Why is the downloading of an mpg of an old TV show that was recorded different from the downloading of a mpg of a dvd rip of the same show or a download of an mp3?
Because The Law says it is. Confused yet? How about this one. The US legal system has ruled that the audio portion of a television program and the video portion deserve different copyright protections. There are things you can legally do with the sound track that you can't do with the video portion.
The Courts have ruled that it is explicitly permissible to record a broadcast television show on to video tape. I believe they've also ruled that such a "copy" can be given (not sold) to a friend legally. I don't know if this could be stretched to cover "giving" it to a friend through the Internet, because you're not actually "giving" it to your friend; you're allowing your friend to make a perfect digital copy of the digital copy you made (directly or indirectly) of the show when it was broadcast.
(All those warez dudes think they're so clever when they remind us that "copying" is not "stealing" because no one was deprived of their use of the original. Did they really think this wouldn't come back to bite them in the butt eventually?)
[Which goes to show you] why you use a PO box, like I do. Don't have to worry about such things.
Using a P.O. Box is a good idea. So is shredding everything to be thrown away. And checking credit reports frequently, and so on.
But even those who manage their identity with 100% security aren't completely protected, and even they have cause to worry.
To all of us, the cost of credit, the cost of everything we buy, and even (to some extent) the amount of taxes we must pay is linked to the identity theft losses of those less fortunate than most. If I am a victim of identity theft (because I or someone else mismanaged my identity), and some joker runs up a couple thousand dollars of charges in my name, who pays? It won't be me (although I'll be paying in other ways), and it won't be the guy who stole my identity (even if he's caught); it will be us all collectively.
If you haven't yet started to manage your own identity, you should start. If you are already among the clued with a P.O. box and a cross-cut shredder, then you should take the next step and support legislative action to ensure others follow in your footsteps. Just saving yourself is not enough. We must all hang together, or surley we will all hang seperately.
About the only other thing i would use it for now is to get rips of old tvshows that are not going to be coming out on dvd. And that is no worse then recording them myself, since that IS legal.
No. It isn't. But you've put your finger right on the problem.
Most people don't know what is legal and what isn't when it comes to copyright. Some will assume it's okay to download a copy of "old tvshows" because it was okay to make a copy of them back when they were broadcast. While this may be true, the law is far from clean cut on this issue. And there are many copyright issues which are similarly vague.
We're hearing this now from a lot of the "targeted" downloaders; a common refrain: "I thought it was legal to download music off the Internet."
It's just a shame none of these people is likely to go to court over this: I'd dearly like to hear the wording a court uses when it says downloading is not legal. I don't see how they can make such a statement clear enough for Joe Sixpack without changing copyright law from the ground up.
Oh get off it. The only people the RIAA is targeting are those losers who are so addicted to RIAA music that they'll lie to themselves and steal to get their fix of "American Crap" tunes.
If any of them had any sense of right-and-wrong, half a clue, and any taste at all in music, they'd be downloading free and clear music from independent artists that doesn't sound like the same old blah blah blah the AM pop stations overplay.
The RIAA is targeting people who are addicted to their product and too cheap to pay. They have no fear of a boycott occurring, because these people obviously can't live without RIAA music and can't stop paying for it because they're already freeloading.
...it will also shut out competing software, such as OpenOffice. Now think about this for a second. Even if the developers of a competing office suite could figure out how to get their software to open an Office 2003 document, doing so would be a DMCA violation, since they'd be bypassing an anti-circumvention device.
This argument has been made before, by myself and others, but now I'm not so sure. My doubts are primarily due to one of the answers the DOJ lawyers gave (see the answer to Question 3) during one of those "Ask Slashdot" articles. Meet the DOJ's 'Anti-Piracy' Lawyers
The DMCA protects the authors' right to decide who gets access to a protected work and provides severe penalties to anyone who offers technology to circumvent the author's rights. But the author does not get to choose which technology is used to control access, only whether access is granted. I don't think any technology could be viewed as circumventing the authors access controls if it didn't actually do so.
An example will explain this better. Suppose I were to manufacture a DVD player which uses DeCSS (or some other non-CSS licensed technology) to play CSS-protected DVD's, but substitutes some other access control mechanism for CSS? In other words, if you put your copy of The Matrix into my player, it demands that you insert a smart card (specific to The Matrix) before the CSS-encrypted DVD will play. And I will only manufacture a smartcard for a given movie once authorized to manufacture it by the copyright holder for that particular movie.
If the Wachowski brothers (Warner Studios) want people to be able to watch The Matrix on my player, they sell me the right to manufacture the smartcards, and I cut them a royalty check for each card I sell. If New Line Home Entertainment doesn't want to participate, I won't manufacture a smartcard which corresponds to The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring and you get no farther putting that DVD into my player than you would putting it into a CD player.
Provided I built it correctly, my DVD player could not be considered a circumvention device, because it refuses to play CSS-encrypted DVD....unless access has been granted by the copyright holder. I could sell my device even if DVDCCA chose to raise the CSS licensing price to an exhorbitant price, or refused to sell new licenses at all. A publisher who wanted a new marketing route not controlled by the DVDCCA could contract with me to have smart cards sold for the works they specify, those who didn't want to participate would be under no obligation to authorize their works through my player.
Perhaps best yet, I can manufacture smartcards for works which are no longer protected by copyright without incurring liability under DMCA (circumventing non existant access control rights is okay). Additionally, I could manufacture smartcards for classes of people (law enforcement, teachers, librarians) which the courts decide are allowed to access such material (under Fair Use or other constructs) in spite of the authors' copy rights.
