This is no problem. Since it isn't me who runs the software, but rather my computer, I've started a sourceforge project to define an API for a kernel daemon to automatically detect and accept any click wrap license agreement. I'll never even see it. And if someone wants to sue, they can either fine or incarcerate (their choice) that daemon to their heart's content.
(apply smileys liberally for the satire impaired.)
That's not circumventing DRM for things you already have fair use on. It's circumventing DRM and then distrubuting pirated material.
Yes, but it would also be illegal to NOT circumvent DRM and distribute the resulting NON-pirated material.
As the article states (although not very clearly) if my garage band wants to allow people to play our latest album on their DRM-enabled MP3 players, we would have to add a watermark to our music. But the Recording Industry can't just let anyone who calls themselves a "garage band" put watermarks on whatever unwatermarked material they have, or soon everyone would be a garage band... "circumventing DRM and then distrubuting pirated material."
So, the ability to add a watermark will be restricted to those who can afford a large up-front investment. And anyone who distributes material with a counterfeit (how can you have a "counterfeit" without creating an "authorized" to define it?) watermark gets thrown in jail, regardless of whether any copyright infringement has occurred.
It also leaves open the whole issue of compelled speech; am I compelled to add a watermark to every digital publication I make, in the same way some religions compel every public mural to include a picture of their Fearless Religious Leader? What if the content I want to publish is digitally precise, and (in my humble artistic opinion) nothing else will do?
The camera recognizes the watermark placed by Lucas and shuts off.
So, when my daughter is getting ready to take her first steps, I get my new DRM-enabled video camera ready. And if the camera detects anything in the viewfinder (Star Wars playing on the TV in the background, a copy of Good HouseKeeping Digital on the eBook reader on the coffeeTable, some "Registration Required" web page on the computer screen, a snippet of the latest Brittney Spears on the radio in the background, etc.) I'll find my daughters first footsteps have been lost to DRM.
(Or, alternately, I'll be watching the next Star WareZ through a picture of somebody elses TV where their pet ant chooses to take it's first steps.
The point of these DRM measures is to create a system where you can't be a publisher until you've been "approved" by some industry or governmental interest. They can't allow just anyone to add a watermark, or I could add my own watermark after stripping someone elses digital content. Only a select few will be authorized to create watermarks; the rest of us will have no ability to create anything which can be ditributed through any sort of digital media; The general population will become silent "listen only" citizens. And if that isn't a direct assault on the principles of free speech, I can't think of a better one.
Anyone who thinks they can make this work without screwing up the tech industry, this country's economic future, and Democracy in general is probably old enought they won't have to live through it.
I'll agree with your sentiment, it's the details I get tripped-up on.
Is it illegal for me to ping your host? To do it twice? To do it when someone else is doing also doing it?
I have no way of knowing what speed your net connection is; for all I know you're connecting to the Internet via packet ham radio, and I might inadvertently swamp your feed by asking if you serve http? My actions would not be malicious, but you'd never know that from the effect you see.
When you decided to connect to the internet, you decided to offer a set of services. Why should you expect anyone else to not make use of those services. (Is that even what you want?)
Yes, the internet would be a better place for all of us if the script kiddees would just grow up. But wake up, already. The script kiddees (and spammers, etc.) are going to continue having their fun until there's no longer any internet left for them to have fun on. Maybe then they'll understand what they've destroyed, but I'm not counting on it.
I'm a part of a peer-to-peer file sharing system, but I refuse (for moral reasons) to serve any file unless I'm certain it's public domain (I have very few of these) or I am the copyright owner. I serve mostly my own rants, and historical papers of political bent.
If I am adversely affected because some copyright holder incorrectly believes that I am serving his content, I have no recourse because my sharing is not economically motivated. No one pays me for the files I offer so I can't show even a single dollar of economic impairment. I guess Big Business does have it better.
Furthermore, there seems to be no provision requiring them to notify me that they think I'm serving their stuff. How do I know it's the MPAA DOS'ing me into the ground and not some communist lunatic who disagrees with the Federalist Papers?
Does this legislation authorize copyright holders to infringe free speech in a way that the government is barred from doing?
It's a real shame someone is gonna have to fork over about $500 grand to their lawyers just to have this law declared overly broad.
Look, it doesn't matter whether the bits travel over the air or inside of wire, the problems is the same; the bits will be traveling over somebody else's air or wire. That somebody must either use their position as the carrier to control the communications to their own favor, or they will be economically run out of the market by some other somebody who does (and does it better). Your ability to 'win' this game (as a consumer) has nowhere to go but down.
There are at least three solutions to this problem:
Cultural Layer: Everyone agrees to cultural norms which say it's not fair to take advantage of your position to economically better yourself. People who violate these cultural standards are shunned out of the society.
Financial Layer: This would involve something like per-packet charging. Under this system, it doesn't matter what your packet is carrying, as long as you pay your bills.
Political Layer: Under this system, it becomes illegal to discriminate against a packet, passing one while blocking another. Think of this as "free speech for packets".
