I've read-up on all the Lessig arguments and I think he's done a good job of understanding and explaining the mechanics of how overzealous copyright law can hinder the development of derivatives. But I have to disagree with his conclusions.
Lessig's arguments, in a nutshell, are that because of draconian copyright law, the culture we would expect to see developing around protected works is not developing.
Maybe he's right, but maybe who cares?
It seems to me that the actions of the RIAA and friends will primarily result in the next generation developing it's own non-derivative culture, and with it, a derivative culture based on it.
Here's one example: the fastest growing software culture right now is not the proprietary software culture where everything is fairly adequately protected, but the free software culture where sharing and derivations are king.
Or consider this: The BBC is investigating the possibility of opening their archives to the world, placing them on the Internet, and allowing anyone who cares to create their own derivative works. If this happens, is there any doube that the next geveration of American kids will enjoy a culture of Dr. Who remakes, and be scarcely familiar with the culture of Friends and (God forbid) it's remakes?
The culture will grow wherever the culture is allowed to grow.
There's plenty of music out there on the internet which the RIAA can't complain about you downloading because the artist has already authorized it. (I don't want to bias anyone, so I won't post links here, but I'll invite replies and follow-up to post their favorite sites.)
What would happen if the onling music sharing community were to declare January, 2005 as Free Music Only month and take a pledge to refuse to offer, download, or purchase any music which isn'tFree To Share for 31 days. Would the RIAA notice if all priacy stopped? Would they modify their prices or policies to compensate for the sudden reduction in the behavior they are soo keen to stop?
Would the industry ever recover from the loss of customers to the Free Music culture.
I submit that we don't have to build our culture on top of the one created by the RIAA; that the culture we have created for ourselves is really quite good, and certaintly adequate for our needs.
I'd say let the RIAA keep their worn-out cookie-cutter tunes. Let the culture they created die by their own silly overly-protective rules.
Wouldn't that be ironic; the RIAA, faced with the prospect that their primary market just doesn't care anymore, pleading to reduce copyright terms just so that future genrations will bother to remember them at all?
What harm is there in allowing someone who is clever enough to come up with something new, that other people can use, to profit from his or her discovery? [R]ealize that our work has real value for society.
No one I know is asserting that software is worthless. This is a discussion about how much society values these inventions, and how to best go about extracting that value for the benefit of the society. It's a question of wether patents, applied to software, are the best (or at least a good enough) mechanism to use.
Remember that life itself does nothing to guarantee a clever software developer can earn money from that which he develops; this function is provided only by society, and only at society's whim.
Most people would agree that a painting by one of the great masters has value. Less would argue that we should, therefore, lock it in a vault, away from public view, and demand a large payment from anyone who wants to view it. That wouldn't be in anyone's interest.
So the question is, what would motivate you, the clued software developer, to innovate? More money, or less hassle?
You can't just hit Ctrl-Z and undo Supreme Court appointments.
Or extensions to Copyright, or Constitutional Amendments banning Marriage among Gays, or a skyrocketing budget deficit. But Justices eventually die, Amemnments can be repealed, a deficit can be paid off and even Copyrights will eventually expire, if we can convince Congress to stop voting extensions. There's going to be a legacy; just a matter of who gets to create it.
The important thing to ensure is that there's a chance to fix things later if we screw-up now.
But did you ever rebuild a kernel and forget to re-run LILO? That's the kind of problem we really need to watch out for. You can't unload a bad module if you can't get a shell prompt.
Many would argue Hiroshima has yet to be rebuilt. It's at least fair to say the people who died at Hiroshima have yet to be brought back to life.
Your point was?
When the final history of the world is written, it will certainly record Hiroshima as the place where the first nuclear detonation in anger occurred. We should hope that it will record Nagasaki as the place where the final nuclear detonation in anger occurred, and we should work toward that goal. But there's an awful lot of history left ahead of us.
I think it would be naieve to believe that we will be successful in preventing another 'nuclear detonation in anger" from ever occurring again. I see that as a possibility only if some better means of wreaking havok on our enemies becomes available.
That's not an outside possibility. Nukes have the disadvantage that they are hard to build in secret, difficult to test in secret, hard to deliver, relatively unreliable, and the effects aren't easy to control. It's real easy to accidentally nuke your own interests even if you manage to nuke your enemy. And even if you get that far, you've opened the precedent to get nuked in return by those few nations that have them, have tested then, know how to deliver them, etc.
We have much more to fear from things like, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and perhaps even airplanes. An no doubt the future will see the development of other weapons unimaginable to us lowly 21st century humans.
So, if your point was that some things, once broken, can never be put back together again, then your point is taken. If your point was that the election of one candidate over the other can offer certainty to ensure or avoid such an event, then you'll have to offer more proof than you have to date. I'm sure we would all be interested in hearing it.
If your point was that the selection of one candidate over the other could have an influnce on the possibility of the event, either positive or negative, then you argument carries so little weight as to require discarding altogether, for two reasons:
First, you seem to be claiming to predict the future, which deserves skepticism in all cases.
Second, I'd argue your focus is too narrow. It's not only nukes, or even only weapons, which can break things. And there's nothing to guarantee we would even be concious of all the things which are causing things to be "broken" today.
If we remember the Hiroshima tragedy for the lives lost there, aren't we obligated to prevent it from happening again if we can? Do you know how many civilians were killed last month in Sudan? In Haiti. In Texas? None of these resulted from nukes, though, so perhaps they just aren't that important?
When you think about all the things could cause things to get "broken", and all of the things that have caused things to get "broken" in the past, the ones that were caused directly by human action are the only ones we have any control over; and the ones caused by human military action the ones military leaders have the most control over.
In this respect, anyone who promotes a philosophy of "safety by eliminating nukes" is just picking the low hanging fruit.
If a child dies, is it somehow worse that he died "...because of terrorism" than it would be if he died "...because of an earthquake" or "...because of starvation" or "because his parents didn't have health insurance"? Is it somehow less worse that the child was Iraqui, or Sudaneese, rather than American?
What is so bad about the idea of establishing criteria for high risk passengers?
Why all the special treatment for airlines? You won't find security that way, all that does is make anything not defined as "airline security related" less secure.
Statistically speaking, I believe that the prominent threat to the airlines (notice I don't say "only") comes from Arab Muslim single males between the ages of 18 and 45.
I don't suppose you'd care to post a cite or something to back up this claim? How many airlines have come under threat? How many of those incidents can be attributed to "Arab Muslim single males between the ages of 18 and 45"?
At any rate, though, I don't think that maintaining flexible profiles for high risk passengers is such a bad idea.
Neither do I, but that's not what we're talking about here. We talking about maintaining flexible profiles for suspected high risk passengers. Who decides what "suspected" means? Or "high risk" for that matter?
We used to pride ourselves on baing a nation of laws. Now we are a nation of fear.
That's why they couldn't vote at all before the internet.
Your point is well made; accessibility to this 'convenience' website does not affect the absentee ballot process, which remains as (in)secure as it has always been.
But I'm reminded of that famous line from the Hackers movie:
The world is not governed by reality, but by the
perception of reality.
