I'd say that is just lip service for the benefit of the content providers. A way of saying "see? we are doing things, and you can work with us (and pay us in the process)".
Basically, rapidshare doesn't know which content is copyrighted or not, as a good percentage of it is encrypted, and that percentage is sure to grow if any kind of countermeasure is tried. You have to manually search the blogs for the password to be able to know if the content is copyrighted or not. The economics of it is non-existent.
So the basic system of the storage-download sites have to change for it to reduce copyrighted works copying, and that's also unlikely except via legislation. I think this is just an attempt to move the legislation threat a bit further away in time.
Have you ever looked at a "normal" user interact with a computer? In my experience is more or less like this:
What's that? A mail about some interesting photos I must check out by clicking here... Uhm, I don't know the guy sending it... and I have really no time for photos, but I have to check it to be able to drop it from my mind.
What's that? The Internet opened up. Ah! the photos must be there, but there is some stupid error message that stops me moving Yes! Yes! I said YES! Stupid machine!
What's that? Didn't work. No photos. Again the same message, or it's another one. Impossible to know since I never read the first one, they are all equal, anyway.
What's that? Again the same message. I'll have to read the message to see why I'm not moving forward. Stupid messages! What's an "X active" anyway, do they think I have time for all that. Oh! It seems that to go forward I have really to click "No" on the second message. Must be to avoid stupid users clicking blindly on "OK" all the time. Ain't I smart? I can now move. What? Installing what? Always waiting. Well, it seems to work now. Oh! Those are porn photos! Close, close, close. If the boss sees me I'm dead. Damn SPUM mail!
Ok, next point in my to-do list, banking. What's that? Yes , I want to ALLOW that program to access the site "allOfYourMoney.AreBelong.to.us". Stupid firewall. Won't let me alone to do my work....
People, probably due to a nomadic origin or something, think in computers in terms of "going" places, "reaching" things and "routes" they know (To open the Excel you go here, press here). Messages from the computer are interpreted as obstacles that one must overcome to reach the goal. Some other paradigm has to be found for security in computers. I have some ideas, but too tired to write more. If some rich company making OS's is interested, I do expensive consulting.
The real problem then was that they didn't made an in-depth analysis of what they were using originally. It's always the same. Lately (it's more often lately, I have to recognize that the wall of MS starts to show some cracks) some computer guy in a company will get to me and say "we are planning to move to Open Office (not full Linux, not yet). What do you think?" And then I ask: "What do you have mounted on MS Office?. I mean macros, Access applications, complex Excel sheets..." And they don't know. They have some general idea of the bigger Access apps, but nothing else. And regardless of it, they dare to make a plan of migration. Not only that, they, as very likely the manager in charge of the Munich migration, get paid much more than I do! I guess blind optimism is more valued than knowledgeable pessimism.
Uhm, you are right. Redistribution is allowed but in limited form (making a copy of a DVD for a friend is allowed). If you do it by the thousands, even if you get nothing from it, you are out of the clear. The relevant article of the law (in Spanish):
Artículo 31. Reproducciones provisionales y copia privada.
1. No requerirán autorización del autor los actos de reproducción provisional a los que se refiere el artículo 18 que, además de carecer por sí mismos de una significación económica independiente, sean transitorios o accesorios y formen parte integrante y esencial de un proceso tecnológico y cuya única finalidad consista en facilitar bien una transmisión en red entre terceras partes por un intermediario, bien una utilización lícita, entendiendo por tal la autorizada por el autor o por la ley.
2. No necesita autorización del autor la reproducción, en cualquier soporte, de obras ya divulgadas cuando se lleve a cabo por una persona física para su uso privado a partir de obras a las que haya accedido legalmente y la copia obtenida no sea objeto de una utilización colectiva ni lucrativa, sin perjuicio de la compensación equitativa prevista en el artículo 25, que deberá tener en cuenta si se aplican a tales obras las medidas a las que se refiere el artículo 161. Quedan excluidas de lo dispuesto en este apartado las bases de datos electrónicas y, en aplicación del artículo 99.a), los programas de ordenador.
