This isn't as daft as it sounds. DNA evidence is commonly misrepresented, using extreme odds to suggest that something is highly unlikely, when the evidence proves the opposite. Likewise, many posters here are making the same mistake.
In LA, Larry is charged with Curly's murder. No evidence exists except a suspicion on the part of the police and a hair on the knife used to kill Curly. A sample of Larry's hair is sent to a DNA lab. "Good news", says the lab technician to the police. "The DNA matches. Only 1:50,000 people have that strain."
The prosecutor tells the jury. The jury convict. After all, the chances are 50,000:1 that Larry's innocent aren't they? That's what the prosecutor said, and he was just repeating what the lab said wasn't he? As the prison warden throws the switch and Larry burns to a crisp, something odd happens. A close circuit TV film is revealed which proves that someone completely different murdered Curly. What happened?
Answer: People misread the statistics. There are well over 50,000 people in LA. If there are 5,000,000 people in LA (which I suspect is a low estimate) then there were approximate 100 suspects. In other words, the odds were not, in the absense of all other evidence, 1:50,000 against Larry murdering Curly, the odds were actually 100:1 that he didn't do it.
How is this relevent here? Answer: People are interpretting Patel as meaning that she wants more than 99% of the activity on Napster to be legitimate. This is by her demand that Napster remove more than 99% of the copyrighted material.
But one is not the other. To use statistics I've written elsewhere, if there are 100,000 transactions enabled by Napster, and 99,500 of them are illegitimate, then a 99% reduction would still leave 995 illegitimate transactions against 500 "Patel Approved" ones. The way most posters are reading it, Patel has instead demanded that more than 99% of transactions be legal. That's not what she's said.
Clearly she believes, rightly or wrongly, that there is an excessive amount of violations of copyright law on Napster, to the point that the vast majority, well in excess of 99%, are illegal. Patel is demanding that there be a massive reduction.
Whether her comment "100%" is supposed to be taken literally or not, I don't know. But simply reducing the number of copyright violations on Napster by 99% may actually not be enough, depending on the scale of the issue, to mean that legal uses of Napster would be in the majority.
DNA evidence doesn't always mean what people think it means. 99% doesn't mean the same thing as 99% in another context either. --
Here's a quick calculation. Suppose 100,000 files are transfered every month. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that 99,500 of these files transfers are illegal. This also implies only 500 file transfers are legit - people trading publically copyable songs, etc.
If Napster blocks 99% of the 99,500, then it leaves 995 "illegal" file transfers going on, nearly twice as many legal file transfers, assuming none of the legal file transfers have been effected by the same filters.
One can probably play with the figures. But obviously, if Patel considers the vast majority of Napster uses to be illegal, to the point that she believes less than one in a hundred are actually ok, then we still see illegal file transfering taking up a large proportion of Napster's work, even though the headline figure "A 99% reduction!" appears, at first sight, to be enormous.
None of this should be taken as meaning I believe that using Napster is illegal, or legal, or anything like that. It's an attempt to understand what at first sight looks like an insane demand at compliance.
Maybe, just maybe, Patel isn't as stupid as she looks. --
The argument against Adobe was that Illustrator was a generic name that can legitimately apply to all programs designed for creating illustrations. The issue wouldn't have arisen over, say, Acrobat, which clearly is not a generic.
If someone had created a front-end to Ghostscript to show PDFs, and had called it KAcrobat, they'd have not have been defended in the same way as the KIllustrator people were. Adobe would have had a legitimate case against the KAcrobat people.
In this case, MySQL is a made up name, it's not a generic name that could be used to describe any database package. Therefore the comparison is invalid.
FWIW, Adobe didn't sue anyone. Lawyers working independently of Adobe decided to perform some sort of civil "citizens arrest" that only the peculiarities of German law can explain. This was explained in the second of the two KIllustrator threads, and you might find it worth your while reading those threads, to both educate you on what was happening, and to actually determine what arguments people were using. --
Ah, the requiste whining about how America ain't that great, we did it first in england, you really didn't save the french from
germany two times in the first half of the century, blah, blah, blah....
Not one of these comments appeared in the article to which you respond, with the exception of the "we did it first in England". The article was clearly a correction: MSNBC phrased their story to imply that copyright law in America came out of some censorship laws in Britain. This is historically inaccurate: At the time copyright laws were adopted in the US, there already was a copyright - as we'd recognise it today - law in Britain, and possibly in other parts of Europe.
As such, the founding fathers didn't invent some untried concept, but adopted (if for slightly different reasons to those of the UK government, which was aiming to protect authors rights) existing codes which were adapted for US needs. The story of how this happened and the logic involved would make a good story all by itself.
Incidentally, it's the Fourth of July. If you don't recall, it's 225 years ago today that we told you (the British anyway) to bugger off.
Elsewhere in this thread, you express anger at the suggestion that your post is either a troll or flamebait. Indeed, one moderator sides with you and tags it "Insightful". Insightful, perhaps, as in "Incites a riot"?;-)
Seriously, what exactly is the point of the above comment. What does it have to do with the origins of copyright law?
Oh yeah, why do you folks bitch every time a quasi-historical movie comes out that doesn't kiss European ass? If you don't
like American studios making movies that portray the Good ole USA in a very positive light, then why don't you create your
own movies that are worth distributing world wide? Can't compete with Hollywood on their terms? Thats really sad. Sure,
there are a few foreign movies wich win well deserved acclaim here in the states (Trainspotting, Crouching Tiger Hidden
Dragon)But for the most part, your film industry can't hold a candle to Hollywood, in terms of raw popularity. Great Britain
had their time at the top of the world food chain, and pissed and stomped their way accross the world, claiming every spit of
land you beat the Spainards to for the Crown. Remember "The sun never sets on the British Empire?"
Again - what does this have to do with the article to which your respond? What, indeed, does it have to do with the origins of copyright law? And are you sure the allegation makes any sense anyway?
Do Europeans ridicule Hollywood for not "kissing ass", or do they ridicule it for constantly and monotonously casting actors with British accents as the bad guys, in a way that betrays a lack of originality (as do black hats/boots, and moustaches) coupled with a kind of nationalism that's off-putting to the audiences the moviemakers are usually trying to target? And, for what it's worth, do UK movies exclusively portray Americans as "bad characters" - movies that do certainly exist, but are they even the majority of those movies that have American characters?