... I would think the Republicans would be up in arms about this.
It worries me no matter who they are predicted to vote for. Consider:
The basis for democracy is that, in exchange for an opportunity to vote freely and fairly, we all agree to accept the result of the election, even if the candidate of our choice does not win the election. Reasonable people are willing to accept this bargain on the basis of the elections being free and fair.
The subtle upshot of this, which many people miss, is that an election can be rigged even without compromising a single vote.
An election is definitively won by a candidate when the number of votes received by a candidate exceeds the number of votes received by his next-nearest competitor plus the margin of error. This was the crux of the problems in Florida in the 2000 election: initially the amount of uncertainty in the vote counts exceeded the difference between Bush and Gore. What ensued was a remedial process to reduse the uncertainty through re-examination of ballots, lawsuits, and ultimately courtroom decisions.
It's interesting to note that no part of this remedial process was under the control of the voters. Clearly, you wouldn't want it to be under the control of anyone, but it explains one strategy for rigging an election under circumstances where it's too risky (or you simply have no means to) swing how the voters will actually vote. Control of the remedial process can be leveraged into control of the election itself, but only if the difference between the two candidates is small enough. Or, put another way, only if the uncertainty is large enough. Anything which raises questions about the freeness and fairness of the election process introduces uncertainty.
So, yes I'm a little concerned that some uber-hacker will root the electronic voting machines and change a few votes, but I'm a lot more concerned that confidence in a whole lot of votes will be lost simply because some uber-hacker could root the machines.
I'd lump this article in the same category. Every time I hear a story about how the election process is being skewed one way or another, I can't help but think it's because someone has already rigged the remedial process in their own favor, and all they need to with the election now is enough people questioning the initial tally.
Which is not to say I think we should stop discussing the vulnerabilities of the system, but rather to point out that we need to do more than just discuss them; we've got to ensure that the vulnerabilities are corrected. We need to send a message (from both sides of the political spectrum) that we believe our candidate can beat the opponent in a fair fight, and we won't stand for any of this crap which makes the election appear to be untrustworthyi, if for no other reason than because it calls into question the legitimacy of an election we clearly won.
I have my favorite candidate. I accept the possibility that the other candidate could win. I am of the opinion that if the wrong candidate gets elected, he could prove very bad for this country, but I don't think either/any candidate is so horrible that the damage couldn't be pretty much undone by electing the 'right' candidate in another 4 years.
But if we wind-up with an untrustable election system (no paper trail electronic voting, Internet vote casting, selectively disenfranchised voters, etc.) we might never see the chance 4 years down the road.
So I'm predicting now that the 2004 race will be close (no brainer) but I'm hoping there won't be another 2000-style fiasco in the vote counting. If there is, I hope we will all look at the resolution process with a very skeptical eye, a critical eye, an eye to the possiblity that the November vote may have already been rigged.
And that holds true no matter who wins in November.
Who really cares if someone forged, misrepresented or just misunderstood the nature of this document?
We need to keep in mind:
The document was, in fact a forgery.
The non-experts who looked at it suspected it was a forgery.
There's ample evidence that the people it was provided to knew it was a forgery.
The experts who were paid to know these things confirmed it was a forgery.
Having a formerly well-respected individual get onto television and state emphatically to the entire world that they were genuine does not alter the fact that the document was a forgery.
and yet, we're still trudging around Iraq, looking for the Nukes that don't exist.
It's almost like nobody really cares that someone forged, misrepresented or just misunderstood the nature of this document?
Oh, I'm sorry, were we talking about something trivial here?
Yeah, there's probably a lot more than that, too. History offered them a bubble, and they rode it. Heck, they even enjoyed it, too. You would have done the same thing. Probably did during the Tech Bubble. Yadda, Yadda.
Fix the problem, not the blame.
Every generation leaves it's own legacy which the next generation can either benefit from or, alternately, try to recover from. The Boomers got a free ride off the backs of those who survived the Great Depression and World War II. And they will leave a legacy for the rest of us.
Maybe that legacy will be cleaner air, solid social infrastructure, and a rest-of-the-world that feels included in our success, rather than being intent on blowing us up.
Or maybe their legacy will just be a Corporate Slave State, a few bronze statues to some out-of-fire-code buildings, and a bunch of records no one is licensed to listen to anymore.
Will the next generation be more familiar with Lennon the musician or Lennon the Dictator. Here's a hint: in this free country right here, right now, "sharing" the works of one will get you slapped with a lawsuit, but "sharing" the works of the other is allowed. Which one is more likely to survive the digital dark ages to come? I guess the Boomers just never learned that "If you love something, set it free." lesson.
Different versions of the same bill come up in congress and most congresscritters (including Kerry) vote for some and against others.
That wasn't what I was referring to. (I'll agree, you can't be an effective negotiator and build coalitions if you insist on "with us or against us" loyalty.) That stuff is "just being prudent" in my book.
Flip-Flop is not a Kerry problem; not any more than any other congresscritter (I love that one, can I borrow it?) and perhaps a bit less. The Republicans would have pulled that out (or something just as irrelevant) no matter who the Democrats put up.
It's a problem with Democrats, or maybe I should say it's a problem with both the Democrats and the Republicans trying to adapt themselves to the political environment they've created.
The one thing Kerry can't be is a better Bush than Bush is. So people who like Bush's "win at the expense of everyone else" and "It's not what you know, it's who you know" style are going to like the way Bush does it a lot better than how Kerry might. No Brainer.
What disturbs me is that Kerry hasn't got the courage to say what really needs to be done. I don't think anyone has right now. If they did, they wouldn't even get onto a major party ticket, let alone hope to get the votes to take the office.
And that's the disturbing part. Things are going to have to get a lot worse before enough people feel the problem and figure they haven't got anything else to lose.
Then, there will have to be a radical candidate; someone crazy enough to talk about things like:
Holding U.S. economic growth near zero for a few decades in order to give the rest of the world a chance to catch up,
Committing financial suicide (as a candidate) by insisting Corporations work for the public good,
Placing the Internet under strong government regulation (not to restrict free speech, but to ensure it),
In order for this to be allowed to happen, there are a few prerequisites; a strong democracy must be maintained somewhere (this is under threat if we lose control of the voting machines), personal freedoms (not the same as a Democracy) have to be maintained (under severe threat if we lose control of the computers), and the freedom to communicate, or organize into a community must continue to exist (which is why every time free speech and open communications are restricted on the Internet, another flame of hope dies).
Don't count on Kerry to propose that kind of "New America"; that's not what he's here for.
But we can hope Kerry won't be as effective as Bush at selling his soul for personal enrichment, personal glory. I'm hoping Kerry will at least consider the possibility that he might be wrong. That's the kind of flip-flopping I like to see out of a major party candidate.
Yeah, because we all know that older people don't mind when a president and "his people" lie to the nation. And clearly everyone knows the president has lied to all of us. It's just that older people don't mind. Huh?
I think I'm old enough to qualify as one of them "older people", even if I don't tend to agree with my peers, so I'll try to relate things from the "Boomer" point -of-view. It might help others (you don't seem to need it) understand just what a mess we're in.