Relevant here is the second point, where it says "copia obtenida no sea objeto de una utilización colectiva ni lucrativa", that is, "the obtained copy won't be used collectively or for gain". I guess the collectively is aimed to bars showing per-pay sport events in giant screens, a common thing in Spain, but anyway, it's limited.
That's the law in Spain, up to now. It has always been. If you aren't profiting by copyright infringement (other than getting the copied thing, that is), then you are in the clear. In any case the current (left leaning) government has drafted a new law that makes illegal all that the SGAE wants to be illegal.Well, not all, they would like individual users to be punishable too, and the government said no thanks; and they wanted the webs to be closed without judicial intervention, and the government initially complied but then changed it to need judicial intervention, but with the new law judges should put them down, anyway). So from now on (I'm not sure about if it's fully operative now but should be soon) it should be fairly easy to put down a "links" site. At least when it's hosted in Spain.
Anyway the situation in Spain is, I think, not too bad. Individual users are protected if they just download things for themselves or others, or even if they make a thousand photocopies of a book and give them away, as long as they get no profit from it. But that will surely change in the future too. When two groups fight for something, and one (the SGAE) has a clear financial objective, and the other (the file sharers) a vague convenience one, the first group will in the end prevail, against all reason, logic or fairness.
Years before I took any formal course, I was looking at the manual of a BASIC computer and making circles on the screen by programming a dot that kept to the same distance to another and rotated. I still remember the emotion of seeing a real circle emerge on screen. I don't know if BASIC helped me much to program, but the immediacy of the thing certainly did much to keep my interest alive.
If Russia had been making plastic toys instead of trying to export Stalinist revolution, there WOULDN'T have been anything to fight about.
So, in light of this reasoning, there is no possibility of ever being anything to fight about with China. That's reassuring. I had always thought that having an aggressive dictatorship as government was the root of the problem, not the particular economic model that they followed.
Taiwan was just an example. If you want another example closer to home, they could blow up yours (home) and nobody would do anything about it either. Morals and the rule of law is what keeps the West living better than, say, Somalia. The more we bend our morals, the nearer we are to an anything-goes situation. There is a ruthless dictatorship in an aggressive country, and we are afraid even to offend them by talking too loud about it.
Well, yes, I guess that's what was missing in the Cold War. If Russia was making cheap plastic toys for Wal Mart, perhaps the US would have permitted the placement of missiles in Cuba, in order not to make people nervous. Dumb Russians, they really lost the Cold War because of Communism. Chinese are seemingly smarter, and have understood that they can do anything as long as they provide with cheap labor to the West's consumers. I guess in a couple of years they'll be able to invade Taiwan with no more consequences than some really stern speeches from various so-called world leaders.
Actually, the product site says that the gun deactivates when the watch is removed, and the watch has a fingerprint scanner for reactivation.
Sorry, then the inmates have to grab the gun, the watch and a finger too. Ah, of course, there is the PIN too. Then you have to take the whole arm with you, watch and all, so it doesn't deactivate. OK, OK, I admit the thing can be useful in some setups:-).
Just what I needed, a gun that will stop working when the batteries run out (I suppose that will be the behavior). Anyway, I suppose that can be useful for prison guards and similar. Till the inmates learn to take the watch with the gun, of course.
I'd prefer my phone to be able to open my garage door. It should be a cinch, as it's all radio signals (I know, different frequencies, but hey! what about the universal radio chips that were supposed to be controlled by software?), but nope, if I forget my remote, I cannot use my phone.
It's just me or does everybody find this a terribly sad story? The robot, trapped in the sands of an alien planet, its solar cells slowly depleting, far from any possible help. Waiting for the instructions that it hopes will liberate it, but the instructions fail, and they come ever less often now. The sun rises a bit less every day, and the shadows are ever longer...