Added to this somewhat juvenile rant about the movie industry is a comment about the British Empire. Again, what exactly does this have to do with copyright law? Or even the movie industry? British Imperialism is dead. It was regarded with increasing moral repugnance throughout the 20th Century, with national leaders like Mahatma Ghandi holding up imperialism for what it is: A nasty system that enslaves whole nations and whole peoples, cold and abusive, and an affront to modern liberal values. Britain had the courage to ditch it, which is something to be welcomed.
Well, now it's our turn to be leader of the pack, and if you don't like the privileges that come with that -like painting things in
a pro US light, and not giving a rats ass what you Europeans think about it- well, too bad. I know the US ain't perfect,
and we like to color history to benefit ourselves (seriously, do you honestly believe the scholars in your country
don't?)
And here we start to doubt the sanity of the poster. A comment adding more flesh to an article which left out interesting and relevent history is ruled "invalid" because, well, because Americans should be able to write what they want and if they leave out history, no matter how stupid, they shouldn't be told what that left out history is.
Small wonder, I guess, that the US is the only Western Democracy that refuses to teach many of its children basic science.
But worse, there's an overtone in both the last paragraph and the paragraph before it - that America is now the imperialist force, and therefore its version of history is the valid one. It's as if the last 300-400 years of European history, one of bloodshed and enslavement, has taught us nothing about imperialism - or even that that bloodshed and enslavement is somehow right, because a country has to exist to do those things, and by-gosh if dfenstrate doesn't believe that the US should be that country.
To sum up: If your posting is to be believed, you take it as an outrage that anyone should provide more information in response to a version of history presented by an American, and you believe that because you believe that America is some kind of new imperial power, and you believe that is right.
I find that point of view utterly, completely, abhorent and evil. If you seriously believe what you've written, you need to get a reality check. If you were writing it for the purposes of winding up other people, well, congratulations, you've succeeded, but at the cost of putting yourself in the same fellow-travellor category as most brutal of 16th Century Spanish conquistadors, or of 19th Century South African Mining Engineers. As a course onward to popularity, you might just want to start walking about with a swastika tattooed to your head. You'll get the same results.
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Slashdot isn't one of said sites, on two counts: it's not one I feel is valuable enough to pay for (I'm not saying it's a bad site, it's just not something I want to spend money on) and it isn't a site that accepts (currently) instrusive advertising. Right now it's an ad-banners only website, and I'm happy with that.
If Slashdot did start accepting that kind of advertising, I'd stop reading it, in an instant.
As far the "it pays for the content so that you don't have to", as I said, I'm happy about paying for content from some sites on the 'net. I've proven that, I've paid for content from Salon and others. If Yahoo asked, I'd pay for that. But right now, with its infuriating combination of giant ads sat in the middle of some articles, and pop-down ads appearing elsewhere, and no sign that a "pay for surfing in peace" option is on the horizon, I'm more likely to ditch it.
If someone else paying for something means I can't concentrate on what it is that was paid for, I'd rather they didn't - just as I'm not going to accept a drink that's "free" if it's been spiked. --
As I run my own (private, natch) name server, I put myself as "owner" of the x10.com domain in it, and had ads.x10.com resolve to a non-existant address. I've done much the same with doubleclick.com and other sites that have regularly pissed me off.
The result of this isn't that the windows don't continue to pop up, they do. But as they appear under the browser, it's no great deal. Most importantly, the ads don't suck dry my limited bandwidth (across a modem link) so I can browse at a reasonable pace.
For those who need to know, this is what I did (BIND4, as I'm using OpenBSD as my firewall/NAT-based proxy):
I added the line:
primary x10.com x10.com
to my named.boot file. Then created a x10.com file in my namedb directory, reading something like this:
@ IN SOA x10.com. nic.pillory.peh.link. (
19971003
28800
7200
3600000
86400 )
NS pillory.peh.link.
ads A 10.255.0.0
Actually, any half competent DNS admin should be able to do something similar with their setup.
This has benefits over putting the entries in your/etc/hosts in two ways: to begin with, everything under x10.com is blocked, so if x10.com start putting out stuff as ads2.x10.com, the block will still take effect. Secondly, the file applies to every machine on your network. If you have an Intranet at home like I do, that's useful.
Ultimately, if companies want money for their content, they'd be better off asking for it from me than bombarding me with ads. I fully intend to stop visiting certain sites, however much it pains me, until they start providing me with a way to turn off intrusive, bandwidth sucking, unstable browser crashing (y'hear me Netscape?;-) advertising, whether it be via a subscription or some other means.
And yep, I put my money where my mouth is. I've put in my two year sub to Salon with donation. There's stuff out there I'm willing to pay for. I want to read the site, not get too pissed at it and impatient I end up surfing somewhere else...
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Personally I'm waiting for a Desktop Publisher of any consequence for Linux. Even one of the quality of those around 10 years ago, even for poorly supported platforms, would be a good thing.
Which I guess would lead most people to comment that one of the things Windows does that Linux doesn't really at the moment is hassle-free printing. Sure you can combine Ghostscript and lpr and half a dozen other utilities to do it, but it's still a pain in the next to configure for anyone who doesn't have a native-Postscript printer.
When these issues have come up in the past for me, it's tended to be in (me asking, 7-8 years ago) why should I move to a PC when my (68000 based machine, famous, but I don't want this to turn into advocacy of a platform in a coma) has the apps I want and the PC doesn't, to which the answer was usually "Oh yes the PC _does_". That product allowed me to compose music, had a full screen bitmap editor that supported animation and had some very nice special effects, had other types of animation program (structured, special effects, movie editors, etc), had various forms of word processor that straddled the gap between the extreme "text editor with embedded formatting" TeX/ROFFs of this world to the graphical "runs like syrup and has a user interface designed to get in the way of what you're doing" - as well as those apps, and all the other usual applications too.
And the answer to this was usually "ER, yeah, that was ported to Windows aaaaaaages ago" or "That was ported from Windows" or "You can download a freeware clone called GrotTracker from SIMTEL", etc.