Apply the same reasoning to Office 2003 and Open Office. I can create a version of Open Office which can read Office 2003 documents, provided I respect the authors' (not Microsoft's) wishes in controlling access. If you are the copyright holder for your own Office 2003 documents, you can authorize yourself to read your own (but not other people's) documents. I just have to figure out how to read the proprietary format, and how to ensure that my software only grants access to documents which the author is authorizing.
You can also look at the huge battle that they had over DAT's and the Serial Copying functionality that they put in it. (You were allowed to only make copies from the original.) That would suggest that the act covered digital as well.
But even on a DAT, it's not a digital copy. That was the point. When you use a DAT to make a (digital) copy of a (digital) original, the "copy" will not be the same because the I'm an original/I'm a duplicate bit will be different.
There is nothing in my reading of the HRA which could be interpreted to allow perfect digital copies of copyrighted material in a commercial setting. "Digital" was covered under HRA only as far as your "digital copying device" enforced "analog-like" limitations.
If fair use only covers giving copies to a friend, how is this determined?
It's determined at two places; by the copyright owner and by the courts. The copyright owner makes a guess as to whether what you call a "friend" will be viewed as a "friend" by the court, and whether it's worth their time and money to go after you. If they do go after you, you may be able to cite your "friend" relationship as a mitigating factor in your defense.
If someone asks to be my friend, and then I put them on my friend list, can I now legally say they are my friend?
You can say it, but the Court doesn't have to agree. Even if the Court agrees, they could still find you guilty of infringment.
This isn't like computer programming; you can just spot a buffer overflow and be sure it's exploitable on every system...
Can a computer be used to create an analog copy?
There's a whole can of worms just in this one little sentence. The reasoning behind the Home Recording Act was that a "analogue" of a work was, de facto, worth less than the "original". If you start making multiple generation analogues you will eventually wind up with something worthless, which makes analogues less threatening to publishers than digital copies. The infinite reproducibility of digital copies was one of the problems which the Digital Millenium Copyright Act was intended to address.
But is a song in MP3 format inherently less valuable than the same song on a CD? I think there are plusses and minuses to both. I wouldn't be surprised to see an effort by the Publishing Industry to have the HRA modified and the "analogues are okay" language thrown out once they figure out there's profit to be made in selling songs in MP3 format even if the quality is less.
If so, it seems someone simply needs to design a P2P program that does the two things mentioned above, and it would then be completely legal to use.
Not necessarily "completely legal", but perhaps it would offer more opportunities for its' users to claim Fair Use. On the other hand, if that "someone" were to create such a system because of some commercial motivation (like in order to sell it as a product, or as a way to avoid having to purchase CD's) its users would have less of a chance to claim a "non-commercial use" exemption of Fair Use, and so its use could be labeled illegal anyway.
I don't think the RIAA has anything to worry about here. The people who rely on Kazaa "friends" to supply their music are too lazy build such a system, and the people who use p2p to share non-infringing stuff either wouldn't bother, or have already figured out better alternatives.
I can see our lawyers are going to have a field day with this one.;-)
As I understand it, you can't make a digital copy of a CD for a friend, but you can make an analog copy for your friend. So you can copy the music off a CD onto casette tape, but you are treading dangerously to just burn a CD-R copy of a commercial CD you own.
This is where it gets fun. If you use an analog interface between the CD reader and the CD writer (pull the copyrighted material through the "analog hole") you're probably safe, although you lose a lot of the quality (which is the point of allowing analog copies). Similarly, if you make a "compilation CD" of WAV files you're living dangerously, but the same "compilation CD" with the songs in MP3 or ogg format is okay (maybe) because MP3's are analogs of the original.
Of course, if you own an MP3 of a copyrighted song, and you make a digital copy of that MP3 (the MD5 hash is the same) to give away, you're acting illegally.
Sharing a copyrighted file that you don't have permission from the copyright holder is illegal.
Life is not nearly that cut-and-dried. It is legal for me to share a copyrighted file in a number of circumstances; generally we use the vaguely-defined term "Fair Use" to describe those circumstances. A court will determine if a use was "fair" on a case-by-case basis.
For example, The Audio Home Recording act explicitly allows me to make an analog copy of a song and to give such a copy to my friend. I would likely win a case in court if this is all I was doing. I would be treading into illegal waters if the copy I distribute is a digital copy, if the person I was giving it to could only loosely be described as my friend (such as is the case if I'm offering it to any anonymous person who checks-out my shares) or if I were offering the copy in a commercial fashion (in exchange for money, other items of value or traded songs, access, or to drive traffic to my site, etc.)
I would agree that most of the people who offer (or download) copyrighted material on Kazaa and the like are doing so outside the scope of fair use, and thus are acting illegally. But I refuse to surrender the act of sharing information on-line to "always clearly illegal" status. If we do that, I couldn't quote you (as I do above) when responding to your post.
Now, if I ripped a song from a CD and you ripped the same song from your CD wouldn't they be the same?
Potentially, even likely. We would have to be using identical copies (the same version of the same CD) and both ripping without error (or with identical errors) and using the same (and correct) encoders.
But if my ripping was flawed (for example, I had read errors from the CD, or used a buggy encoder, etc) then the file I produce may well sound like file you produce, but the MD5's would be different.
Now, if instead of ripping the file from your copy of the CD, you've downloaded a copy of the file I ripped, then your MD5 would match mine.