The baby boom generation represents a demographic abnormality which may not be apparent to you, but is clearly apparent to them.
First, they are by far the largest single demographic of American society today. Which means, in terms of raw numbers, they have the votes.
Second, every generation tends to become more active as voters as they reach their senior years, and that's what the Boomers are becomming right now.
And finally, the Boomers (generally, people born between the end of WWII (1945) and the middle of the 60's (1965)) were raised during the Industrialization Bubble on the mid 20th century, where the Corporation was King, standardization and mass production were the buzzwords. They have been raised in a society which rewards Group-Think, and rewards it well.
Because educating our children was deemed a priority then, most Boomers attended schools in buildings less than 10 years old. Because educating our children now is just a lip-service issue, most of the Boomer's children (and a lot of their grandchildren) attend school in those very same buildings.
The Boomers have generally reached senior points in their careers, and are past child-breaing years. That means they aren't generally nearly as interested in questions like "How can I afford the mortgage payment" and "how can I pay for my children's education" as their younger counterparts because, for many of them, the paychecks are bigger, the mortgage is paid-off, and the Kids are already through college. Instead, the issues of interest to Boomers, generally, revolve around staying healthy as long as possible, and preparing for the day they're no longer around. This also explains, to some extent, the surge of religious dedication often attributed to the Religious Right.
In a strange twist, the oldest Boomers who saved hard for retirement are finding an unusual and unexpected expense: instead of treating their grandchildren to a toy train at Christmas and a winter vacation in Florida are instead breaking the budget for such things as braces and winter coats for grandchildren who's parents are unable to get the health care or proper winter clothing for them. Instead of a retirement spent growing roses, it's unofficial daycare duty for their own childern, who can't afford to take a day off work.
It makes perfect sense, therefore, for the Boomer generation to favor policies which emphasize health care for seniors to be paid for by a huge budget deficits. The cost will be paid after they're dead and buried. They are only acting rationally, in their own interest. The don't just want tax breaks skewed toward their higher incomes, they need them in order to reach their retirement goals.
And the politicians they support, who also must act in their own best interest, are also acting rationally when they pander to (as they must) this voting block. It's no secret that many Kerry supporters are only luke-warm in their support, voting for Kerry primarily because doing so is a vote against Bush. The Bush campaign has picked up on this, too, citing Kerry's seeming tendency to flip-flop on issues, which (my opinion here) is a manifestation of Kerry's realization that he has no way to run this country any better than Bush without reversing a slew of Bush's policies, but if he were to admit before the election that he has plans to reverse Bush's policies, he wouldn't stand a snowballs' chance in hell of getting the Boomer votes he needs t
You [hang] three or four politicians for corruption, the political landscape will change so fast it'll make the presidential elections look like a bingo game.
Unfortunately, that's one of the problems with corruption: if a corrupt system starts hanging people it calls corrupt, can we ever be sure the correct people are being hanged?
Do we trust the inmates of the asylum to decide who is sane?
I rue the day my children will look at me and ask Dad, how could you have let this happen on your watch?
So Bob receives his one-time-pad encrypted (and thus not vulnerable to compromise) instructions from Alice and proceeds to make ready with the Napalm. But upon arriving at the target location, finds not only a large compliment of heavily armed defense forces, but an overwhelming amount of fire suppression equipment on site as well. After a hasty decision to abort the mission and a narrow escape, Bob confronts Alice with the obvious;
Bob: You Traitor! You sold me out! I'm never trusting you again.
Alice: What makes you think that?
Bob: Because the instructions were encrypted with a one-time-pad and therefore weren't vulnerable to compromise. Since you were the only other person who knew what the instructions were, it must have been you who passed the information along to Smokey the Bear.
If Bob insists that the encryption could not have been compromised, then Bob must conclude Alice can no longer be trusted. If however Bob accepts the possibility that Smokey the Bear just guessed the target, which is to say, that the encryption system was broken by a Karnak attack, then Bob may conclude Alice is still trustable.
Here's another. Alice posesses a valuable and compromising document. To protect it, she encrypts it with the believed-to-be-unbreakable encryption system her secret organization has standardized on and stores the only copy on her hard drive under a passphrase known only to her. All other copies are destroyed. Shortly thereafter, her home is raided, and hard drive confiscated. During interrogation she is presented with a copy of the compromised documenti decrypted from her hard drive.
Should she conclude that the encryption system actually has a vulnerability, from which follows that the interrogators probably posess a great deal of knowledge about her secret organization, and that her secret organization should change encryption systems? Or should she consider the possibility that, when the interrogators were presented with the "Enter the passphrase to access the valuable and compromising document:" dialog box, they might just have guessed that the passphrase might be "support" (or "password", or "marsiey dotsen dosey dotsen liddle lamsey divey, akiddley divey-tu woodenshu"), meaning the encryption system itself is still unbreakable, and the only knowledge the interrogators posess is the single document to which their Karnak attack has granted them access.
How is my understanding of security in this less than complete?
Two things to note:
Since each bit is independently encrypted, you have to have the hash to know what the original message is.
First, to know the message you need to know either the cyphertext and the protocol/key (hash) or you need to know the plaintext. Yes, it's a given that your crypto system is useless if you can't keep your plaintext secret, but it's one of the many factors which live outside the scope of cryptography but within the scope of security.
Second, One Time Pad is not quite as useless as you might imagine. The OTP key (hash) must be delivered through a seperate channel, but the channel seperation can obtained in many ways. It can be physical, as you suggest, delivering the key through the mail, but it could also be temporal; you can send the key years in advance of the message, even before you know what the message is.
Additionally, the two keys (the one we are calling the cyphertext and the one we are calling the hash) are essentially equivalent (they're both just a string of randomish bits of a certain length) and in that respect essentially equivalent to the plaintext. That means you can 'encrypt' either (or both) of the keys in the same fashion again. In essense your cyphertext C is a function of your plaintext P xor A xor B xor C xor D.... where all of A, B, C, D, etc. are random pads, subject to the OTP constraints (all but the plaintext must be truly random, security of each component is equally important, loss of one equals the loss of the message, etc.)
Without a copy of the hash there is absolutely no way to determine the plaintext.
Cryptography only rearranges the information. It does not seek to destroy. If the information is not destroyed, it is recoverable. This is the point of a crypto system: to allow the information to be recovered by the intended recipient while denying it to others.
But if anyone is able to determine the plaintext, then the crypto system is vulnerable to the Karnak attack. If you don't understand this, you may well have a strong command of the mathematics of cryptography, but a less-than-complete concept of security.
Be aware: your own overconfidence may be your downfall.
The Karnak attack is, at its essence, the case where the attacker guesses the key, or the plaintext.
It's not an extremely powerful attack, but cryptographers are forced to address it because it denies the defense of absolute security.
A simple example, although far from complete in scope, would be the case where Alice and Bob, having found that their communications have been compromised, conclude that their thought-to-be-unbreakable crypto system is actually vulnerable. Mallory can claim his attack was just a successful application of the Karnak attack, and is therefore not forced into revealing what, if any, vulnerability of the thought-to-be-unbreakable crypto system was exploited. Even if the thought-to-be-unbreakable crypto system in fact is unbreakable, it is still vulnerable to the Karnak attack.