My problem with Linux, and I speak as someone who uses it pretty close to exclusively at home, is that this range of software just isn't available yet. I still feel like I lost something moving from the comatose machine to a Linux system. BeOS and Windows advocates will probably berate me at this point for switching to Linux, but I believe Linux is capable of doing all of these things, and the experience of adopting yet another platform that then ceased to be supported by its creator, and was too closed to be adequately supported by another group, was that I wasn't about to adopt BeOS. And Windows, frankly, sucks you into a world of constant upgrades and expensive software I want to have nothing to do with.
The work still needs to be done. We do need to look at the holes in the software line: Linux is ready for the desktop, whether you use KDE or GNOME, both are more than adequate, but the software that makes using a computer fun and productive is currently what's lacking.
But maybe I ought to shut up moaning and get on with it myself...;)
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I have both Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp 3 installed on my laptop. On the same partition indeed. And Linux installed on a seperate partition. They all coexist peacefully, with LILO whether to boot into Windows/OS/2 or Linux, and OS/2's Boot Manager deciding whether the Windows/OS/2 partition should be OS/2 or Windows.
And remember: OS/2 Warp 3 came out well before Windows 95. If Microsoft had wanted to cripple OS/2, they'd have had no problems doing so. --
It's not that ironic: IBM themselves acknowledge that they've acted the same way as Microsoft in the past, and have learned from their mistakes, viz:
Andy Hoiles, IBM's Linux business manager for the company's European Enterprise Systems Group, believes Microsoft's anti-open source, pro-.Net strategy is the arrogance of a company that has succeeded in conquering markets more often than it has failed.
"We had that arrogance a few years ago," he said. "Then we nearly went out of business. You learn from that."
I'd agree that it's ironic that the computer industry is waiting for IBM to save them from a giant, out of control, monopolistic market monolith. But it's perfectly reasonable for IBM to criticise Microsoft and be a pro-open source body, just as it's reasonable for a reformed alcoholic to encourage a drunk to go to the AA, and be a steadfast teetotal.
#1, and I think this goes for all of Apple's line, the lack of the new exciting OS to go with the new exciting hardware caused people to hold back from
buying new computers.
Absolutely. I, and many collegues, were considering getting one, but were holding back for two reasons: Mac OS X wasn't out, and then when it (finally) was the minimum cube needed to run it was still relatively expensive (no, not for the spec, just it's hard to justify blowing >$1500 on a new computer because of love of the design alone.)
I hope they resume production in due course, and that the entry level price is kept low and gives you a machine you'd want to run Mac OS X on (ie >128M RAM) and has all the things you actually need (like a CDRW)
A quiet, powerful, computer that takes up little desk space and contains enough within it for expansion not to be a major issue is a great thing. I hope Apple still intend to keep looking at that design. --
As for "
one product is always going to come before the other. That does not mean that one is named after the other", are you seriously trying to tell us that the Killustrator developers chose the name at random, and had never heard of Illustrator? I'm sure the same is true of KOffice and KWord, too...
Nope. I'm saying that the KIllustrator people chose the name because it was the most descriptive name for the product, given that it was the generic name for products of this type - vector based drawing packages whose application is orientated to illustrating. GEM Paint, Deluxe Paint, Windows Paint, PC Paintbrush and Paint Shop Pro were written by people well after MacPaint, which was the inspiration for early versions of those programs, but we do not question the notion that Paint is the right generic term for that type of application, and that each author was right to name their app as such, and that there is no confusion between any of those programs.
It's not that they named the Paint programs after MacPaint, it's that MacPaint had the generic title.
Now, please feel free to argue that Illustrator is too generic a term to be trademarked; then you'd be on safer ground. However, arguing that Adobe using it first doesn't grant them any exclusivity over its use isn't going to get you very far.
I haven't mentioned trademark law once except to correct the original poster about the nature of the allegation. To answer the above: No, Adobe does not have the right to declare a word its own simply because it used it first when the term is generic. That's the crux of my argument.
It's ludicrous, in my view, to try and seperate the two, and I haven't done so. If Adobe called their program MegaDraw, and they were acting against KMegaDraw, as I've said elsewhere, they would be on firm ground, and the fact they got there first would matter. But they've chosen a generic term that can legitimately apply to any drawing package orientated to illustrations - indeed, is probably the only descriptive term that applies - and therefore the fact that they're first means they have no moral, and if what you've written is correct, no legal, right to suppress other people's use of it.
If Adobe wants their product to have a protected name, they should change it to something it would be legitimate to trademark. Their current behaviour is an abuse of language. --
Exactly how many people are going to confuse a product called Adobe Illustrator, that costs money, and runs on Windows and Mac with a product called KIllustrator, that's free, and runs under Linux and other Unix-like operating systems?
Adobe has not lost a single customer, even if the fatuious argument that KIllustrator and Adobe Illustrator are, in some way, "competitors", held any water. They're different products. They have different names. They run on different platforms. They are aimed at different audiences. You and Adobe should learn to deal with it.
When Adobe comes up with a Linux version, we can start arguing that one is competing with the other. Then the merits of having different but similar names can be debated. Not before.
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How is Megadraw any less descriptive than Illustrator.
It isn't less descriptive, thus it fufills one of the requirements of a decent product name (Amazon, etc notwithstanding...)
But I didn't say that "Megadraw" was less descriptive. I said that Adobe went for descriptive as their first priority, and chose "one that is completely generic and was already used for that purpose when Adobe used it."
With the possible exception of Vector, I've seen programs with names that are either those you suggested or derivatives. Indeed, two of the names you suggest, Painter and Drawer, are derivatives of words Microsoft uses in their product names! (MS Draw is a free (as in beer) add-on component to Microsoft Office, downloadable from their website - I have it installed on my machine at work)
Is anyone going to get confused between KIllustrator and Adobe Illustrator? Well, were they confused between PC Paintbrush, Deluxe Paint, and Windows Paint?