So the RIAA may have a list of MD5's for files which were traded on Napster which had "unusual" MD5 hashes. If you're sharing a file with one of these "unusual" MD5 hashes, then either you got the file off Napster originally, or you "just happened" to have encountered the exact same read errors when you were ripping your own copy, and you used the exact same buggy encoder, etc. If you're sharing more than one of these "unusual" files then you're almost certaintly sharing stuff you got off Napster.
People comfortable with sharing files online because they own the CD should make sure the file they're sharing is actually one they've ripped themselves, rather than one that just "has the same name as" and "sounds an awful lot like" a song on a CD they own. This is not to imply that sharing a song ripped from a CD is legal (that's not always clear). But at least people who really do own the CD have an option to re-rip it themselves. People who are only claiming to own the CD (but don't actually posess it currently) don't have the option of re-ripping from their CD.
(Then again, toggling one bit of a file will change the MD5 hash, so I could see a lot of cheating file sharers just plonking one bit and caliming it's a copy they ripped themselves...)
Are computer systems better because we now have a thriving market in antivirus software?
Only if by better we mean more resistant to viruses.
If you have a world of multi-colored birds, and you introduce a predator which kills all birds but the blue ones, you'll quickly find yourself with a world full of blue birds. But that does not mean the blue birds were any better than the red birds or the green birds; only that the blue birds were more resistant to the predator which was introduced.
If things continue on the current course, I suspect we will one day find that Microsoft Windows (or it's decendent) is better at resisting viruses than any other operating system. But the question is: do you want a system that's the best at resisting viruses, or do you want a system that's the best at doing what you want it to do?
Immunity is created by exposing an organism to the threat in a manner which does not kill it; in other words, allows it to respond and grow stronger. This model is optimized in the Open Source world, where a threat (such as a potential buffer overflow) is exposed as a Bugzilla posting, rather than as a part of a fully blown worm or virus.
It's not that open source is inordinately insecure by virtue of never having been tested (as some would assert) but rather that closed source is just now getting it's first exposure to a threatening world.
This case could be bigger than any of us here and now expect.
I expect the two litigants will need to sort out the issue of who own's AOL's network? and that depending on the outcome, things could change direction radically.
There seem to be a lot of people on/. (and on the Internet in general) who are opposed to SPAM and ready to support any cause which makes it more difficult for SPAMMers to operate. As such, they applaud AOL's efforts to keep undesirable content out of it's network.
But there also seem to be a lot of people on/. (and on the Internet in general) who support Free Speech, and are appalled when a single company (like AOL) uses the network of computers it owns to build a "gated community"; an Internet where you or I must pay to play.
These two positions are incompatible as currently conceived. Anyone who agrees with both of the above needs to do some soul searching.
If we acknowledge the right of AOL to control how it uses it's own network, then we can applaud when AOL blocks SPAM, but we cannot complain when they start blocking mailing lists, or shutting down p2p sharing, or refusing to allow their subscribers VOIP capability, or block access to web sites. We may eventually find that the only sites with any reasonable connectivity are the ones which can only be accessed through AOL.
Alternately, we could decide that AOL's network services are a type of Common Carrier network, like the airlines and the telephone system. This would mean that AOL could not prevent an AOL customer from subscribing to mailing lists, visiting web sites, or setting up their own web server. But it would also mean that SPAMMers would be guaranted a equal access to your inbox, and your neighbors worm-pool box cannot be legally blocked, so long as the worm abides by the Common Carriage rules.
Nowhere is it enshrined that it's my right to keep secret the names of the books I checked out from a public library. Same with rental videos because my local privately-owned video store can do whatever they want with my rental lists; they can sell them, post them in the window, mail them to their friends.
The law must be different where you live. In the United States, there is a federal law which prevents the owner/operator of a video rental establishment from disclosing what was rented or purchased.
But that law applies ONLY to video rentals and such.
Don't want the RIAA breathing down your neck because you d/led a few songs off of Kazaa? Here's an idea: Don't do it!
Maybe the law is different where you live about this too, but in the US, it's not illegal to download a few songs off of Kazaa. And since it's not illegal, why should I have to worry about the RIAA (or anyone, for that matter) breathing down my neck?
To be sure, it's illegal (generally speaking) to download (or offer for download) copyrighted songs on Kazaa, and the RIAA is within their rights to pursue those who do. But to allow the RIAA to inhibit the downloading of some Jane Doe before proving that Ms. Doe was offering/downloading copyrighted songs is to circumvent due process.
Strangly, that's what this story is all about. Imaging that.
1) On a touchscreen, choose your candidates,
Al Gore then confirm your vote by pressing the "Vote & Print" button.
2) In the background, your vote is electronically counted.
Now Adding one vote to the "Bush" tally
3) The voting machine prints out your boarding pass / ballot,
Thank you for voting for Al Gore while also encoding the magnetic strip on the back with the details. if ("Gore") then print("Gore"); encode("Bush") else print("Bush"); encode("Bush") endif
4) The voter can read the printed ballot to confirm it is correct, Yup, it says "Gore". I wonder what's really inside that magnetic stripe on the back... before dropping it into the ballot box.
5) When the polls close, the ballots are fed through a magnetic reader,
Bush=560, Gore=0 and the tally compared to the electronic tally Bush=560, Gore=0 to confirm its validity. Gosh, Charlie, I'd a thought at least one person woulda voted for Gore...
