecution unit.
From the horse's mouth:
http://www.okokrim.no/okokrim/brochu re98.html
Suffice to say that Ecocrime is somewhat famous for being incompetent and charging windmills. Inger Marie Sunde has started some kind of witch-hunt against Internet crime, especially against script kiddies.
I don't think there is any kind of conspiracy here, though. She seems personally convinced that the police needs extended rights to intrude our privacy on the 'net to be able to stop cybercrime.
What happened in the DeCSS/Johansen case was that MPAA asked the norwegian authorities to look into the case, and IMS jumped on the opportunity to go after one of these terrible hackers.
So, there is no conspiracy. She was just a "useful idiot" for the MPAA.
Too bad that DeCSS/Johansen didn't end up in Norwegian court - it would have been an excellent opportunity for a media blitz.
I'm beginning to think that many of the reverse engineering projects these days are losing site of the fact that they are destroying a potential revenue stream for the original developers.
What's the beef?
If DC wanted to make sure that you only use the scanner with their software, why didn't they just make you sign a contract saying so when you receive the cuecat?
Oh, no. What they are doing, is that they pretend to give it away for free. Then, when someone exercise their right to modify the device to be suitable for their own use, they come running with lawyers and some half-cooked story about IP theft that has no basis in real laws.
Is it really our responsibility to protect their broken business plan?
They are defending their right not to have their intellectual Property reverse engineered and openly distributed.
And, pray tell, which IP law gives them this right?
It is not copyright infringement - the drivers were independently developed, not stolen.
It is not trademark
It is not patented
It is, afaik, a trade secret.
A trade secret is acquired by improper means if:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/ch90.text. html#PC90
As you might have noticed, that law does indeed not mention reverse engineering.
You don't pull a microwave apart and put it back together then complain when you get radiation poisoning do you ?
But then we are into liability law (or rather, stupidity:)), which is a completely different orange.
It is a promotional scam for vendor lock-in. You're getting nothing for free, you're paying for the device in the fees to the service.
As long as you are told the conditions up front (i.e., have to sign a contract), I see no problem. Bad schemes will just die out because the marketplace won't buy them.
What I'm miffed about is that MPAA, DC and others don't have the balls to state up front what their conditions are. What they do is to try to cloak their merchandise as regular goods, and then sic lawyers at people when they don't use the goods according to their businessplan.
If every encrypted DVD had a sign saying "can only be played on DVDCCA licensed players in zone n, no other rights, including fair use, are transferred to the purchaser of this DVD", I'd actually be very happy because it would mean that Joe Customer will be informed about what the MPAA is trying to do with our rights.
Completely untrue. Are you a lawyer? This is a major tenant of trade secrecy law.
Apples and oranges.
If _YOU_ have a trade secret and want it to remain that way, _YOU_ have to make sure that _YOU_ don't publish the secret. (Pretty obvious, right? If you want to claim in court that it is a secret, you can't go around telling people about it).
If _I_ independently discover the trade secret (that is - has not signed an NDA with you, didn't break into your office to get my hands on the trade secret, etc), _YOU_ can not drag me to court.
If I got my hands on the trade secret in an unlawful way, on the other hand, you have to go after me to show that you are protecting your trade secret.
if you are shown to not have attempted to protect patents or trademarks from abuse
Trademarks, yes. Patents, no.
Does Unisys and GIF ring a bell? For many years, Unisys didn't bother to go after software implementations of lzw - yet, their patent is still valid.
Also, several companies apply for "submarine patents". i.e., try to patent as many techniques as possible in an emerging field of technology. Then they stay low for some years and hope that one of the successful companies in that field infringe on their patents.
If the protocol IP is lost, then anyone can make identical, competing products, based on their
specs.
You mean like SAMBA, the Phoenix clone of the IBM BIOS, or the Wordnn.doc-format parser in StarOffice?