Many of us on Slashdot have concerns about how Copyright and Patent law seem to be working in conjunction to lock-up ownership of ideas and prevent future innovation. One argument which gets trotted-out regularly is that many of today's most strongly protected ideas are built on top of a long history of prior innovations.
I have been struck by an analogous thread in the Libertarian Party which seems to favor private ownership over public ownership when it comes to things like Utilities, Property, etc. But the anaolgy holds that much of what we consider to be eligible for private ownership is "built on top of" a solid foundation of public ownership, and derives a good deal of it's value from it. The often cited example of this is private land which is worthless without the public roads lending access to it.
Can the Libertarian Party offer a platform of balance between the good of private property ownership and the necessity of public property ownership (government) or does the Libertarian Party offer another solution to replace the functions which we have traditionally relied on a government function to handle?
What country are you talking about? If what you were saying about this compulsory license fee was true, things like Linux wouldn't be possible.
I was referring to copyright law as it applies to audio recordings in the United States; there is a compulsory license fee payment required for the public performance of audio recordings, such as via a radio station. This has nothing to do with Linux, which is not an audio recording, and copyrighted, but made available under the terms of the GPL.
Are you similarly of the opinion that such a radio station must also pay to play public domain work?
When discussing in the context of the performance of audio recordings, my opinion would be that the public performance of a public domain work would require neither a license nor a payment. But then what constitutes an "audio recording in the public domain"? A work can reach public domain when it's copyright limitation is surpassed or when all rights holders explicitly pass it to the public domain.
For the vast majority of audio recordings, the copyright timeout is far away in the future, if ever. (But it's an interesting thought, listening to pre-1920 wax cylinder audio performances in 192Kbps fidelity...) And there is a reasonable debate as to how the copyright owner of an audio recording could effect the transfer of the work to the public domain in a legal sense. Assuming the copyright holder would not be benefiting financially after doing so, and presuming the owner owned all rights (a necessary precursor), he could either hire a lawyer (at his own expense) to draw-up the necessary paperwork (whatever that turns out to be) or simply choose not to enforce his rights (which costs him nothing) and leave the status ambiguous.
But we should remember that CC-licensed works are not public domain, and also that my opinion counts for rather little here.
Re:One, two, three, four, I declare a flame-war!
on
Assault Weapons Ban
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It is my pleasure to reply to a suitably armored poster.
...nobody has a legitimate reason for owning a 30 round clip.
I always get annoyed when discussions about the Second Amendment come up and everybody immediately starts thinking about gunpowder. That's not what it's about.
The Second Amendment (Right to Bear Arms) is not a result of the wildly successful 1776 Sportsman's PAC. It wasn't meant to authorize individuals or groups to assassinate government officials in case they went insane. And it wasn't an attempt to ensure people could keep trading old flintlocks like so many Disco albums from the '70's.
It was an acknowledgement of a problem which faced the fledgling Colonies at the time, and is still quite relevant today.
You can pass a law making it illegal for people to keep and bear arms, but the people most dangerous to the survival of the Nation aren't going to listen. Because of this, we need to be sure this nation can survive even if we face an enemy that doesn't play by our rules. In this respect, outlawing guns works against us, in that it allows us to implement policies that, if the subjects had guns, we could never get away with. So instead we outlaw the practice of disarming the populace.
It's a way of saying to prospective government organizers: "if you want to run this place, you have to figure out how to make it work without taking away people's weapons. If you can't, you're not worthy of running this place. Period. Just like if you can't figure out how to run this place without favoring one religion over another, or shutting down the free press, or silencing your critics, or preventing peaceful assembly, or violating peoples privacy, or searching their homes, documents, things, or imprisoning people without charges or due process, or holding onto a suspect indefinitely without letting him see a lawyer, or torturing prisoners, or trying to make a Federal Law to ban powers reserved to the States, then just go away, because you're not up to the job. Sure, running the country is easy if you can do that stuff; but we have higher standards."
The rise of gun violence should not be seen as being caused by the availability of guns as much as it should be viewed as a failure of our society to remain violence free in the face of weapons availability. Don't curse the NRA, they're just the weather vane.
Should we read the Second Amendment to say that we should all be packing porta-nukes? For the safety of the Nation, of course. No. What it means is that we should strive to build a country that can survive even if our next door neighbor decides to pack a porta-nuke. Because, the reality of the world is (and will always be) that our next door neighbor just might be packing a porta-nuke.
In a world like this, the only possible way to be safe is to first make sure that nobody in their right mind would have a reason to light-up their porta-nuke, and second to understand that occasionally we will encounter a person or two who isn't in their right mind, who's going to kill a lot of people and cause a lot of damage (kinda like one of those Hurricanes) and that we better just be prepared for it to happen, and be prepared to deal with it when it does. An approch which says "we'll prevent a hurricane from ever happening here" can only be followed by "we don't need FEMA anymore, now do we", which shows clearly how backward such an approach is.
On September 11th, 2001, the U.S. saw an example of an attack which some claim represents a new kind of threat to this nation. But was also saw a flawless demonstration of the kind of defense against that threat which our Founding Fathers hoped we would deploy, and knew even then would be effective. On Flight 93, the attack failed, not because of some smart weapon posessed by the U.S. army, or because some airport screener matched-up two names on a No Fly list, but because of the democratic defense;
Nobody is going to sue anybody for sharing authorized work, it's just a silly notion.
Agreed. But if you and I are competitors and I'm making a statutory payment you aren't, I'm either going to find a way to make you pay or find a way to not pay it myself.
In the context of compulsory licensing, the copyright owner loses rights other copyright owners would have. One is the right to demand an arbitrary royalty or withold authorization to use. The slashdot crowd likes that part because it means anyone can use the work once they pay the statutory fee.
But the dark side of compulsory licensing is that the copyright owner loses right to forgo an arbitrary royalty and grant authorization to use. I suspect the slashdot crowd would not like that part, if it understood the implications, because it means noone can use the work unless they pay the statutory fee.
Nobody is going to sue anybody for using a copyrighted work in an authorized way, but if there's a seperate compulsory license, it's not the copyright owner's right to authorize.
If you were to start a non-commercial radio station that played only Creative Commons work, who exactly is going to sue you, and on what grounds? Certainly not any of the PROs.
If by PRO's you mean the professional broadcasters; big media, Clear Channel, etc, I would say it's exactly these you'll need to worry about.
It's been pretty well established that the rules for Internet Radio were formed at the behest of the existing Big Media players as an attempt to raise the entry barrier for start-up Internet radio broadcasters. I would expect a lawsuit like this would be considered just one more arrow in the sheath to be employed for market protection purposes.
They would sue, not for copyright infringment or to recover royalties, but rather to enforce payment into the fund. If they win, they gain a strategy to use to shut-down Internet Radio startups. If they lose, though, that means they can add a clause to their contracts stipulating that nobody gets airplay unless they waive their "statutory" rights, and we get Payola all over again. Translation: they can't lose. The lawsuit grounds would be a straight forward equal-protection argument.