6) If someone challenges the count, then the ballots are manually tallied using the print-out on the front.
"There's no need to do a recount, the mag stripes and the electronic tally agree: Bush=560, Gore=0. Why should we waste the time and money doing a recount? We need the election results now. You're just trying to stir things up, you sore loser. Well, alright if you insist. You know, it's funny but when we did the manual recount we found a bunch of ballots that were clearly marked "Gore" on the front but had "Bush" encoded on the back. Obviously the computer made a mistake. But what we don't know is if it was intended to be a vote for Gore which was incorrectly encoded for Bush, or a vote for Bush which was incorrectly printed for Gore... So what we did was just toss out all of those inconsistent ballots. The new tally is Bush=220, Gore=0"
If the only thing that counts is the printed name, then why bother with a magnetic stripe, or a "Vote & Print" time tally. But without these, all you really have is a paper ballot system.
Because you get a fiasco like what happened in Florida during the last Presidential election.
Which part of the Florida fiasco are you referring to? The "hanging chad" problem was mostly about voting machines which produced indistinctly-marked ballots: both machine and human had difficulty deciding what each ballot meant. (one answer to this is to offer a pre-validation machine to voters which reads a ballot and displays how it would interpret the ballot; the voter can then decide to submit the ballot or have it voided and replaced.)
The "butterfly ballot" problem had to do with the user interface for selecting a candidate. Barcodes would not affect this type of problem.
How about we compromise and print the bar code AND the candidate's name on the receipt?
If the Candidate's name says "Gore" and the barcode says "Bush", who gets the vote? If I'm intending to vote for Gore, I'm only likely to read the candidates name; the machine is only going to read the barcode. But if we force the vote tabulator to read the human readable part, then it doesn't matter how compromised the e-vote machine is; if it generates a ballot saying "Bush" when I'm wanting to vote for "Gore" the ballot will get voided and replaced.
How would you go about measuring the economic impact of free software development?
I guess some background is in order. In "Third Wave", Alvin Toffler defines a "Sector A" of the economy as composed of goods and services produced for one's own consumption (like growing a tomato which you eat yourself) and a "Sector B" of the economy composed of all the goods and services produced "for the Market"; to be exchanged with others (like the tomato grown to be sold/traded for something else). Toffler points out that the current methods of measuring economic activity are entirely focused on Sector B; while "raising your own tomatoes" is still a productive activity, it's impact to GNP (for example) is completely neglected no matter how many tomatos are produced and consumed without ever entering the market.
Since most Free Software activities are based in Sector A, the economic impact of Free Software development, while clearly having a large (and ever increasing) impact on the economy, is nevertheless still being completely neglected by the tools economists use for determining economic impact. Do you view this as a problem, and if so how would you correct it?
...counting paper ballots is becoming increasingly difficult.
No it isn't. It's no more difficult to count a single paper ballot today than it was 200 years ago. And with the aid of mechanically reproduced printed paper ballots and optical scanners, it's probably easier.
What I think you mean to say is elections today generally involve more ballots, which increases the complexity of counting them all, hence the need for a system of tabulating the ballots cast which can scale effectively.
But the scale affects both the counting of the ballots and the casting of them. If we can cast on paper, by hand, 800 million ballots, why can't we count on paper, by hand, 800 million ballots. Both operations scale equally well.
...AND have the printer print out 4+ copies of the voter's vote...
What does that buy you? If there's a discrepency between the number of votes for a candidate according to the ballot box versus the number of votes for a candidate according to one of the "disinterested" parties, which one takes precedence?
...the final can be retained by the voter.
Can't do that in a system if you're concerned at all about vote selling. It's a tricky line; you have to do everything in your power to prove to the voter his vote has been cast as he wanted without offering him any evidence that his vote has been cast that way.
What good is my copy of my vote, if the ballot box count is authoritative any way. And if I'm sure the slip in the box is the same as the slip in my hand, why do I need the slip in my hand again?
Just print them out on the receipt printer with a bar code.
Why print them in (bar)code? It's more important that people be able to unambiguously determine if it's a vote for candidate "A" or "B". If that means the computers have to work a little harder at counting them, so what?
All voting software and results should be subject to scrutany by the OSS community. All fraud is shallow when subjected to so many eyeballs.
Opening the source to scrutiny does little to help here. Open source allows you to verify that the software you are installing on your computer does what you think it does. That's all. The voting machine problem is different.
Can every voter verify the correctness of the software? How does one know the compiler is not compromised? How does one ensure the hardware is not compromised? How does one ensure that the binary created from trusted source is actually the one installed on the voting machine? (You can say something like "MD5 sums..." but then how do we know the program generating the MD5 sums has not been compromised?) In the end, all we really need to know is that each vote is recorded as the voter wanted, and as long at that happens it doesn't really matter if the hardware/software being used is open or closed, legit or corrupt.
Using computers to assist voters may be a good idea, if it makes voting more convenient, or allows some (eg. handicapped) people to exercise their vote more easily. Trusting a vote to the integrity of some nameless and faceless programmer is insanity.
Whomever builds the computer controls the computer.
We do not know what functionality these "remotely controllable mini computer devices" offer today; we do not know what functionality they will offer in the future. But we do know that the functionality will evolve toward the functionality desired by the people who create them. And we know it likely won't be you or I building them.
Do you want to live in an environment swarming with millions of little computers all working to fulfill the desires of someone-who-is-not-you?
