This means that putting google's servers at Verizon will not increase speed so much. It may reduce latency a little, but that is not so important.
Low latency is under-appreciated. Due to the way Internet congestion control and other connection establishment algorithms work, latency makes a big difference in how fast a connection starts up and how fast it recovers from any packet loss. Many web pages cause a half dozen connections to different sites to be established, and they don't all run in parallel, notably not the one that establishes the connection in the first place. DNS lookups and HTTPS make this all worse, as well, because both require additional network round trips.
I have a 7 mbps connection now with ~100 ms typical latency to most sites in the United States. If I had a choice between twice the bandwidth with the same latency or half the latency with the same bandwidth, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat. It would make a much more perceptible difference. ISPs just need to learn how to market the increased real world speed that comes with lower latency.
This is a reasonable argument except for one thing. Large Internet access providers are granted special privileges by virtue of being de facto common carriers. In most states, for example, if you want rights to deploy your communication cables across public rights of way, you need a "Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity".
Without such a certificate, you are at the mercy of individual public and private land owners. So if the large Internet access providers do not want to be de facto common carriers any more, state governments could just refuse to renew the providers CPCNs, on the grounds that they are not acting like common carriers they promised to be when the the certificates were granted (at least in the case of telephone companies). City governments could refuse to renew cable provider franchise agreements on similar grounds. Another option is to start taxing utility easements with an exemption for common carriers, on the grounds that the non-common carriers are not operating in the public interest.
If that is insufficient, local municipalities could build out their own provider neutral distribution networks similar to UTOPIA. That is the certain outcome of the large IAPs pushing the private property argument too far. Irrelevance and death.
"With a debit card, if the initial claim is denied, your bank account is empty and your rent payment is bouncing as you teeter on the edge of eviction while you argue with the bank"
That is one reason not to use a debit card, especially online, without at least a months worth of savings in a separate account. That is my insurance policy for the scenario you describe.
"In the US, Federal law limits you to $50 in exposure to theft of a credit card. With debit cards you are at the mercy of your bank, so I'm glad you are comfortable with yours"
Both Visa and Mastercard have a zero liability policy for unauthorized use of your card, provided you report a lost card within 24 hours. The only difference with a debit card is that you have to wait for your money to be returned to you, because it was taken directly from your account.
"That's why debit cards here in Portugal all have a PIN, and almost all the shops have little readers with keypads."
That is the case in the United States too. The difference (apparently) is that in the U.S. a debit card can also be processed like a credit card - no PIN required. I probably shouldn't, but I use my debit card to purchase things online all the time.
Just keep telling yourself that. The level of evidence that humans cause global warming is about as deep as the level of evidence for life on Mars. Correlation is not causation, and what correlation there is is _extremely_ weak. If you don't have a theory with predictive power, scientifically speaking you don't know anything. There is no warming model that has demonstrated an iota of that.
The question is, what is so significant about the past thirty years
The past thirty years are significant because we have satellite data for those years, data which is vastly more reliable than estimates constructed from surface temperature measurements. That is important if you care about tenths of a degree.
With lesser accuracy, ice cores and other temperature proxies can show temperature trends going back hundreds of thousands to millions of years of course. But they probably cannot tell us anything reliably about recent global warming in the past century or so, although they can tell us useful things about the phase relationship between temperatures and carbon dioxide levels, Milankovitch cycles and so on.
This is not news. There is no debate about whether global warming is real. All available sources show a warming trend when averaged over the past thirty years.
I don't know why these people bother, except perhaps as a red herring to distract people from the real controversy, which is about causation.
"the problem people have with RAMBUS is specifically that they sat in on the JEDEC working groups to watch the development of new standards, and then when everyone had decided on the design and invested huge amounts of money, they piped up that they had a patent on it"
This ought to be counted as inequitable conduct, and the relevant patents invalidated as a consequence.
"A vendor can have a stellar product at a low price, but if someone takes the time to do a review and finds them a tiny bit out of compliance with the vague regulations, they lose the bid"
This is the problem with binary thinking. Accessibility comes in degrees. Unless a product has serious problems, the deficiencies should be a consideration not a disqualifier.
Apparently not by the publishers of Playboy themselves though. Of course if the magazine were offered as an online service, the problem would largely be eliminated. No secondary re-publishing required.
Why should websites be exempt from these requirements?
It depends on how broadly you draw "public accommodation". Take computer software in general, for example. Should the government ban the release of software (open source software in particular) that does not have special support for those with disabilities? What if instead it is provided as software as a service? Does an SAS application become a public accommodation just because it is free? What if it isn't?