In the early days of the Internet, (prior to August '93) things were kept under control by cultural norms. Spamming violated these norms, and was kept under control because of it. We no longer have those cultural norms to keep people in line. It was killed by the spammers and their kin.
We don't yet have the micro-payment infrastructure which would be required to make a financial layer solution work. We're trying to cobble something like this together to keep the World Wide Web alive with things like click-through ads, but it's not working very well.
But throughout all of this, the phone system (remember that?) has kept on chugging because the network providers are prevented (by the equal access/common carrier laws) from blocking, limiting, or degrading the voice channels (narrow band). These laws are the foundation of a political layer solution which now offers the only hope of survival for the Internet as we know it.
If the FCC continues on it's brain-dead course of allowing network providers to choose which packets they'll pass and which ones they won't, the Internet will continue to implode. Those who stick around will find themselves back on CompuServe in the Bad Old Days.
Even after the Internet is run into the ground, FidoNet will survive.
If you support Free Speech, you'll want a Political Layer solution, or a Financial Layer solution.
If you don't trust Governments, you'll want a Financial Layer solution or a Cultural Layer solution.
If you don't trust haxors, you'll want to avoid Cultural Layer solutions and Political Layer solutions.
If you want a free (beer) Internet, you'll want a Cultural Layer solution or a Political Layer solution.
If you're a spammer, clearly you want a Political Layer solution, but you'll settle for a Cultural Layer solution as long as the rest of the people on the Internet will continue to let you get away with murder.
If you're anti-spam, you're either begging for a Financial Layer solution, or you're going to have to take some responsibility for shunning spammers (and their like) who view the Internet as a place where they can ignore social norms and enrich themselves.
It begs the old Nortel question, "What do you want the Internet to be?"
I don't recognize that IS number. It's likely you and I don't work for the same company.
Further, I have no idea what company you work for (and no desire to know) nor do I know if the companies you and I work for are in the same industry, strategic partners or competitors. It really doesn't matter, I believe my point still stands, even if it was not clear to you.
What we see in this report is a knee-jerk reaction by an Information Services group taking action far beyond it's necessary scope, and a wry example of the consequence such actions can have.
The problem, from their point of view, is that line engineers have an opportunity to do something undesirable, and the IS reaction is to remove that opportunity. But the side effect is that the line engineers are now unable to do what they were hired to do: come up with innovative solutions to problems.
That is a problem, but not one which the Information Services group has visibility to. It's not one they are likely to care about.
But your boss (or rather the boss of the original poster) should, because it's obvious what this will do to his ability to develop, and by extension, to the ability of the organization he works for to compete against competition such as the one I claimed to work for in my original post.
Information Services is a wonderful field for those who are into power grabs. Once you control an organizations computers, you can write your own ticket to riches, because you can control the technological direction of the entire organization. This is a big part of the reason why Microsoft spends so much time and effort focusing on the IS organizations of large corporations. They know who's really in charge.
But IS only runs an organization at the technology level; they can be undercut at the political level as soon as the board members realize that IS actions can actually hurt the bottom line.
It's a tough battle, because Information Technology is a tough parasite to shake. It's likely that any organization which already suffers from a power-hungry IS organization will have to endure a lot of pain while extracting itself from the mess. That can only occur with a long-term commitment to the survival of the company as a whole, and that determination must come from the board.
So my original reply was a short quip to say just that, and targeted at the only group who need to hear that message: If your organization depends on it's engineers to develop innovative technology (and what organization doesn't) then you need to dis-encumber (read: empower) your engineering staff, and you need to remind your Information Services staff that their job is make the environment work for the engineers, not against them; in other words, put the Services back into Information Services.
Societies that work universally have a strong military kept under strict civilian control to avoid their leveraging their military power into political power. This strategy saves the society from making decisions based on military considerations alone, which creates an environment unsuitable for the general population who must live, work, and thrive there.
High-tech business that work have a strong IS kept under strict board control to avoid their leveraging their technological power into political power. It's the same strategy which saves the business from making decisions based on technological considerations alone (witness: "You'll have to build houses without a hammer, because we're afraid you'll try to break into the filing cabinets...") which creates an environment unsuitable for the general population who must live, work, and thrive there.
The Soviet Union gave their military lots of power and resources. Funny, it wasn't for lack of military might that the Soviet Union was conquored.
I happen to work for your biggest competitor, and we've been wondering how we were ever going to compete against you. I'm glad to see that your innovation is going to be encumbered by this filter software in the future. Sell your stock now, because we're going to clean up all over you in the near future.
Oh, and tell the guys in Information Systems I said Thanks!
...bugs can be fixed by anyone with requisite knowledge, talent, and time.
You forgot one, perhaps the most important one of all: context.
Even the most ubiquitous "Hello World" program can be considered buggy, if the specification calls for it to say "Hallo Welt". In a world before IIS-based web viruses, an exploitable IIS install wasn't a vulnerability worth wasting patch time on. Nimda is a problem because the context changed; the world became a place where everyone has a web server, and something exploits them whenever it can. There is no doubt a new exploit waiting in Windows (Linux, BSD, etc. too) to become a problem when the world context changes.
