So, on the one hand, commercial data must be kept secret:
"Don't look at the source code."
"That information is proprietary."
Non-disclosure agreements
Intellectual property black boxes that you can't touch, or even discuss how to touch.
On the other hand, my medical records, surfing habits, shopping history, demographic info should be open to anyone who wants to use it to make a buck..
And when some of us protest, then it's "no..you can't stop the free flow of information. Once your data hits my servers, I own it, and you can't tell me what to do with it. We'll police ourselves."
I believe people who work hard and ethically have a right to their billion dollars.
Hello? Heelllooo?!
No one makes a billion dollars by working 100,000 times harder than someone making 10K.
They make a billion dollars by having a horde of people who are earning 10K work for them. Check out Nike.
Phil Knight doesn't work any harder than the Vietnamese girls who make the shoes. Those girls are not *lazy*.
He makes his money by siphoning off the value from their labor, since they work in a corrupt government where unions and occupational safety codes are written by dictators who have no interest in protecting these "lazy" poor people.
There is no relationship, for example, between executive compensation and productivity.
What really lets people make huge amounts of money is not hard work (the mexicans who wash the dishes in the restaurant where you dine are working very hard) and it's not intelligence (the college prof's who taught you are probably pulling in 60K on average. The grad students are making 15-20K) but it's being able to position yourself into a role where you either manage people, or money, or both. Or maybe get a fat government monopoly on something (i.e. patents) that others use and skim off of their income. That, or just let your money "work" for you.
In either case the key to making big bucks is to park your behind right in the middle of some productivity intersection, and start taking tolls..
And if any one objects, there will always be Ayn Rand worshipping idealogues such as yourself to keep up the PR war, believing that this is somehow the ethical way to do business.
Maybe I'm jaded from living in silicon valley, but I *do* think that most net services should either be free (supported by ads) or of very limited cost. Let's look at some of the "expenses" of these high-flying companies, who are now in the lurch.
hiring brand name MBAs for ridiculous salaries (web-based email/chat isn't exactly some deep esoteric endeavor).
hiring perl jocks for $100+ per hour ( xyz.com, your local free isp, the works)
buying up beacoup unneeded office space at king's ransom rates for a hypothetical future workforce of thousands (yahoo)
floating unmanagable corporate bonds or otherwise staking your future on unreasonable margin wet-dreams (amazon.com + many others)
generally over-expanding in an effort to take over the world...
so I guess my point is that if you are planning on taking over the planet or fulfilling some 'grand-synthesis' of commercial services, then NO, advertising will not be able to pay your bills.
But there ought to be a place for the small/medium company that just wants to sell a few books online(hey I expect to pay for the books), or provide a free chat service, news site, email hosting, etc. I mean the hardware is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, 20 bucks a year or a few banner ads per person ought to be able to get you there with extra cash in your pocket.
Hopefully, many of these Nasdaq monoliths will just go belly-up, and their high-priced business practices with them.
Then we can get some company based in Kansas or someplace where a freshly-minted college student can rent an apartment for $600/month or less, and go work for a pretty decent small-potatoes company. No expansion into selling toasters with that email client. Or home mortgage loans. Just provide a cool service to 10 million people for only $1/year...
Most Classical music is still copyrighted and very expensively so.
Because it's played from sheet music there are several copyright issues to deal with: the actual music or the original text the composer wrote, which although it may no longer be copyrighted, it nevertheless remains the physical property of some estate. This music is periodically edited, often to account for changes in instrumentation/music hall sizes.
Most people, when they hear Beethoven's symphonies, are not hearing the original version: Mahler edited the text to exploit the larger music halls which came into fashion. He added instruments and "beefed up" the sound.
Also, there is a copyright on the actual typesetting of the notes as they appear on the paper (yes this is very lame). All of these are copyrighted for the life of the author plus some ungodly length of time (I think it's 50 years, actually, instead of 120, but the law may have changed)
So the bottom line is that if you wish to play a classical music piece you will have to pay up the wazzoo for the music.