Re:Actually, it does not at all promote filesharin
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NYT Promotes File Sharing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
[I]f a rightsholder says that it's ok share her work, then it's ok to share her work. What's so complicated about that?
We wish it were that simple.
For one thing, problems can occur where a compulsory license is required. For example, suppose you create and perform a song that I want to play on my radio station. Even if you give me full rights to play that song, I am still required to pay the compulsory license fee for using your work in that manner. Copyright law does not give you (as the copyright holder) the authority to authorize me to withold the payment of that license fee. This means I can't start an Internet radio station even if I only use content released under the Creative Commons licenses. Crazy, huh?
For another, law can create an environment where it is physically impossible to execute legitimately owned rights. Using the example above, if you wanted to distribute your work on DAT tape, and wanted to allow anyone to make multiple-generation copies, you could certainly authorize that as the copyright holder, but people in some countries (the U.S) would find it impossible to purchase DAT recorders which would allow them to exercise that right without breaking the law. In other countries (Canada, I believe) the purchaser of a blank tape would still pay an extra tax (a fee above and beyond the cost of the tape itself) to compensate every artist (except you) whose rights (it is presumed) are being infringed, even when no such infringment occurs.
Certainly others can come up with additional examples.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read-up on all the Lessig arguments and I think he's done a good job of understanding and explaining the mechanics of how overzealous copyright law can hinder the development of derivatives. But I have to disagree with his conclusions.
Lessig's arguments, in a nutshell, are that because of draconian copyright law, the culture we would expect to see developing around protected works is not developing.
Maybe he's right, but maybe who cares?
It seems to me that the actions of the RIAA and friends will primarily result in the next generation developing it's own non-derivative culture, and with it, a derivative culture based on it.
Here's one example: the fastest growing software culture right now is not the proprietary software culture where everything is fairly adequately protected, but the free software culture where sharing and derivations are king.
Or consider this: The BBC is investigating the possibility of opening their archives to the world, placing them on the Internet, and allowing anyone who cares to create their own derivative works. If this happens, is there any doube that the next geveration of American kids will enjoy a culture of Dr. Who remakes, and be scarcely familiar with the culture of Friends and (God forbid) it's remakes?
The culture will grow wherever the culture is allowed to grow.
There's plenty of music out there on the internet which the RIAA can't complain about you downloading because the artist has already authorized it. (I don't want to bias anyone, so I won't post links here, but I'll invite replies and follow-up to post their favorite sites.)
What would happen if the onling music sharing community were to declare January, 2005 as Free Music Only month and take a pledge to refuse to offer, download, or purchase any music which isn't Free To Share for 31 days. Would the RIAA notice if all priacy stopped? Would they modify their prices or policies to compensate for the sudden reduction in the behavior they are soo keen to stop?
Would the industry ever recover from the loss of customers to the Free Music culture.
I submit that we don't have to build our culture on top of the one created by the RIAA; that the culture we have created for ourselves is really quite good, and certaintly adequate for our needs.
I'd say let the RIAA keep their worn-out cookie-cutter tunes. Let the culture they created die by their own silly overly-protective rules.
Wouldn't that be ironic; the RIAA, faced with the prospect that their primary market just doesn't care anymore, pleading to reduce copyright terms just so that future genrations will bother to remember them at all?
No one I know is asserting that software is worthless. This is a discussion about how much society values these inventions, and how to best go about extracting that value for the benefit of the society. It's a question of wether patents, applied to software, are the best (or at least a good enough) mechanism to use.
Remember that life itself does nothing to guarantee a clever software developer can earn money from that which he develops; this function is provided only by society, and only at society's whim.
Most people would agree that a painting by one of the great masters has value. Less would argue that we should, therefore, lock it in a vault, away from public view, and demand a large payment from anyone who wants to view it. That wouldn't be in anyone's interest.
So the question is, what would motivate you, the clued software developer, to innovate? More money, or less hassle?
Or extensions to Copyright, or Constitutional Amendments banning Marriage among Gays, or a skyrocketing budget deficit. But Justices eventually die, Amemnments can be repealed, a deficit can be paid off and even Copyrights will eventually expire, if we can convince Congress to stop voting extensions. There's going to be a legacy; just a matter of who gets to create it.
The important thing to ensure is that there's a chance to fix things later if we screw-up now.
But did you ever rebuild a kernel and forget to re-run LILO? That's the kind of problem we really need to watch out for. You can't unload a bad module if you can't get a shell prompt.
Many would argue Hiroshima has yet to be rebuilt. It's at least fair to say the people who died at Hiroshima have yet to be brought back to life.
Your point was?
When the final history of the world is written, it will certainly record Hiroshima as the place where the first nuclear detonation in anger occurred. We should hope that it will record Nagasaki as the place where the final nuclear detonation in anger occurred, and we should work toward that goal. But there's an awful lot of history left ahead of us.
I think it would be naieve to believe that we will be successful in preventing another 'nuclear detonation in anger" from ever occurring again. I see that as a possibility only if some better means of wreaking havok on our enemies becomes available.
That's not an outside possibility. Nukes have the disadvantage that they are hard to build in secret, difficult to test in secret, hard to deliver, relatively unreliable, and the effects aren't easy to control. It's real easy to accidentally nuke your own interests even if you manage to nuke your enemy. And even if you get that far, you've opened the precedent to get nuked in return by those few nations that have them, have tested then, know how to deliver them, etc.
We have much more to fear from things like, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and perhaps even airplanes. An no doubt the future will see the development of other weapons unimaginable to us lowly 21st century humans.
So, if your point was that some things, once broken, can never be put back together again, then your point is taken. If your point was that the election of one candidate over the other can offer certainty to ensure or avoid such an event, then you'll have to offer more proof than you have to date. I'm sure we would all be interested in hearing it.
If your point was that the selection of one candidate over the other could have an influnce on the possibility of the event, either positive or negative, then you argument carries so little weight as to require discarding altogether, for two reasons:
First, you seem to be claiming to predict the future, which deserves skepticism in all cases.
Second, I'd argue your focus is too narrow. It's not only nukes, or even only weapons, which can break things. And there's nothing to guarantee we would even be concious of all the things which are causing things to be "broken" today.
If we remember the Hiroshima tragedy for the lives lost there, aren't we obligated to prevent it from happening again if we can? Do you know how many civilians were killed last month in Sudan? In Haiti. In Texas? None of these resulted from nukes, though, so perhaps they just aren't that important?
When you think about all the things could cause things to get "broken", and all of the things that have caused things to get "broken" in the past, the ones that were caused directly by human action are the only ones we have any control over; and the ones caused by human military action the ones military leaders have the most control over.
In this respect, anyone who promotes a philosophy of "safety by eliminating nukes" is just picking the low hanging fruit.
If a child dies, is it somehow worse that he died "...because of terrorism" than it would be if he died "...because of an earthquake" or "...because of starvation" or "because his parents didn't have health insurance"? Is it somehow less worse that the child was Iraqui, or Sudaneese, rather than American?
Why all the special treatment for airlines? You won't find security that way, all that does is make anything not defined as "airline security related" less secure.
