Listen to him complain about collateral damage - collateral damage is the point of blackhole lists! Damaging a rogue ISP's users is the solution, not the problem. If we didnt' punish these ignorant subscribers they would continue supporting spammers. . . . Rogue ISPs have proven that they will not act against spammers until they are financially threatened, and the only way to do that is to damage their user base to the point that they start losing subscribers. Collateral damage IS the point of blacklists - otherwise they're useless.
How is the collateral damage caused by blacklisting any better than what the RIAA proposed to do under Berman-Coble? If we're the good guys, we have to do it right.
We condemn the government when it punishes innocent people because of whom they associate with. We condemn our neighbors when they deride people solely because of where they live or shop. We do not punish the innocent for the actions of the guilty just because the innocent are easier to find and hurt.
Collateral damage is a poor justification for blacklists. Do we evict tenants who rent from slum-lords because the slum-lords are slum-lords? Do we burn down the apartments and cast the tenants out on the street hoping they'll exercise better judgment in choosing a landlord next time?
Of course not. We write laws guaranting tenants rights and do our darndest to see them enforced as often as possible. Spamming ISPs should be required to behave or face a the usual penalty -- fines or jail. If the fines are too low, raise them. If the (net)cops are too slow, set a bounty for private enforcement. Are there no geeks who will turn bounty hunter? I'll bet some of those who maintain blacklists would be just as happy with the business model of suing spammers for $500/message. Collateral damage is NOT the only way to "financially threaten" spammers. If we can find a way to bomb them out of business and not explode so many civilians, isn't that a good thing?
Why haven't we boycotted? Answer: some of us have.
I haven't bought a CD, DVD, etc. from any artist that is owned by the RIAA or MPAA in a year. I have told all my friends and family that I will not give them as gifts and that I prefer not to receive them as gifts either. And, I have explained to all those friends and family why.
I rent no movies.
I download no copyrighted tracks.
How do I survive without media? I buy music from local bands that press their own CDs. I borrow movies from the public library. I use over-the-air broadcast TV only -- no cable or satellite. (My one vice is going to first-run movies at the theatre.)
Do you know what I found out? I don't need those people as much as I thought I did. Sure, sure, my little boycott won't put those guys out of business. I know that. But now I have my money instead of them. As for you, you must decide for yourself.
This is why FatWallet needs to keep pressing the charges of the 512(f) provision and not let Wal*Mart settle out of court.
Perhaps what FatWallet needs to do is get back to being FatWallet. Their mission is the service they've set out to provide. If they devote their time and their funds to taking on WalMart, what will happen to that service? They don't have the resources to do both. Much as they'd probably like to pursue Walmart, trying would be a good way to destroy their business.
They take the victory. They walk away. Bonus: they just got their name mentioned in a WSJ article and on Slashdot.
Was this "crime" any reason to confiscate so much of the offender's equpiment? . . . Is it some sort of irrational fear that leads to those that commit computer crimes being put in the same category as terrorists (which they have been, BTW) even if their crime is simply that of "stealing" bandwidth?
Why take the computers? To search them, of course. The other shoe will drop when one of these 23 people turns out to have some contraband, etc. on his machine. Then they say, "Look, see, we were right. They were ALL terrorists / theives / copyright infringers / pirates."
How, exactly, are the provider's losses any more than the difference between what these uncappers paid for and the amount they would have been charged had they paid for the bandwidth they actually used?
What does that come to? The cost of about 3 extra subscriptions apiece? Ten? And for how many months? One? Two?
Sure, sure, these people broke their contracts, but _this_ is _nuts_.
"Software upgrades can be delivered easily using the internet," says Halderman, "and this will permanently undermine the usefulness of audio CD copy prevention." To ban upgrades, he argues, would lead to "buggy software and poor hardware."
So, he's talking about distributing a driver upgrade that circumvents the copy-prevention mechanism, right? Can you say DMCA?
What makes this especially fun is that the upgrade can be described as "a system for allowing a CDROM player to recover usable data from a CD with bad or malformed addenda to its table of contents". Thus, this upgrade does something legitimate. Not that the DMCA has ever cared about the presence or absence of a "substantial non-infringing use."