Like many things, the reasonability of such requirements depends on how strict they are and how hard they are to implement. Banning websites like Google Maps on the grounds of inaccessibility would be pernicious. But there might be something an online mapping application could do that would make it somewhat more accessible. If the government does not draw the requirements with some considerable care, they could become fodder for decades of lawsuits.
Drawn carefully though, I think such requirements would be a good idea. An online travel ticket / reservation site is an excellent example of what should properly be considered a public accomodation. As should most sites that offer goods for sale, or provide reference information. Websites run by businesses should be held to a stricter standard than free services provided by individuals, though.
GE's right to use the software had expired, and they will very dearly for that. GE escaped DMCA liability in this case because (1) they were not making a "copy", and (2) because the DMCA has been held not to prohibit "circumvention" except when someone's copyright is being violated.
(e.g. if someone is making an illegal copy, the DMCA adds additional liability, but does not prohibit a user from circumventing copy access control to do something that does not violate anyone's copyright). No new property right for the copyright holders, just an secondary penalty when the existing rights are violated. This was first held in Chamberlain v. Skylink (2004).
My understanding is that such boxes may not be able to be "trafficked in" if the primary use of such devices is copyright circumvention. But you should be able to use them personally without violating the DMCA, as long as you are not using them to make an illegitimate copy of something.
So the real question is are such devices often / primarily used to make illegal copies, or are they primarily used for some other legitimate application, e.g. fair use.
I think in principle the DMCA is merely another charge to be tacked on when a crime (copyright violation) has already occurred.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Chamberlain v. Skylink (2004) held just that - namely that the DMCA does not create a separate property right, but only increases liability when an actual copyright violation has occured. This precedent was the basis of the recent Fifth Circuit holding on this point.
The court held that "The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners."
CSS is primarily an access control technology, not a copy control technology. Using a tool like DeCSS for the purpose of viewing a DVD does not violate anyones copyright, and is therefore, following the logic of the court, not a violation of the DMCA. The court here was actually following a precedent set by the court of appeals for the federal circuit in Chamberlain v. Skylink (2004). That court said:
The essence of the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions is that 1201(a),(b) establish causes of action for liability. They do not establish a new property right. The DMCA's text indicates that circumvention is not infringement, 17 U.S.C. 1201(c)(1) ("Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title."), and the statute's structure makes the point even clearer. This distinction between property and liability is critical. Whereas copyrights, like patents, are property, liability protection from unauthorized circumvention merely creates a new cause of action under which a defendant may be liable
In other words, this appears to be old news. It appears to have been legal to use DeCSS to view a DVD in the United States at least since 2004, and arguably earlier. I am glad the court knows how to read 1201(c)(1) because I am sure many have read the same passage in the past and didn't realize it applied to the DMCA _itself_.
There are good reasons for Microsoft to call it a contract. It doesn't make it so, though. If you purchase a copy of Microsoft software from someone other than Microsoft, there is no privity of contract between you and Microsoft. Nor is there any consideration that passes between you and Microsoft.
Lack of consideration means that even if you agree to the "contract" that displays during the installation process, Microsoft hasn't provided you any additional benefits beyond those you already have, those for which you have paid for. Nor are you providing any additional consideration to them. As both a contract and as a license such a "EULA" or end user "contract" is null and void.
One of the software industries' answers to that is that retail end users do not actually "own" anything. This is a highly dubious proposition that is the subject of three pending appeals to the Ninth Circuit.
What this would appear to mean is that any use of a dongle by a program for licensing is now null and void. If a "remover" tool is available to eliminate the need for the dongle, then anyone is free to use this.
Not quite. If the software was obtained by means of a legally binding _contract_ with the original manufacturer, the "license" (contract) terms still apply. What this decision says is that the DMCA does not apply to an end user unless the user is circumventing a technological protection measure for the purpose of violating someone's _copyright_ (which they were not). They were violating the "license" agreement, and paid dearly as a consequence, but did not violate the DMCA, according the court.
Unfortunately, a "remover" tool may still be legally prohibited as an anti-circumvention device on other grounds, especially if its primary use is to help people do things that actually do violate someone's copyright. So the distributor of such a tool could be in trouble. An end user who uses such a tool but who does not use it to make an illegal copy, based on this decision appears to be in the clear.
There are rather strong arguments that "use licenses" are null and void, on the grounds that the end user has purchased a copy of the software, and has no need to accept a license to gain permission to use what they now own.
Even if the end user accepts the license, since they have a pre-existing legal right to use it, it doesn't bind them as a contract because there is no "consideration" (i.e. quid pro quo) at that point. The user has already paid for the software, and usually to a third party. That completely releases the end user from any sort of contractual obligation regarding what they have purchased.