Reverse engineering of trade secrets is not illegal. If it were, the result would be a marketplace with little or no competition.
And no, EULAs are not valid until UCITA becomes law (and even then, RE will still be allowed in Europe and other parts of the world).
Seems like a certain company needs to re-read the IP laws. If they can't point to a signed contract that says that you only can use the barcode reader together with their services or a patent for the transmission protocol, they don't have any legal leg to stand on.
The fact that people still want whatever the work in question is shows that it still has some value
There is sale value, and there are other values.
For me, many old C64 games have a large nostalgic value. However, the market is often not large enough for the publisher to justify the cost of a reprint.
If I own two houses - one bought in 1982 and one bought in 1998 - and I move in to the more recent purchase, leaving the older one empty inside but still in my posession, is there any reason why you "can't have it"? Software takes many programmers working many hours just like workers building a house. Houses are often sold to make money just like software. It just happens to be much easier (and cheaper) to copy software than to copy a house.
Physical property and intellectual property is not equal! Read the copyright law.
Authors of IP are granted a time limited distribution monopoly. In return for this monopoly, old IP enters the public domain.
What the abandonware sites are arguing, is that the current time limit is too large and that commercially unavailable software with no sale value should enter the PD.
I like downloading abandonware. I am a criminal. At least I don't just rationalize it. Take it like a man/woman people, and admit it to yourselves!
There is something called civil disobedience. The last changes in the copyright law (28 to 90 years time limit) was caused by commercial interests. Some people feel that those changes destroy the original intent of the law.
I find it extremely short sighted to say that something is illegal "because the law says so".
no rational? how about the fact that they own it, they paid for its development, its distribution?
Yes they do. But they do not own it in the same sense that they own property.
Copyright law gives them a distribution monopoly for a limited time to make it possible for them to profit on their investment.
The other part of the copyright contract, however, is that when the time-limit expires (or, as abandonware advocates argue, when the work has no economic value anymore), the work enters the public domain.
So if I have a car I no longer use, and probably never will, you feel you should be allowed to take it without my permission?
This is confusing physical and intellectual property.
Physical property is expensive to duplicate, IP isn't. If the creator of IP doesn't have any use for it anymore, how does it harm the creator in any way if I make a copy?
The historical background for copyright law clearly shows that the purpose was to make it more attractive to write books, make music, write newspaper articles, etc. Generally speaking - encourage sharing of ideas. The creator is granted a time-limited monopoly on distributing the work, but is not allowed to control how we use a copy of the work. This is why we have concepts like "fair use".
Today copyright is increasingly used to hoard IP away from people, which was clearly _not_ the intention.
Once the economic value of the work is zero, I fail to see how I damage the author by distributing copies. If I follow the letter of the law, this is illegal. I however fail to see how doing this is against the _intention_ of the law.
most games were written for the stock hardware: an A500 with 1MB RAM
..which in the end was one of the contributing factors to the Amiga's downfall.
The games were hardwired to the hardware and doing every special trick available to squeeze performance. This makes it a lot harder than necessary to design the next generation of the hardware without breaking backwards compatibility.
it is illegal to reproduce copyrighted works without the holder's permission.
The point you are missing is that CSS is a trade secret, not a copyrighted work.
Norwegian and German law allow you to do reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes, no matter what Xing's EULA says.
CSS is not patented. In order to patent something, you have to document how it works.
So, you have a trade secret that has been lawfully reverse engineered. If the DMCA had not existed, the plaintiffs wouldn't have a leg to stand on in this case.
One of the defense strategies was to raise free speech/1. amendment issues.
The problem is that DeCSS first was published as a Windows binary, and the court find it hard to consider a binary protected speech. The point of Touretzky's testimony is to show that object code, structured english, C source-code and stuff printed on T-shirts can all be considered speech.
Cisco at least has a certification program that is worth a lot more than the paper it is printed on.
MCSE is sort of a joke compared to CCIE.