I'd think any patent that uses phrases like "a variety of" is too vague.
Not that I'm defending these putzes, but using the word "variety" here is not entirely crazy. For instance, Amazon.com is well known for selling a variety of merchandise on the net. Do you think it makes any difference what gets sold when you're talking about how they sell it?
If I patent an ink pen capable of writing in a variety of colors by extending one of several ink tubes out of an apature at the bottom of a pen, is it unpatentable because I used the word variety? No. It's unpatentable because people have been selling 4-color pens since at least the 1970s.
I think this patent is ridiculous, but for other things, not for that.
Patent infringement is not a tort. Patent infringement is patent infringment. "Tort Reform" has nothing to do with it.
Tort Reform is only about certain kinds of lawsuit -- things similar to personal injury suits. Tort reform will have no effect on other kinds of lawsuits, including all kinds of intellectual property suits, contracts, criminal law, etc. For instance, Tort reform won't change the way you sue some one who defaults on a contract. Same thing for patents.
...IP as a concept can be salvaged with two simple steps: make it ownable only by individuals and non-transferable.
What you propose is either much more complicated or much less innovative than it sounds. First, let's talk about copyrights, not IP. Trademarks, which are meant for labelling, need to last as long as the business that uses them exists. Patents are already much, much shorter than this; I don't think you want them lengthened to life + zero.
Second, a question. You conclude,
This method . . . would have put most of the items at issue in Eldred v. Ashcroft into the PD, while still allowing Disney, RIAA et. al to lobby Congress for longer & longer terms . ..
I don't understand. How could the **AA lobby for longer terms when you've fixed the term at life of the author + zero?
Now, let's get into the meat of this proposal. What does it mean that a copyright be non-transferrable? Does that mean that the "moral rights" to control the way something is used can't be sold? That might be a workable idea.
However, does "non-transferrable" also mean that you can't sell the future revenue from a work for a fixed sum now? For example, I write a novel and MGM wants to buy the so-called movie rights. We want to do a deal where they give me $2M now and they get all the future revenue. Are we allowed to do that? Or must I retain a running royalty? If so, how small can the running royalty be? 10%? 5%? 1%? 0.000001%?
Setting up a system where the creator can't transfer away all the money rights might be good, might be bad, but above all, it's complicated.
If all you're suggesting is setting the term at life + zero, that's not a grand new idea. If you mean to also tack on some "moral rights" that are non-transferrable, that's more interesting.
If you keep your idea secret, which you have every right to do, then the idea is useless to everyone, including yourself.
This is the quintessential bargain of patent law. (1) You, the inventor, have thought of something that the rest of us haven't. (2) So, if you will teach us how to do it, we'll give you a short monopoly. (3) But after that time, the idea becomes free for all to use.
This is one of the reasons patents are harder to get than copyrights -- every patent must teach the reader how to make the idea work.
Have computer viruses, then, become like the bacteria on our skin? -- As long as they're relatively benign and stay out of our blood streams, they can live on our skin all they want?
Or are they more like VD? -- Make sure you have current protection with you wherever you compute, otherwise sooner or later you're gonna catch the big one with the destructive payload.
From the Wired piece: When justices pressed Olson to explain why Congress should not be limited to extend copyright terms to just future works, Olson said the Constitution requires that Congress -- not the courts -- make that call.
"We're living in an era where piracy is a significant problem," Olson said. . ..
Some one explain to me how the length of a copyright term has anything to do with combating piracy. If piracy is a problem, isn't it roughly the same problem at life plus 70 that it was at life plus 50?
Actually, the morning NPR coverage was pretty disappointing. Props to them for giving the case 7 1/2 minutes in the morning, but their article suggested the case was about whether the present copyright holder or internet publishers got the rights to the work. That kind of misses the point that if Eldred wins we all get the works for free from now on.
Also, just for kicks, they tossed in the point that if CTEA is overturned, new derivative works could include pornographic ones. While that's true, this case is about free public access. The pornography angle amounts to **AA FUD.
The 5 minute spot in the afternoon that summarized the Justice's questioning was better.
Check out the NPRsummary of the questioning and the responses.