There are several legal precedents in favor of that conclusion, including United States v. Wise (1977), and Vernor v. Autodesk (2008). Autodesk could not use a license to prohibit someone from reselling a copy of software he had purchased from them. No music publishers with regard to audio CDs, nor book publishers with regard to books. Three cases, however, including Vernor, are currently on appeal to the Ninth Circuit (which made the decision in Wise). See here.
Sure, as long as they don't read the WP code first
That is certainly the safe way to go about it, (or to divide the reponsibility to document the WP interface and to code between different programmers) but after applying the abstraction, filtration, comparison test described in the well known Gates Rubber v. Bando Chemical case, it is relatively unlikely that a maker of a WordPress compatible system will duplicate much in the way of protectable elements, unless of course the developers are more or less dull, lazy, and incompetent.
For the sake of argument let's pretend WP was a commercial product. Do you think you'd be able to create a theme for it and release it and sell it and not have it be considered a derivative work?
Absolutely. There isn't a shred of a legal argument to the contrary, or rather not any that hasn't been eviscerated by multiple statutory provisions and half a dozen legal precedents.
Check out 17 USC 102(b) for example:
"In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."
Or 17 USC 117(a):
"Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. -- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner,"
See also Baystate v. Bentley Systems (1996) re the unprotectibility of technical interfaces, and Gates Rubber v. Bando Chemical (1993) on the abstraction, filtration, comparison test for computer program copyright analysis.
The scènes à faire doctrine "excludes from protection those elements of a program that have been dictated by external factors". The merger doctrine denies copyright protection to material that is indistinguishable from the underlying ideas.
Applying those two principles alone completely eliminates any remotely copyright protectable considerations from a plugin that hasn't actually copied any code, at least so far as the distributor of the plugin is concerned. As for the end user, see 17 USC 117(a) as quoted above. End users have the legal authority to make local adaptations of copyright protected program necessary for them to make use of them on a machine. That includes both durable and ephemeral adaptations. In other words, it is _perfectly_ legal for an end user to take a code optimizer and statically link a previously dynamically linked library into a combined work, as long as he/she does not distribute that adaptation to third parties.
Slashdot Mirror
This means that putting google's servers at Verizon will not increase speed so much. It may reduce latency a little, but that is not so important.
Low latency is under-appreciated. Due to the way Internet congestion control and other connection establishment algorithms work, latency makes a big difference in how fast a connection starts up and how fast it recovers from any packet loss. Many web pages cause a half dozen connections to different sites to be established, and they don't all run in parallel, notably not the one that establishes the connection in the first place. DNS lookups and HTTPS make this all worse, as well, because both require additional network round trips.
I have a 7 mbps connection now with ~100 ms typical latency to most sites in the United States. If I had a choice between twice the bandwidth with the same latency or half the latency with the same bandwidth, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat. It would make a much more perceptible difference. ISPs just need to learn how to market the increased real world speed that comes with lower latency.
This is a reasonable argument except for one thing. Large Internet access providers are granted special privileges by virtue of being de facto common carriers. In most states, for example, if you want rights to deploy your communication cables across public rights of way, you need a "Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity".
Without such a certificate, you are at the mercy of individual public and private land owners. So if the large Internet access providers do not want to be de facto common carriers any more, state governments could just refuse to renew the providers CPCNs, on the grounds that they are not acting like common carriers they promised to be when the the certificates were granted (at least in the case of telephone companies). City governments could refuse to renew cable provider franchise agreements on similar grounds. Another option is to start taxing utility easements with an exemption for common carriers, on the grounds that the non-common carriers are not operating in the public interest.
If that is insufficient, local municipalities could build out their own provider neutral distribution networks similar to UTOPIA. That is the certain outcome of the large IAPs pushing the private property argument too far. Irrelevance and death.
"With a debit card, if the initial claim is denied, your bank account is empty and your rent payment is bouncing as you teeter on the edge of eviction while you argue with the bank"
That is one reason not to use a debit card, especially online, without at least a months worth of savings in a separate account. That is my insurance policy for the scenario you describe.
"In the US, Federal law limits you to $50 in exposure to theft of a credit card. With debit cards you are at the mercy of your bank, so I'm glad you are comfortable with yours"
Both Visa and Mastercard have a zero liability policy for unauthorized use of your card, provided you report a lost card within 24 hours. The only difference with a debit card is that you have to wait for your money to be returned to you, because it was taken directly from your account.