I cannot avoid it, it feels like a Ray Bradbury story or perhaps like Flowers for Algernon. Sad.
So when you try to put a medicine on the market, that only a small handful of people will take, you have to test it, test it again, then in other animals, then finally in people with controlled trials. When you modify a food, that almost everybody will take, you are allowed to on your say so, or perhaps on the looks of the thing "Hey, its maize, old and good, you know it cannot harm anybody".
I wonder if a medicine that showed this effects on rats would have been allowed even to be tested on humans, much less to be ever released to general consumption.
If they can make an appliance that gets electricity from body heat and can be "uncomfortably cold", could they turn it into an air-conditioning device that run on its own, or even generate electricity while cooling? _That_ would be an invention.
Better to have waited a couple of years more, till much more books had been published in the DRM'd format. Publishers were starting to warm to the Kindle, and now they will retrench like timid snails.
That's the logical situation. The basics of computing, the foundations, should be served by free, open source software, because they are a general-purpose common ground that can be better served by a standards-compliant infrastructure-oriented infrastructure.
Then the special-purpose applications, with a smaller market or a market more interested in service or immediacy or whatever, should be served by non free (in either of the two senses) apps.
Not everything will be OSS. I, for one, would be happy to reach point when there is a layer of broadly used OSS that guarantees basic freedoms for everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
'let them do their own reporting'
Well, I guess you wouldn't like it if they took up on that idea. They sure couldn't make a much worse job of it than you do.
I'd say that is just lip service for the benefit of the content providers. A way of saying "see? we are doing things, and you can work with us (and pay us in the process)".
Basically, rapidshare doesn't know which content is copyrighted or not, as a good percentage of it is encrypted, and that percentage is sure to grow if any kind of countermeasure is tried. You have to manually search the blogs for the password to be able to know if the content is copyrighted or not. The economics of it is non-existent.
So the basic system of the storage-download sites have to change for it to reduce copyrighted works copying, and that's also unlikely except via legislation. I think this is just an attempt to move the legislation threat a bit further away in time.
Have you ever looked at a "normal" user interact with a computer? In my experience is more or less like this:
What's that? A mail about some interesting photos I must check out by clicking here... Uhm, I don't know the guy sending it... and I have really no time for photos, but I have to check it to be able to drop it from my mind.
What's that? The Internet opened up. Ah! the photos must be there, but there is some stupid error message that stops me moving Yes! Yes! I said YES! Stupid machine!
What's that? Didn't work. No photos. Again the same message, or it's another one. Impossible to know since I never read the first one, they are all equal, anyway.
What's that? Again the same message. I'll have to read the message to see why I'm not moving forward. Stupid messages! What's an "X active" anyway, do they think I have time for all that. Oh! It seems that to go forward I have really to click "No" on the second message. Must be to avoid stupid users clicking blindly on "OK" all the time. Ain't I smart? I can now move. What? Installing what? Always waiting. Well, it seems to work now. Oh! Those are porn photos! Close, close, close. If the boss sees me I'm dead. Damn SPUM mail!
Ok, next point in my to-do list, banking. What's that? Yes , I want to ALLOW that program to access the site "allOfYourMoney.AreBelong.to.us". Stupid firewall. Won't let me alone to do my work. ...
People, probably due to a nomadic origin or something, think in computers in terms of "going" places, "reaching" things and "routes" they know (To open the Excel you go here, press here). Messages from the computer are interpreted as obstacles that one must overcome to reach the goal. Some other paradigm has to be found for security in computers. I have some ideas, but too tired to write more. If some rich company making OS's is interested, I do expensive consulting.
