Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots.
There are merits to this argument.
The contract Kellner speaks of is the implied social contract. It's the same type of contract USENET once had (years ago) which said you can use the resource so long as you don't do things like waste bandwidth, post commercial offers, make wildly off-topic posts, cross-post to every newsgroup, etc.
It was exactly the sort of social contract the Green Card Lawyers broke; not technically a violation of any laws or prohibited by any contract they signed, but (to many, including me) it broke the social norms of the community, and ultimately destroyed the community.
It's the same sort of social contract violation you feel when a telemarketer calls you during dinner (or at all), or when a spammer puts ten "need inkjet refills?" into your email inbox.
In a way, it's related to how the RIAA felt about the people who violated the "personal copies only" norm for music and instead used Napster to share everything with everyone. Again, it may technically not be a violation of copyright law, but it violated the social norms which the music industry executives were banking on.
Think about this; we used to have a social norm in this country which allowed people to carry things like toenail clippers and box cutters with them onto aircraft. That norm was violated on only one occasion (with tragic consequences) and now that social contract is void. We are developing new laws and contracts (social and otherwise) to deal with the new realities, but at a great cost to all involved.
Can you blame the RIAA for the fear that the community (of music lovers) which they based their industry on is threatened with distruction by those CDR-toting geeks who don't understand (or choose to ignore, for their own personal benefit) the social norms of the community?
Can you blame the MPAA for the same (as yet mostly unrealized) fear that broadband internet will do the same to their community?
I've watched the geek community come into it's own during the opening days of the Internet, and I can't say I'm impressed with attitude toward respecting (or understanding, or even recognising) the social contracts they're expected to follow. Part of that is good: some people call that behavior "thinking outside the box" and it was no doubt responsible for much of the innovation we've seen in the technology sector recently. But there's also a dark side to it; that behaviors could lead to the destruction of a community we might later decide we would rather have kept.
Heed this warning: The free software/open source community is founded on exactly this sort of social contract in the GPL. It would not take much of a well-funded anti-GPL element to violate that social contract and destroy this community. There are no doubt forces examining just these sorts of tactics for their own benefit.
I'm not saying it's your patriotic duty to watch the commercials, but think beyond your own personal gain and understand how your actions might eventually come home to roost. If you insist on having a PVR with a 30-second skip function, don't be surprised if communities built around the lack of that function (broadcast television with 30-second commercials, for example) crumble. If enough people get a 30-second skip function, you may find that feature becomes worthless. What replaces the community you lose may be better, or it might be worse. On the other hand, if we write into law a preservation for "broadcast television with 30-second commercials", our act of preserving that community will deny the development (good or bad) of what would have replaced it.
If we had banned ad-blocking technology from the World Wide Web, there may have been less incentive to develop click-behind windows. Then again, if we had banned ad-blocking technology from the World Wide Web, there might not be today any web on which those ads could be displayed.
No. Copyright exists "...to promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts..."
The end is not to protect authors; protecting authors is the means to that end. It's not the only possible means. It's a means which was thought-up in an age where the idea of instantaneous, ubiquitous, virtually costless duplication, publication and distribution was devoid of conception.
We need to keep our sights on the goal of producing a net benefit to society. If we determine that society will benefit the most by disarming all citizens of control of their computers, then that's what we should do (if our Constitution allows that). But, if we determine that abandoning copyright will serve us best, (the Constitution does allow this; it empowers Congress wrt Copyright, but does not obligate) then the fact that content creators are harmed should only be noted as a regretable but unavoidable fact of life. (The fact that snake oil vendors were harmed did not deter us from the development of modern medicine.) Personally, I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
I believe an argument can be made that society can benefit greatly under circumstances where content creators can exercise only minimal control; and I believe the Internet, ubiquitous computing, and even the Free Software movement are shining examples of this.
Perhaps what we need is some form of governance board, perhaps modelled after the Federal Reserve System, which is not beholden to one side or the other to select a dynamic but viable solution. They might choose to raise or lower the cost of publishing (adjusting the interest rates) by modifying the strength of the copyright monopoly vs. fair use, changing the effective term, dictating compulsory licensing (and setting the terms), instituting or changing the registration requirements, etc. I don't know what the balancing formulas would be; we may be just now beginning to think of the "science of Intellectual Property management" in the same sense that we now think of economics as the science of Real Property management".