I think things sound pretty bad for Eldred and Co. There seems little hope that the Court plans to invalidate the life plus 70 term for new works created after 1998. At best, it sounds like the Court might invalidate the retroactive part of the law. This wouldn't be a complete defeat for Eldred, since many of the valuable old works whose creators have been lobbying Congress would be among those that would lose copyright. Therefore, less incentive to lobby.
Sometimes, in fact, often, you can invent something else that does the job required. Then again, sometimes you just can't. I suppose this sounds a lot like the notion that when Michael Crichton creates a one-hour night-time drama called ER, sometimes you can create a knock-off that people will watch and sometimes you can't.
Still, I'd say the ability of a nice, broad patent to exclude is different from copyright. For instance, a diesel engine won't run on gasoline. Hypothetically (this didn't really happen, to my knowledge), if the country has a network of gas stations built, but no diesel stations built, it may be that a diesel engine is less valuable until such a network of fuel sellers is established. That's a non-trivial problem.
Similar fuel-distribution problems are plaguing fuel-cell cars today. Until a fuel-cell distribution infrastructure is established, the current gasoline and diesel engines have an advantage in this respect.
Those pharmeceutical companies are another example. If they find an anti-allergy or anti-depressant or anti-impotence drug that works, their competitor simply may not be able to invent a substitute.
Anyway, your point that design-around is a good thing is well taken. I can't speak as to what the framers thought on that subject, but I do know that a lot of people who write about it today find great value in design-around. So do I.
the twenty year term (from date of filing) was only recently adopted -- it was actually 17 years from 1956 until 1999.
If you're going to pick nits, it was 17 years from date of issue. In practice, the 20-year from date of filing term is about equivalent. Overall, it may even produce slightly shorter patents if the application process takes longer than 3 years.
The reason has nothing to do with "competing monied interests on both sides of the patent issue." That's just plain silly -- its gobbledygook.
It's not that silly. Take pharmeceutical companies and generic drug manufacturers for instance. There are two groups of people that throw enormous amounts of money at the question of when particular patents will effectively end. Personally, I'm not historian enough to have an opinion worth hearing on what actually happened to keep patent terms as short as they are, but I can say that the money argument isn't nonsense. (Some one correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't patent terms start at 7 years from issue, jump to 14, then to 17, and then switch to 20 from filing?)
The difference in term has to do with the fundamental differences in the subject matter, scope and nature of the respective intellectual property assets.
However, here you may have something. Let's look at the differing tales of a publisher and a manufacturer who both see a competitor who has IP on something they'd like to sell. The publisher can't sell his competitor's copyrighted thing (e.g., a boy band pop song), so he signs an artist who creates a similar work and he sells that instead (another boy band with an equally bad pop song).
Our manufacturer has a worse time of it because of the way patents work. Say he wants to sell ziplock-style plastic sandwich bags. If the ziplock-style bag is covered by a comprehensive patent, he can't go out and get another bag that works just like it. He has to come up with a bag with a completely different closure mechanism. If the invention and the patent are really fundamental, maybe he can't. This manufacturer has an incentive to see this patent end as soon as possible. At the same time, he wants his own patents to last longer. Tension.
With copyrights, the industry has chosen to focus on a lets-create-new-content business model. While copyright does prevent you from getting a property exactly like Mickey Mouse, you can always create Bugs Bunny, which sells to almost the exact same consumer demand. Not so patents. If you can't sell the patented type of whatever-it-is, you're out of luck.
There is no misunderstanding between civilized individuals. There is simply a raw conflict of interest and no amount of debate is going to change that. We should not be debating with them, but within ourselves - what are we going to do about them?
This debate, like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, is not about changing the minds of the debators. It is about changing the minds of the audience. The **AA's revenue stream depends on laws (copyright, DMCA, etc.) which depends on legislators, which depend on voters. Both **AA and anti-DCMA advocates need to convince voters -- not consumers -- voters, to elect the legislators that serve them.
Does anyone think Valenti or Rosen or Stallman or Torvalds or Perens or Lessig or any of these people are going to change their minds? No. But that's not the goal of this debate.