FWIW, a lot of people are suggesting that there's such a thing as a "vector drawing" program. While, technically, that's true, a delve into it would reveal that there's several categories of package that falls under that category, from print-orientated CAD-derived packages, through diagram makers, to illustrators - programs designed for the express purpose of allowing an artist/graphic designer to produce illustrations. Each of these is aimed at a different application - the fact that you can scale what you draw without losing resolution doesn't mean that "they're the same" or that they work the same way.
Both Photoshop and Deluxe Paint edit bitmaps, but few people would suggest that they're aimed at the same application. A ZDNet article comparing the two would be rightly ridiculed, even if Deluxe Paint development had continued to the present day with the advanced functionality you'd expect for a decade more of development.
It's certainly legitimate to refer to KIllustrator as an illustrator in the same way as it wouldn't be to refer to Visio, or AutoCAD, or even MS Draw, as an illustrator. You wouldn't refer to Photoshop as a paint program, and you wouldn't refer to Windows Paint as a photo editor. People who miss this point and assume that unbelievably generic titles like "Vectorizer" would be appropriate, perhaps, might find it worth their while delving into the subject a little more closely.
--
And on what planet would someone choose a product that runs on an entirely different OS to all their other applications over one that runs on the same one, all other things being equal?
There simply is no way an average Adobe Illustrator user is going to be interested in KIllustrator, or vice versa, even assuming they're able to choose their own operating system (which in the majority of cases, where graphic design is done professionally, is not the case.)
There is no graphic designer in my place of employment who'd be allowed to use KIllustrator. They'd be fired if they installed Linux and KIllustrator on their machine. In the time between installing it and being fired, they'd have problems interoperating with everyone else in the office, as Exchange, by default, is not set up to provide non-proprietary email clients with access.
I know the pseudo-libertarian hogwash that passes for informed opinions here suggests you can "choose" anything. But in the vast majority of cases, if you want to get a job done and you want to get a job, you do not have realistic choices. This is an explicit case.
As for my analogy being wrong - care to explain how? The only analogy I saw that was wrong was the idiotic comment that Linux and Windows aren't competitors because they "run under different operating systems". They don't run under operating systems at all - it's an absurd comment to make.
--
Operating systems do not run on operating systems. But you'd have been right if you'd said something like "AmigaOS and Windows NT are not competitors either, they run on different hardware."
Which would have been making a similar analogy to the one I was making.
--
That's a good one. I have a Linux box. If there is an application on Linux that I like better than a similar one that runs on my
Windows box or my Mac, I use it. That's called competition. If that's not clear enough for you here's a direct statement: You
are wrong, the products compete.
So in the extremely limited market of people who own three computers and are interested in graphic design and Unix, those people have the choice. How many of these people are there? Large enough for any sane, rational, person to believe their profits would be threatened by competition in it?
The products do not compete. One is a package that runs under Windows and MacOS, the other under Linux. In a world where few people have more than one computer, that's enough of a distinction to ensure that sales/distributions of one do not affect the others in any serious degree.
That's another good one. You've got to be a lawyer -- or at least a comedian. Which one came first? Adobe Illustrator. Clear lines can be drawn (har har) between the naming of Killustrator and the original naming of Adobe Illustrator. Sorry, you[r] point is not taken.
Perhaps you could limit your personal abuse to your wife? But to answer the above, one product is always going to come before the other. That does not mean that one is named after the other.
If we were talking about Adobe calling their product "Megadraw", and KDE "KMegadraw", or "Lines123" and "KLines123", then you might have a point. But Adobe have chosen a descriptive name for their product, one that is completely generic and was already used for that purpose when Adobe used it. What would you describe a vector drawing program as if you wanted to sum it up in one word? It is nonsense to suggest that the name is not equally applicable to other products simply because Adobe used it first. That's abuse of language.
I'd love to see those stats regarding operating systems and which ones aren't as prevalent as others. I don't believe it, and why don't you include the names of those operating systems.
Sure thing. Let me pull up www.adobe.com. Let's see: Acrobat Distiller is available for HP UX, IBM AIX, and Solaris. I seem to recall there was a VMS version at one point too. Are you now going to tell me that there are more installed HP UX installations, or AIX, or even Solaris, in their respective markets, than Linux installations? And I'm refering to commercial Linux servers here, not geeks with boxes running XMMS.
I'm sorry your response to someone daring to disagree with you is to try to ridicule it, but you're going to actually have to think of some arguments beyond "You are wrong" and "Sorry, you[r] point is not taken" because Adobe's use "came first".
This isn't a race. It's about the appropriation of language. Adobe has no right to declare a word in common use its own, and KDE has every right to name a project as descriptively as possible. If Adobe, and yourself, don't like it, they'll just have to learn to deal with it. Perhaps Adobe should change the name of their product to something less generic? --
Killustrator is not a competing product to Adobe Illustrator (I assume that's what you meant.) It can't be - the two products do not even run under the same operating system. They're aimed at different audiences.
The name was not derived from said competing product.
The name is generic. Like "Office", which was used to describe office suites during the eighties well before Microsoft adopted the name for their suite. It's reasonable to say that the two products have the same derivation for the name, rather than one being derived from the other.
The name of the product does not benefit greatly from the inclusion of the competing product's own name in it's moniker.
The name of the product is illustrative of the product's use, and therefore both products gain from the use of the generic word "Illustrator" (meaning, that that illustrates), in their names. Adobe's marketing of a product under that name may or may not "help" KIllustrator in ensuring users already know what the product is for, but the intended user profile of both products is sufficiently intelligent to be able to distingish between the two products, even by name.
People may not like Adobe just because they don't write stuff for Linux, but that is Adobe's choice. A company that is out
for profit isn't obligated to write software for a particular platform just because many people feel that it's the right thing to do.
This is a company that sells stock and is obligated to turn a profit. Writing this type of software for the Linux OS may not be
the right thing to do for the business. Remember, this is the company that didn't write stuff for Windows until the early to
mid-90's simply because they didn't think it was economically feasible.
My heart bleeds. Adobe's development of Linux software is not at issue here, though I feel compelled to point out that they do develop server products, such as Acrobat Distiller, for less prevelent operating systems than Linux, so the economic argument doesn't cut it. Adobe choose to name their product generically, and are claiming a monopoly on use of that generic descriptor. While they're doing so, they're slapping down a group of people who are not competing with them, and, being a group of individuals rather than a huge corporation, do not have the resources to fight back.