Case in point:
My mother plays in a semi-professional local orchestra. There's a core group of musicians who get a couple hundred dollars per performance, surrounded by a larger group of volunteers. The licensing fees for the sheet music amounts to, on average, $5000 per perfomance. That's for each piece of music played. Since they have about five concerts a year, each performed twice, and each containing about 5 musical selections, that amounts to about $250,000 a year
in copyright fees that this community orchestra must pay. This is by far the biggest artificial hurdle that local symphonies face in trying to stay afloat, since the difference between red and black is often much smaller. Why non-profit organizations must pay these fees is beyond me. Also, the debate over government funding of the arts is really silly in comparison to the huge sums sent to the estates of dead composers, who often control the above copyrights. I would much rather if the government just got out of the way and refused to enforce these monopolies instead of requiring community symphonies to pay outrageous amounts, and then throwing them a few bucks in NEA grants with loads of strings attached.
It seems to me like they are just moving the problem into the hardware area. I.e. the size of the hardware grows exponentially, rather than computation time. Moreover, it's not clear from the article that the computation time wont grow exponentially either. I'm assuming that it won't, but these things are pretty tough to prove, and would require building a large number of these devices, each suited for a different # of vertices, and then graphing the computation time. Even that wouldn't be conclusive.
So those of you worrying about AI can relax a bit. Also, building hardware which solves a single algorithm with no abstract constants is not particularly useful for taking over the world, simulating thought, etc.
There might be some applications to decryption, if the size of the key is fixed, etc. But they'll have to build a different "computer" as the key-size grows. Wont be a problem for the NSA though...
DeCSS is code, and there is a strong argument, as well as a federal court ruling, which says that source code is speech, so the analogy fails on its face.
moreover, the case against 2600 is not that they wrote the code, but that they linked to a cite where the code was posted, so a better (but still wrong) analogy would be to arrest someone for giving them directions to where a gunshop might be found.
..but even if that analogy held, things like the anarchist's cookbook are legal publications. The Progressive even published instructions on making a hydrogen bomb and was allowed to publish this on the grounds of freedom of speech -- the ruling is still wrong(and stupid).
finally, DeCSS does not enable copying -- you can copy bit-for-bit just fine, and then press unauthorized DVD's which will play on authorized DVD players; this is happening on a mass scale in China and other foreign countries.
What DeCSS does do is allow
a person/company to manufacture a DVD player without being under the thumb of the MPAA. This means that
1) MPAA can't make a buck in "license fees" on every DVD player sold.
2) it cannot control how the movie is watched -- i.e. whether you have to sit through "previews"/commercials or fast-forward through them, and
3) whether they can control price/availability. i.e. -- charge more/release sooner in the richer countries and charge less/release later in the 3rd world (via "region coding"). Also, in those countries with weaker anti-trust laws, they could conceivably license only *one* manufacturer of DVD's who would be their distributor. Then they would control the price, since if those guys didn't play ball, they'd lose their license.
It's not about preventing copying -- the "encrypting" is so trivial it can be broken by a brute force attack in seconds on average hardware. It's a technical application of an industry-written copyright law to control a hardware market.
Sorry, but this is just not an appropriate metaphor for the pro-gun crowd to hang their from.
On the one hand, you've got the MPAA claiming to have the sole legal license that every DVD player must agree to. A license which mandates "region pricing." Moreover, they claim that CSS is a "trade secret" even though their own lawyers leaked the source code in public records, plus it's available on thousands of websites worldwide.
No one goes after these guys for monopolistic trade practices.
Then, you've got this 16 year old kid arrested for trying to play DVD's on his linux box, and 2600 sued for linking to him.
I keep waiting for the evil Kirk to burst into the courtroom, zap the jury and cackle hysterically...
Also, Kudos to the foreign activists who post the code on their webpages. Thank you. Things are pretty messed up over here in the States...
more pressure on hardware manufacturers to open up their specs.
more companies using *nix in more departments(not just as servers) means more jobs for *nix sysadmins, custom software providers, and contractors.
a greater push towards open standards/source code so that writing programs will be easier, more efficient, and more fun.
we wont have a future where people are charged to use their word-processors as a "service," or giant registry databases keeping track of every single piece of software we use and for how long. Atleast it gives privacy a fighting chance..
the (good) code you write will live on in other projects.
higher visibility of *nix means more popularity and a better chance of getting dates:)
Mom will have an OS that is stable, fast, easy to use, and free. (come on, help mom out -- she'll thank you)
We're *almost* there. Almost. Let's not let snobbery get in the way. Mom would be so happy..