This is the one area where Open Source software (if properly managed) has a win over closed source hands down.
In your environment, speed may be critical and security not an issue. In mine it may be the other way around. If we're both using the same program, and the vendor has to focus on one of these over the other, one of us is going to be pissed. With Open Source, we each get what we need.
Open Source does not eliminate all software development and maintenance costs, it only reduces the cost by spreading the costs for common development and maintenance among common users; you'll still pay full cost for your custom development and maintenance.
But it sure beats in-house development, because you do get to share the common development and maintenance costs. You pay for all of that yourself when you're developing in-house, because it's all custom development and maintenance.
By contrast, Closed Source shares all development and maintenance costs among all users, and provides no possibility for custom development and maintenance. (Well, unless you're a major purchaser, in which case you can pay the full cost for your custom development and maintenance (from a single source provider), and the vendor will share the results out among common users, pocketing the profits in the process.)
In other words, Closed Source is the way to go if your business does just exactly what every other business does, and you don't want any unfair advantages over your compettitors...
So, in conclusion: the _vulnerability_ only existed when a person with an Exploiter-like mind discovered the bug/misdesign and linked it together with an _exploit_.
You neglect to mention that sometines it's not a person who performs the discovery and linking, sometimes nature (or perhaps you'd prefer the word "circumstance") creates the link.
Otherwise, we could eliminate all exploits by banning either of discovery or exploit. We already have laws banning the exploit, and we're beginning to see laws (DMCA) which ban the discovery, but I have little confidence that Nature is going to pay attention to either of these, leaving us with the problem intact, if slightly reduced.
Damn straight. But then again, you know Linux, don't you? Ever thought of adding Lindows(tm) Consulting/Support to your shingle?
As you point out, you won't be competing against Wal*Mart, and I'll bet Microsoft has already warned every large consulting/service organization not to even think about offering Linux(tm) or Lindows(tm) support, or they can kiss their Microsoft Certified Partner designation good-bye.
Yet if Wat*Mart sells it, you know there's gonna be a market for technicians to service it....
Wal*Mart may be a crocodile, but as any plover will tell you, there's food in them there teeth.
This is a major step up from the "os-less" PC they were selling before, but still a step in the right direction.
The hardware may be crud, but if it is, drag it down the block to WalMart and get a replacement box. And now that it has an OS included, you can prove that the hardware is broke.
This is not to say "Behold WalMart, our savior", but rather to say "Now that Microsoft has some serious threat to worry about, we may be able to catch our breath before heading back into the arena..."
And at $300 bucks, assembled, with warranty, it practically meets my definition for "buy it for the parts".
Gartner found that Macs cost US$1,114 to support per year, while Wintel systems cost $1,438. Macs also needed less technical support and hardware and software costs were lower, the report explains.
Translation: Deploy Macs instead of PC's and you'll can kiss 22% of your budget, headcount, and corporate influence good bye.
Two years from now, when more people have broadband, but nobody actually uses it because it costs too much, the MPAA and the RIAA will lament the opportunity missed (and the profits lost) by not offering their wares for sale on-line while the infrastructure supported it.
Even if the worst fears of the new electric lights are true, I still think 802.11 will survive.
It will take less people and dollars (in designers) to work around the problem of sharing the 2.4 GHz (or some other unregulated) band than it would take (in lawyers) to get permission to use a band that's currently regulated for some other purpose.
Given the choice between solving a technology problem and solving a political problem, I think most geeks would prefer the former.
WI-FI is a way of providing a high speed network connection using radio.
It's key features are:
it's wireless; good for laptop users, or people who don't want to run wires all over their house.
it short range; up to 150 meters without special antennas, several kilometers with directional antennas.
it's high speed, from 2 Megabits per second to 11 Megabits per second.
it uses an unregulated frequency, (in most countries) meaning large corporations can't use the law to prevent a small inventor from using it.
it's reasonably cheap, a basic wireless card costs about $100, and a base station runs $200-$300 retail.
It is also referred to (generally) as "802.11" or more correctly as 802.11b.
More good information and additional links are available from your favorite web search engine (or local library) under the topics of Wireless Networking, Wi-Fi, 802.11. Common associated products are Orinoco, Wavelan, etc.
However the encrypted data has blended the copyrights of your original data and that of the DVDCCA
...which a proper application of DeCSS would remove. The original (pre-encrypted) work and the derived (post-decrypted) work should be bit-for-bit identical, or someone's done something wrong. It would be a tough job to show even one bit (pardon the pun) of DVD-CCA content in the end product. So while I could not authorize people to make copies of the CSS protected DVD, (and playable on a licensed DVD player) that's not my interest. It's my work (the part a DVD player wonlt allow you to copy) e're talking about. Those who own a legit copy of the DVD, and have been granted the right to make a digital copy of the work it contains should not be required (by law) to purchase a CSS decryption license if they don't want to use the CSS software to do the decryption (if it's been reverse engineered by someone else).
