Just a thought-- give it a try and see if it works, I suppose.
Make the checkboxes and whatnot as images, very high-resolution black-and-white (2-color) images, and put them into the document, rescaled via CSS using ems instead of pixel heights.
I think the biggest setback to PNG was lousy support in Internet Explorer during a time of rapid Internet growth and solidification. Even though 8-bit PNG was rather trouble-free, the whole format had a "new and iffy" feel to it. Indexed, single-color transparency worked well, but in that case there were few clearly visible advantages to PNG (true, it's better compression, but it's not like PNG24/JPEG, where you can clearly see lack of JPEG crud). Also, there's still no standard browser support for MNG, so GIF has an advantage with 89a animation.
Although PNG has good compression over something like TIFF or BMP for full-color images, it's still a poor choice for posting large photos to the Web, as its lossless compression results in unwieldly file sizes while maximum (and adequate) quality JPEGs do much better.
To call "copyright infringement" theft is to make it seem that the victim has lost property (or the use of it) as in "They stole my car" or "They stole my diamond ring". Talk about obfuscation.
I agree that it's imperfect as a metaphor and incorrect as a statement, but to frame a response to someone's argument completely based upon that one poor choice of words just waylays the argument and invites poor assumptions. I wouldn't use the "Infringement = theft" line myself (although I can create a case that it's akin to nonpayment for services) but it's a disservice to the discourse to wail and stomp all over that one statement when it's not the issue.
There's a big difference between going in front of a judge and saying "this person has been incorrectly charged with the wrong crime", and going in front of Slashdot and saying "When you said 'stealing music', you really meant 'copyright infringement'."
Huh? Then what would be the ramifications of the US congress either abolishing copyrights tomorrow or enacting the death penalty for it?
How is that relevant to the discussion? Punishment or criminal definition was never brought up in this discussion, simply an offhand use of not having the "right to steal".
The reasons the copyright argument exists is because there is a legal definition for it.
There are also moral and ethical questions around that argument. People in the discussion know what the law is. That's a given point. The question often debated is whether the law should exist, and to what extent. Saying "your metaphor to stealing is wrong because it's not exactly stealing", especially when failing to cite how that changes the given argument, is just rehashing a tired line and trying to short-circuit the debate back to a completely legal one-- which it often isn't.
Yeah, but I'm not dealing with legal systems, nor am I concerned with the degrees of legal retribution.
I'm just annoyed that the people who always chime in with "It's not theft, it's copyright infringement.", are playing the flip-side of the same card. Although "theft" may be untrue to the discussion, by oversimplification and calling upon a basic known "evil", using nothing more than the argument "But it's not theft, it's infringement" does the opposite disservice, by obscuring the argument and framing it wholly within the legal construct. Also, to simply drop in with this quip (unless the first argument consists of nothing more than "It's THEFT, dammit!") appears to strive to construct a false link of "Theft=Wrong, Not theft=Not wrong, Infringement=Not theft, so Infringement=Not wrong".
That may be circumvention, but that's just to be able to use something you legally acquired. That's not what I'm talking about. Granted, if you kept and re-watched the copy after turning the original back in, I would find fault with that.
I've often wondered if there's a way to recycle disc media-- given my lousy track record with CDRWs (they tend to get scratched beyond reusability after the first time anyway), I just use and discard one-write discs even for ephemeral things.
You're missing the point-- I the PP was annoyed with the industry's commercial pleadings that are tacked onto the beginning of shows. It's another piece of irrelevant advertising, with a tone that's accusatory to the uninvolved and laughable to the pirates, and interrupts the experience for everyone.
If the movies were that lousy, there'd be no incentive to go or pirate them. Apparently they have some desirability-- having a place to get them with a lot less expenditure doesn't explicitly speak for or against the quality.
That said, the movies do kinda suck lately-- especially this year.