Legislation is NOT always bad; but in a democracy you do have to eat the meal you've cooked, eat what you're served if you're too lazy to cook for yourself, or go hungry.
Are you hungry enough yet to write a letter? Or even vote?
If this the case how would free content continue to exist and operate in this system, as they would obviously have to use watermarks just like copyrighted works if they want to be playable on the new hardware DRM systems.
Free content could not exist, unless it were also simple to create the watermarks, to allow the content to be played. Maybe it will be as simple as dropping it off at the corner drugstore for "processing".
The ability to create the watermarks is what the proponents to this legislation would like to reserve to themselves.
Copyright is fundamentally at odds with free speech. Both are important, so both must be balanced. You can't have absolutes on either side.
I don't think we will go so far as to allow either one to completely override the other. But I do question how far out-of-whack the balance will get before each side realizes they can't live without the other.
Isn't that a bit like holding Napster responsible for all theft of music that happens on its systems, or the manufacturers of CD-RW drives for all software piracy done on their machines?
The difference is intent.
While Napster may allow (we could even say encourage) piracy, the designers of Napster did not "breathe life" into Napster, giving it the ability to act of it's own accord. Someone has to tell napster to perform an errant action. This is not true of OutLook.
Outlook was designed to allow a remote user to cause your computer to take action on it's own.
In any other industry, this would be termed a product defect (or more likely a product liability) case.
...Microsoft can basically do whatever they want, however stupid it is, and it doesn't make a dent in their market share. Microsoft could be caught depositing huge sums of money in Osama Bin Laden's personal bank account and they'd manage to put just the right spin on it and somehow blame it on the GPL and still maintain their ridiculous market share.
This is a common symptom of an addiction.
Look, if you tell a dope addict that their dealer is "depositing huge sums of money in Osama Bin Laden's personal bank account" would they give it up? Of course not. They're addicted. So are most corporate IT departments. (How would you go about preserving all of your corporation's Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint documents in a usable format if you decided to dump Microsoft applications? How would you retrain all the marketbots and salesdroids?
You can't change their behavior, they will first have to admit they have a problem, then seek treatment for themselves. But neither should you be an enabler; that only hides the problem and prolongs the agony.
The only way to avoid Microsoft lock-in is to retain control over your own computer systems. Don't become an addict; just say no.
Explain to me, then, all the various Linux distros for desktops that allow you pick and choose?
Integration (bundling things together, and making them require each other) is a primary method that a corporation can use to differentiate their products from their competitors, to retain control over the product they are selling, to retain their market share, to create barriers to entry of competitors, and to maintain abnormally high prices.
Modularization (breaking things up into little black boxes with well defined interfaces) is a strategy for allowing competition, and is therefore much favored by consumers, in the long run.
Which is not to say that integration is always bad. In a competitive market, integration is a valuable technique for product differentiation, but less valuable as a means to retain product control. In a monopolized market, integration is useless as a product differentiator, but extremely effective for retaining product control.
One of Microsoft's strategies all along has been to pretend they don't have a monopoly, and therefore everything they do must be for the "competitive market" reasons (which are to be encouraged) rather than the "monopolized market" reasons, which earned them their antitrust conviction.
As an example, if you must buy a Ford radio for your Ford car, your choices are more limited than if you can buy any radio, tape player, CD player, etc. and just "plug it in". They can also require you to buy one of their (presumably overpriced) radios with every car they sell, even if you don't need a radio. The example breaks down with software; a Ford truck can't know you've installed a non-Ford radio, and therefore can't demand that you remove it and replace it with a genuine Ford radio. With software, it not only can do this, it can do it by itself.
When Microsoft says they can't create a modular operating system, they just mean it's not in their own interest to do so. The free software community, being built by the consumers of the software, has every incentive to modularize, and little incentive to force integration.
Their embedded product is an example of where they don't yet have a monopoly, in a market that requires a modular product. You bet they have a modular version of Windows to address that market.
Re:Where is the BSA for the GPL?
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If the company that owned the closed code didn't want to accept the GPL, they would become liable for copyright infringement, and would lose their rights to use the GPL'd code, but nothing in copyright law forces them to open up their own code!
That's an excellent point I had not considered, but I'm not sure I agree with you. I guess it would depend on wether the GPL 'shrink-wrap' license is enforceable or not.