I suppose DVD-CCA could have chosen to patent (and therefore publish) the CSS specification, but they did not choose this route. If they had, they might have been able to prevent the use of something like DeCSS on patent infringment grounds, but that protection would last a maximum of 15(?) years; far short of the 95+ years of protection offered by Copyright law, or the indefinite protection available by just refusing to sell additional licenses after a few years.
You could just as easily have published your work on hollerinth cards and no one would be able to read it either.
Some people can read Hollerith cards. If you can't, that's not my problem.
The issue occurs if you can read Hollerith cards, but you are legally prevented from doing so. The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA make it illegal for others to (in this example) provide you with a machine to read Hollerith cards, or teach you how to read them, or even link to a web site where the information is provided.
The law does not protect me (as I'm granting you the right), the law grants a monopoly power to DVD-CCA, under the guise of copyright law, even though DVD-CCA is neither an author nor an inventor of any work in this discussion.
Re:Part of copyright should be the right to not
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What Is Public Domain?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You misunderstand. If I'm the copyright holder, I own the copyright to the work and all of it's derivatives. I still own the copyright to every derivative even if the only derivative left in existance is in your posession. I can't prevent you from selling it (first sale doctrine) but I can prevent you from publishing it. For example, I can claim copyright ownership of a work (and enforce my right to prevent further derivatives) even if I only made one and I gave it to you.
Should my ability to relinquish my rights to a work be contingent on my keeping the original, or being able to recreate the derivative?
If you bought a copy of my DVD, I have the right to prevent you from making copies of that DVD. CSS assists me in protecting my rights for as long as I choose to enforce them. But CSS does not provide for the possibility that you might be authorized to make a copy. That's not a fault of CSS; CSS is under no obligation to offer that feature. But the law (DMCA) effectively prevents you from using other means (such as DeCSS) to create a derivative you're entitled to create.
If this were the only remaining copy in existance, and you wanted to assist me in publishing additional copies, my right to speak my own words would be infringed.
Re:Part of copyright should be the right to not
on
What Is Public Domain?
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· Score: 4, Informative
An AC posted:
A copyright holder should have the right to completely remove the copyright from their creation, and thus allow others to use it completely and freely without worry about any sort of licensing issues.
...to which einhverfr offers a seemingly obvious, yet deviously incorrect reply of:
They do.
But this is not the case. Consider the following...
I have created a work, and I am the copyright holder. I have published this work as a CSS protected DVD. Now I wish to completely relinquish my copyrights to this work and make the work freely available for one and all to use.
As the copyright holder, I have the exclusive right to decide who can copy [1] my work. I can grant you explicit permission to make a copy [1] of that DVD, or by placing my work into the public domain, I can allow everyone to copy [1] my work. What I cannot do is grant you or anyone the permission to access my work who is not already licensed to do so by the DVD Copy Control Association. And if DVDCCA is unwilling [2] or unable [3] to grant such a license, the right to speak [1] my work becomes abridged [4] through a law [5] enacted by Congress.
So the technical answer is "No, I cannot "allow others to use it completely and freely without worry about any sort of licensing issues."
This is a terrible tangled web we are weaving ourselves into. How many of your copyrighted works would be locked forever on your hard drive if Microsoft revoked your license to access those files?
[1] publish, create a derivative of, or generally
express
[2] because you haven't offered them enough money, or because they don't like the content of the DVD I've published.
[3] because they've gone out of business.
[4] c.f. First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
If you use 1 minute of someones song in your 50 minute movie, you only have to give the songwriter royalties for the 1 minute of song, not for your entire movie.
Your belief is dangerously incorrect. The power granted by copyright is not (unless explicitly provided for) a compulsory license. There is no law compelling you to allow me to use 1 minute of your song in my movie once I've paid for it. Instead, copyright law grants you the power to prevent my use of that song in a manner to which you object; my only recourse is to offer you enough money before I publish my movie to overcome your objections. If I don't have enough money, or if money isn't an object and you stand on your principles, I'm SOL and need to find a different song to use.
Again, compulsory licensing works differently (and much more in line with your thinking) but doesn't apply in this instance.
Could you offer up any reason why people should do work for you without any return?
I can offer none. Can you offer any reason why I shouldn't be able to take what I've learned from reading your (GPL licensed) source and use that knowledge to create my own (proprietary, closed source) program?
If I am free to steal, you are likely to stop sharing. And that's the point the MPAA (and the RIAA, and closed source software companies like Microsoft, etc.) have been trying to make all along.
There are many people (and many Slashdotters among them) who think nothing of taking a video or a song (which was NOT released under any sort of "share me freely under these conditions" license) and making copies of it available for any joe with a network drop to download for free.
These people are often the same one who express outrage when anyone proposes taking the products of the Free Software and Open Source community and sharing them in specific violation of the agreed license.