How many of you can rebuild a carburetor? Or do a tune up?
You just want to turn the key and drive
How many know which foods spoil at which temperatures? Or which preservatives/additives have which effects? Or how the sushi is transported and how it's prepared?
You just take the bag-o-frozen pizza, stick it in the microwave, and press START
Does this make you stupid? Worthy of ridicule as the unthinking masses? No.
Then why the double standard when it comes to computers?
Why is the desire to press a button OK for an elevator or a microwave but wrong for a text-editor?
AOL is a business, AIM is one of their products, and if they don't want other companies to connect to it then that is their right.
Sure. Until we decide we don't want 'em to do it. The packets sent to AOL don't just pass through their hardware. And their software takes up more than a few megs on many a harddrive. Last I checked, a lot of people who don't use AOL as their ISP use their messanging system, so those packets are travelling on network access not paid for by AOL.
Moreover, those packets are only able to make it to their precious servers because every guy in between agreed to adopt open protocols. Yet again, AOL has parked their furry behinds on top of this open protocol and decided to build a walled garden.
There isn't a fundamental human right to use AOL, but neither is there a fundamental human right to use proprietary protocols in a widely used internet feature and buy up your competitors (especially if you're not human).
So the point is, if you are using a public, collaborative network, then you are open to regulation -- especially regulation aimed at standardization/open protocols -- you know, the good kind.
Let's broaden our vision here a little. Just like AOL's previous walled garden startegy failed, this one will, too. Actually enforcing what the FCC agreement was meant to do will be good for instant messanging and, in the long term, for AOL.
I think what we have instead, is the current situation.
People are voting with their mouse clicks.
We are not pirates. We are not even robber barrons. It's a natural human trait to share music, and as long as hard drive space is cheap and bandwidth keeps growing, the only way that we will "lose" is if an intrusive government somehow manages to spy on all of us or monitor our downloads or establish some technological barriers to doing what is cheap, easy, and natural. I hope that doesn't happen, though, and perhaps you should, too.
But if you mean that we need a new copyright regime, then I'm all for it. Whatever it is, though it should
1. Maintain the richness of the public domain as its first priority
2. Uphold privacy, limit government intrusivness.
3. Be the result of a true public debate
As a corollary, it certainly wont criminalize the behavior of 80% of the computer using populace, all in the name of upholding a scared and greedy trade body.
1) the rights of corporations *should* not be as rich as those of people (I know -- they are)
..and
2) that the GPL uses the (unifairly) restrictive powers of copyright law in a way to to lessen the restrictive impact of some future copyrights -- (get it...GNU != Unix)
Yes, if our laws were'nt bought and paid for but were instead subject to real democratic input, there would be no need for a GPL, or any of the other crazy license agreements (Use of this product entitles us to all moral rights of your work and your first unborn child. You agree to not disparage this software or make money off of any remotely related activity. Any ideas you think of while using this product belong to XYZ corp..) we wouldn't have to rely on creative legal maneouvres to maintain the richness of the public domain. I agree with the original poster. The current copyright laws had no public input, were not responsive to any public pressures, and were not written with any public benefit in mind. They were spawned in the offices of lobbyists a stone's throw from the capitol. Said lobbyists handed the bills and a check to our congressmen. Virtually all laws governing commerce in this country have the same history.
If the corporations have such a low regard for the law that they can bribe our legislators and rewrite it retroactively anytime a Disney cartoon approaches the public domain, then why should we have any higher regard for these McStatutes*?
Slashdot Mirror
Your sordid love life disgusts me. Sheesh!
Keep that sh*t behind closed doors.
So, on the one hand, commercial data must be kept secret:
"Don't look at the source code."
"That information is proprietary."
Non-disclosure agreements
Intellectual property black boxes that you can't touch, or even discuss how to touch.