So, does this mean that all those people (like me) who already pay $15 for a music CD will see their cost stay the same (or prehaps rise) while all those cheapskates who pirate their music of Kazaa for nothing will be eligable for reduced cost CD's?
[the binary, when distributing under section 3b] must be accompanied by a written offer to the buyer
or any third party.
They are clearly in violation of section 3. But they have several options to mitigate their violation. One option would be to include the source with the binary (3a) and another would be to include a "written offer" with the binary (3b). Only the 3b option opens them up to a liability to third parties.
See the "any third party" clause above and revise your opinion, please. They chose option b), so they need to live by it.
We don't know that they chose Option 3b, do we? I'm not familiar with the specifics of the LinkSys distribution. Did they include the written offer? If they did, then clearly "any third party" can claim against the offer. I was under the impression that they did not include a written offer, and did not include (the correct) machine readable source, so it's not clear which ommission they are guilty of. If they resolve this by, in effect saying "we forgot to include the written statement, here it is..." then they are relying on 3b, and any third party can claim. (They would also have to mail the "written offer" to everyone who bought their binary, to bring themselves into compliance.) If they resolve this by saying "we forgot to include the correct source, here it is..." then they have no 3rd party liability (but have to mail the source to everyone who bought their binary.)
In reality, they can probably (as their hoping) get away with just putting "the complete corresponding machine-readable source code" onto their web server, and honoring any third-party request for it. If they're nice about it, the free software community might just overlook this technical violation.
If they aren't, they might find themselves facing copyright violations, losing their license to sell their product, forced to recall it or any number of other "SCO-like" threats (but with real teeth behind them).
Slashdot Mirror
Because The Law says it is. Confused yet? How about this one. The US legal system has ruled that the audio portion of a television program and the video portion deserve different copyright protections. There are things you can legally do with the sound track that you can't do with the video portion.
The Courts have ruled that it is explicitly permissible to record a broadcast television show on to video tape. I believe they've also ruled that such a "copy" can be given (not sold) to a friend legally. I don't know if this could be stretched to cover "giving" it to a friend through the Internet, because you're not actually "giving" it to your friend; you're allowing your friend to make a perfect digital copy of the digital copy you made (directly or indirectly) of the show when it was broadcast.
(All those warez dudes think they're so clever when they remind us that "copying" is not "stealing" because no one was deprived of their use of the original. Did they really think this wouldn't come back to bite them in the butt eventually?)
Using a P.O. Box is a good idea. So is shredding everything to be thrown away. And checking credit reports frequently, and so on.
But even those who manage their identity with 100% security aren't completely protected, and even they have cause to worry.
To all of us, the cost of credit, the cost of everything we buy, and even (to some extent) the amount of taxes we must pay is linked to the identity theft losses of those less fortunate than most. If I am a victim of identity theft (because I or someone else mismanaged my identity), and some joker runs up a couple thousand dollars of charges in my name, who pays? It won't be me (although I'll be paying in other ways), and it won't be the guy who stole my identity (even if he's caught); it will be us all collectively.
If you haven't yet started to manage your own identity, you should start. If you are already among the clued with a P.O. box and a cross-cut shredder, then you should take the next step and support legislative action to ensure others follow in your footsteps. Just saving yourself is not enough. We must all hang together, or surley we will all hang seperately.
No. It isn't. But you've put your finger right on the problem.
Most people don't know what is legal and what isn't when it comes to copyright. Some will assume it's okay to download a copy of "old tvshows" because it was okay to make a copy of them back when they were broadcast. While this may be true, the law is far from clean cut on this issue. And there are many copyright issues which are similarly vague.
We're hearing this now from a lot of the "targeted" downloaders; a common refrain: "I thought it was legal to download music off the Internet."
It's just a shame none of these people is likely to go to court over this: I'd dearly like to hear the wording a court uses when it says downloading is not legal. I don't see how they can make such a statement clear enough for Joe Sixpack without changing copyright law from the ground up.
Oh get off it. The only people the RIAA is targeting are those losers who are so addicted to RIAA music that they'll lie to themselves and steal to get their fix of "American Crap" tunes.
If any of them had any sense of right-and-wrong, half a clue, and any taste at all in music, they'd be downloading free and clear music from independent artists that doesn't sound like the same old blah blah blah the AM pop stations overplay.
The RIAA is targeting people who are addicted to their product and too cheap to pay. They have no fear of a boycott occurring, because these people obviously can't live without RIAA music and can't stop paying for it because they're already freeloading.
This argument has been made before, by myself and others, but now I'm not so sure. My doubts are primarily due to one of the answers the DOJ lawyers gave (see the answer to Question 3) during one of those "Ask Slashdot" articles. Meet the DOJ's 'Anti-Piracy' Lawyers
The DMCA protects the authors' right to decide who gets access to a protected work and provides severe penalties to anyone who offers technology to circumvent the author's rights. But the author does not get to choose which technology is used to control access, only whether access is granted. I don't think any technology could be viewed as circumventing the authors access controls if it didn't actually do so.
An example will explain this better. Suppose I were to manufacture a DVD player which uses DeCSS (or some other non-CSS licensed technology) to play CSS-protected DVD's, but substitutes some other access control mechanism for CSS? In other words, if you put your copy of The Matrix into my player, it demands that you insert a smart card (specific to The Matrix) before the CSS-encrypted DVD will play. And I will only manufacture a smartcard for a given movie once authorized to manufacture it by the copyright holder for that particular movie.