Essentially, Adobe is the playground bully here.
But getting back on topic, maybe people should consider copyright infringement issues before they name their software.
There are no copyright issues under discussion. The issue is an alleged trademark violation - an allegation that, if allowed to stand, chips away at the right to use the English language sanely and to provide descriptive names of products and services.
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Seriously though, in some ways I wonder if Microsoft would have a stronger case than Adobe. Illustrator is clearly a generic description of a product, "One that illustrates."
Word, however, is not. No matter how you look at it, Microsoft's product is not a word. It's a word processor (and a bloody bloated pile of... but that's another story;)
You can't even argue that Word is an abbrevation for Word Processor. Does anyone say "Let's fire up the word and write that letter?" or "Let's go to the software shop and buy a word."
Whereas it's reasonable to substitute illustrator in both those sentences. --
Which country do you think is pushing most for the treaty?
Clue: It isn't China. These clauses are being put in to encourage states that, traditionally, have been regarded as "rogue" in the sphere of copyright law, to come on board.
Thank god Britain rejected Hague two weeks ago. Oh wait, wrong one;-)
(Though as they're both the products of corporate greed, you can forgive me for the mistake...)
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Perhaps you'd like to read what you're responding to before hitting the reply button.
I specifically said that Gates had come up with a wrong example if he wants to demonstrate that the GPL is anti-business, and explained why the licencing of sendmail is no more business-friendly than the GPL is.
Yes, Bill was using sendmail as an example of the right way. No, Bill obviously hasn't read the licence, otherwise he wouldn't be saying that the sendmail way is superior to the GPL'd way. --
No, the submitter doesn't. He's quoting Gates who is suggesting that Sendmail and TCP/IP would never have happened had they been released under the GPL.
Sendmail is not (any more) under the BSD licence. See here.
Just as with the GPL, you have to release the source, or else negotiate with the copyright holders when redistributing. The only added right is to redistribute closed source versions as long as you do so without charge. From the PoV of Microsoft's argument, it's hard to see how this can be less "anti-business" than the GPL is.
In many ways, this gives an answer to the many critics of the DMCA who've been protesting about the clamp down on DeCSS and how it makes it difficult to choose Linux (and other free OS's) as an operating system for certain applications - not for what Linux is capable of, but because of unjust laws discriminating against it. The answer being: If you don't like it, shop around for governments that have the laws you want.
The US is a country dominated by the interests (or at any rate wants) of big business. This is known, and is why the latest round of draconian copyright laws are being put into place. It's why the US is the home of some of the most powerful corporations in the world, including MS - which controls the very way we can use computers, and AOL-Time-Warner, which controls a large proportion of what we see, read and hear. This isn't new, it isn't news to anyone reading this.
The truth is that anyone protesting about these conditions can see look across the world and find examples of places where it is legal to do the things you want to do. This varies from countries with more liberal drugs policies, to countries where working conditions are guaranteed. And, in the case of the DMCA, most, if not all, of Europe is untouched by this kind of legislation.
And generally, if you're the sort of person who finds this important, you probably can move to the country that has the laws you want. If implementing DVD viewers is your speciality, it's highly unlikely that you don't have the skills to get a European employer to sponsor a visa for you - and that's assuming you don't want to take the student route, or some other similar perfectly legal way of getting into Europe.
Ultimately you have to make a choice. Moaning about how the government has been taken over by corporate interests can only go so far: if you want to deal with it, you have to take matters into your own hands. There are countries out there that are not in the pockets of big business, that have laws protecting the rights of employees, of people to write code they want to write, that have written the right to privacy into their constitutions or as their highest priority laws. It may sound faceous, but perhaps it's Europe that yerns for America's "huddled masses" now, as a collection of nation states committed to democracy in a way that a US controlled by private corporate interests never can be.
Either way, there's little excuse to continue complaining. Continuing to live in the US is a choice, more so indeed than choosing a career or to have a family - the favourate examples of areas where people shouldn't complain if they choose to do these things and then find they have less freedom than before. If you don't like the DMCA, get the skills to leave, and then do it. --
Slashdot Mirror
In LA, Larry is charged with Curly's murder. No evidence exists except a suspicion on the part of the police and a hair on the knife used to kill Curly. A sample of Larry's hair is sent to a DNA lab. "Good news", says the lab technician to the police. "The DNA matches. Only 1:50,000 people have that strain."
The prosecutor tells the jury. The jury convict. After all, the chances are 50,000:1 that Larry's innocent aren't they? That's what the prosecutor said, and he was just repeating what the lab said wasn't he? As the prison warden throws the switch and Larry burns to a crisp, something odd happens. A close circuit TV film is revealed which proves that someone completely different murdered Curly. What happened?
Answer: People misread the statistics. There are well over 50,000 people in LA. If there are 5,000,000 people in LA (which I suspect is a low estimate) then there were approximate 100 suspects. In other words, the odds were not, in the absense of all other evidence, 1:50,000 against Larry murdering Curly, the odds were actually 100:1 that he didn't do it.
How is this relevent here? Answer: People are interpretting Patel as meaning that she wants more than 99% of the activity on Napster to be legitimate. This is by her demand that Napster remove more than 99% of the copyrighted material.
But one is not the other. To use statistics I've written elsewhere, if there are 100,000 transactions enabled by Napster, and 99,500 of them are illegitimate, then a 99% reduction would still leave 995 illegitimate transactions against 500 "Patel Approved" ones. The way most posters are reading it, Patel has instead demanded that more than 99% of transactions be legal. That's not what she's said.
Clearly she believes, rightly or wrongly, that there is an excessive amount of violations of copyright law on Napster, to the point that the vast majority, well in excess of 99%, are illegal. Patel is demanding that there be a massive reduction.
Whether her comment "100%" is supposed to be taken literally or not, I don't know. But simply reducing the number of copyright violations on Napster by 99% may actually not be enough, depending on the scale of the issue, to mean that legal uses of Napster would be in the majority.
DNA evidence doesn't always mean what people think it means. 99% doesn't mean the same thing as 99% in another context either.