Their routers are very decent. Unfortunately, some of them are rather light on the CPU side, so performance suffers when you want to do compression and encryption. Their larger routers have add-on cards with ASICs for this, though.
but start throwing in the FSAA and other shiney new effects
Umm.. Nope. The bottleneck is mainly memory bandwith and the processing speed of the 3D card.
Processor speed is increasing faster than mem speed, so relative latency is going up. The more work you can offload on other parts of your computer, the better.
To the MPAA however, which has far more potent propaganda organs than Slashdot can boast, this really is about copying and piracy.
It is about player control, really. With DeCSS out there, anyone can make a DVD player that is not restricted by the DVDCCA licensing regime. i.e., zone free DVD players with perfect digital output, without macrovision and with copy/recording capabilities.
That is the reason why they are going after DeCSS and ignoring all the other DVD copy tools like PowerRipper.
the MPAA fully expects movies to be downloadable in a short period of time by ordinary viewers in just a matter of a few years.
That won't happen until backbone access becomes a lot cheaper than today.
When ISPs are selling cheap xDSL and cable modems to private customers today, they don't really expect them to use the full bandwith 24/7. They are gambling on most users to use it only for email and web browsing, perhaps the occational realvideo broadcast. Thus, they don't need to buy a fat expensive upstream pipe to the backbone.
If the MPAA nightmare comes true and it becomes the norm for normal people to download gigabytesized movies, these uplinks will be congested in no time. They'd have to buy a much larger uplink - at a very high cost, a cost which will be sent on down to the customers.
Now the problem is that Caldera and most other distros automatically leave all services on.
Disclaimer: I work for Trustix, so I'm obviously biased and completely untrustworthy.:)
This is exactly one of the reasons why we made Trustix Secure Linux.
The most obvious changes compared to a normal distribution are: remove all cleartext services if a secure alternative is available (telnet/r* vs openssh), include secure configuration defaults for services, don't run any network services by default and only include the packages that you need on a server.
For those interested, the full mission statement is here Mailinglists available here Distribution available here
Slashdot Mirror
that was extrememely well written! bravo good chap, bravo!
Not to mention extremely useful.
Articles like this, sent to the right people in state and media at the right time could actually make a difference.
That would just show utter disregard for the law, and would make us no friends in the legal departments.
Those who read Kaplan's ruling knows what his view of the Open Source community is. Acts like this will just solidify the perception that we disregard any law as long as we are able to circumvent it, and will make it a lot harder for our arguments to be taken seriously in a court of law.
The fight is not about "can we circumvent this?", it is about "how can we show that this law is bad, and get it removed".
And you don't have to "agree" to Real's terms and conditions when you install the software?
/usr/lib/realplayer.
... does that mean DVD manufacturers are "modifying copyright" simply because you can't copy a DVD without special equipment that is on the fringe of legality?
.. they can determine exactly how it can be used, and you as an end user only have two options ... agree, or don't. You have no fair use rights in this case.
Sure I do. Actually, when i install RealPlayer 7 on a Linux box, it just drops a license file in
This is what that license file has to say about the content that i view through realplayer:
"2
b) You agree that you shall only use
the Software and Documentation in a
manner that complies with all
applicable laws in the jurisdictions in
which you use the Software and
Documentation, including, but not
limited to, applicable restrictions
concerning copyright and other
intellectual property rights.
c) You may only use the Software for
your private, non-commercial use. You
may not use the Software in any way to
provide, or as part of, any commercial
service or application. Copies of
content files, including, but not
limited to songs and other audio
recordings, which are downloaded or
copied using the Software, and which
are protected by the copyright laws or
related laws of any jurisdiction, are
for your own personal use only and may
not be distributed to third parties or
performed outside your normal circle of
family and social acquaintances.
d) You may not use the Software in an
attempt to, or in conjunction with, any
device, program or service designed to
circumvent technological measures
employed to control access to, or the
rights in, a content file or other work
protected by the copyright laws of any
jurisdiction."