On the other hand, my medical records, surfing habits, shopping history, demographic info should be open to anyone who wants to use it to make a buck..
And when some of us protest, then it's "no..you can't stop the free flow of information. Once your data hits my servers, I own it, and you can't tell me what to do with it. We'll police ourselves."
I believe people who work hard and ethically have a right to their billion dollars.
Hello? Heelllooo?!
No one makes a billion dollars by working 100,000 times harder than someone making 10K.
They make a billion dollars by having a horde of people who are earning 10K work for them. Check out Nike.
Phil Knight doesn't work any harder than the Vietnamese girls who make the shoes. Those girls are not *lazy*.
He makes his money by siphoning off the value from their labor, since they work in a corrupt government where unions and occupational safety codes are written by dictators who have no interest in protecting these "lazy" poor people.
There is no relationship, for example, between executive compensation and productivity.
What really lets people make huge amounts of money is not hard work (the mexicans who wash the dishes in the restaurant where you dine are working very hard) and it's not intelligence (the college prof's who taught you are probably pulling in 60K on average. The grad students are making 15-20K) but it's being able to position yourself into a role where you either manage people, or money, or both. Or maybe get a fat government monopoly on something (i.e. patents) that others use and skim off of their income. That, or just let your money "work" for you.
In either case the key to making big bucks is to park your behind right in the middle of some productivity intersection, and start taking tolls..
And if any one objects, there will always be Ayn Rand worshipping idealogues such as yourself to keep up the PR war, believing that this is somehow the ethical way to do business.
hiring brand name MBAs for ridiculous salaries (web-based email/chat isn't exactly some deep esoteric endeavor).
hiring perl jocks for $100+ per hour ( xyz.com, your local free isp, the works)
buying up beacoup unneeded office space at king's ransom rates for a hypothetical future workforce of thousands (yahoo)
floating unmanagable corporate bonds or otherwise staking your future on unreasonable margin wet-dreams (amazon.com + many others)
generally over-expanding in an effort to take over the world...
so I guess my point is that if you are planning on taking over the planet or fulfilling some 'grand-synthesis' of commercial services, then NO, advertising will not be able to pay your bills.
But there ought to be a place for the small/medium company that just wants to sell a few books online(hey I expect to pay for the books), or provide a free chat service, news site, email hosting, etc. I mean the hardware is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, 20 bucks a year or a few banner ads per person ought to be able to get you there with extra cash in your pocket.
Hopefully, many of these Nasdaq monoliths will just go belly-up, and their high-priced business practices with them.
Then we can get some company based in Kansas or someplace where a freshly-minted college student can rent an apartment for $600/month or less, and go work for a pretty decent small-potatoes company. No expansion into selling toasters with that email client. Or home mortgage loans. Just provide a cool service to 10 million people for only $1/year...
Most Classical music is still copyrighted and very expensively so.
Because it's played from sheet music there are several copyright issues to deal with: the actual music or the original text the composer wrote, which although it may no longer be copyrighted, it nevertheless remains the physical property of some estate. This music is periodically edited, often to account for changes in instrumentation/music hall sizes.
Most people, when they hear Beethoven's symphonies, are not hearing the original version: Mahler edited the text to exploit the larger music halls which came into fashion. He added instruments and "beefed up" the sound.
Also, there is a copyright on the actual typesetting of the notes as they appear on the paper (yes this is very lame). All of these are copyrighted for the life of the author plus some ungodly length of time (I think it's 50 years, actually, instead of 120, but the law may have changed)
So the bottom line is that if you wish to play a classical music piece you will have to pay up the wazzoo for the music.