Let's say that Berman's description of the bill is accurate. (Not that we believe this for a second--we _can_ read, afterall.) If so, what kind of "self-help" (i.e. "attacks") does he seem to think are permitted? With all his disclaimers, it's pretty hard to tell.
Answer: (1) They scan a P2P server for infringing works. (2) Then, they just download the infringing work. Alot. (3) Optional: Meanwhile, they create honeypots to flood the P2P nets with false files of their copyrighted works.
The effect of this is to cripple the pirate server and blow its bandwidth pipe. The elegance of this is that the attack ends immediately when the server owner removes the infringing file. Meanwhile, every download is a separate act of infringement by the server owner. As a bonus, the pirate's ISP will probably go apeshit over the traffic volume, causing the pirate additional grief without the **AA having to do any additional work.
This is a good plan for the **AA because it is mostly non-invasive (no more so than other downloading guests), deletes no files, requires no viruses, and probably doesn't fry any hardware (though it may every once in a while).
BUT if that's all the **AA had in mind (and that by itself would be bad enough), why is the bill so vague? Why is there a threshhold damages amount of $250? No, the **AA want to go further, and they're paying Berman to get them there.
(There is, of course, at least one problem with the above scenario. If attackers are required to ID themselves to a target server as "I am a **AA goon", as Berman suggests, then the target servers will learn to ignore them. Such a plan only works with anonymous, IP-shifting attackers.)
What law does the Internet really need? I don't think that the Internet really needs much law--it's really just a question of figuring out how best to apply more general laws to the online environment.
My man! Somebody nominate this guy for something. Like a legislature. Or the bench.
Slashdot Mirror
Listen to him complain about collateral damage - collateral damage is the point of blackhole lists! Damaging a rogue ISP's users is the solution, not the problem. If we didnt' punish these ignorant subscribers they would continue supporting spammers. . . . Rogue ISPs have proven that they will not act against spammers until they are financially threatened, and the only way to do that is to damage their user base to the point that they start losing subscribers. Collateral damage IS the point of blacklists - otherwise they're useless.
/message. Collateral damage is NOT the only way to "financially threaten" spammers. If we can find a way to bomb them out of business and not explode so many civilians, isn't that a good thing?
How is the collateral damage caused by blacklisting any better than what the RIAA proposed to do under Berman-Coble? If we're the good guys, we have to do it right.
We condemn the government when it punishes innocent people because of whom they associate with. We condemn our neighbors when they deride people solely because of where they live or shop. We do not punish the innocent for the actions of the guilty just because the innocent are easier to find and hurt.
Collateral damage is a poor justification for blacklists. Do we evict tenants who rent from slum-lords because the slum-lords are slum-lords? Do we burn down the apartments and cast the tenants out on the street hoping they'll exercise better judgment in choosing a landlord next time?
Of course not. We write laws guaranting tenants rights and do our darndest to see them enforced as often as possible. Spamming ISPs should be required to behave or face a the usual penalty -- fines or jail. If the fines are too low, raise them. If the (net)cops are too slow, set a bounty for private enforcement. Are there no geeks who will turn bounty hunter? I'll bet some of those who maintain blacklists would be just as happy with the business model of suing spammers for $500
Why haven't we boycotted? Answer: some of us have.
I haven't bought a CD, DVD, etc. from any artist that is owned by the RIAA or MPAA in a year. I have told all my friends and family that I will not give them as gifts and that I prefer not to receive them as gifts either. And, I have explained to all those friends and family why.
I rent no movies.
I download no copyrighted tracks.
How do I survive without media?
I buy music from local bands that press their own CDs. I borrow movies from the public library. I use over-the-air broadcast TV only -- no cable or satellite. (My one vice is going to first-run movies at the theatre.)
Do you know what I found out? I don't need those people as much as I thought I did. Sure, sure, my little boycott won't put those guys out of business. I know that. But now I have my money instead of them. As for you, you must decide for yourself.
This is why FatWallet needs to keep pressing the charges of the 512(f) provision and not let Wal*Mart settle out of court.
Perhaps what FatWallet needs to do is get back to being FatWallet. Their mission is the service they've set out to provide. If they devote their time and their funds to taking on WalMart, what will happen to that service? They don't have the resources to do both. Much as they'd probably like to pursue Walmart, trying would be a good way to destroy their business.