From what I can see, it only says that I am required to follow copyright law on the content received through realplayer.
Also, what rights I have to a certain work distributed through a realvideo stream is granted by the copyright owner, and not by Real.
Last I hear, click-wrap agreements were not unconstitutional or even on shaky ground.
The clickwrap license itself is not, as far as I know. However, you can not add any term you like to a clickwrap license and believe that it is legally binding. For example, reverse engineering is explicitly allowed in many countries even if a term in the clickwrap should claim otherwise.Also, a clickwrap is basically a non-negotiable contract so that would possibly also limit what terms are legally binding in a clickwrap compared to standard contract law.
I don't have time to hunt for case law at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that I would be able to find court rulings where terms in a clickwrap have been overuled.
If clickwrap is already dried and cut, why did the content and software producers push the UCITA so hard?
No, Realmedia video is available to a select group of people. Those who a) have an internet connection, b) have agreed to Real's terms for using their RealVideo software, and c) that choose to login to a certain site and request the stream.
In my opinion, that would be like saying that a certain public broadcast is only available to the select few who have a) a TV, and b) choose to tune in to a praticular channel at a particular time.
Once the FCC regulates Real content, then I'll agree with fair use/time shifting arguments but until then, it is a proprietary data feed bound to Real's terms and conditions.
So you are only guaranteed fair use rights if the work is distributed over a distribution channel regulated by the FCC?
I find that strange, but I don't know enough about the FCC to provide counter arguments on that one.
Perhaps I should have used audio CDs as an example instead.
They are not modifying copyright laws at all, they are determining how they want THEIR proprietary data utilized.
The protection offered to IP by law is either governed by copyright or contract law. If I don't need to click through a license or sign a contract to watch a certain realmedia video stream, I would assume that it is covered by normal copyright law - including fair use.
I'm sure you have read Kaplan's ruling in MPAA vs 2600. If not, I'd advise you to.
Kaplan found that a customer is entitled to fair use of the work contained on a DVD. However, it is illegal to actually exercise this right, as it requires the circumvention of an access control.
You have the right to fair use, but performing the act of fair use is illegal. If that isn't modifying copyright law, I don't know what is.
Real's feeds are NOT like the government subsidized airwaves that have been deemed a minimal communication's mechanism that should be afforded to all Americans. It is a proprietary data feed, Real owns it
You are confusing distribution mechanism and content.
Real owns the format, i.e. the distribution mechanism. They do not, however, own most of the content distributed in realmedia format.
It is the copyright owner of the work, not Real, that determines the terms. The terms either has to be a contract, or plain copyright.
the player manufacturers are not producing hardware "that can remove the copy protection on your work. "
Ah, but the DMCA says "circumvention". And circumvention is defined as gaining access without the authority of the copyright owner.
If I publish a DVD and say that any DVDCCA licensed player is not authorized to play it, then surely that nice Sony box is a circumvention device.
This idea has already been thrown around on the openlaw mailinglist and rejected. Basically, any sane judge would throw out a case like this because it is clearly constructed.
Furthermore, by producing a DVD you implicitly allow it to be viewed on a DVD player.
Ah, it gets better than that. The MPAA claims that they implicitly authorise the disc to be played on DVDCCA-licensed DVD-players only.
This is really about controlling the players through a licensing regime. The cool thing is that they can add a lot of player restrictions through that license - restrictions that don't allow us many of the fair use rights we used to have.
Btw, here's a nice quote from Kaplan's ruling:
"The fact that Congress elected to leave technologically unsophisticated persons who wish to make fair use of encrypted copyrighted works without the technical means of doing so is a matter for Congress"
So - we are allowed fair use, but we are not allowed to perform the act of fair use if it requires circumventing some access control.