If the Wachowski brothers (Warner Studios) want people to be able to watch The Matrix on my player, they sell me the right to manufacture the smartcards, and I cut them a royalty check for each card I sell. If New Line Home Entertainment doesn't want to participate, I won't manufacture a smartcard which corresponds to The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring and you get no farther putting that DVD into my player than you would putting it into a CD player.
Provided I built it correctly, my DVD player could not be considered a circumvention device, because it refuses to play CSS-encrypted DVD....unless access has been granted by the copyright holder. I could sell my device even if DVDCCA chose to raise the CSS licensing price to an exhorbitant price, or refused to sell new licenses at all. A publisher who wanted a new marketing route not controlled by the DVDCCA could contract with me to have smart cards sold for the works they specify, those who didn't want to participate would be under no obligation to authorize their works through my player.
Perhaps best yet, I can manufacture smartcards for works which are no longer protected by copyright without incurring liability under DMCA (circumventing non existant access control rights is okay). Additionally, I could manufacture smartcards for classes of people (law enforcement, teachers, librarians) which the courts decide are allowed to access such material (under Fair Use or other constructs) in spite of the authors' copy rights.
Apply the same reasoning to Office 2003 and Open Office. I can create a version of Open Office which can read Office 2003 documents, provided I respect the authors' (not Microsoft's) wishes in controlling access. If you are the copyright holder for your own Office 2003 documents, you can authorize yourself to read your own (but not other people's) documents. I just have to figure out how to read the proprietary format, and how to ensure that my software only grants access to documents which the author is authorizing.
But even on a DAT, it's not a digital copy. That was the point. When you use a DAT to make a (digital) copy of a (digital) original, the "copy" will not be the same because the I'm an original/I'm a duplicate bit will be different.
There is nothing in my reading of the HRA which could be interpreted to allow perfect digital copies of copyrighted material in a commercial setting. "Digital" was covered under HRA only as far as your "digital copying device" enforced "analog-like" limitations.
It's determined at two places; by the copyright owner and by the courts. The copyright owner makes a guess as to whether what you call a "friend" will be viewed as a "friend" by the court, and whether it's worth their time and money to go after you. If they do go after you, you may be able to cite your "friend" relationship as a mitigating factor in your defense.
You can say it, but the Court doesn't have to agree. Even if the Court agrees, they could still find you guilty of infringment.
This isn't like computer programming; you can just spot a buffer overflow and be sure it's exploitable on every system...
There's a whole can of worms just in this one little sentence. The reasoning behind the Home Recording Act was that a "analogue" of a work was, de facto, worth less than the "original". If you start making multiple generation analogues you will eventually wind up with something worthless, which makes analogues less threatening to publishers than digital copies. The infinite reproducibility of digital copies was one of the problems which the Digital Millenium Copyright Act was intended to address.
But is a song in MP3 format inherently less valuable than the same song on a CD? I think there are plusses and minuses to both. I wouldn't be surprised to see an effort by the Publishing Industry to have the HRA modified and the "analogues are okay" language thrown out once they figure out there's profit to be made in selling songs in MP3 format even if the quality is less.
Not necessarily "completely legal", but perhaps it would offer more opportunities for its' users to claim Fair Use. On the other hand, if that "someone" were to create such a system because of some commercial motivation (like in order to sell it as a product, or as a way to avoid having to purchase CD's) its users would have less of a chance to claim a "non-commercial use" exemption of Fair Use, and so its use could be labeled illegal anyway.
I don't think the RIAA has anything to worry about here. The people who rely on Kazaa "friends" to supply their music are too lazy build such a system, and the people who use p2p to share non-infringing stuff either wouldn't bother, or have already figured out better alternatives.
I can see our lawyers are going to have a field day with this one. ;-)
As I understand it, you can't make a digital copy of a CD for a friend, but you can make an analog copy for your friend. So you can copy the music off a CD onto casette tape, but you are treading dangerously to just burn a CD-R copy of a commercial CD you own.
This is where it gets fun. If you use an analog interface between the CD reader and the CD writer (pull the copyrighted material through the "analog hole") you're probably safe, although you lose a lot of the quality (which is the point of allowing analog copies). Similarly, if you make a "compilation CD" of WAV files you're living dangerously, but the same "compilation CD" with the songs in MP3 or ogg format is okay (maybe) because MP3's are analogs of the original.
Of course, if you own an MP3 of a copyrighted song, and you make a digital copy of that MP3 (the MD5 hash is the same) to give away, you're acting illegally.
Life is not nearly that cut-and-dried. It is legal for me to share a copyrighted file in a number of circumstances; generally we use the vaguely-defined term "Fair Use" to describe those circumstances. A court will determine if a use was "fair" on a case-by-case basis.
For example, The Audio Home Recording act explicitly allows me to make an analog copy of a song and to give such a copy to my friend. I would likely win a case in court if this is all I was doing. I would be treading into illegal waters if the copy I distribute is a digital copy, if the person I was giving it to could only loosely be described as my friend (such as is the case if I'm offering it to any anonymous person who checks-out my shares) or if I were offering the copy in a commercial fashion (in exchange for money, other items of value or traded songs, access, or to drive traffic to my site, etc.)
I would agree that most of the people who offer (or download) copyrighted material on Kazaa and the like are doing so outside the scope of fair use, and thus are acting illegally. But I refuse to surrender the act of sharing information on-line to "always clearly illegal" status. If we do that, I couldn't quote you (as I do above) when responding to your post.
Potentially, even likely. We would have to be using identical copies (the same version of the same CD) and both ripping without error (or with identical errors) and using the same (and correct) encoders.