I have a hard time reconciling the two. Is there a "Fair Use" provision for software? If I take a snippet (or 1000 hours) of your GPL'd code and include it in my proprietary product (and don't release source) is this a GPL violation, or is this acceptable and covered under fair use because I only "borrowed" a snippet?
(Let's try to avoid all the obfuscating uses like "what if that code is in MP3 format, or what if the code can be represented as an n-digit prime number?")
To me this reads clearly; If you want the world to respect your copyright and Open Source License then you gotta respect the rest of the world's copyrights and licenses. You can't go distributing mp3's and DVD's then expect others to respect the GPL.
In other words, pick one: Choose a world where you have the right to make your computer do anything it can be made to do, and to share your discoveries with anyone who will learn (the Open Source and Free Software course) and moderate your own actions, or choose a world where you don't have to moderate your own actions; you can do anything the computer will let you do, it just won't be that much. You'll be able to claim "fair use" to make as many copies of as much content as you want and share them with everyone worldwide provided you don't violate the terms of the license you signed; you just won't be able to get access to any of that content without signing a license prohibiting you from doing anything useful with the content in the first place.
If the Free Software community is to survive, then the Free Software community has to step up to the plate and take responsibility for ensuring that what is produced is a net benefit to the greater community as a whole. That doesn't mean shutting down GNUtella, but it does mean not illegally publishing others copyright content to the GNUtella network, not downloading illegal content others have provided, and shunning those who engage in such practices. It may mean buying a commercial copy of a CD (or program) even though you've already downloaded an illegitimate copy of it. It's a tough road, because we have an obligation to both provide the DeCSS software (so you can get around the DRM when the need arises) while at the same time creating a community that knows enough not to use DeCSS to publish content they're not entitled to. That may mean adding a DRM module to the Linux kernel, and leaving it there even though anyone who can type make could pull it out.
If we can't show a willingness to police ourselves, Hollywood, Disney, Jack Valenti, and Sen. Hollings will likely step in to remove the options.
Slashdot Mirror
This is no problem. Since it isn't me who runs the software, but rather my computer, I've started a sourceforge project to define an API for a kernel daemon to automatically detect and accept any click wrap license agreement. I'll never even see it. And if someone wants to sue, they can either fine or incarcerate (their choice) that daemon to their heart's content. (apply smileys liberally for the satire impaired.)
Yes, but it would also be illegal to NOT circumvent DRM and distribute the resulting NON-pirated material.
As the article states (although not very clearly) if my garage band wants to allow people to play our latest album on their DRM-enabled MP3 players, we would have to add a watermark to our music. But the Recording Industry can't just let anyone who calls themselves a "garage band" put watermarks on whatever unwatermarked material they have, or soon everyone would be a garage band... "circumventing DRM and then distrubuting pirated material."
So, the ability to add a watermark will be restricted to those who can afford a large up-front investment. And anyone who distributes material with a counterfeit (how can you have a "counterfeit" without creating an "authorized" to define it?) watermark gets thrown in jail, regardless of whether any copyright infringement has occurred.
It also leaves open the whole issue of compelled speech; am I compelled to add a watermark to every digital publication I make, in the same way some religions compel every public mural to include a picture of their Fearless Religious Leader? What if the content I want to publish is digitally precise, and (in my humble artistic opinion) nothing else will do?
(Or, alternately, I'll be watching the next Star WareZ through a picture of somebody elses TV where their pet ant chooses to take it's first steps.
The point of these DRM measures is to create a system where you can't be a publisher until you've been "approved" by some industry or governmental interest. They can't allow just anyone to add a watermark, or I could add my own watermark after stripping someone elses digital content. Only a select few will be authorized to create watermarks; the rest of us will have no ability to create anything which can be ditributed through any sort of digital media; The general population will become silent "listen only" citizens. And if that isn't a direct assault on the principles of free speech, I can't think of a better one.
Anyone who thinks they can make this work without screwing up the tech industry, this country's economic future, and Democracy in general is probably old enought they won't have to live through it.
Is it illegal for me to ping your host? To do it twice? To do it when someone else is doing also doing it?
I have no way of knowing what speed your net connection is; for all I know you're connecting to the Internet via packet ham radio, and I might inadvertently swamp your feed by asking if you serve http? My actions would not be malicious, but you'd never know that from the effect you see.
When you decided to connect to the internet, you decided to offer a set of services. Why should you expect anyone else to not make use of those services. (Is that even what you want?)
Yes, the internet would be a better place for all of us if the script kiddees would just grow up. But wake up, already. The script kiddees (and spammers, etc.) are going to continue having their fun until there's no longer any internet left for them to have fun on. Maybe then they'll understand what they've destroyed, but I'm not counting on it.
I'm a part of a peer-to-peer file sharing system, but I refuse (for moral reasons) to serve any file unless I'm certain it's public domain (I have very few of these) or I am the copyright owner. I serve mostly my own rants, and historical papers of political bent.
If I am adversely affected because some copyright holder incorrectly believes that I am serving his content, I have no recourse because my sharing is not economically motivated. No one pays me for the files I offer so I can't show even a single dollar of economic impairment. I guess Big Business does have it better.