"That's why debit cards here in Portugal all have a PIN, and almost all the shops have little readers with keypads."
That is the case in the United States too. The difference (apparently) is that in the U.S. a debit card can also be processed like a credit card - no PIN required. I probably shouldn't, but I use my debit card to purchase things online all the time.
It is not dead yet, but it will be. Paypal has announced they will be discontinuing service after September 22, 2010. Check out the link.
Just keep telling yourself that. The level of evidence that humans cause global warming is about as deep as the level of evidence for life on Mars. Correlation is not causation, and what correlation there is is _extremely_ weak. If you don't have a theory with predictive power, scientifically speaking you don't know anything. There is no warming model that has demonstrated an iota of that.
The question is, what is so significant about the past thirty years
The past thirty years are significant because we have satellite data for those years, data which is vastly more reliable than estimates constructed from surface temperature measurements. That is important if you care about tenths of a degree.
With lesser accuracy, ice cores and other temperature proxies can show temperature trends going back hundreds of thousands to millions of years of course. But they probably cannot tell us anything reliably about recent global warming in the past century or so, although they can tell us useful things about the phase relationship between temperatures and carbon dioxide levels, Milankovitch cycles and so on.
This is not news. There is no debate about whether global warming is real. All available sources show a warming trend when averaged over the past thirty years.
I don't know why these people bother, except perhaps as a red herring to distract people from the real controversy, which is about causation.
There isn't an intelligent person the planet who denies that global warming is real. The debate is all about causation.
"the problem people have with RAMBUS is specifically that they sat in on the JEDEC working groups to watch the development of new standards, and then when everyone had decided on the design and invested huge amounts of money, they piped up that they had a patent on it"
This ought to be counted as inequitable conduct, and the relevant patents invalidated as a consequence.
"A vendor can have a stellar product at a low price, but if someone takes the time to do a review and finds them a tiny bit out of compliance with the vague regulations, they lose the bid"
This is the problem with binary thinking. Accessibility comes in degrees. Unless a product has serious problems, the deficiencies should be a consideration not a disqualifier.
"Wow did you even read the summary?"
In other words, the original poster wants to do something about a problem he is not willing to do something relatively easy about, unfortunately.
Apparently not by the publishers of Playboy themselves though. Of course if the magazine were offered as an online service, the problem would largely be eliminated. No secondary re-publishing required.
Why should websites be exempt from these requirements?
It depends on how broadly you draw "public accommodation". Take computer software in general, for example. Should the government ban the release of software (open source software in particular) that does not have special support for those with disabilities? What if instead it is provided as software as a service? Does an SAS application become a public accommodation just because it is free? What if it isn't?
Like many things, the reasonability of such requirements depends on how strict they are and how hard they are to implement. Banning websites like Google Maps on the grounds of inaccessibility would be pernicious. But there might be something an online mapping application could do that would make it somewhat more accessible. If the government does not draw the requirements with some considerable care, they could become fodder for decades of lawsuits.
Drawn carefully though, I think such requirements would be a good idea. An online travel ticket / reservation site is an excellent example of what should properly be considered a public accomodation. As should most sites that offer goods for sale, or provide reference information. Websites run by businesses should be held to a stricter standard than free services provided by individuals, though.
GE's right to use the software had expired, and they will very dearly for that. GE escaped DMCA liability in this case because (1) they were not making a "copy", and (2) because the DMCA has been held not to prohibit "circumvention" except when someone's copyright is being violated.
(e.g. if someone is making an illegal copy, the DMCA adds additional liability, but does not prohibit a user from circumventing copy access control to do something that does not violate anyone's copyright). No new property right for the copyright holders, just an secondary penalty when the existing rights are violated. This was first held in Chamberlain v. Skylink (2004).
My understanding is that such boxes may not be able to be "trafficked in" if the primary use of such devices is copyright circumvention. But you should be able to use them personally without violating the DMCA, as long as you are not using them to make an illegitimate copy of something.
So the real question is are such devices often / primarily used to make illegal copies, or are they primarily used for some other legitimate application, e.g. fair use.
I think in principle the DMCA is merely another charge to be tacked on when a crime (copyright violation) has already occurred.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Chamberlain v. Skylink (2004) held just that - namely that the DMCA does not create a separate property right, but only increases liability when an actual copyright violation has occured. This precedent was the basis of the recent Fifth Circuit holding on this point.
The court held that "The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners."