From Section 5 under Terms and Conditions of the GPL:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.
Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it. (emphasis added)
As I read this, if the code has already shipped, the agreement is set in stone. I don't believe the GPL offeres any way to terminate ones obligations once the license is accepted.
This section immediately follows section 4, which states:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However,
parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. (emphasis added)
I take this to mean that if you use GPL'd software in your proprietary software product and distribute a copy to me, I have inherited full GPL rights to all of the code (including your closed portion) even if you are later found noncompliant, and your rights to distribute the code are terminated. Although I could see an agrument made that, if the code could be deemed to have been distributed without accepting the GPL license, then the license would "automatically terminate", leaving me with no license under which to demand your source.
It does beg the question of what happens when the GPL grants me the right to receive code from you that the GPL prohibits you from distributing to me.
Or are you saying that M$ owns all those computers because their OS is installed on it?
They do own those computers, both in the Hax0r sense and in every other sense which is important to this discussion.
A computer is only useful in the sense that it can be used to run software. When you run software written by someone else, it will perform those functions which the software author programmed it to perform. If part of the author's goal is to use that computer to their own benefit, the fact that you bought the hardware makes no difference. And while the software itself can only do so much, much software is accompanied by a license agreement which greatly extends the rights you've granted to that software author, according to their demands.
This is what makes software so different from anything else, and makes a software monopoly so much more dangerous than anything else; software has loyalty. A computer which has been indoctrinated by Microsoft (or any other software manufacturer, including open source) becomes an agent of the will of the software author. In most cases, the author just wants the software to perform as you expect, the other cases we often call spyware. But Microsoft has proven themselves particularly good at using their control over the operating system software to promote their applications software, and vice-versa. These are the network effects Judge Jackson noted and was infuriated by. Open source has the same ability to take over your computer for purposes other than what you want, but of course it's a lot harder to do with many eyes looking at the source than it is to in a precompiled binary protected by a non-disclosure agreement and a "no reverse engineering" license clause.
Many people don't realize what they're getting themselves (or their organization) into when they blindly accept a license agreement. In this case, Microsoft doesn't have to force the school to undergo an audit, because the school already agreed to undergo an audit when they accepted the license.
Think about it this way; if Microsoft were to introduce a new program "Microsoft Four: the answer to the age old question what do you get when you add two and two?" which always comes up with the answer five you would have no recourse save what Microsoft offers to give you out of the kindness of its heart. Read the license: AS IS, NO WARRANTY. And if part of the license terms you agreed to included allowing them access to your hardware whenever they demand, why do you think you should be relieved of your end of the bargain?
Re:Where is the BSA for the GPL?
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GPL's Strength
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Well you're not really taking any software.
The GPL is viral in that all of the closed code compiled with it would become open-sourced by such a violation. If I owned such closed source, I might well consider that a "taking", especially if the GPL part was included by some under-paid contractor, against my wishes. (But then again, I shouldn't have used GPL'd stuff in my closed source, should I?)
Come to think of it, this might just be the reason BillyG is losing sleep over the GPL. If a thousand or so Slashdotters each put up half a WinXP license ($100) toward a bounty, Microsoft would be just one disgruntled contractor, licensee, or code reviewer away from seeing their monopoly disappear in a puff of GPL smoke. To be sure, they'd simply pay anything not to be put out of business in this fashion.
To counter that, they're probably making sure everyone at MS knows not to include GPL'd code in their shipping product, but if it's already shipped, it's too late. I'd suspect that's why MS feels it has to discredit the GPL first.
Kinda like when I used to tell my little brother "You don't want any of these cookies...chomp chomp...because they all contain worms...chomp chomp...so I'll just finish them off...chomp chomp...so you aren't tempted...chomp chomp...
Where is the BSA for the GPL?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've always wondered why the Slashdot community (and GPL advocates in general) don't all get together and start a BSA-like (Business Software Alliance) organization to defend and promote the GPL?
sell shares to raise funds. say, $10 a piece.
offer a bounty for whistleblowers (licensees, contractors, coders with options underwater, etc) who can demonstrate uses of GPL'd code in shipping, closed-source products.
conduct BSA-style raids on firms selling closed-source software.
since a proven violation would likely open-source the product, terminate that firm's ability to sell it further, and result in heavy fines (triple damages, plus all the ill-gotten gains) there would be a strong incentive to settle out-of-court.
the settlement funds are fed-back into the organization to offer more bounties, and pay dividends to the share holders, etc.