I don't suppose you'd care to post a cite or something to back up this claim? How many airlines have come under threat? How many of those incidents can be attributed to "Arab Muslim single males between the ages of 18 and 45"?
Neither do I, but that's not what we're talking about here. We talking about maintaining flexible profiles for suspected high risk passengers. Who decides what "suspected" means? Or "high risk" for that matter?
We used to pride ourselves on baing a nation of laws. Now we are a nation of fear.
Your point is well made; accessibility to this 'convenience' website does not affect the absentee ballot process, which remains as (in)secure as it has always been.
But I'm reminded of that famous line from the Hackers movie:
Precisely.
It worries me no matter who they are predicted to vote for. Consider:
The basis for democracy is that, in exchange for an opportunity to vote freely and fairly, we all agree to accept the result of the election, even if the candidate of our choice does not win the election. Reasonable people are willing to accept this bargain on the basis of the elections being free and fair.
The subtle upshot of this, which many people miss, is that an election can be rigged even without compromising a single vote.
An election is definitively won by a candidate when the number of votes received by a candidate exceeds the number of votes received by his next-nearest competitor plus the margin of error. This was the crux of the problems in Florida in the 2000 election: initially the amount of uncertainty in the vote counts exceeded the difference between Bush and Gore. What ensued was a remedial process to reduse the uncertainty through re-examination of ballots, lawsuits, and ultimately courtroom decisions.
It's interesting to note that no part of this remedial process was under the control of the voters. Clearly, you wouldn't want it to be under the control of anyone, but it explains one strategy for rigging an election under circumstances where it's too risky (or you simply have no means to) swing how the voters will actually vote. Control of the remedial process can be leveraged into control of the election itself, but only if the difference between the two candidates is small enough. Or, put another way, only if the uncertainty is large enough. Anything which raises questions about the freeness and fairness of the election process introduces uncertainty.
So, yes I'm a little concerned that some uber-hacker will root the electronic voting machines and change a few votes, but I'm a lot more concerned that confidence in a whole lot of votes will be lost simply because some uber-hacker could root the machines.
I'd lump this article in the same category. Every time I hear a story about how the election process is being skewed one way or another, I can't help but think it's because someone has already rigged the remedial process in their own favor, and all they need to with the election now is enough people questioning the initial tally.
Which is not to say I think we should stop discussing the vulnerabilities of the system, but rather to point out that we need to do more than just discuss them; we've got to ensure that the vulnerabilities are corrected. We need to send a message (from both sides of the political spectrum) that we believe our candidate can beat the opponent in a fair fight, and we won't stand for any of this crap which makes the election appear to be untrustworthyi, if for no other reason than because it calls into question the legitimacy of an election we clearly won.
I have my favorite candidate. I accept the possibility that the other candidate could win. I am of the opinion that if the wrong candidate gets elected, he could prove very bad for this country, but I don't think either/any candidate is so horrible that the damage couldn't be pretty much undone by electing the 'right' candidate in another 4 years.
But if we wind-up with an untrustable election system (no paper trail electronic voting, Internet vote casting, selectively disenfranchised voters, etc.) we might never see the chance 4 years down the road.
So I'm predicting now that the 2004 race will be close (no brainer) but I'm hoping there won't be another 2000-style fiasco in the vote counting. If there is, I hope we will all look at the resolution process with a very skeptical eye, a critical eye, an eye to the possiblity that the November vote may have already been rigged.
And that holds true no matter who wins in November.
We need to keep in mind:
The document was, in fact a forgery.
The non-experts who looked at it suspected it was a forgery.
There's ample evidence that the people it was provided to knew it was a forgery.
The experts who were paid to know these things confirmed it was a forgery.
Having a formerly well-respected individual get onto television and state emphatically to the entire world that they were genuine does not alter the fact that the document was a forgery.
and yet, we're still trudging around Iraq, looking for the Nukes that don't exist.
It's almost like nobody really cares that someone forged, misrepresented or just misunderstood the nature of this document?
Oh, I'm sorry, were we talking about something trivial here?
Yeah, there's probably a lot more than that, too. History offered them a bubble, and they rode it. Heck, they even enjoyed it, too. You would have done the same thing. Probably did during the Tech Bubble. Yadda, Yadda.
Fix the problem, not the blame.
Every generation leaves it's own legacy which the next generation can either benefit from or, alternately, try to recover from. The Boomers got a free ride off the backs of those who survived the Great Depression and World War II. And they will leave a legacy for the rest of us.
Maybe that legacy will be cleaner air, solid social infrastructure, and a rest-of-the-world that feels included in our success, rather than being intent on blowing us up.
Or maybe their legacy will just be a Corporate Slave State, a few bronze statues to some out-of-fire-code buildings, and a bunch of records no one is licensed to listen to anymore.
Will the next generation be more familiar with Lennon the musician or Lennon the Dictator. Here's a hint: in this free country right here, right now, "sharing" the works of one will get you slapped with a lawsuit, but "sharing" the works of the other is allowed. Which one is more likely to survive the digital dark ages to come? I guess the Boomers just never learned that "If you love something, set it free." lesson.
Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today...
The good news? If they wake up now, they just might have a chance to mitigate the damage. Should we wake them up, or write them off as already lost?
That wasn't what I was referring to. (I'll agree, you can't be an effective negotiator and build coalitions if you insist on "with us or against us" loyalty.) That stuff is "just being prudent" in my book.
Flip-Flop is not a Kerry problem; not any more than any other congresscritter (I love that one, can I borrow it?) and perhaps a bit less. The Republicans would have pulled that out (or something just as irrelevant) no matter who the Democrats put up.
It's a problem with Democrats, or maybe I should say it's a problem with both the Democrats and the Republicans trying to adapt themselves to the political environment they've created.
The one thing Kerry can't be is a better Bush than Bush is. So people who like Bush's "win at the expense of everyone else" and "It's not what you know, it's who you know" style are going to like the way Bush does it a lot better than how Kerry might. No Brainer.
What disturbs me is that Kerry hasn't got the courage to say what really needs to be done. I don't think anyone has right now. If they did, they wouldn't even get onto a major party ticket, let alone hope to get the votes to take the office.
And that's the disturbing part. Things are going to have to get a lot worse before enough people feel the problem and figure they haven't got anything else to lose.
Then, there will have to be a radical candidate; someone crazy enough to talk about things like:
In order for this to be allowed to happen, there are a few prerequisites; a strong democracy must be maintained somewhere (this is under threat if we lose control of the voting machines), personal freedoms (not the same as a Democracy) have to be maintained (under severe threat if we lose control of the computers), and the freedom to communicate, or organize into a community must continue to exist (which is why every time free speech and open communications are restricted on the Internet, another flame of hope dies).
Don't count on Kerry to propose that kind of "New America"; that's not what he's here for.
But we can hope Kerry won't be as effective as Bush at selling his soul for personal enrichment, personal glory. I'm hoping Kerry will at least consider the possibility that he might be wrong. That's the kind of flip-flopping I like to see out of a major party candidate.
That's beyond Bush's ability to grasp.