They take the victory. They walk away. Bonus: they just got their name mentioned in a WSJ article and on Slashdot.
Was this "crime" any reason to confiscate so much of the offender's equpiment? . . . Is it some sort of irrational fear that leads to those that commit computer crimes being put in the same category as terrorists (which they have been, BTW) even if their crime is simply that of "stealing" bandwidth?
Why take the computers? To search them, of course. The other shoe will drop when one of these 23 people turns out to have some contraband, etc. on his machine. Then they say, "Look, see, we were right. They were ALL terrorists / theives / copyright infringers / pirates."
How, exactly, are the provider's losses any more than the difference between what these uncappers paid for and the amount they would have been charged had they paid for the bandwidth they actually used?
What does that come to? The cost of about 3 extra subscriptions apiece? Ten? And for how many months? One? Two?
Sure, sure, these people broke their contracts, but _this_ is _nuts_.
LOL
Thank you. I needed that this morning.
"Software upgrades can be delivered easily using the internet," says Halderman, "and this will permanently undermine the usefulness of audio CD copy prevention." To ban upgrades, he argues, would lead to "buggy software and poor hardware."
So, he's talking about distributing a driver upgrade that circumvents the copy-prevention mechanism, right? Can you say DMCA?
What makes this especially fun is that the upgrade can be described as "a system for allowing a CDROM player to recover usable data from a CD with bad or malformed addenda to its table of contents". Thus, this upgrade does something legitimate. Not that the DMCA has ever cared about the presence or absence of a "substantial non-infringing use."
Grumble, grumble.
NOTICE OF REJECTION OF CLAIMS
Your article San Diego Company Owns E-Commerce is hereby rejected as anticipated by the prior art article Patent Cases Hurting Small Businesses.
Seriously, are patent examiners now moonlighting as Slashdot editors?
Didn't the veterans of the LAPD also do this in Idaho? See also Copland (Stalone, Keitel, De Niro, 1997).
I'd think any patent that uses phrases like "a variety of" is too vague.
Not that I'm defending these putzes, but using the word "variety" here is not entirely crazy. For instance, Amazon.com is well known for selling a variety of merchandise on the net. Do you think it makes any difference what gets sold when you're talking about how they sell it?
If I patent an ink pen capable of writing in a variety of colors by extending one of several ink tubes out of an apature at the bottom of a pen, is it unpatentable because I used the word variety? No. It's unpatentable because people have been selling 4-color pens since at least the 1970s.
I think this patent is ridiculous, but for other things, not for that.
Tort reform won't fix the IP law problem.
Patent infringement is not a tort. Patent infringement is patent infringment. "Tort Reform" has nothing to do with it.
Tort Reform is only about certain kinds of lawsuit -- things similar to personal injury suits. Tort reform will have no effect on other kinds of lawsuits, including all kinds of intellectual property suits, contracts, criminal law, etc. For instance, Tort reform won't change the way you sue some one who defaults on a contract. Same thing for patents.
...IP as a concept can be salvaged with two simple steps: make it ownable only by individuals and non-transferable.
.
What you propose is either much more complicated or much less innovative than it sounds. First, let's talk about copyrights, not IP. Trademarks, which are meant for labelling, need to last as long as the business that uses them exists. Patents are already much, much shorter than this; I don't think you want them lengthened to life + zero.
Second, a question. You conclude,
This method . . . would have put most of the items at issue in Eldred v. Ashcroft into the PD, while still allowing Disney, RIAA et. al to lobby Congress for longer & longer terms . .
I don't understand. How could the **AA lobby for longer terms when you've fixed the term at life of the author + zero?
Now, let's get into the meat of this proposal. What does it mean that a copyright be non-transferrable? Does that mean that the "moral rights" to control the way something is used can't be sold? That might be a workable idea.
However, does "non-transferrable" also mean that you can't sell the future revenue from a work for a fixed sum now? For example, I write a novel and MGM wants to buy the so-called movie rights. We want to do a deal where they give me $2M now and they get all the future revenue. Are we allowed to do that? Or must I retain a running royalty? If so, how small can the running royalty be? 10%? 5%? 1%? 0.000001%?