I doubt it. From what I've read, they have to be quite old, and/or be a unique model in order to get much more worth out of it than the annoyance cost of storage. Also, marginally common models can lack value unless they're cleaned and readjusted.
I've got a few typewriters sitting around, but they're rather common models. Even the interesting and antique-looking Royal Portable, I found, was produced for a wide range of years (mine comes, IIRC, from the late '30s or early '40s) and has little collectible value. If it's anything with plastic on it, forget it. Aside from simple packrattishness, I use them, along with old paper from estate sales, for artistically authentic old documents and letters. The biggest problem doing this? I've lived in the computer age too long. I can't write legible flowing cursive worth a damn. I really ought to self-teach or take a class on calligraphy.
Good point. Session-stealing is a threat, since most times an umbrella session is required across subdomains to carry the "logged-in-ness". Hadn't considered that.
I suppose that if you isolated as many sensitive operations as possible under a specific subdomain's session-ID cookie, then use a less-secure and more general ID cookie for things like viewing others' profiles, that would dampen and contain, although not eliminate, this session-theft threat.
It's not even really a browser security issue. Okay, I suppose there could be user-interaction requirements so the form-filler doesn't *automatically* autofill on page load, but the real issue is site-owners who ignore the basic principles of site security and password handling, and open their users up to simple exploits.
The central concept in much of web-client security assumes that a domain is a single entity, and if you trust the domain, you trust the domain entirely. I don't see fault in this assumption-- a line has to be drawn somewhere as to what "one entity" is, and to split it much further would lead to unnecessary hoops and inconveniences. Back in the NetSol-monopoly days before cheap domain names, this point may have been debatable, but at that time there was far less personal information getting passed around by clients, as well.
Nowadays, anyone who is running a service with open access and open-ended "userpages" should be taking the bare-minimum step of sub-domaining their users' pages, and sub-domaining their own login forms as well. It costs nothing, it's more convenient for users, and it sandboxes everyone from each others' potential hack-attacks. If an exploit that gets around that, then people can talk, as that'd be a legitimate XSS or trojan/spoofing exploit. This stuff, though, is pinning exploits borne of shoddy web-side security onto the client developers.
That's funny you say that, because I'm on DSL, and I like it for the same reason-- I've found the same if not more setup troubles on cable connection (Comcast, even), with having to register the modem with the network, and the router with the modem... DSL for me has generally been "plug it in and go".
Of course, this is probably, more than anything, from going with smaller (TDS Metrocom) companies that don't bother with the "handy installation discs", and just give you a stock modem and a how-to paper.
You talk as if companies can just magically force people to pay more... okay, there are those "Compliance Fees" on phone bill that are basically "our lobbying money", so I suppose there's some instance, but still...
If a company "passes along" a charge to a consumer, that makes their product less attractive, and they stand to lose out to unburdened competitors. The company's having to decide where to trim costs or hike prices to pay the settlement is part of dealing with the settlement.
That brings in a whole new hairball, too, because if you legislate differences between media, it all gets shaken up when some new medium comes into play that's "a little bit of this and a little bit of that (oh... and on the Internet, patent)".
Imagine if we could catch every single person who has violated the law. What would happen?
The police would keep the footage on file to selectively enforce against anyone doing something legal but objectionable, or someone with something they want. Just because they could cite everyone on the planet for something, it doesn't mean they would.
This is the way it's been for quite a long time, and for anyone running a venue with entertainment should know how to deal with cover licensing. Why shouldn't songwriters have the rights to royalties on music they created? Why should performers get a free ride off songwriters? In a lot of cases, the songwriters are background people-- completely different from the popular performers of a song-- and they may have never performed the song at all. The royalties are their sole compensation for the work of songwriting.
If anything, the statutory licensing system is quite an improvement over simple copyright. Instead of having to track down and negotiate with numerous songwriters, the mechanicals can be taken care of by some simple record-keeping and a payment amount that the writer has to accept.