While I certainly see broadcast and cable TV being considered in time shifting arguments, I can't see the same when it comes to streamed content via the Internet
I'm not a fan of "one time use" entertainment (i.e. Divx)
Ah, but with DivX you actually sign a _contract_ saying that you enter into a PayPerView arrangement. Thus, the sale/rental is covered by contract law, not copyright law.
A Realmedia video available to anyone is for all practical purposes equal to a TV broadcast. Why shouldn't the content be covered by normal copyright law?
I can't see the same when it comes to streamed content via the Internet, especially when that streaming is via proprietary format at the originating company's expense.
What has the expense got to do with it? TV broadcasts also cost. Publishing a webzine costs.
They publish it. Ergo, the content should be covered by copyright law.
The way I see it, you play by Real's rules (watch it when it's streamed real-time) or don't watch it at all. No one is forcing you to use the technology, God knows Real has huge competition in this area anyway and if their business model is so evil, you can rest assured it will fail due to consumer backlash in the end.
Sorry, but I find that bullshit.
Why should companies be allowed to modify copyright law to suit their business model?
Streambox allowed access to work that was never purchased. This makes a big difference in the fair use analysis.
It simply time-shifts it, doesn't it?
I mean - I don't purchase public television but I'm still allowed to record a movie on my VCR.
To me, this seems like an over-ruling of the time-shifting fair use right upheld in the BetaMax case (which Congress specifically mentioned that DMCA _should not_ overrule when they hashed out the law).
Anyway, since this was settled out of court, it won't produce much legal precedent.
Norway's economic and environmental crime investigation and prosecution unit.
From the horse's mouth:
http://www.okokrim.no/okokrim/brochu re98.html
Suffice to say that Ecocrime is somewhat famous for being incompetent and charging windmills. Inger Marie Sunde has started some kind of witch-hunt against Internet crime, especially against script kiddies.
I don't think there is any kind of conspiracy here, though. She seems personally convinced that the police needs extended rights to intrude our privacy on the 'net to be able to stop cybercrime.
What happened in the DeCSS/Johansen case was that MPAA asked the norwegian authorities to look into the case, and IMS jumped on the opportunity to go after one of these terrible hackers.
So, there is no conspiracy. She was just a "useful idiot" for the MPAA.
Too bad that DeCSS/Johansen didn't end up in Norwegian court - it would have been an excellent opportunity for a media blitz.
I'm beginning to think that many of the reverse engineering projects these days are losing site of the fact that they are destroying a potential revenue stream for the original developers.
What's the beef?
If DC wanted to make sure that you only use the scanner with their software, why didn't they just make you sign a contract saying so when you receive the cuecat?
Oh, no. What they are doing, is that they pretend to give it away for free. Then, when someone exercise their right to modify the device to be suitable for their own use, they come running with lawyers and some half-cooked story about IP theft that has no basis in real laws.
Is it really our responsibility to protect their broken business plan?
They are defending their right not to have their intellectual Property reverse engineered and openly distributed.
. html#PC90
:)), which is a completely different orange.
And, pray tell, which IP law gives them this right?
It is not copyright infringement - the drivers were independently developed, not stolen.
It is not trademark
It is not patented
It is, afaik, a trade secret.
A trade secret is acquired by improper means if:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/ch90.text
As you might have noticed, that law does indeed not mention reverse engineering.
You don't pull a microwave apart and put it back together then complain when you get radiation poisoning do you ?
But then we are into liability law (or rather, stupidity
It is a promotional scam for vendor lock-in. You're getting nothing for free, you're paying for the device in the fees to the service.
As long as you are told the conditions up front (i.e., have to sign a contract), I see no problem. Bad schemes will just die out because the marketplace won't buy them.
What I'm miffed about is that MPAA, DC and others don't have the balls to state up front what their conditions are. What they do is to try to cloak their merchandise as regular goods, and then sic lawyers at people when they don't use the goods according to their businessplan.