Furthermore, there seems to be no provision requiring them to notify me that they think I'm serving their stuff. How do I know it's the MPAA DOS'ing me into the ground and not some communist lunatic who disagrees with the Federalist Papers?
Does this legislation authorize copyright holders to infringe free speech in a way that the government is barred from doing?
It's a real shame someone is gonna have to fork over about $500 grand to their lawyers just to have this law declared overly broad.
If others don't like the direction you're taking, they will fork the project and patch their own.
You are worried over nothing. That's the way open source is supposed to work.
Look, it doesn't matter whether the bits travel over the air or inside of wire, the problems is the same; the bits will be traveling over somebody else's air or wire. That somebody must either use their position as the carrier to control the communications to their own favor, or they will be economically run out of the market by some other somebody who does (and does it better). Your ability to 'win' this game (as a consumer) has nowhere to go but down.
There are at least three solutions to this problem:
Cultural Layer: Everyone agrees to cultural norms which say it's not fair to take advantage of your position to economically better yourself. People who violate these cultural standards are shunned out of the society.
Financial Layer: This would involve something like per-packet charging. Under this system, it doesn't matter what your packet is carrying, as long as you pay your bills.
Political Layer: Under this system, it becomes illegal to discriminate against a packet, passing one while blocking another. Think of this as "free speech for packets".
In the early days of the Internet, (prior to August '93) things were kept under control by cultural norms. Spamming violated these norms, and was kept under control because of it. We no longer have those cultural norms to keep people in line. It was killed by the spammers and their kin.
We don't yet have the micro-payment infrastructure which would be required to make a financial layer solution work. We're trying to cobble something like this together to keep the World Wide Web alive with things like click-through ads, but it's not working very well.
But throughout all of this, the phone system (remember that?) has kept on chugging because the network providers are prevented (by the equal access/common carrier laws) from blocking, limiting, or degrading the voice channels (narrow band). These laws are the foundation of a political layer solution which now offers the only hope of survival for the Internet as we know it.
If the FCC continues on it's brain-dead course of allowing network providers to choose which packets they'll pass and which ones they won't, the Internet will continue to implode. Those who stick around will find themselves back on CompuServe in the Bad Old Days.
Even after the Internet is run into the ground, FidoNet will survive.
If you support Free Speech, you'll want a Political Layer solution, or a Financial Layer solution.
If you don't trust Governments, you'll want a Financial Layer solution or a Cultural Layer solution.
If you don't trust haxors, you'll want to avoid Cultural Layer solutions and Political Layer solutions.
If you want a free (beer) Internet, you'll want a Cultural Layer solution or a Political Layer solution.
If you're a spammer, clearly you want a Political Layer solution, but you'll settle for a Cultural Layer solution as long as the rest of the people on the Internet will continue to let you get away with murder.
If you're anti-spam, you're either begging for a Financial Layer solution, or you're going to have to take some responsibility for shunning spammers (and their like) who view the Internet as a place where they can ignore social norms and enrich themselves.
It begs the old Nortel question, "What do you want the Internet to be?"
Further, I have no idea what company you work for (and no desire to know) nor do I know if the companies you and I work for are in the same industry, strategic partners or competitors. It really doesn't matter, I believe my point still stands, even if it was not clear to you.
What we see in this report is a knee-jerk reaction by an Information Services group taking action far beyond it's necessary scope, and a wry example of the consequence such actions can have.
The problem, from their point of view, is that line engineers have an opportunity to do something undesirable, and the IS reaction is to remove that opportunity. But the side effect is that the line engineers are now unable to do what they were hired to do: come up with innovative solutions to problems.
That is a problem, but not one which the Information Services group has visibility to. It's not one they are likely to care about.
But your boss (or rather the boss of the original poster) should, because it's obvious what this will do to his ability to develop, and by extension, to the ability of the organization he works for to compete against competition such as the one I claimed to work for in my original post.
Information Services is a wonderful field for those who are into power grabs. Once you control an organizations computers, you can write your own ticket to riches, because you can control the technological direction of the entire organization. This is a big part of the reason why Microsoft spends so much time and effort focusing on the IS organizations of large corporations. They know who's really in charge.
But IS only runs an organization at the technology level; they can be undercut at the political level as soon as the board members realize that IS actions can actually hurt the bottom line.
It's a tough battle, because Information Technology is a tough parasite to shake. It's likely that any organization which already suffers from a power-hungry IS organization will have to endure a lot of pain while extracting itself from the mess. That can only occur with a long-term commitment to the survival of the company as a whole, and that determination must come from the board.
So my original reply was a short quip to say just that, and targeted at the only group who need to hear that message: If your organization depends on it's engineers to develop innovative technology (and what organization doesn't) then you need to dis-encumber (read: empower) your engineering staff, and you need to remind your Information Services staff that their job is make the environment work for the engineers, not against them; in other words, put the Services back into Information Services.