And, if a writer doesn't want to be compensated, they have that right as well. Disclaim copyright or liberally license, and don't sign onto BMI or ASCAP.
Covers aren't really considered a "derivative work" as much as a "use", when regarding the written portions of a song.
Regardless, derivative works are restricted by copyright as well. The only derivatives that aren't are fair-use derivatives-- of which parody is one. Fair use is a hole opened so, generally, peoples' rights to free speech and commentary are not curtailed by copyright protection. However, it does not permit non-commentary copying or derivation, as done with covers.
So if someone steals your SSN and fraudulently obtains a credit card, it's the institution's fault? Who's the victim? You are.
A service provider accepted falsified credentials and assumed an agreement because of fraud by an improperly authorized third party. Why should I be involved, responsible, or at fault? It's completely between the fraudulent third party and the defrauded lender... or, rather, it should be.
The only reason the banks don't get their share of the fault is that performing satisfactory identification of potential borrowers would acutely cut into their margins, so it's called "identity theft", and the "defrauded" third parties are simply assumed to have racked up debts or made agreements based on identification that is obviously too flimsy (given the widespreadness of the problem.)
If the bank made an error on a transaction, would you say they lost their money? Hell no... you would say they lost your money. How is this any different?
The bank lost track of the money you entrusted to them. If the bank uses this to deny you access to that money, then you "lost" the money you entrusted to the bank (by virtue of poorly picking a bank). Still, this isn't even similar-- you were the party that entrusted that money to an incompetent bank. In identity theft, you may have no connection at all to either the service provider or the fraudulent requester.
Unfortunately, at a certain point, it just becomes genocide. Raise your standards a bit more? Now it's total global annihilation. Do you think you're cut out for that? It'd be far too much work, even with legalization.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a thought-- give it a try and see if it works, I suppose.
Make the checkboxes and whatnot as images, very high-resolution black-and-white (2-color) images, and put them into the document, rescaled via CSS using ems instead of pixel heights.
I think the biggest setback to PNG was lousy support in Internet Explorer during a time of rapid Internet growth and solidification. Even though 8-bit PNG was rather trouble-free, the whole format had a "new and iffy" feel to it. Indexed, single-color transparency worked well, but in that case there were few clearly visible advantages to PNG (true, it's better compression, but it's not like PNG24/JPEG, where you can clearly see lack of JPEG crud). Also, there's still no standard browser support for MNG, so GIF has an advantage with 89a animation.
Although PNG has good compression over something like TIFF or BMP for full-color images, it's still a poor choice for posting large photos to the Web, as its lossless compression results in unwieldly file sizes while maximum (and adequate) quality JPEGs do much better.
To call "copyright infringement" theft is to make it seem that the victim has lost property (or the use of it) as in "They stole my car" or "They stole my diamond ring". Talk about obfuscation.
I agree that it's imperfect as a metaphor and incorrect as a statement, but to frame a response to someone's argument completely based upon that one poor choice of words just waylays the argument and invites poor assumptions. I wouldn't use the "Infringement = theft" line myself (although I can create a case that it's akin to nonpayment for services) but it's a disservice to the discourse to wail and stomp all over that one statement when it's not the issue.
There's a big difference between going in front of a judge and saying "this person has been incorrectly charged with the wrong crime", and going in front of Slashdot and saying "When you said 'stealing music', you really meant 'copyright infringement'."
Huh? Then what would be the ramifications of the US congress either abolishing copyrights tomorrow or enacting the death penalty for it?
How is that relevant to the discussion? Punishment or criminal definition was never brought up in this discussion, simply an offhand use of not having the "right to steal".
The reasons the copyright argument exists is because there is a legal definition for it.
There are also moral and ethical questions around that argument. People in the discussion know what the law is. That's a given point. The question often debated is whether the law should exist, and to what extent. Saying "your metaphor to stealing is wrong because it's not exactly stealing", especially when failing to cite how that changes the given argument, is just rehashing a tired line and trying to short-circuit the debate back to a completely legal one-- which it often isn't.