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Here's a quick calculation. Suppose 100,000 files are transfered every month. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that 99,500 of these files transfers are illegal. This also implies only 500 file transfers are legit - people trading publically copyable songs, etc.
If Napster blocks 99% of the 99,500, then it leaves 995 "illegal" file transfers going on, nearly twice as many legal file transfers, assuming none of the legal file transfers have been effected by the same filters.
One can probably play with the figures. But obviously, if Patel considers the vast majority of Napster uses to be illegal, to the point that she believes less than one in a hundred are actually ok, then we still see illegal file transfering taking up a large proportion of Napster's work, even though the headline figure "A 99% reduction!" appears, at first sight, to be enormous.
None of this should be taken as meaning I believe that using Napster is illegal, or legal, or anything like that. It's an attempt to understand what at first sight looks like an insane demand at compliance.
Maybe, just maybe, Patel isn't as stupid as she looks.
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If someone had created a front-end to Ghostscript to show PDFs, and had called it KAcrobat, they'd have not have been defended in the same way as the KIllustrator people were. Adobe would have had a legitimate case against the KAcrobat people.
In this case, MySQL is a made up name, it's not a generic name that could be used to describe any database package. Therefore the comparison is invalid.
FWIW, Adobe didn't sue anyone. Lawyers working independently of Adobe decided to perform some sort of civil "citizens arrest" that only the peculiarities of German law can explain. This was explained in the second of the two KIllustrator threads, and you might find it worth your while reading those threads, to both educate you on what was happening, and to actually determine what arguments people were using.
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As such, the founding fathers didn't invent some untried concept, but adopted (if for slightly different reasons to those of the UK government, which was aiming to protect authors rights) existing codes which were adapted for US needs. The story of how this happened and the logic involved would make a good story all by itself.
Elsewhere in this thread, you express anger at the suggestion that your post is either a troll or flamebait. Indeed, one moderator sides with you and tags it "Insightful". Insightful, perhaps, as in "Incites a riot"?Seriously, what exactly is the point of the above comment. What does it have to do with the origins of copyright law?
Again - what does this have to do with the article to which your respond? What, indeed, does it have to do with the origins of copyright law? And are you sure the allegation makes any sense anyway?Do Europeans ridicule Hollywood for not "kissing ass", or do they ridicule it for constantly and monotonously casting actors with British accents as the bad guys, in a way that betrays a lack of originality (as do black hats/boots, and moustaches) coupled with a kind of nationalism that's off-putting to the audiences the moviemakers are usually trying to target? And, for what it's worth, do UK movies exclusively portray Americans as "bad characters" - movies that do certainly exist, but are they even the majority of those movies that have American characters?
Added to this somewhat juvenile rant about the movie industry is a comment about the British Empire. Again, what exactly does this have to do with copyright law? Or even the movie industry? British Imperialism is dead. It was regarded with increasing moral repugnance throughout the 20th Century, with national leaders like Mahatma Ghandi holding up imperialism for what it is: A nasty system that enslaves whole nations and whole peoples, cold and abusive, and an affront to modern liberal values. Britain had the courage to ditch it, which is something to be welcomed.
And here we start to doubt the sanity of the poster. A comment adding more flesh to an article which left out interesting and relevent history is ruled "invalid" because, well, because Americans should be able to write what they want and if they leave out history, no matter how stupid, they shouldn't be told what that left out history is.Small wonder, I guess, that the US is the only Western Democracy that refuses to teach many of its children basic science.
But worse, there's an overtone in both the last paragraph and the paragraph before it - that America is now the imperialist force, and therefore its version of history is the valid one. It's as if the last 300-400 years of European history, one of bloodshed and enslavement, has taught us nothing about imperialism - or even that that bloodshed and enslavement is somehow right, because a country has to exist to do those things, and by-gosh if dfenstrate doesn't believe that the US should be that country.
To sum up: If your posting is to be believed, you take it as an outrage that anyone should provide more information in response to a version of history presented by an American, and you believe that because you believe that America is some kind of new imperial power, and you believe that is right.
I find that point of view utterly, completely, abhorent and evil. If you seriously believe what you've written, you need to get a reality check. If you were writing it for the purposes of winding up other people, well, congratulations, you've succeeded, but at the cost of putting yourself in the same fellow-travellor category as most brutal of 16th Century Spanish conquistadors, or of 19th Century South African Mining Engineers. As a course onward to popularity, you might just want to start walking about with a swastika tattooed to your head. You'll get the same results.
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If Slashdot did start accepting that kind of advertising, I'd stop reading it, in an instant.
As far the "it pays for the content so that you don't have to", as I said, I'm happy about paying for content from some sites on the 'net. I've proven that, I've paid for content from Salon and others. If Yahoo asked, I'd pay for that. But right now, with its infuriating combination of giant ads sat in the middle of some articles, and pop-down ads appearing elsewhere, and no sign that a "pay for surfing in peace" option is on the horizon, I'm more likely to ditch it.
If someone else paying for something means I can't concentrate on what it is that was paid for, I'd rather they didn't - just as I'm not going to accept a drink that's "free" if it's been spiked.
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The result of this isn't that the windows don't continue to pop up, they do. But as they appear under the browser, it's no great deal. Most importantly, the ads don't suck dry my limited bandwidth (across a modem link) so I can browse at a reasonable pace.
For those who need to know, this is what I did (BIND4, as I'm using OpenBSD as my firewall/NAT-based proxy):
I added the line:
primary x10.com x10.com
to my named.boot file. Then created a x10.com file in my namedb directory, reading something like this:
@ IN SOA x10.com. nic.pillory.peh.link. (
19971003
28800
7200
3600000
86400 )
NS pillory.peh.link.
ads A 10.255.0.0
Actually, any half competent DNS admin should be able to do something similar with their setup.
This has benefits over putting the entries in your /etc/hosts in two ways: to begin with, everything under x10.com is blocked, so if x10.com start putting out stuff as ads2.x10.com, the block will still take effect. Secondly, the file applies to every machine on your network. If you have an Intranet at home like I do, that's useful.