Societies that work universally have a strong military kept under strict civilian control to avoid their leveraging their military power into political power. This strategy saves the society from making decisions based on military considerations alone, which creates an environment unsuitable for the general population who must live, work, and thrive there.
High-tech business that work have a strong IS kept under strict board control to avoid their leveraging their technological power into political power. It's the same strategy which saves the business from making decisions based on technological considerations alone (witness: "You'll have to build houses without a hammer, because we're afraid you'll try to break into the filing cabinets...") which creates an environment unsuitable for the general population who must live, work, and thrive there.
The Soviet Union gave their military lots of power and resources. Funny, it wasn't for lack of military might that the Soviet Union was conquored.
I happen to work for your biggest competitor, and we've been wondering how we were ever going to compete against you. I'm glad to see that your innovation is going to be encumbered by this filter software in the future. Sell your stock now, because we're going to clean up all over you in the near future.
Oh, and tell the guys in Information Systems I said Thanks!
Amen, Brother!
"Us yellowbeards are never more dangerous than when we're dead."
You forgot one, perhaps the most important one of all: context.
Even the most ubiquitous "Hello World" program can be considered buggy, if the specification calls for it to say "Hallo Welt". In a world before IIS-based web viruses, an exploitable IIS install wasn't a vulnerability worth wasting patch time on. Nimda is a problem because the context changed; the world became a place where everyone has a web server, and something exploits them whenever it can. There is no doubt a new exploit waiting in Windows (Linux, BSD, etc. too) to become a problem when the world context changes.
This is the one area where Open Source software (if properly managed) has a win over closed source hands down.
In your environment, speed may be critical and security not an issue. In mine it may be the other way around. If we're both using the same program, and the vendor has to focus on one of these over the other, one of us is going to be pissed. With Open Source, we each get what we need.
Open Source does not eliminate all software development and maintenance costs, it only reduces the cost by spreading the costs for common development and maintenance among common users; you'll still pay full cost for your custom development and maintenance.
But it sure beats in-house development, because you do get to share the common development and maintenance costs. You pay for all of that yourself when you're developing in-house, because it's all custom development and maintenance.
By contrast, Closed Source shares all development and maintenance costs among all users, and provides no possibility for custom development and maintenance. (Well, unless you're a major purchaser, in which case you can pay the full cost for your custom development and maintenance (from a single source provider), and the vendor will share the results out among common users, pocketing the profits in the process.)
In other words, Closed Source is the way to go if your business does just exactly what every other business does, and you don't want any unfair advantages over your compettitors...
You neglect to mention that sometines it's not a person who performs the discovery and linking, sometimes nature (or perhaps you'd prefer the word "circumstance") creates the link.
Otherwise, we could eliminate all exploits by banning either of discovery or exploit. We already have laws banning the exploit, and we're beginning to see laws (DMCA) which ban the discovery, but I have little confidence that Nature is going to pay attention to either of these, leaving us with the problem intact, if slightly reduced.
Damn straight. But then again, you know Linux, don't you? Ever thought of adding Lindows(tm) Consulting/Support to your shingle?
As you point out, you won't be competing against Wal*Mart, and I'll bet Microsoft has already warned every large consulting/service organization not to even think about offering Linux(tm) or Lindows(tm) support, or they can kiss their Microsoft Certified Partner designation good-bye.
Yet if Wat*Mart sells it, you know there's gonna be a market for technicians to service it....
Wal*Mart may be a crocodile, but as any plover will tell you, there's food in them there teeth.
The hardware may be crud, but if it is, drag it down the block to WalMart and get a replacement box. And now that it has an OS included, you can prove that the hardware is broke.
This is not to say "Behold WalMart, our savior", but rather to say "Now that Microsoft has some serious threat to worry about, we may be able to catch our breath before heading back into the arena..."
And at $300 bucks, assembled, with warranty, it practically meets my definition for "buy it for the parts".
Translation: Deploy Macs instead of PC's and you'll can kiss 22% of your budget, headcount, and corporate influence good bye.
It will take less people and dollars (in designers) to work around the problem of sharing the 2.4 GHz (or some other unregulated) band than it would take (in lawyers) to get permission to use a band that's currently regulated for some other purpose.
Given the choice between solving a technology problem and solving a political problem, I think most geeks would prefer the former.
It's key features are:
More good information and additional links are available from your favorite web search engine (or local library) under the topics of Wireless Networking, Wi-Fi, 802.11. Common associated products are Orinoco, Wavelan, etc.
I suppose DVD-CCA could have chosen to patent (and therefore publish) the CSS specification, but they did not choose this route. If they had, they might have been able to prevent the use of something like DeCSS on patent infringment grounds, but that protection would last a maximum of 15(?) years; far short of the 95+ years of protection offered by Copyright law, or the indefinite protection available by just refusing to sell additional licenses after a few years.
Some people can read Hollerith cards. If you can't, that's not my problem.
The issue occurs if you can read Hollerith cards, but you are legally prevented from doing so. The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA make it illegal for others to (in this example) provide you with a machine to read Hollerith cards, or teach you how to read them, or even link to a web site where the information is provided.