Yeah, but I'm not dealing with legal systems, nor am I concerned with the degrees of legal retribution.
I'm just annoyed that the people who always chime in with "It's not theft, it's copyright infringement.", are playing the flip-side of the same card. Although "theft" may be untrue to the discussion, by oversimplification and calling upon a basic known "evil", using nothing more than the argument "But it's not theft, it's infringement" does the opposite disservice, by obscuring the argument and framing it wholly within the legal construct. Also, to simply drop in with this quip (unless the first argument consists of nothing more than "It's THEFT, dammit!") appears to strive to construct a false link of "Theft=Wrong, Not theft=Not wrong, Infringement=Not theft, so Infringement=Not wrong".
That may be circumvention, but that's just to be able to use something you legally acquired. That's not what I'm talking about. Granted, if you kept and re-watched the copy after turning the original back in, I would find fault with that.
I've often wondered if there's a way to recycle disc media-- given my lousy track record with CDRWs (they tend to get scratched beyond reusability after the first time anyway), I just use and discard one-write discs even for ephemeral things.
And, clearly, since "copyright infringement" is a multi-syllable word that takes thought to understand, it can't be wrong.
You're missing the point-- I the PP was annoyed with the industry's commercial pleadings that are tacked onto the beginning of shows. It's another piece of irrelevant advertising, with a tone that's accusatory to the uninvolved and laughable to the pirates, and interrupts the experience for everyone.
If the movies were that lousy, there'd be no incentive to go or pirate them. Apparently they have some desirability-- having a place to get them with a lot less expenditure doesn't explicitly speak for or against the quality.
That said, the movies do kinda suck lately-- especially this year.
I doubt it. From what I've read, they have to be quite old, and/or be a unique model in order to get much more worth out of it than the annoyance cost of storage. Also, marginally common models can lack value unless they're cleaned and readjusted.
I've got a few typewriters sitting around, but they're rather common models. Even the interesting and antique-looking Royal Portable, I found, was produced for a wide range of years (mine comes, IIRC, from the late '30s or early '40s) and has little collectible value. If it's anything with plastic on it, forget it. Aside from simple packrattishness, I use them, along with old paper from estate sales, for artistically authentic old documents and letters. The biggest problem doing this? I've lived in the computer age too long. I can't write legible flowing cursive worth a damn. I really ought to self-teach or take a class on calligraphy.
Not the GPP, but who said either wasn't a crime?
By weight, volume, or population?
Good point. Session-stealing is a threat, since most times an umbrella session is required across subdomains to carry the "logged-in-ness". Hadn't considered that.
I suppose that if you isolated as many sensitive operations as possible under a specific subdomain's session-ID cookie, then use a less-secure and more general ID cookie for things like viewing others' profiles, that would dampen and contain, although not eliminate, this session-theft threat.
It's not even really a browser security issue. Okay, I suppose there could be user-interaction requirements so the form-filler doesn't *automatically* autofill on page load, but the real issue is site-owners who ignore the basic principles of site security and password handling, and open their users up to simple exploits.
The central concept in much of web-client security assumes that a domain is a single entity, and if you trust the domain, you trust the domain entirely. I don't see fault in this assumption-- a line has to be drawn somewhere as to what "one entity" is, and to split it much further would lead to unnecessary hoops and inconveniences. Back in the NetSol-monopoly days before cheap domain names, this point may have been debatable, but at that time there was far less personal information getting passed around by clients, as well.
Nowadays, anyone who is running a service with open access and open-ended "userpages" should be taking the bare-minimum step of sub-domaining their users' pages, and sub-domaining their own login forms as well. It costs nothing, it's more convenient for users, and it sandboxes everyone from each others' potential hack-attacks. If an exploit that gets around that, then people can talk, as that'd be a legitimate XSS or trojan/spoofing exploit. This stuff, though, is pinning exploits borne of shoddy web-side security onto the client developers.