Ultimately, if companies want money for their content, they'd be better off asking for it from me than bombarding me with ads. I fully intend to stop visiting certain sites, however much it pains me, until they start providing me with a way to turn off intrusive, bandwidth sucking, unstable browser crashing (y'hear me Netscape? ;-) advertising, whether it be via a subscription or some other means.
And yep, I put my money where my mouth is. I've put in my two year sub to Salon with donation. There's stuff out there I'm willing to pay for. I want to read the site, not get too pissed at it and impatient I end up surfing somewhere else...
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PS1="$PWD> "
to
PS1="
Memory fault(coredump)^G
$PWD>"
(^G being the "beep" character.)
While I was at it, I modified his MSDOS prompt to look similar to his Cygwin prompt, and his Cygwin prompt to:
PS1="$(pwd -P | tr / \\\\)> "
He comes back from vacation on Tuesday. Can't wait...
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Which I guess would lead most people to comment that one of the things Windows does that Linux doesn't really at the moment is hassle-free printing. Sure you can combine Ghostscript and lpr and half a dozen other utilities to do it, but it's still a pain in the next to configure for anyone who doesn't have a native-Postscript printer.
When these issues have come up in the past for me, it's tended to be in (me asking, 7-8 years ago) why should I move to a PC when my (68000 based machine, famous, but I don't want this to turn into advocacy of a platform in a coma) has the apps I want and the PC doesn't, to which the answer was usually "Oh yes the PC _does_". That product allowed me to compose music, had a full screen bitmap editor that supported animation and had some very nice special effects, had other types of animation program (structured, special effects, movie editors, etc), had various forms of word processor that straddled the gap between the extreme "text editor with embedded formatting" TeX/ROFFs of this world to the graphical "runs like syrup and has a user interface designed to get in the way of what you're doing" - as well as those apps, and all the other usual applications too.
And the answer to this was usually "ER, yeah, that was ported to Windows aaaaaaages ago" or "That was ported from Windows" or "You can download a freeware clone called GrotTracker from SIMTEL", etc.
My problem with Linux, and I speak as someone who uses it pretty close to exclusively at home, is that this range of software just isn't available yet. I still feel like I lost something moving from the comatose machine to a Linux system. BeOS and Windows advocates will probably berate me at this point for switching to Linux, but I believe Linux is capable of doing all of these things, and the experience of adopting yet another platform that then ceased to be supported by its creator, and was too closed to be adequately supported by another group, was that I wasn't about to adopt BeOS. And Windows, frankly, sucks you into a world of constant upgrades and expensive software I want to have nothing to do with.
The work still needs to be done. We do need to look at the holes in the software line: Linux is ready for the desktop, whether you use KDE or GNOME, both are more than adequate, but the software that makes using a computer fun and productive is currently what's lacking.
But maybe I ought to shut up moaning and get on with it myself... ;)
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And remember: OS/2 Warp 3 came out well before Windows 95. If Microsoft had wanted to cripple OS/2, they'd have had no problems doing so.
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Way to go, IBM.
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I hope they resume production in due course, and that the entry level price is kept low and gives you a machine you'd want to run Mac OS X on (ie >128M RAM) and has all the things you actually need (like a CDRW)
A quiet, powerful, computer that takes up little desk space and contains enough within it for expansion not to be a major issue is a great thing. I hope Apple still intend to keep looking at that design.
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It's not that they named the Paint programs after MacPaint, it's that MacPaint had the generic title.
I haven't mentioned trademark law once except to correct the original poster about the nature of the allegation. To answer the above: No, Adobe does not have the right to declare a word its own simply because it used it first when the term is generic. That's the crux of my argument.It's ludicrous, in my view, to try and seperate the two, and I haven't done so. If Adobe called their program MegaDraw, and they were acting against KMegaDraw, as I've said elsewhere, they would be on firm ground, and the fact they got there first would matter. But they've chosen a generic term that can legitimately apply to any drawing package orientated to illustrations - indeed, is probably the only descriptive term that applies - and therefore the fact that they're first means they have no moral, and if what you've written is correct, no legal, right to suppress other people's use of it.
If Adobe wants their product to have a protected name, they should change it to something it would be legitimate to trademark. Their current behaviour is an abuse of language.
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Adobe has not lost a single customer, even if the fatuious argument that KIllustrator and Adobe Illustrator are, in some way, "competitors", held any water. They're different products. They have different names. They run on different platforms. They are aimed at different audiences. You and Adobe should learn to deal with it.
When Adobe comes up with a Linux version, we can start arguing that one is competing with the other. Then the merits of having different but similar names can be debated. Not before.
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But I didn't say that "Megadraw" was less descriptive. I said that Adobe went for descriptive as their first priority, and chose "one that is completely generic and was already used for that purpose when Adobe used it."
With the possible exception of Vector, I've seen programs with names that are either those you suggested or derivatives. Indeed, two of the names you suggest, Painter and Drawer, are derivatives of words Microsoft uses in their product names! (MS Draw is a free (as in beer) add-on component to Microsoft Office, downloadable from their website - I have it installed on my machine at work)
Is anyone going to get confused between KIllustrator and Adobe Illustrator? Well, were they confused between PC Paintbrush, Deluxe Paint, and Windows Paint?
FWIW, a lot of people are suggesting that there's such a thing as a "vector drawing" program. While, technically, that's true, a delve into it would reveal that there's several categories of package that falls under that category, from print-orientated CAD-derived packages, through diagram makers, to illustrators - programs designed for the express purpose of allowing an artist/graphic designer to produce illustrations. Each of these is aimed at a different application - the fact that you can scale what you draw without losing resolution doesn't mean that "they're the same" or that they work the same way.
Both Photoshop and Deluxe Paint edit bitmaps, but few people would suggest that they're aimed at the same application. A ZDNet article comparing the two would be rightly ridiculed, even if Deluxe Paint development had continued to the present day with the advanced functionality you'd expect for a decade more of development.
It's certainly legitimate to refer to KIllustrator as an illustrator in the same way as it wouldn't be to refer to Visio, or AutoCAD, or even MS Draw, as an illustrator. You wouldn't refer to Photoshop as a paint program, and you wouldn't refer to Windows Paint as a photo editor. People who miss this point and assume that unbelievably generic titles like "Vectorizer" would be appropriate, perhaps, might find it worth their while delving into the subject a little more closely.