If every encrypted DVD had a sign saying "can only be played on DVDCCA licensed players in zone n, no other rights, including fair use, are transferred to the purchaser of this DVD", I'd actually be very happy because it would mean that Joe Customer will be informed about what the MPAA is trying to do with our rights.
Completely untrue. Are you a lawyer? This is a major tenant of trade secrecy law.
Apples and oranges.
If _YOU_ have a trade secret and want it to remain that way, _YOU_ have to make sure that _YOU_ don't publish the secret. (Pretty obvious, right? If you want to claim in court that it is a secret, you can't go around telling people about it).
If _I_ independently discover the trade secret (that is - has not signed an NDA with you, didn't break into your office to get my hands on the trade secret, etc), _YOU_ can not drag me to court.
If I got my hands on the trade secret in an unlawful way, on the other hand, you have to go after me to show that you are protecting your trade secret.
if you are shown to not have attempted to protect patents or trademarks from abuse
Trademarks, yes. Patents, no.
Does Unisys and GIF ring a bell? For many years, Unisys didn't bother to go after software implementations of lzw - yet, their patent is still valid.
Also, several companies apply for "submarine patents". i.e., try to patent as many techniques as possible in an emerging field of technology. Then they stay low for some years and hope that one of the successful companies in that field infringe on their patents.
If the protocol IP is lost, then anyone can make identical, competing products, based on their
.doc-format parser in StarOffice?
specs.
You mean like SAMBA, the Phoenix clone of the IBM BIOS, or the Wordnn
Reverse engineering of trade secrets is not illegal. If it were, the result would be a marketplace with little or no competition.
And no, EULAs are not valid until UCITA becomes law (and even then, RE will still be allowed in Europe and other parts of the world).
Seems like a certain company needs to re-read the IP laws. If they can't point to a signed contract that says that you only can use the barcode reader together with their services or a patent for the transmission protocol, they don't have any legal leg to stand on.
Is the official 2.2.17 exactly the same as 2.2.17-pre20 ?
The only change is the version line in the makefile.
The 2.2.18-pre patches apply to 2.2.17 cleanly, except for that line.
The fact that people still want whatever the work in question is shows that it still has some value
There is sale value, and there are other values.
For me, many old C64 games have a large nostalgic value. However, the market is often not large enough for the publisher to justify the cost of a reprint.
If I own two houses - one bought in 1982 and one bought in 1998 - and I move in to the more recent purchase, leaving the older one empty inside but still in my posession, is there any reason why you "can't have it"? Software takes many programmers working many hours just like workers building a house. Houses are often sold to make money just like software. It just happens to be much easier (and cheaper) to copy software than to copy a house.
Physical property and intellectual property is not equal! Read the copyright law.
Authors of IP are granted a time limited distribution monopoly. In return for this monopoly, old IP enters the public domain.
What the abandonware sites are arguing, is that the current time limit is too large and that commercially unavailable software with no sale value should enter the PD.
I like downloading abandonware. I am a criminal. At least I don't just rationalize it. Take it like a man/woman people, and admit it to yourselves!
There is something called civil disobedience. The last changes in the copyright law (28 to 90 years time limit) was caused by commercial interests. Some people feel that those changes destroy the original intent of the law.
I find it extremely short sighted to say that something is illegal "because the law says so".
no rational? how about the fact that they own it, they paid for its development, its distribution?
Yes they do. But they do not own it in the same sense that they own property.
Copyright law gives them a distribution monopoly for a limited time to make it possible for them to profit on their investment.
The other part of the copyright contract, however, is that when the time-limit expires (or, as abandonware advocates argue, when the work has no economic value anymore), the work enters the public domain.
So if I have a car I no longer use, and probably never will, you feel you should be allowed to take it without my permission?
This is confusing physical and intellectual property.
Physical property is expensive to duplicate, IP isn't. If the creator of IP doesn't have any use for it anymore, how does it harm the creator in any way if I make a copy?