I realize this would never work (the community would never support it; free software has never been about taking software from others unwilling to give it) but it's fun to dream about it.
The common thread running through all of these "ding dong the telcos are dead" posts is the final stages of a toppling monopoly. The North American switching environment makes for an excellent case study in this.
Prior to the breakup of AT&T in 1984, telephony in North America was governed by monopoly conditions similar to what you see in many "third world" countries today. The network, lines, and (for a long time) even the phones were property of the telephone company. You paid a lease charge and could only use the equipment in ways which were profitable to Ma Bell. There was even a case where the phone company sued to stop the sale of a plastic cone (to cover the mouthpiece and block out noise) because of the damage it might cause to the network.
It should not surprise anyone to learn that, also up until about 1984, the state-of-the-art in telephone switching equipment was, for the most part, still compatible with equipment state-of-the-art for half a century before. (The difference is roughly equivalent to the technological differences between an 80386 based system, and one based on a Pentium; a little more speed, a little more capacity, a completely new math co-processor on the same chip, but the same tired engine underneath it all.)
Several things happened in 1984 with the AT&T consent decree: for one, competition was mandated back into the market. Legislation was introduced mandating that all calls (yes even ones carrying data over 2400 baud modems) had to be treated the same. (the Common Carrier laws) Also, special protection was created for "Data services"; which the telephone companies were prohibited from offering, even though they were (at the time) in apparently the best position to offer those services.
The effects were both immediately apparent, and blindingly unobvious. The expected part was the drop in long distance rates when Sprint and MCI entered the long distance market and offered real competition. But the unobvious part was the effect the telephony deregulation had on data communications. It's no coincidence that modem technology, home computing, and the Internet all took-off at about the same time. The Internet we enjoy today is the direct result of deregulation that occurred 20 years ago. But it would have occurred even earlier if Ma Bell had not had a profit incentive to prevent it from occurring earlier.
This is not to say Bell Labs didn't advance the state-of-the-art in telephony. Anyone living through those times will tell you that most of the innovation within that industry was coming from the company holding the monopoly control over it. But looking back, you have to wonder if, but for the Ma Bell monopoly, we might have had the Internet revolution back in the 1960's.
Don't just knock the phone companies. They are doing what any business with a monopoly must do; use every trick in the book to prevent challenger technologies from getting a foothold and knocking out their cash cow.
In the interest of full disclosure here, I should point out that I entered the telephony industry at the start of that deregulation wave, rode it hard and long (and profitably) and now find myself part of that industry in danger of being routed by these voice-over-IP interlopers.
But what really concerns me is that we're seeing the next wave of monopolies being built today, using the same tired tricks, and to the same disgusting ends. If you believe your Internet Service Provider won't block H323 (voice over IP) and start charging you for it just as soon as they can be sure you won't jump to their competitor when they do, you're dreaming. If you think AOL, or MSN, or Earthlink, or whomever won't terminate service to "unprofitable parts" of the Internet just as soon as they've gained monopoly control over the rest, it's probably because you've never lived through it yourself. (Wasn't that you asking them to block SPAM from Asia?) You can bet that the majority of "computer software innovation" for the next little while are going to be coming out of Redmond. But if you think that's because noone without an M$ badge can understand computers, you're falling into the same trap your grandparents fell into 80 years ago.
We're seeing the death of the Telephony monopoly in these very days, and many say it's about time. Don't feel guilty taking pleasure in the breath of fresh air it provides; you have paid dearly for it, and waited far too long. But neither let the lessons it teaches escape your grasp. In the AT&T case, their 100+year monopoly may have been well deserved. After all it isn't easy to run a twisted copper pair to every household in North America, and give it five-nines reliability. We're not talking carpet bomb the whole nation with install disks hard or strong-arm the OEM's against the competitors hard. We're talking back breaking, ditch digging, sweat dripping, pole climbing, mile after mile after mile hard. If they had a monopoly over the telephone network, at least they earned it.