Setting up a system where the creator can't transfer away all the money rights might be good, might be bad, but above all, it's complicated.
If all you're suggesting is setting the term at life + zero, that's not a grand new idea. If you mean to also tack on some "moral rights" that are non-transferrable, that's more interesting.
If you keep your idea secret, which you have every right to do, then the idea is useless to everyone, including yourself.
This is the quintessential bargain of patent law. (1) You, the inventor, have thought of something that the rest of us haven't. (2) So, if you will teach us how to do it, we'll give you a short monopoly. (3) But after that time, the idea becomes free for all to use.
This is one of the reasons patents are harder to get than copyrights -- every patent must teach the reader how to make the idea work.
Have computer viruses, then, become like the bacteria on our skin? -- As long as they're relatively benign and stay out of our blood streams, they can live on our skin all they want?
Or are they more like VD? -- Make sure you have current protection with you wherever you compute, otherwise sooner or later you're gonna catch the big one with the destructive payload.
From the Wired piece:
.
When justices pressed Olson to explain why Congress should not be limited to extend copyright terms to just future works, Olson said the Constitution requires that Congress -- not the courts -- make that call.
"We're living in an era where piracy is a significant problem," Olson said. . .
Some one explain to me how the length of a copyright term has anything to do with combating piracy. If piracy is a problem, isn't it roughly the same problem at life plus 70 that it was at life plus 50?
Actually, the morning NPR coverage was pretty disappointing. Props to them for giving the case 7 1/2 minutes in the morning, but their article suggested the case was about whether the present copyright holder or internet publishers got the rights to the work. That kind of misses the point that if Eldred wins we all get the works for free from now on.
Also, just for kicks, they tossed in the point that if CTEA is overturned, new derivative works could include pornographic ones. While that's true, this case is about free public access. The pornography angle amounts to **AA FUD.
The 5 minute spot in the afternoon that summarized the Justice's questioning was better.
Post hoc, ergo procter hoc? Yeah, right.
And where, BTW, is the stat on how many peole die each week after watching 86 straight hours of TV? You know they're out there.
Check out the NPR summary of the questioning and the responses.
I think things sound pretty bad for Eldred and Co. There seems little hope that the Court plans to invalidate the life plus 70 term for new works created after 1998. At best, it sounds like the Court might invalidate the retroactive part of the law. This wouldn't be a complete defeat for Eldred, since many of the valuable old works whose creators have been lobbying Congress would be among those that would lose copyright. Therefore, less incentive to lobby.
Sometimes, in fact, often, you can invent something else that does the job required. Then again, sometimes you just can't. I suppose this sounds a lot like the notion that when Michael Crichton creates a one-hour night-time drama called ER, sometimes you can create a knock-off that people will watch and sometimes you can't.
Still, I'd say the ability of a nice, broad patent to exclude is different from copyright. For instance, a diesel engine won't run on gasoline. Hypothetically (this didn't really happen, to my knowledge), if the country has a network of gas stations built, but no diesel stations built, it may be that a diesel engine is less valuable until such a network of fuel sellers is established. That's a non-trivial problem.
Similar fuel-distribution problems are plaguing fuel-cell cars today. Until a fuel-cell distribution infrastructure is established, the current gasoline and diesel engines have an advantage in this respect.
Those pharmeceutical companies are another example. If they find an anti-allergy or anti-depressant or anti-impotence drug that works, their competitor simply may not be able to invent a substitute.
Anyway, your point that design-around is a good thing is well taken. I can't speak as to what the framers thought on that subject, but I do know that a lot of people who write about it today find great value in design-around. So do I.
the twenty year term (from date of filing) was only recently adopted -- it was actually 17 years from 1956 until 1999.
If you're going to pick nits, it was 17 years from date of issue. In practice, the 20-year from date of filing term is about equivalent. Overall, it may even produce slightly shorter patents if the application process takes longer than 3 years.
The reason has nothing to do with "competing monied interests on both sides of the patent issue." That's just plain silly -- its gobbledygook.