Case in point:
My mother plays in a semi-professional local orchestra. There's a core group of musicians who get a couple hundred dollars per performance, surrounded by a larger group of volunteers. The licensing fees for the sheet music amounts to, on average, $5000 per perfomance. That's for each piece of music played. Since they have about five concerts a year, each performed twice, and each containing about 5 musical selections, that amounts to about $250,000 a year in copyright fees that this community orchestra must pay. This is by far the biggest artificial hurdle that local symphonies face in trying to stay afloat, since the difference between red and black is often much smaller. Why non-profit organizations must pay these fees is beyond me. Also, the debate over government funding of the arts is really silly in comparison to the huge sums sent to the estates of dead composers, who often control the above copyrights. I would much rather if the government just got out of the way and refused to enforce these monopolies instead of requiring community symphonies to pay outrageous amounts, and then throwing them a few bucks in NEA grants with loads of strings attached.
amount Chaucer got paid to write The Canterbury Tales = $0.00
...amount of St. Mathew's Passion which is "borrowed" work from other composers = 1/5
amount Van Gogh received from sales of all but 1 painting = $0.00
copyright fees collected by Bach = $0.00
amount they received in sampling/licensing fees = $0.00
amount (currency converted to USD and adjusted for inflation)
It seems to me like they are just moving the problem into the hardware area. I.e. the size of the hardware grows exponentially, rather than computation time. Moreover, it's not clear from the article that the computation time wont grow exponentially either. I'm assuming that it won't, but these things are pretty tough to prove, and would require building a large number of these devices, each suited for a different # of vertices, and then graphing the computation time. Even that wouldn't be conclusive.
So those of you worrying about AI can relax a bit. Also, building hardware which solves a single algorithm with no abstract constants is not particularly useful for taking over the world, simulating thought, etc.
There might be some applications to decryption, if the size of the key is fixed, etc. But they'll have to build a different "computer" as the key-size grows. Wont be a problem for the NSA though...
I must have inserted the vaporised jury for dramatic effect :)
Hope you're also right about the judges.
(Now if we could just get those guys appointed to the appeals court...)
DeCSS is code, and there is a strong argument, as well as a federal court ruling, which says that source code is speech, so the analogy fails on its face.
moreover, the case against 2600 is not that they wrote the code, but that they linked to a cite where the code was posted, so a better (but still wrong) analogy would be to arrest someone for giving them directions to where a gunshop might be found.
..but even if that analogy held, things like the anarchist's cookbook are legal publications. The Progressive even published instructions on making a hydrogen bomb and was allowed to publish this on the grounds of freedom of speech -- the ruling is still wrong(and stupid).
finally, DeCSS does not enable copying -- you can copy bit-for-bit just fine, and then press unauthorized DVD's which will play on authorized DVD players; this is happening on a mass scale in China and other foreign countries.
What DeCSS does do is allow a person/company to manufacture a DVD player without being under the thumb of the MPAA. This means that
1) MPAA can't make a buck in "license fees" on every DVD player sold.
2) it cannot control how the movie is watched -- i.e. whether you have to sit through "previews"/commercials or fast-forward through them, and
3) whether they can control price/availability. i.e. -- charge more/release sooner in the richer countries and charge less/release later in the 3rd world (via "region coding"). Also, in those countries with weaker anti-trust laws, they could conceivably license only *one* manufacturer of DVD's who would be their distributor. Then they would control the price, since if those guys didn't play ball, they'd lose their license.
It's not about preventing copying -- the "encrypting" is so trivial it can be broken by a brute force attack in seconds on average hardware. It's a technical application of an industry-written copyright law to control a hardware market.
Sorry, but this is just not an appropriate metaphor for the pro-gun crowd to hang their from.
On the one hand, you've got the MPAA claiming to have the sole legal license that every DVD player must agree to. A license which mandates "region pricing." Moreover, they claim that CSS is a "trade secret" even though their own lawyers leaked the source code in public records, plus it's available on thousands of websites worldwide.
No one goes after these guys for monopolistic trade practices.
Then, you've got this 16 year old kid arrested for trying to play DVD's on his linux box, and 2600 sued for linking to him.
I keep waiting for the evil Kirk to burst into the courtroom, zap the jury and cackle hysterically...
Also, Kudos to the foreign activists who post the code on their webpages. Thank you. Things are pretty messed up over here in the States...
more pressure on hardware manufacturers to open up their specs.
more companies using *nix in more departments(not just as servers) means more jobs for *nix sysadmins, custom software providers, and contractors.
a greater push towards open standards/source code so that writing programs will be easier, more efficient, and more fun.
we wont have a future where people are charged to use their word-processors as a "service," or giant registry databases keeping track of every single piece of software we use and for how long. Atleast it gives privacy a fighting chance..
the (good) code you write will live on in other projects.
higher visibility of *nix means more popularity and a better chance of getting dates:)
Mom will have an OS that is stable, fast, easy to use, and free.