The law does not protect me (as I'm granting you the right), the law grants a monopoly power to DVD-CCA, under the guise of copyright law, even though DVD-CCA is neither an author nor an inventor of any work in this discussion.
Should my ability to relinquish my rights to a work be contingent on my keeping the original, or being able to recreate the derivative?
If you bought a copy of my DVD, I have the right to prevent you from making copies of that DVD. CSS assists me in protecting my rights for as long as I choose to enforce them. But CSS does not provide for the possibility that you might be authorized to make a copy. That's not a fault of CSS; CSS is under no obligation to offer that feature. But the law (DMCA) effectively prevents you from using other means (such as DeCSS) to create a derivative you're entitled to create.
If this were the only remaining copy in existance, and you wanted to assist me in publishing additional copies, my right to speak my own words would be infringed.
But this is not the case. Consider the following...
I have created a work, and I am the copyright holder. I have published this work as a CSS protected DVD. Now I wish to completely relinquish my copyrights to this work and make the work freely available for one and all to use.
As the copyright holder, I have the exclusive right to decide who can copy [1] my work. I can grant you explicit permission to make a copy [1] of that DVD, or by placing my work into the public domain, I can allow everyone to copy [1] my work. What I cannot do is grant you or anyone the permission to access my work who is not already licensed to do so by the DVD Copy Control Association. And if DVDCCA is unwilling [2] or unable [3] to grant such a license, the right to speak [1] my work becomes abridged [4] through a law [5] enacted by Congress.
So the technical answer is "No, I cannot "allow others to use it completely and freely without worry about any sort of licensing issues."
This is a terrible tangled web we are weaving ourselves into. How many of your copyrighted works would be locked forever on your hard drive if Microsoft revoked your license to access those files?
Your belief is dangerously incorrect. The power granted by copyright is not (unless explicitly provided for) a compulsory license. There is no law compelling you to allow me to use 1 minute of your song in my movie once I've paid for it. Instead, copyright law grants you the power to prevent my use of that song in a manner to which you object; my only recourse is to offer you enough money before I publish my movie to overcome your objections. If I don't have enough money, or if money isn't an object and you stand on your principles, I'm SOL and need to find a different song to use.
Again, compulsory licensing works differently (and much more in line with your thinking) but doesn't apply in this instance.
I can offer none. Can you offer any reason why I shouldn't be able to take what I've learned from reading your (GPL licensed) source and use that knowledge to create my own (proprietary, closed source) program?
If I am free to steal, you are likely to stop sharing. And that's the point the MPAA (and the RIAA, and closed source software companies like Microsoft, etc.) have been trying to make all along.
There are many people (and many Slashdotters among them) who think nothing of taking a video or a song (which was NOT released under any sort of "share me freely under these conditions" license) and making copies of it available for any joe with a network drop to download for free.
These people are often the same one who express outrage when anyone proposes taking the products of the Free Software and Open Source community and sharing them in specific violation of the agreed license.
I have a hard time reconciling the two. Is there a "Fair Use" provision for software? If I take a snippet (or 1000 hours) of your GPL'd code and include it in my proprietary product (and don't release source) is this a GPL violation, or is this acceptable and covered under fair use because I only "borrowed" a snippet?
(Let's try to avoid all the obfuscating uses like "what if that code is in MP3 format, or what if the code can be represented as an n-digit prime number?")
To me this reads clearly; If you want the world to respect your copyright and Open Source License then you gotta respect the rest of the world's copyrights and licenses. You can't go distributing mp3's and DVD's then expect others to respect the GPL.
In other words, pick one: Choose a world where you have the right to make your computer do anything it can be made to do, and to share your discoveries with anyone who will learn (the Open Source and Free Software course) and moderate your own actions, or choose a world where you don't have to moderate your own actions; you can do anything the computer will let you do, it just won't be that much. You'll be able to claim "fair use" to make as many copies of as much content as you want and share them with everyone worldwide provided you don't violate the terms of the license you signed; you just won't be able to get access to any of that content without signing a license prohibiting you from doing anything useful with the content in the first place.
If the Free Software community is to survive, then the Free Software community has to step up to the plate and take responsibility for ensuring that what is produced is a net benefit to the greater community as a whole. That doesn't mean shutting down GNUtella, but it does mean not illegally publishing others copyright content to the GNUtella network, not downloading illegal content others have provided, and shunning those who engage in such practices. It may mean buying a commercial copy of a CD (or program) even though you've already downloaded an illegitimate copy of it. It's a tough road, because we have an obligation to both provide the DeCSS software (so you can get around the DRM when the need arises) while at the same time creating a community that knows enough not to use DeCSS to publish content they're not entitled to. That may mean adding a DRM module to the Linux kernel, and leaving it there even though anyone who can type make could pull it out.
If we can't show a willingness to police ourselves, Hollywood, Disney, Jack Valenti, and Sen. Hollings will likely step in to remove the options.