It's not that silly. Take pharmeceutical companies and generic drug manufacturers for instance. There are two groups of people that throw enormous amounts of money at the question of when particular patents will effectively end. Personally, I'm not historian enough to have an opinion worth hearing on what actually happened to keep patent terms as short as they are, but I can say that the money argument isn't nonsense. (Some one correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't patent terms start at 7 years from issue, jump to 14, then to 17, and then switch to 20 from filing?)
The difference in term has to do with the fundamental differences in the subject matter, scope and nature of the respective intellectual property assets.
However, here you may have something. Let's look at the differing tales of a publisher and a manufacturer who both see a competitor who has IP on something they'd like to sell. The publisher can't sell his competitor's copyrighted thing (e.g., a boy band pop song), so he signs an artist who creates a similar work and he sells that instead (another boy band with an equally bad pop song).
Our manufacturer has a worse time of it because of the way patents work. Say he wants to sell ziplock-style plastic sandwich bags. If the ziplock-style bag is covered by a comprehensive patent, he can't go out and get another bag that works just like it. He has to come up with a bag with a completely different closure mechanism. If the invention and the patent are really fundamental, maybe he can't. This manufacturer has an incentive to see this patent end as soon as possible. At the same time, he wants his own patents to last longer. Tension.
With copyrights, the industry has chosen to focus on a lets-create-new-content business model. While copyright does prevent you from getting a property exactly like Mickey Mouse, you can always create Bugs Bunny, which sells to almost the exact same consumer demand. Not so patents. If you can't sell the patented type of whatever-it-is, you're out of luck.
There is no misunderstanding between civilized individuals. There is simply a raw conflict of interest and no amount of debate is going to change that. We should not be debating with them, but within ourselves - what are we going to do about them?
This debate, like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, is not about changing the minds of the debators. It is about changing the minds of the audience. The **AA's revenue stream depends on laws (copyright, DMCA, etc.) which depends on legislators, which depend on voters. Both **AA and anti-DCMA advocates need to convince voters -- not consumers -- voters, to elect the legislators that serve them.
Does anyone think Valenti or Rosen or Stallman or Torvalds or Perens or Lessig or any of these people are going to change their minds? No. But that's not the goal of this debate.
Let's say that Berman's description of the bill is accurate. (Not that we believe this for a second--we _can_ read, afterall.) If so, what kind of "self-help" (i.e. "attacks") does he seem to think are permitted? With all his disclaimers, it's pretty hard to tell.
Answer: (1) They scan a P2P server for infringing works. (2) Then, they just download the infringing work. Alot. (3) Optional: Meanwhile, they create honeypots to flood the P2P nets with false files of their copyrighted works.
The effect of this is to cripple the pirate server and blow its bandwidth pipe. The elegance of this is that the attack ends immediately when the server owner removes the infringing file. Meanwhile, every download is a separate act of infringement by the server owner. As a bonus, the pirate's ISP will probably go apeshit over the traffic volume, causing the pirate additional grief without the **AA having to do any additional work.
This is a good plan for the **AA because it is mostly non-invasive (no more so than other downloading guests), deletes no files, requires no viruses, and probably doesn't fry any hardware (though it may every once in a while).
BUT if that's all the **AA had in mind (and that by itself would be bad enough), why is the bill so vague? Why is there a threshhold damages amount of $250? No, the **AA want to go further, and they're paying Berman to get them there.
(There is, of course, at least one problem with the above scenario. If attackers are required to ID themselves to a target server as "I am a **AA goon", as Berman suggests, then the target servers will learn to ignore them. Such a plan only works with anonymous, IP-shifting attackers.)
Strip away the clutter and follow the logic through. The article seems to think:
1. We must find a way to sell broadband. (Why? Either to help the economy or to give justice to the access-lacking masses, take your pick.)
2. To get people to buy broadband, we need content. (The proof of this is that Napster sold broadband.)
3. Therefore we need DRM so that MPAA and RIAA will sell content, thus selling broadband, thus saving humanity.
Is this article really doing anything more than pushing the case for DRM?
LOL. Thanks.
What law does the Internet really need?
I don't think that the Internet really needs much law--it's really just a question of figuring out how best to apply more general laws to the online environment.
My man! Somebody nominate this guy for something. Like a legislature. Or the bench.