But we're also building new monopolies even as we speak. Without legislation mandating that AOL (or whoever eventually wins the fight) provide common-carrier type service, you can bet everything other than web and email will be like DTMF dialing: an extra $3.95/month premium service. If the Microsoft antitrust settlement fails to preserve competition in the computer software market, we may spend another 50 years or so (how old will you be then) getting incremental technological advancements to Windows, and still be using menus and mice before it's finally over. Slashdot may be remembered not as news for nerds but for the glimpses of technology which might have been but never were.
We have a choice here. (At least I hope we still do.) We can nip these monopolies in the bud, restore competition to the market place, and begin reaping the Internet equivalent of 3 cents a minute long distance, or we can forget the lessons of the history we're living through, and let our children 30 years hence talk about this 'new fangled internet service that lets you create your own programs, compile them, and even share them with others, without having to buy a license or anything.
If it's anything like I'm thinking, someday people studying history will look back to the turn of this century and say "How could they have lived through that and not seen what was going on. It's so blatently obvious!".
I did hear that Steven King's last internet-only story wasn't a big seller, but it would be interesting to know if it bolstered the sales.
As the article points out, there's a very small number of authors who already have good name recognition (like King) and are already making a lot of money off their publications. This distribution model wouldn't work well for them because very few people are going to "discover" King as an author this way then proceed to purchase books of his they would otherwise not known about.
This was one of the mistakes King made. Schneier had good reason for naming it the "Street Performers Protocol": it's not necessarily effective for Broadway headliners.
I also wonder what his attitude would be if, for instance, Ace started publishing paperbacks of one of the books he's put up at the Free Library for $1 less than Baen and not paying him any royalties.
Probably the same as his attitude would be if Ace started publishing paperbacks of one of the books he hasn't put up at the Free Library for $1 less than Baen and not paying him any royalties.
Just because it's less work to illegally re-publish a work that's been distributed electronically (as compared to one where you'd have to scan and OCR it) doesn't make it any more legal.
And, as any good slashdotter knows, encrypting the books at the Free Library wouldn't keep them from being pirated. But, as the article points out, leaving them unencrypted has completely stoped them from being pirated.
Copyright law is really (or should be!) about publishing--no one but the owner of the "rights" to a piece of work has the legal right to publish it.
Please forgive the US-centric nature of this post.
No. Copyright law is really (and should be) about promoting the progress of science and the useful arts by encouraging Authors and Inventors to share their ideas.
At the time when the Congress was empowered to create a Copyright law, it seemed very reasonable to achieve that goal by (among other things) offering authors a limited monopoly to the publishing of their works.
There is no reason to believe that such a limited monopoly is the only way to go about achieving the goals which the Constitution grants Congress the task of achieving.
If, for example, it were determined that such a limited copyright had no effect on promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, it could be argued such a determination would remove Congress's authority to provide any sort of monopoly rights to an author.
The "exclusive copyright monopoly for the author" is by no means set in stone, but that's exactly what todays publishers what you to believe.
Years ago, our company did all software development on large IBM mainframes. All code storage, design tools, code editors, compilers, test tools, etc. Everything. Every designer had to have an account, storage space, access to a terminal, and processing time on the mainframe. That was reasonable enough.
But to tie everything together, that meant that everyone else also had to have a mainframe account, many of whom did not otherwise need access to the design environment or need mainframe training. We're talking about sales folk (to check on the projected release date) business managers (availability), technical writers, secretaries (t oaccess email) etc. That was a lot of training, account space, and processing power which could have been better spent elsewhere.
It was a great boon when we started deploying personal computers (less contention for the 3270 mainframe terminals) and things really took off when we moved to web-based distribution of information. That meant that you could access most of the derivative portion of the environment (project planning, documentation, etc) from whatever computer (PC, Macintosh, UNIX workstationi, VT100) you happened to already have and be trained for.
You no longer had to have a specific computer running a specific operating system to access the information you needed. Sounds familiar?
Nowadays, the company has moved back to creating IE-specific web pages. That means everyone in the company has to have a PC running Windows to get any information out of our development environment.
The funny part is, just after we moved the content to the web, we moved the design tools to UNIX. So now all the designers need UNIX workstations...where IE support is just a bad joke. Care to guess what we do when management says "please review the important corporate information off the (IE-only) web page..."?
So getting back to the world where you don't have to have a specific application running under a specific operating system to access the corporate information is a good thing. Anything which promotes diversity in that realm is good.