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There simply is no way an average Adobe Illustrator user is going to be interested in KIllustrator, or vice versa, even assuming they're able to choose their own operating system (which in the majority of cases, where graphic design is done professionally, is not the case.)
There is no graphic designer in my place of employment who'd be allowed to use KIllustrator. They'd be fired if they installed Linux and KIllustrator on their machine. In the time between installing it and being fired, they'd have problems interoperating with everyone else in the office, as Exchange, by default, is not set up to provide non-proprietary email clients with access.
I know the pseudo-libertarian hogwash that passes for informed opinions here suggests you can "choose" anything. But in the vast majority of cases, if you want to get a job done and you want to get a job, you do not have realistic choices. This is an explicit case.
As for my analogy being wrong - care to explain how? The only analogy I saw that was wrong was the idiotic comment that Linux and Windows aren't competitors because they "run under different operating systems". They don't run under operating systems at all - it's an absurd comment to make.
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Which would have been making a similar analogy to the one I was making.
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The products do not compete. One is a package that runs under Windows and MacOS, the other under Linux. In a world where few people have more than one computer, that's enough of a distinction to ensure that sales/distributions of one do not affect the others in any serious degree.
Perhaps you could limit your personal abuse to your wife? But to answer the above, one product is always going to come before the other. That does not mean that one is named after the other.If we were talking about Adobe calling their product "Megadraw", and KDE "KMegadraw", or "Lines123" and "KLines123", then you might have a point. But Adobe have chosen a descriptive name for their product, one that is completely generic and was already used for that purpose when Adobe used it. What would you describe a vector drawing program as if you wanted to sum it up in one word? It is nonsense to suggest that the name is not equally applicable to other products simply because Adobe used it first. That's abuse of language.
Sure thing. Let me pull up www.adobe.com. Let's see: Acrobat Distiller is available for HP UX, IBM AIX, and Solaris. I seem to recall there was a VMS version at one point too. Are you now going to tell me that there are more installed HP UX installations, or AIX, or even Solaris, in their respective markets, than Linux installations? And I'm refering to commercial Linux servers here, not geeks with boxes running XMMS.I'm sorry your response to someone daring to disagree with you is to try to ridicule it, but you're going to actually have to think of some arguments beyond "You are wrong" and "Sorry, you[r] point is not taken" because Adobe's use "came first".
This isn't a race. It's about the appropriation of language. Adobe has no right to declare a word in common use its own, and KDE has every right to name a project as descriptively as possible. If Adobe, and yourself, don't like it, they'll just have to learn to deal with it. Perhaps Adobe should change the name of their product to something less generic?
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Essentially, Adobe is the playground bully here.
There are no copyright issues under discussion. The issue is an alleged trademark violation - an allegation that, if allowed to stand, chips away at the right to use the English language sanely and to provide descriptive names of products and services.--
Seriously though, in some ways I wonder if Microsoft would have a stronger case than Adobe. Illustrator is clearly a generic description of a product, "One that illustrates."
Word, however, is not. No matter how you look at it, Microsoft's product is not a word. It's a word processor (and a bloody bloated pile of... but that's another story ;)
You can't even argue that Word is an abbrevation for Word Processor. Does anyone say "Let's fire up the word and write that letter?" or "Let's go to the software shop and buy a word."
Whereas it's reasonable to substitute illustrator in both those sentences.
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Clue: It isn't China. These clauses are being put in to encourage states that, traditionally, have been regarded as "rogue" in the sphere of copyright law, to come on board.
Thank god Britain rejected Hague two weeks ago. Oh wait, wrong one ;-)
(Though as they're both the products of corporate greed, you can forgive me for the mistake...)
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I specifically said that Gates had come up with a wrong example if he wants to demonstrate that the GPL is anti-business, and explained why the licencing of sendmail is no more business-friendly than the GPL is.
Yes, Bill was using sendmail as an example of the right way. No, Bill obviously hasn't read the licence, otherwise he wouldn't be saying that the sendmail way is superior to the GPL'd way.
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Go read the article again!
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Just as with the GPL, you have to release the source, or else negotiate with the copyright holders when redistributing. The only added right is to redistribute closed source versions as long as you do so without charge. From the PoV of Microsoft's argument, it's hard to see how this can be less "anti-business" than the GPL is.
Wrong example Bill!
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Now we've all got to write another set of rebuttals! ;-)
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The US is a country dominated by the interests (or at any rate wants) of big business. This is known, and is why the latest round of draconian copyright laws are being put into place. It's why the US is the home of some of the most powerful corporations in the world, including MS - which controls the very way we can use computers, and AOL-Time-Warner, which controls a large proportion of what we see, read and hear. This isn't new, it isn't news to anyone reading this.
The truth is that anyone protesting about these conditions can see look across the world and find examples of places where it is legal to do the things you want to do. This varies from countries with more liberal drugs policies, to countries where working conditions are guaranteed. And, in the case of the DMCA, most, if not all, of Europe is untouched by this kind of legislation.
And generally, if you're the sort of person who finds this important, you probably can move to the country that has the laws you want. If implementing DVD viewers is your speciality, it's highly unlikely that you don't have the skills to get a European employer to sponsor a visa for you - and that's assuming you don't want to take the student route, or some other similar perfectly legal way of getting into Europe.
Ultimately you have to make a choice. Moaning about how the government has been taken over by corporate interests can only go so far: if you want to deal with it, you have to take matters into your own hands. There are countries out there that are not in the pockets of big business, that have laws protecting the rights of employees, of people to write code they want to write, that have written the right to privacy into their constitutions or as their highest priority laws. It may sound faceous, but perhaps it's Europe that yerns for America's "huddled masses" now, as a collection of nation states committed to democracy in a way that a US controlled by private corporate interests never can be.
Either way, there's little excuse to continue complaining. Continuing to live in the US is a choice, more so indeed than choosing a career or to have a family - the favourate examples of areas where people shouldn't complain if they choose to do these things and then find they have less freedom than before. If you don't like the DMCA, get the skills to leave, and then do it.
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