I think I'm old enough to qualify as one of them "older people", even if I don't tend to agree with my peers, so I'll try to relate things from the "Boomer" point -of-view. It might help others (you don't seem to need it) understand just what a mess we're in.
The baby boom generation represents a demographic abnormality which may not be apparent to you, but is clearly apparent to them.
First, they are by far the largest single demographic of American society today. Which means, in terms of raw numbers, they have the votes.
Second, every generation tends to become more active as voters as they reach their senior years, and that's what the Boomers are becomming right now.
And finally, the Boomers (generally, people born between the end of WWII (1945) and the middle of the 60's (1965)) were raised during the Industrialization Bubble on the mid 20th century, where the Corporation was King, standardization and mass production were the buzzwords. They have been raised in a society which rewards Group-Think, and rewards it well.
Because educating our children was deemed a priority then, most Boomers attended schools in buildings less than 10 years old. Because educating our children now is just a lip-service issue, most of the Boomer's children (and a lot of their grandchildren) attend school in those very same buildings.
The Boomers have generally reached senior points in their careers, and are past child-breaing years. That means they aren't generally nearly as interested in questions like "How can I afford the mortgage payment" and "how can I pay for my children's education" as their younger counterparts because, for many of them, the paychecks are bigger, the mortgage is paid-off, and the Kids are already through college. Instead, the issues of interest to Boomers, generally, revolve around staying healthy as long as possible, and preparing for the day they're no longer around. This also explains, to some extent, the surge of religious dedication often attributed to the Religious Right.
In a strange twist, the oldest Boomers who saved hard for retirement are finding an unusual and unexpected expense: instead of treating their grandchildren to a toy train at Christmas and a winter vacation in Florida are instead breaking the budget for such things as braces and winter coats for grandchildren who's parents are unable to get the health care or proper winter clothing for them. Instead of a retirement spent growing roses, it's unofficial daycare duty for their own childern, who can't afford to take a day off work.
It makes perfect sense, therefore, for the Boomer generation to favor policies which emphasize health care for seniors to be paid for by a huge budget deficits. The cost will be paid after they're dead and buried. They are only acting rationally, in their own interest. The don't just want tax breaks skewed toward their higher incomes, they need them in order to reach their retirement goals.
And the politicians they support, who also must act in their own best interest, are also acting rationally when they pander to (as they must) this voting block. It's no secret that many Kerry supporters are only luke-warm in their support, voting for Kerry primarily because doing so is a vote against Bush. The Bush campaign has picked up on this, too, citing Kerry's seeming tendency to flip-flop on issues, which (my opinion here) is a manifestation of Kerry's realization that he has no way to run this country any better than Bush without reversing a slew of Bush's policies, but if he were to admit before the election that he has plans to reverse Bush's policies, he wouldn't stand a snowballs' chance in hell of getting the Boomer votes he needs t
Unfortunately, that's one of the problems with corruption: if a corrupt system starts hanging people it calls corrupt, can we ever be sure the correct people are being hanged?
Do we trust the inmates of the asylum to decide who is sane?
I rue the day my children will look at me and ask Dad, how could you have let this happen on your watch?
So Bob receives his one-time-pad encrypted (and thus not vulnerable to compromise) instructions from Alice and proceeds to make ready with the Napalm. But upon arriving at the target location, finds not only a large compliment of heavily armed defense forces, but an overwhelming amount of fire suppression equipment on site as well. After a hasty decision to abort the mission and a narrow escape, Bob confronts Alice with the obvious;
If Bob insists that the encryption could not have been compromised, then Bob must conclude Alice can no longer be trusted. If however Bob accepts the possibility that Smokey the Bear just guessed the target, which is to say, that the encryption system was broken by a Karnak attack, then Bob may conclude Alice is still trustable.
Here's another. Alice posesses a valuable and compromising document. To protect it, she encrypts it with the believed-to-be-unbreakable encryption system her secret organization has standardized on and stores the only copy on her hard drive under a passphrase known only to her. All other copies are destroyed. Shortly thereafter, her home is raided, and hard drive confiscated. During interrogation she is presented with a copy of the compromised documenti decrypted from her hard drive.
Should she conclude that the encryption system actually has a vulnerability, from which follows that the interrogators probably posess a great deal of knowledge about her secret organization, and that her secret organization should change encryption systems? Or should she consider the possibility that, when the interrogators were presented with the "Enter the passphrase to access the valuable and compromising document:" dialog box, they might just have guessed that the passphrase might be "support" (or "password", or "marsiey dotsen dosey dotsen liddle lamsey divey, akiddley divey-tu woodenshu"), meaning the encryption system itself is still unbreakable, and the only knowledge the interrogators posess is the single document to which their Karnak attack has granted them access.
Two things to note:
First, to know the message you need to know either the cyphertext and the protocol/key (hash) or you need to know the plaintext. Yes, it's a given that your crypto system is useless if you can't keep your plaintext secret, but it's one of the many factors which live outside the scope of cryptography but within the scope of security.
Second, One Time Pad is not quite as useless as you might imagine. The OTP key (hash) must be delivered through a seperate channel, but the channel seperation can obtained in many ways. It can be physical, as you suggest, delivering the key through the mail, but it could also be temporal; you can send the key years in advance of the message, even before you know what the message is.
Additionally, the two keys (the one we are calling the cyphertext and the one we are calling the hash) are essentially equivalent (they're both just a string of randomish bits of a certain length) and in that respect essentially equivalent to the plaintext. That means you can 'encrypt' either (or both) of the keys in the same fashion again. In essense your cyphertext C is a function of your plaintext P xor A xor B xor C xor D.... where all of A, B, C, D, etc. are random pads, subject to the OTP constraints (all but the plaintext must be truly random, security of each component is equally important, loss of one equals the loss of the message, etc.)
Cryptography only rearranges the information. It does not seek to destroy. If the information is not destroyed, it is recoverable. This is the point of a crypto system: to allow the information to be recovered by the intended recipient while denying it to others.
But if anyone is able to determine the plaintext, then the crypto system is vulnerable to the Karnak attack. If you don't understand this, you may well have a strong command of the mathematics of cryptography, but a less-than-complete concept of security.
Be aware: your own overconfidence may be your downfall.
It's not an extremely powerful attack, but cryptographers are forced to address it because it denies the defense of absolute security.
A simple example, although far from complete in scope, would be the case where Alice and Bob, having found that their communications have been compromised, conclude that their thought-to-be-unbreakable crypto system is actually vulnerable. Mallory can claim his attack was just a successful application of the Karnak attack, and is therefore not forced into revealing what, if any, vulnerability of the thought-to-be-unbreakable crypto system was exploited. Even if the thought-to-be-unbreakable crypto system in fact is unbreakable, it is still vulnerable to the Karnak attack.
Never use the work "unbreakable" when describing an encryption protocol. Every encryption system (including OTP) is vulnerable to the Karnak attack.
I'll quote Asimov for this: "I'm all in favor of Free Speech, but my agent has other ideas..." ;-)
I have no objections.