Of course it's good for consumers to get very good software packages included for free.
Naturalists, and other environmental resource managers have a saying: A fed bear is a dead bear.
So it might seem reasonable to assume that, because a software package (or a nugget of food) is being provided free, it must be to your benefit to take it. This is a very short-sighted attitude to take.
Feeding a bear benefits the bear by temporarily giving him access to the food, but also permanently destroys the bear's independence.
Microsoft is well aware that by providing their web browser (or other packages) for free they are gaining market share which will be to their benefit (and your detriment) in the long run.
In other words, I hope you really like what's being given to you for free, because it may be all you get for a long time to come. Alternately, you may find yourself starving when that hand stops feeding you. It does not benefit Microsoft to give away high quality software once there are no competitors. Instead, you can expect the innovation to cease or the price to increase.
Are you a dead bear waiting to happen? Or are you smarter than the average bear.
This is not saying such fragmentation would return the state-of-the-art to the point where it was 20 years ago, but rather that the current state-of-the-art would remain frozen for 20 years, with no possibility for advancement.
That should make it clear that the statement was nothing more than nonsense and was never meant to be taken seriously.
If authors make less money, there will be fewer books.
I challenge you to prove that assertion.
Further, I challenge you to prove that an author makes less money by allowing (or being required to allow) his book to be sold used than by restricting the sale of used books.
And while you're at it, prove that the benefit to society of supporting the "first sale doctrine" is less than the benefit to society should we do away with it. After all, copyright is not something created for the benefit of authors and publishers, it was created for the benefit of society; it just happens to be beneficial for authors and publishers.
I wonder how this (CNN) article would have read if the author only knew about TALK. After all, at least with IRC there is a server which can be monitored. With TALK, you don't even get one of those.
This is not for you and me. This is not about exposing some of us to FORTRAN and the others to C++. The program is aimed at giving IT executives a chance to switch places.
The idea is to take someone with a large government budget to spend and indoctrinate them for 6 month or a year in some IT corporation, while at the same time giving a senior IT executive from the same company a chance to spend a half year or so meeting the players inside the government, learning what problems they face and recommending the best possible solution ("...which our company just happens to sell...") for those problems.
This is nothing more than legalized influence peddling. If I ran an IT company, I'd pay good money to get this program running, too.
(I think with the NET law you can't make copies and give them away either)
In general, it's the making a copy part that's prohibited, not the what you do with it. You can buy a work and give it away on the NET, so long as you don't make a copy in the process. When you figure out how to do that, let us know.
The problem is that unlike software, or even movies, books have been around near forever and people (especially libraries) have gotten used to actually BUYING books.
This is an excellent point which is often overlooked, but it goes much deeper. Think about state of the art computing ten years ago (1992). The 386's were just begining to gain popularity, and Windows 95 was just a proposal on Microsoft's 5 year plan. If you were "computer literate" back then, you likely bought (or otherwise acquired) some software to run on it. How much of that software do you still have? How much of it will still run on any sort of computer you still have access to?
Go back another decade to 1982, the era of the Commodore Vic20 and the Timex/Sinclair ZX80/ZX81. Apple's Macintosh wouldn't hit the market for another two years yet; their Apple ][ was dominant. How much of that software do you still have? How much of it will still run on any sort of computer you still have access to today? Emulation is fair game.
And that's just looking twenty years into the past.
Now think about electronic media going forward. You know that eBook you bought last week? Do you think your eBook reader will still be running 10 years from now? 20 years? Do you think your license will still be valid? What about that DVD? How long do you suppose you have before the 'new and improved' DVD players won't play the 2002-format DVD's, even if you've kept them in mint condition? And you can bet DMCA-like laws will make emulation a non-option.
Now go to your bookshelf and see if you can find a book with a copyright date in the 1992 or 1982 era. Got some? Can you still read them? Is the information still relevant? Heck, I've got magazines from back then, some of which I haven't got around to reading yet. I've got paperback (disposable) books from the 60's. I have hardcover books a century older than those. In many cases, the publisher is long out of business, but fortunately my license (and ability) to read those books is not dependent on the publisher being around.