The historical background for copyright law clearly shows that the purpose was to make it more attractive to write books, make music, write newspaper articles, etc. Generally speaking - encourage sharing of ideas. The creator is granted a time-limited monopoly on distributing the work, but is not allowed to control how we use a copy of the work. This is why we have concepts like "fair use".
Today copyright is increasingly used to hoard IP away from people, which was clearly _not_ the intention.
Once the economic value of the work is zero, I fail to see how I damage the author by distributing copies. If I follow the letter of the law, this is illegal. I however fail to see how doing this is against the _intention_ of the law.
most games were written for the stock hardware: an A500 with 1MB RAM
..which in the end was one of the contributing factors to the Amiga's downfall.
The games were hardwired to the hardware and doing every special trick available to squeeze performance. This makes it a lot harder than necessary to design the next generation of the hardware without breaking backwards compatibility.
A picture is worth a thousand words
But on the Web, a picture often requires the bandwidth of several thousand words.
it is illegal to reproduce copyrighted works without the holder's permission.
The point you are missing is that CSS is a trade secret, not a copyrighted work.
Norwegian and German law allow you to do reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes, no matter what Xing's EULA says.
CSS is not patented. In order to patent something, you have to document how it works.
So, you have a trade secret that has been lawfully reverse engineered. If the DMCA had not existed, the plaintiffs wouldn't have a leg to stand on in this case.
One of the defense strategies was to raise free speech/1. amendment issues.
The problem is that DeCSS first was published as a Windows binary, and the court find it hard to consider a binary protected speech. The point of Touretzky's testimony is to show that object code, structured english, C source-code and stuff printed on T-shirts can all be considered speech.
Cisco at least has a certification program that is worth a lot more than the paper it is printed on.
MCSE is sort of a joke compared to CCIE.
Their routers are very decent. Unfortunately, some of them are rather light on the CPU side, so performance suffers when you want to do compression and encryption. Their larger routers have add-on cards with ASICs for this, though.
but start throwing in the FSAA and other shiney new effects
Umm.. Nope. The bottleneck is mainly memory bandwith and the processing speed of the 3D card.
Processor speed is increasing faster than mem speed, so relative latency is going up. The more work you can offload on other parts of your computer, the better.
To the MPAA however, which has far more potent propaganda organs than Slashdot can boast, this really is about copying and piracy.
It is about player control, really. With DeCSS out there, anyone can make a DVD player that is not restricted by the DVDCCA licensing regime. i.e., zone free DVD players with perfect digital output, without macrovision and with copy/recording capabilities.
That is the reason why they are going after DeCSS and ignoring all the other DVD copy tools like PowerRipper.
the MPAA fully expects movies to be downloadable in a short period of time by ordinary viewers in just a matter of a few years.
That won't happen until backbone access becomes a lot cheaper than today.
When ISPs are selling cheap xDSL and cable modems to private customers today, they don't really expect them to use the full bandwith 24/7. They are gambling on most users to use it only for email and web browsing, perhaps the occational realvideo broadcast. Thus, they don't need to buy a fat expensive upstream pipe to the backbone.
If the MPAA nightmare comes true and it becomes the norm for normal people to download gigabytesized movies, these uplinks will be congested in no time. They'd have to buy a much larger uplink - at a very high cost, a cost which will be sent on down to the customers.
Now the problem is that Caldera and most other distros automatically leave all services on.
:)
Disclaimer: I work for Trustix, so I'm obviously biased and completely untrustworthy.
This is exactly one of the reasons why we made Trustix Secure Linux.
The most obvious changes compared to a normal distribution are: remove all cleartext services if a secure alternative is available (telnet/r* vs openssh), include secure configuration defaults for services, don't run any network services by default and only include the packages that you need on a server.
For those interested, the full mission statement is here
Mailinglists available here
Distribution available here