I have been struck by an analogous thread in the Libertarian Party which seems to favor private ownership over public ownership when it comes to things like Utilities, Property, etc. But the anaolgy holds that much of what we consider to be eligible for private ownership is "built on top of" a solid foundation of public ownership, and derives a good deal of it's value from it. The often cited example of this is private land which is worthless without the public roads lending access to it.
Can the Libertarian Party offer a platform of balance between the good of private property ownership and the necessity of public property ownership (government) or does the Libertarian Party offer another solution to replace the functions which we have traditionally relied on a government function to handle?
I was referring to copyright law as it applies to audio recordings in the United States; there is a compulsory license fee payment required for the public performance of audio recordings, such as via a radio station. This has nothing to do with Linux, which is not an audio recording, and copyrighted, but made available under the terms of the GPL.
When discussing in the context of the performance of audio recordings, my opinion would be that the public performance of a public domain work would require neither a license nor a payment. But then what constitutes an "audio recording in the public domain"? A work can reach public domain when it's copyright limitation is surpassed or when all rights holders explicitly pass it to the public domain.
For the vast majority of audio recordings, the copyright timeout is far away in the future, if ever. (But it's an interesting thought, listening to pre-1920 wax cylinder audio performances in 192Kbps fidelity...) And there is a reasonable debate as to how the copyright owner of an audio recording could effect the transfer of the work to the public domain in a legal sense. Assuming the copyright holder would not be benefiting financially after doing so, and presuming the owner owned all rights (a necessary precursor), he could either hire a lawyer (at his own expense) to draw-up the necessary paperwork (whatever that turns out to be) or simply choose not to enforce his rights (which costs him nothing) and leave the status ambiguous.
But we should remember that CC-licensed works are not public domain, and also that my opinion counts for rather little here.
I always get annoyed when discussions about the Second Amendment come up and everybody immediately starts thinking about gunpowder. That's not what it's about.
The Second Amendment (Right to Bear Arms) is not a result of the wildly successful 1776 Sportsman's PAC. It wasn't meant to authorize individuals or groups to assassinate government officials in case they went insane. And it wasn't an attempt to ensure people could keep trading old flintlocks like so many Disco albums from the '70's.
It was an acknowledgement of a problem which faced the fledgling Colonies at the time, and is still quite relevant today.
You can pass a law making it illegal for people to keep and bear arms, but the people most dangerous to the survival of the Nation aren't going to listen. Because of this, we need to be sure this nation can survive even if we face an enemy that doesn't play by our rules. In this respect, outlawing guns works against us, in that it allows us to implement policies that, if the subjects had guns, we could never get away with. So instead we outlaw the practice of disarming the populace.
It's a way of saying to prospective government organizers: "if you want to run this place, you have to figure out how to make it work without taking away people's weapons. If you can't, you're not worthy of running this place. Period. Just like if you can't figure out how to run this place without favoring one religion over another, or shutting down the free press, or silencing your critics, or preventing peaceful assembly, or violating peoples privacy, or searching their homes, documents, things, or imprisoning people without charges or due process, or holding onto a suspect indefinitely without letting him see a lawyer, or torturing prisoners, or trying to make a Federal Law to ban powers reserved to the States, then just go away, because you're not up to the job. Sure, running the country is easy if you can do that stuff; but we have higher standards."
The rise of gun violence should not be seen as being caused by the availability of guns as much as it should be viewed as a failure of our society to remain violence free in the face of weapons availability. Don't curse the NRA, they're just the weather vane.
Should we read the Second Amendment to say that we should all be packing porta-nukes? For the safety of the Nation, of course. No. What it means is that we should strive to build a country that can survive even if our next door neighbor decides to pack a porta-nuke. Because, the reality of the world is (and will always be) that our next door neighbor just might be packing a porta-nuke.
In a world like this, the only possible way to be safe is to first make sure that nobody in their right mind would have a reason to light-up their porta-nuke, and second to understand that occasionally we will encounter a person or two who isn't in their right mind, who's going to kill a lot of people and cause a lot of damage (kinda like one of those Hurricanes) and that we better just be prepared for it to happen, and be prepared to deal with it when it does. An approch which says "we'll prevent a hurricane from ever happening here" can only be followed by "we don't need FEMA anymore, now do we", which shows clearly how backward such an approach is.
On September 11th, 2001, the U.S. saw an example of an attack which some claim represents a new kind of threat to this nation. But was also saw a flawless demonstration of the kind of defense against that threat which our Founding Fathers hoped we would deploy, and knew even then would be effective. On Flight 93, the attack failed, not because of some smart weapon posessed by the U.S. army, or because some airport screener matched-up two names on a No Fly list, but because of the democratic defense;
Agreed. But if you and I are competitors and I'm making a statutory payment you aren't, I'm either going to find a way to make you pay or find a way to not pay it myself.
In the context of compulsory licensing, the copyright owner loses rights other copyright owners would have. One is the right to demand an arbitrary royalty or withold authorization to use. The slashdot crowd likes that part because it means anyone can use the work once they pay the statutory fee.
But the dark side of compulsory licensing is that the copyright owner loses right to forgo an arbitrary royalty and grant authorization to use. I suspect the slashdot crowd would not like that part, if it understood the implications, because it means noone can use the work unless they pay the statutory fee.
Nobody is going to sue anybody for using a copyrighted work in an authorized way, but if there's a seperate compulsory license, it's not the copyright owner's right to authorize.
If by PRO's you mean the professional broadcasters; big media, Clear Channel, etc, I would say it's exactly these you'll need to worry about.
It's been pretty well established that the rules for Internet Radio were formed at the behest of the existing Big Media players as an attempt to raise the entry barrier for start-up Internet radio broadcasters. I would expect a lawsuit like this would be considered just one more arrow in the sheath to be employed for market protection purposes.
They would sue, not for copyright infringment or to recover royalties, but rather to enforce payment into the fund. If they win, they gain a strategy to use to shut-down Internet Radio startups. If they lose, though, that means they can add a clause to their contracts stipulating that nobody gets airplay unless they waive their "statutory" rights, and we get Payola all over again. Translation: they can't lose. The lawsuit grounds would be a straight forward equal-protection argument.
We wish it were that simple.
For one thing, problems can occur where a compulsory license is required. For example, suppose you create and perform a song that I want to play on my radio station. Even if you give me full rights to play that song, I am still required to pay the compulsory license fee for using your work in that manner. Copyright law does not give you (as the copyright holder) the authority to authorize me to withold the payment of that license fee. This means I can't start an Internet radio station even if I only use content released under the Creative Commons licenses. Crazy, huh?
For another, law can create an environment where it is physically impossible to execute legitimately owned rights. Using the example above, if you wanted to distribute your work on DAT tape, and wanted to allow anyone to make multiple-generation copies, you could certainly authorize that as the copyright holder, but people in some countries (the U.S) would find it impossible to purchase DAT recorders which would allow them to exercise that right without breaking the law. In other countries (Canada, I believe) the purchaser of a blank tape would still pay an extra tax (a fee above and beyond the cost of the tape itself) to compensate every artist (except you) whose rights (it is presumed) are being infringed, even when no such infringment occurs.
Certainly others can come up with additional examples.