CSS is primarily an access control technology, not a copy control technology. Using a tool like DeCSS for the purpose of viewing a DVD does not violate anyones copyright, and is therefore, following the logic of the court, not a violation of the DMCA. The court here was actually following a precedent set by the court of appeals for the federal circuit in Chamberlain v. Skylink (2004). That court said:
In other words, this appears to be old news. It appears to have been legal to use DeCSS to view a DVD in the United States at least since 2004, and arguably earlier. I am glad the court knows how to read 1201(c)(1) because I am sure many have read the same passage in the past and didn't realize it applied to the DMCA _itself_.
There are good reasons for Microsoft to call it a contract. It doesn't make it so, though. If you purchase a copy of Microsoft software from someone other than Microsoft, there is no privity of contract between you and Microsoft. Nor is there any consideration that passes between you and Microsoft.
Lack of consideration means that even if you agree to the "contract" that displays during the installation process, Microsoft hasn't provided you any additional benefits beyond those you already have, those for which you have paid for. Nor are you providing any additional consideration to them. As both a contract and as a license such a "EULA" or end user "contract" is null and void.
One of the software industries' answers to that is that retail end users do not actually "own" anything. This is a highly dubious proposition that is the subject of three pending appeals to the Ninth Circuit.
What this would appear to mean is that any use of a dongle by a program for licensing is now null and void. If a "remover" tool is available to eliminate the need for the dongle, then anyone is free to use this.
Not quite. If the software was obtained by means of a legally binding _contract_ with the original manufacturer, the "license" (contract) terms still apply. What this decision says is that the DMCA does not apply to an end user unless the user is circumventing a technological protection measure for the purpose of violating someone's _copyright_ (which they were not). They were violating the "license" agreement, and paid dearly as a consequence, but did not violate the DMCA, according the court.
Unfortunately, a "remover" tool may still be legally prohibited as an anti-circumvention device on other grounds, especially if its primary use is to help people do things that actually do violate someone's copyright. So the distributor of such a tool could be in trouble. An end user who uses such a tool but who does not use it to make an illegal copy, based on this decision appears to be in the clear.
There are rather strong arguments that "use licenses" are null and void, on the grounds that the end user has purchased a copy of the software, and has no need to accept a license to gain permission to use what they now own.
Even if the end user accepts the license, since they have a pre-existing legal right to use it, it doesn't bind them as a contract because there is no "consideration" (i.e. quid pro quo) at that point. The user has already paid for the software, and usually to a third party. That completely releases the end user from any sort of contractual obligation regarding what they have purchased.
There are several legal precedents in favor of that conclusion, including United States v. Wise (1977), and Vernor v. Autodesk (2008). Autodesk could not use a license to prohibit someone from reselling a copy of software he had purchased from them. No music publishers with regard to audio CDs, nor book publishers with regard to books. Three cases, however, including Vernor, are currently on appeal to the Ninth Circuit (which made the decision in Wise). See here.
Sure, as long as they don't read the WP code first
That is certainly the safe way to go about it, (or to divide the reponsibility to document the WP interface and to code between different programmers) but after applying the abstraction, filtration, comparison test described in the well known Gates Rubber v. Bando Chemical case, it is relatively unlikely that a maker of a WordPress compatible system will duplicate much in the way of protectable elements, unless of course the developers are more or less dull, lazy, and incompetent.
It's not a license about "derived works" in general. It's a license about "modified source code" - much more specific.
Except the author of a plugin does not in general modify the source code of the host program in any way.
For the sake of argument let's pretend WP was a commercial product. Do you think you'd be able to create a theme for it and release it and sell it and not have it be considered a derivative work?
Absolutely. There isn't a shred of a legal argument to the contrary, or rather not any that hasn't been eviscerated by multiple statutory provisions and half a dozen legal precedents.
Check out 17 USC 102(b) for example:
"In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."
Or 17 USC 117(a):
"Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. -- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner,"
See also Baystate v. Bentley Systems (1996) re the unprotectibility of technical interfaces, and Gates Rubber v. Bando Chemical (1993) on the abstraction, filtration, comparison test for computer program copyright analysis.
The scènes à faire doctrine "excludes from protection those elements of a program that have been dictated by external factors". The merger doctrine denies copyright protection to material that is indistinguishable from the underlying ideas.
Applying those two principles alone completely eliminates any remotely copyright protectable considerations from a plugin that hasn't actually copied any code, at least so far as the distributor of the plugin is concerned. As for the end user, see 17 USC 117(a) as quoted above. End users have the legal authority to make local adaptations of copyright protected program necessary for them to make use of them on a machine. That includes both durable and ephemeral adaptations. In other words, it is _perfectly_ legal for an end user to take a code optimizer and statically link a previously dynamically linked library into a combined work, as long as he/she does not distribute that adaptation to third parties.