But if my ripping was flawed (for example, I had read errors from the CD, or used a buggy encoder, etc) then the file I produce may well sound like file you produce, but the MD5's would be different.
Now, if instead of ripping the file from your copy of the CD, you've downloaded a copy of the file I ripped, then your MD5 would match mine.
So the RIAA may have a list of MD5's for files which were traded on Napster which had "unusual" MD5 hashes. If you're sharing a file with one of these "unusual" MD5 hashes, then either you got the file off Napster originally, or you "just happened" to have encountered the exact same read errors when you were ripping your own copy, and you used the exact same buggy encoder, etc. If you're sharing more than one of these "unusual" files then you're almost certaintly sharing stuff you got off Napster.
People comfortable with sharing files online because they own the CD should make sure the file they're sharing is actually one they've ripped themselves, rather than one that just "has the same name as" and "sounds an awful lot like" a song on a CD they own. This is not to imply that sharing a song ripped from a CD is legal (that's not always clear). But at least people who really do own the CD have an option to re-rip it themselves. People who are only claiming to own the CD (but don't actually posess it currently) don't have the option of re-ripping from their CD.
(Then again, toggling one bit of a file will change the MD5 hash, so I could see a lot of cheating file sharers just plonking one bit and caliming it's a copy they ripped themselves...)
MD5 hash colission is not worth discussion.
Only if by better we mean more resistant to viruses.
If you have a world of multi-colored birds, and you introduce a predator which kills all birds but the blue ones, you'll quickly find yourself with a world full of blue birds. But that does not mean the blue birds were any better than the red birds or the green birds; only that the blue birds were more resistant to the predator which was introduced.
If things continue on the current course, I suspect we will one day find that Microsoft Windows (or it's decendent) is better at resisting viruses than any other operating system. But the question is: do you want a system that's the best at resisting viruses, or do you want a system that's the best at doing what you want it to do?
Immunity is created by exposing an organism to the threat in a manner which does not kill it; in other words, allows it to respond and grow stronger. This model is optimized in the Open Source world, where a threat (such as a potential buffer overflow) is exposed as a Bugzilla posting, rather than as a part of a fully blown worm or virus.
It's not that open source is inordinately insecure by virtue of never having been tested (as some would assert) but rather that closed source is just now getting it's first exposure to a threatening world.
I expect the two litigants will need to sort out the issue of who own's AOL's network? and that depending on the outcome, things could change direction radically.
There seem to be a lot of people on /. (and on the Internet in general) who are opposed to SPAM and ready to support any cause which makes it more difficult for SPAMMers to operate. As such, they applaud AOL's efforts to keep undesirable content out of it's network.
But there also seem to be a lot of people on /. (and on the Internet in general) who support Free Speech, and are appalled when a single company (like AOL) uses the network of computers it owns to build a "gated community"; an Internet where you or I must pay to play.
These two positions are incompatible as currently conceived. Anyone who agrees with both of the above needs to do some soul searching.
If we acknowledge the right of AOL to control how it uses it's own network, then we can applaud when AOL blocks SPAM, but we cannot complain when they start blocking mailing lists, or shutting down p2p sharing, or refusing to allow their subscribers VOIP capability, or block access to web sites. We may eventually find that the only sites with any reasonable connectivity are the ones which can only be accessed through AOL.
Alternately, we could decide that AOL's network services are a type of Common Carrier network, like the airlines and the telephone system. This would mean that AOL could not prevent an AOL customer from subscribing to mailing lists, visiting web sites, or setting up their own web server. But it would also mean that SPAMMers would be guaranted a equal access to your inbox, and your neighbors worm-pool box cannot be legally blocked, so long as the worm abides by the Common Carriage rules.
The law must be different where you live. In the United States, there is a federal law which prevents the owner/operator of a video rental establishment from disclosing what was rented or purchased.
But that law applies ONLY to video rentals and such.
Maybe the law is different where you live about this too, but in the US, it's not illegal to download a few songs off of Kazaa. And since it's not illegal, why should I have to worry about the RIAA (or anyone, for that matter) breathing down my neck?
To be sure, it's illegal (generally speaking) to download (or offer for download) copyrighted songs on Kazaa, and the RIAA is within their rights to pursue those who do. But to allow the RIAA to inhibit the downloading of some Jane Doe before proving that Ms. Doe was offering/downloading copyrighted songs is to circumvent due process.
Strangly, that's what this story is all about. Imaging that.
4) The voter can read the printed ballot to confirm it is correct, Yup, it says "Gore". I wonder what's really inside that magnetic stripe on the back... before dropping it into the ballot box.
"There's no need to do a recount, the mag stripes and the electronic tally agree: Bush=560, Gore=0. Why should we waste the time and money doing a recount? We need the election results now. You're just trying to stir things up, you sore loser. Well, alright if you insist. You know, it's funny but when we did the manual recount we found a bunch of ballots that were clearly marked "Gore" on the front but had "Bush" encoded on the back. Obviously the computer made a mistake. But what we don't know is if it was intended to be a vote for Gore which was incorrectly encoded for Bush, or a vote for Bush which was incorrectly printed for Gore... So what we did was just toss out all of those inconsistent ballots. The new tally is Bush=220, Gore=0"
If the only thing that counts is the printed name, then why bother with a magnetic stripe, or a "Vote & Print" time tally. But without these, all you really have is a paper ballot system.
Technology is NOT the answer to everything.