That's funny you say that, because I'm on DSL, and I like it for the same reason-- I've found the same if not more setup troubles on cable connection (Comcast, even), with having to register the modem with the network, and the router with the modem... DSL for me has generally been "plug it in and go".
Of course, this is probably, more than anything, from going with smaller (TDS Metrocom) companies that don't bother with the "handy installation discs", and just give you a stock modem and a how-to paper.
You talk as if companies can just magically force people to pay more... okay, there are those "Compliance Fees" on phone bill that are basically "our lobbying money", so I suppose there's some instance, but still...
If a company "passes along" a charge to a consumer, that makes their product less attractive, and they stand to lose out to unburdened competitors. The company's having to decide where to trim costs or hike prices to pay the settlement is part of dealing with the settlement.
Then obviously you've never been on the winning end.
Stuff? Where's this "stuff" you're speaking of? Sorry, I guess I just don't follow your reference.
That brings in a whole new hairball, too, because if you legislate differences between media, it all gets shaken up when some new medium comes into play that's "a little bit of this and a little bit of that (oh... and on the Internet, patent)".
Imagine if we could catch every single person who has violated the law. What would happen?
The police would keep the footage on file to selectively enforce against anyone doing something legal but objectionable, or someone with something they want. Just because they could cite everyone on the planet for something, it doesn't mean they would.
This is the way it's been for quite a long time, and for anyone running a venue with entertainment should know how to deal with cover licensing. Why shouldn't songwriters have the rights to royalties on music they created? Why should performers get a free ride off songwriters? In a lot of cases, the songwriters are background people-- completely different from the popular performers of a song-- and they may have never performed the song at all. The royalties are their sole compensation for the work of songwriting.
If anything, the statutory licensing system is quite an improvement over simple copyright. Instead of having to track down and negotiate with numerous songwriters, the mechanicals can be taken care of by some simple record-keeping and a payment amount that the writer has to accept.
And, if a writer doesn't want to be compensated, they have that right as well. Disclaim copyright or liberally license, and don't sign onto BMI or ASCAP.
Covers aren't really considered a "derivative work" as much as a "use", when regarding the written portions of a song.
Regardless, derivative works are restricted by copyright as well. The only derivatives that aren't are fair-use derivatives-- of which parody is one. Fair use is a hole opened so, generally, peoples' rights to free speech and commentary are not curtailed by copyright protection. However, it does not permit non-commentary copying or derivation, as done with covers.
So if someone steals your SSN and fraudulently obtains a credit card, it's the institution's fault? Who's the victim? You are.
A service provider accepted falsified credentials and assumed an agreement because of fraud by an improperly authorized third party. Why should I be involved, responsible, or at fault? It's completely between the fraudulent third party and the defrauded lender... or, rather, it should be.
The only reason the banks don't get their share of the fault is that performing satisfactory identification of potential borrowers would acutely cut into their margins, so it's called "identity theft", and the "defrauded" third parties are simply assumed to have racked up debts or made agreements based on identification that is obviously too flimsy (given the widespreadness of the problem.)
If the bank made an error on a transaction, would you say they lost their money? Hell no... you would say they lost your money. How is this any different?
The bank lost track of the money you entrusted to them. If the bank uses this to deny you access to that money, then you "lost" the money you entrusted to the bank (by virtue of poorly picking a bank). Still, this isn't even similar-- you were the party that entrusted that money to an incompetent bank. In identity theft, you may have no connection at all to either the service provider or the fraudulent requester.
Unfortunately, at a certain point, it just becomes genocide. Raise your standards a bit more? Now it's total global annihilation. Do you think you're cut out for that? It'd be far too much work, even with legalization.
It's a subset... being specific. What's the big deal?