(come on, help mom out -- she'll thank you)
We're *almost* there. Almost. Let's not let snobbery get in the way. Mom would be so happy..
Huraah!!
My mom thanks you.
How many of you can rebuild a carburetor? Or do a tune up?
You just want to turn the key and drive
How many know which foods spoil at which temperatures? Or which preservatives/additives have which effects? Or how the sushi is transported and how it's prepared?
You just take the bag-o-frozen pizza, stick it in the microwave, and press START
Does this make you stupid? Worthy of ridicule as the unthinking masses? No.
Then why the double standard when it comes to computers?
Why is the desire to press a button OK for an elevator or a microwave but wrong for a text-editor?
AOL is a business, AIM is one of their products, and if they don't want other companies to connect to it then that is their right.
Sure. Until we decide we don't want 'em to do it. The packets sent to AOL don't just pass through their hardware. And their software takes up more than a few megs on many a harddrive. Last I checked, a lot of people who don't use AOL as their ISP use their messanging system, so those packets are travelling on network access not paid for by AOL.
Moreover, those packets are only able to make it to their precious servers because every guy in between agreed to adopt open protocols. Yet again, AOL has parked their furry behinds on top of this open protocol and decided to build a walled garden.
There isn't a fundamental human right to use AOL, but neither is there a fundamental human right to use proprietary protocols in a widely used internet feature and buy up your competitors (especially if you're not human).
So the point is, if you are using a public, collaborative network, then you are open to regulation -- especially regulation aimed at standardization/open protocols -- you know, the good kind.
Let's broaden our vision here a little. Just like AOL's previous walled garden startegy failed, this one will, too. Actually enforcing what the FCC agreement was meant to do will be good for instant messanging and, in the long term, for AOL.
lifting the head slightly when speaking,
eyes open up at strange times,
swaying from side to side
Is it just me?
I guess Bezier curves do not a gesture make...
Anarchy? Because of mp3's?
I think what we have instead, is the current situation.
People are voting with their mouse clicks.
We are not pirates. We are not even robber barrons. It's a natural human trait to share music, and as long as hard drive space is cheap and bandwidth keeps growing, the only way that we will "lose" is if an intrusive government somehow manages to spy on all of us or monitor our downloads or establish some technological barriers to doing what is cheap, easy, and natural. I hope that doesn't happen, though, and perhaps you should, too.
But if you mean that we need a new copyright regime, then I'm all for it. Whatever it is, though it should
1. Maintain the richness of the public domain as its first priority
2. Uphold privacy, limit government intrusivness.
3. Be the result of a true public debate
As a corollary, it certainly wont criminalize the behavior of 80% of the computer using populace, all in the name of upholding a scared and greedy trade body.
Some of us still believe that
..and
1) the rights of corporations *should* not be as rich as those of people (I know -- they are)
2) that the GPL uses the (unifairly) restrictive powers of copyright law in a way to to lessen the restrictive impact of some future copyrights -- (get it...GNU != Unix)
Yes, if our laws were'nt bought and paid for but were instead subject to real democratic input, there would be no need for a GPL, or any of the other crazy license agreements (Use of this product entitles us to all moral rights of your work and your first unborn child. You agree to not disparage this software or make money off of any remotely related activity. Any ideas you think of while using this product belong to XYZ corp..) we wouldn't have to rely on creative legal maneouvres to maintain the richness of the public domain. I agree with the original poster. The current copyright laws had no public input, were not responsive to any public pressures, and were not written with any public benefit in mind. They were spawned in the offices of lobbyists a stone's throw from the capitol. Said lobbyists handed the bills and a check to our congressmen. Virtually all laws governing commerce in this country have the same history.
If the corporations have such a low regard for the law that they can bribe our legislators and rewrite it retroactively anytime a Disney cartoon approaches the public domain, then why should we have any higher regard for these McStatutes*?
Why obey?
*
Mc* is a trademark of McDonalds(TM) corp.