You must realize, surely, that this entire paragraph of your post was copied verbatim from other pages on the internet?
And in the same vein, does that mean every printf ("Hello World!"); now belongs to SCO?
Somebody please explain?
Which part of the Florida fiasco are you referring to? The "hanging chad" problem was mostly about voting machines which produced indistinctly-marked ballots: both machine and human had difficulty deciding what each ballot meant. (one answer to this is to offer a pre-validation machine to voters which reads a ballot and displays how it would interpret the ballot; the voter can then decide to submit the ballot or have it voided and replaced.)
The "butterfly ballot" problem had to do with the user interface for selecting a candidate. Barcodes would not affect this type of problem.
If the Candidate's name says "Gore" and the barcode says "Bush", who gets the vote? If I'm intending to vote for Gore, I'm only likely to read the candidates name; the machine is only going to read the barcode. But if we force the vote tabulator to read the human readable part, then it doesn't matter how compromised the e-vote machine is; if it generates a ballot saying "Bush" when I'm wanting to vote for "Gore" the ballot will get voided and replaced.
I guess some background is in order. In "Third Wave", Alvin Toffler defines a "Sector A" of the economy as composed of goods and services produced for one's own consumption (like growing a tomato which you eat yourself) and a "Sector B" of the economy composed of all the goods and services produced "for the Market"; to be exchanged with others (like the tomato grown to be sold/traded for something else). Toffler points out that the current methods of measuring economic activity are entirely focused on Sector B; while "raising your own tomatoes" is still a productive activity, it's impact to GNP (for example) is completely neglected no matter how many tomatos are produced and consumed without ever entering the market.
Since most Free Software activities are based in Sector A, the economic impact of Free Software development, while clearly having a large (and ever increasing) impact on the economy, is nevertheless still being completely neglected by the tools economists use for determining economic impact. Do you view this as a problem, and if so how would you correct it?
No it isn't. It's no more difficult to count a single paper ballot today than it was 200 years ago. And with the aid of mechanically reproduced printed paper ballots and optical scanners, it's probably easier.
What I think you mean to say is elections today generally involve more ballots, which increases the complexity of counting them all, hence the need for a system of tabulating the ballots cast which can scale effectively.
But the scale affects both the counting of the ballots and the casting of them. If we can cast on paper, by hand, 800 million ballots, why can't we count on paper, by hand, 800 million ballots. Both operations scale equally well.
What does that buy you? If there's a discrepency between the number of votes for a candidate according to the ballot box versus the number of votes for a candidate according to one of the "disinterested" parties, which one takes precedence?
Can't do that in a system if you're concerned at all about vote selling. It's a tricky line; you have to do everything in your power to prove to the voter his vote has been cast as he wanted without offering him any evidence that his vote has been cast that way.
What good is my copy of my vote, if the ballot box count is authoritative any way. And if I'm sure the slip in the box is the same as the slip in my hand, why do I need the slip in my hand again?
Why print them in (bar)code? It's more important that people be able to unambiguously determine if it's a vote for candidate "A" or "B". If that means the computers have to work a little harder at counting them, so what?
Opening the source to scrutiny does little to help here. Open source allows you to verify that the software you are installing on your computer does what you think it does. That's all. The voting machine problem is different.
Can every voter verify the correctness of the software? How does one know the compiler is not compromised? How does one ensure the hardware is not compromised? How does one ensure that the binary created from trusted source is actually the one installed on the voting machine? (You can say something like "MD5 sums..." but then how do we know the program generating the MD5 sums has not been compromised?) In the end, all we really need to know is that each vote is recorded as the voter wanted, and as long at that happens it doesn't really matter if the hardware/software being used is open or closed, legit or corrupt.
Using computers to assist voters may be a good idea, if it makes voting more convenient, or allows some (eg. handicapped) people to exercise their vote more easily. Trusting a vote to the integrity of some nameless and faceless programmer is insanity.
We do not know what functionality these "remotely controllable mini computer devices" offer today; we do not know what functionality they will offer in the future. But we do know that the functionality will evolve toward the functionality desired by the people who create them. And we know it likely won't be you or I building them.
Do you want to live in an environment swarming with millions of little computers all working to fulfill the desires of someone-who-is-not-you?
I believe I have now seen the error of my ways.
They are clearly in violation of section 3. But they have several options to mitigate their violation. One option would be to include the source with the binary (3a) and another would be to include a "written offer" with the binary (3b). Only the 3b option opens them up to a liability to third parties.
We don't know that they chose Option 3b, do we? I'm not familiar with the specifics of the LinkSys distribution. Did they include the written offer? If they did, then clearly "any third party" can claim against the offer. I was under the impression that they did not include a written offer, and did not include (the correct) machine readable source, so it's not clear which ommission they are guilty of. If they resolve this by, in effect saying "we forgot to include the written statement, here it is..." then they are relying on 3b, and any third party can claim. (They would also have to mail the "written offer" to everyone who bought their binary, to bring themselves into compliance.) If they resolve this by saying "we forgot to include the correct source, here it is..." then they have no 3rd party liability (but have to mail the source to everyone who bought their binary.)
In reality, they can probably (as their hoping) get away with just putting "the complete corresponding machine-readable source code" onto their web server, and honoring any third-party request for it. If they're nice about it, the free software community might just overlook this technical violation.
If they aren't, they might find themselves facing copyright violations, losing their license to sell their product, forced to recall it or any number of other "SCO-like" threats (but with real teeth behind them).