The real problem then was that they didn't made an in-depth analysis of what they were using originally. It's always the same. Lately (it's more often lately, I have to recognize that the wall of MS starts to show some cracks) some computer guy in a company will get to me and say "we are planning to move to Open Office (not full Linux, not yet). What do you think?" And then I ask: "What do you have mounted on MS Office?. I mean macros, Access applications, complex Excel sheets..." And they don't know. They have some general idea of the bigger Access apps, but nothing else. And regardless of it, they dare to make a plan of migration. Not only that, they, as very likely the manager in charge of the Munich migration, get paid much more than I do! I guess blind optimism is more valued than knowledgeable pessimism.
Uhm, you are right. Redistribution is allowed but in limited form (making a copy of a DVD for a friend is allowed). If you do it by the thousands, even if you get nothing from it, you are out of the clear. The relevant article of the law (in Spanish):
Artículo 31. Reproducciones provisionales y copia privada.
1. No requerirán autorización del autor los actos de reproducción provisional a los que se refiere el artículo 18 que, además de carecer por sí mismos de una significación económica independiente, sean transitorios o accesorios y formen parte integrante y esencial de un proceso tecnológico y cuya única finalidad consista en facilitar bien una transmisión en red entre terceras partes por un intermediario, bien una utilización lícita, entendiendo por tal la autorizada por el autor o por la ley.
2. No necesita autorización del autor la reproducción, en cualquier soporte, de obras ya divulgadas cuando se lleve a cabo por una persona física para su uso privado a partir de obras a las que haya accedido legalmente y la copia obtenida no sea objeto de una utilización colectiva ni lucrativa, sin perjuicio de la compensación equitativa prevista en el artículo 25, que deberá tener en cuenta si se aplican a tales obras las medidas a las que se refiere el artículo 161. Quedan excluidas de lo dispuesto en este apartado las bases de datos electrónicas y, en aplicación del artículo 99.a), los programas de ordenador.
Relevant here is the second point, where it says "copia obtenida no sea objeto de una utilización colectiva ni lucrativa", that is, "the obtained copy won't be used collectively or for gain". I guess the collectively is aimed to bars showing per-pay sport events in giant screens, a common thing in Spain, but anyway, it's limited.
That really happened, but...
That's the law in Spain, up to now. It has always been. If you aren't profiting by copyright infringement (other than getting the copied thing, that is), then you are in the clear. In any case the current (left leaning) government has drafted a new law that makes illegal all that the SGAE wants to be illegal .Well, not all, they would like individual users to be punishable too, and the government said no thanks; and they wanted the webs to be closed without judicial intervention, and the government initially complied but then changed it to need judicial intervention, but with the new law judges should put them down, anyway). So from now on (I'm not sure about if it's fully operative now but should be soon) it should be fairly easy to put down a "links" site. At least when it's hosted in Spain.
Anyway the situation in Spain is, I think, not too bad. Individual users are protected if they just download things for themselves or others, or even if they make a thousand photocopies of a book and give them away, as long as they get no profit from it. But that will surely change in the future too. When two groups fight for something, and one (the SGAE) has a clear financial objective, and the other (the file sharers) a vague convenience one, the first group will in the end prevail, against all reason, logic or fairness.
Anybody knows the point of this?
http://slashdot.org/journal/92046/My-sig :-)
Years before I took any formal course, I was looking at the manual of a BASIC computer and making circles on the screen by programming a dot that kept to the same distance to another and rotated. I still remember the emotion of seeing a real circle emerge on screen. I don't know if BASIC helped me much to program, but the immediacy of the thing certainly did much to keep my interest alive.
Haven't they seen ANY film at all?
The researchers have programmed Shelley to handle like a racecar by using a set of computer calculations called algorithms
Ha! So that's how they did it! Quite simple, really, once you know the trick.
I'm from now on not devoting so much time to the Internet. I'm standing JUST NOW and stopping this whole nonsense of hours-long browsing...
Who cares, anyway?
I can heartily recommend this site : smart.fm It has lots of Japanese, but other languages too, and is free like in no money.
suddenly find themselves failing college once the gloves come off.
Well, now at least there is a filter somewhere. How long till the gloves stop coming off in College, I wonder. That will be really bad.
If Russia had been making plastic toys instead of trying to export Stalinist revolution, there WOULDN'T have been anything to fight about.
So, in light of this reasoning, there is no possibility of ever being anything to fight about with China. That's reassuring. I had always thought that having an aggressive dictatorship as government was the root of the problem, not the particular economic model that they followed.
Taiwan was just an example. If you want another example closer to home, they could blow up yours (home) and nobody would do anything about it either. Morals and the rule of law is what keeps the West living better than, say, Somalia. The more we bend our morals, the nearer we are to an anything-goes situation. There is a ruthless dictatorship in an aggressive country, and we are afraid even to offend them by talking too loud about it.
People have their commercial interests
Well, yes, I guess that's what was missing in the Cold War. If Russia was making cheap plastic toys for Wal Mart, perhaps the US would have permitted the placement of missiles in Cuba, in order not to make people nervous. Dumb Russians, they really lost the Cold War because of Communism. Chinese are seemingly smarter, and have understood that they can do anything as long as they provide with cheap labor to the West's consumers. I guess in a couple of years they'll be able to invade Taiwan with no more consequences than some really stern speeches from various so-called world leaders.
Actually, the product site says that the gun deactivates when the watch is removed, and the watch has a fingerprint scanner for reactivation.
Sorry, then the inmates have to grab the gun, the watch and a finger too. Ah, of course, there is the PIN too. Then you have to take the whole arm with you, watch and all, so it doesn't deactivate. OK, OK, I admit the thing can be useful in some setups :-).
Just what I needed, a gun that will stop working when the batteries run out (I suppose that will be the behavior). Anyway, I suppose that can be useful for prison guards and similar. Till the inmates learn to take the watch with the gun, of course.
I'd prefer my phone to be able to open my garage door. It should be a cinch, as it's all radio signals (I know, different frequencies, but hey! what about the universal radio chips that were supposed to be controlled by software?), but nope, if I forget my remote, I cannot use my phone.
It's just me or does everybody find this a terribly sad story? The robot, trapped in the sands of an alien planet, its solar cells slowly depleting, far from any possible help. Waiting for the instructions that it hopes will liberate it, but the instructions fail, and they come ever less often now. The sun rises a bit less every day, and the shadows are ever longer...
I cannot avoid it, it feels like a Ray Bradbury story or perhaps like Flowers for Algernon. Sad.
So when you try to put a medicine on the market, that only a small handful of people will take, you have to test it, test it again, then in other animals, then finally in people with controlled trials. When you modify a food, that almost everybody will take, you are allowed to on your say so, or perhaps on the looks of the thing "Hey, its maize, old and good, you know it cannot harm anybody".
I wonder if a medicine that showed this effects on rats would have been allowed even to be tested on humans, much less to be ever released to general consumption.
If they can make an appliance that gets electricity from body heat and can be "uncomfortably cold", could they turn it into an air-conditioning device that run on its own, or even generate electricity while cooling? _That_ would be an invention.
Better to have waited a couple of years more, till much more books had been published in the DRM'd format. Publishers were starting to warm to the Kindle, and now they will retrench like timid snails.
Honestly -- did Microsoft learn nothing from the browser war? Its anti-trust lawsuits?
Yes, they learned that they still keep getting richer every day, and punishments are a joke.
That's the logical situation. The basics of computing, the foundations, should be served by free, open source software, because they are a general-purpose common ground that can be better served by a standards-compliant infrastructure-oriented infrastructure.
Then the special-purpose applications, with a smaller market or a market more interested in service or immediacy or whatever, should be served by non free (in either of the two senses) apps.
Not everything will be OSS. I, for one, would be happy to reach point when there is a layer of broadly used OSS that guarantees basic freedoms for everybody.