I can't fault the authors or publishers for choosing the more money option over the less money option, and I guess they think there's more money for them if a new copy is sold over an old copy being resold. But what we see here again is the age old truism that businesses like dumb consumers. Where education will lead the consumers to purchase less product, a business has only one incentive to educate or inform: competition. This is why the Author's Guild is reacting against Amazon; in this case, Amazon is providing a service which is beneficial to consumers at the (percieved) expense of the members of the Author's Guild. It also shows how important competition and the free exchange of information has become in this new wired world, and how damaging a monopolistic construction, or the obstruction of free information flow can be.
It's about time that people with intelligence and money get together to have our say.
Unfortunately, there's more money in the set of { stoopid with money } than in the set of { intelligent with money }, even though the few in the intelligent set generally have more money. The money in the stoopid set is less well guarded, too.
Slashdot Mirror
There are merits to this argument.
The contract Kellner speaks of is the implied social contract. It's the same type of contract USENET once had (years ago) which said you can use the resource so long as you don't do things like waste bandwidth, post commercial offers, make wildly off-topic posts, cross-post to every newsgroup, etc.
It was exactly the sort of social contract the Green Card Lawyers broke; not technically a violation of any laws or prohibited by any contract they signed, but (to many, including me) it broke the social norms of the community, and ultimately destroyed the community.
It's the same sort of social contract violation you feel when a telemarketer calls you during dinner (or at all), or when a spammer puts ten "need inkjet refills?" into your email inbox.
In a way, it's related to how the RIAA felt about the people who violated the "personal copies only" norm for music and instead used Napster to share everything with everyone. Again, it may technically not be a violation of copyright law, but it violated the social norms which the music industry executives were banking on.
Think about this; we used to have a social norm in this country which allowed people to carry things like toenail clippers and box cutters with them onto aircraft. That norm was violated on only one occasion (with tragic consequences) and now that social contract is void. We are developing new laws and contracts (social and otherwise) to deal with the new realities, but at a great cost to all involved.
Can you blame the RIAA for the fear that the community (of music lovers) which they based their industry on is threatened with distruction by those CDR-toting geeks who don't understand (or choose to ignore, for their own personal benefit) the social norms of the community?
Can you blame the MPAA for the same (as yet mostly unrealized) fear that broadband internet will do the same to their community?
I've watched the geek community come into it's own during the opening days of the Internet, and I can't say I'm impressed with attitude toward respecting (or understanding, or even recognising) the social contracts they're expected to follow. Part of that is good: some people call that behavior "thinking outside the box" and it was no doubt responsible for much of the innovation we've seen in the technology sector recently. But there's also a dark side to it; that behaviors could lead to the destruction of a community we might later decide we would rather have kept.
Heed this warning: The free software/open source community is founded on exactly this sort of social contract in the GPL. It would not take much of a well-funded anti-GPL element to violate that social contract and destroy this community. There are no doubt forces examining just these sorts of tactics for their own benefit.
I'm not saying it's your patriotic duty to watch the commercials, but think beyond your own personal gain and understand how your actions might eventually come home to roost. If you insist on having a PVR with a 30-second skip function, don't be surprised if communities built around the lack of that function (broadcast television with 30-second commercials, for example) crumble. If enough people get a 30-second skip function, you may find that feature becomes worthless. What replaces the community you lose may be better, or it might be worse. On the other hand, if we write into law a preservation for "broadcast television with 30-second commercials", our act of preserving that community will deny the development (good or bad) of what would have replaced it.
If we had banned ad-blocking technology from the World Wide Web, there may have been less incentive to develop click-behind windows. Then again, if we had banned ad-blocking technology from the World Wide Web, there might not be today any web on which those ads could be displayed.
Why is the ability to trivially duplicate anything digital a problem?
No. Copyright exists "...to promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts..."
The end is not to protect authors; protecting authors is the means to that end. It's not the only possible means. It's a means which was thought-up in an age where the idea of instantaneous, ubiquitous, virtually costless duplication, publication and distribution was devoid of conception.
We need to keep our sights on the goal of producing a net benefit to society. If we determine that society will benefit the most by disarming all citizens of control of their computers, then that's what we should do (if our Constitution allows that). But, if we determine that abandoning copyright will serve us best, (the Constitution does allow this; it empowers Congress wrt Copyright, but does not obligate) then the fact that content creators are harmed should only be noted as a regretable but unavoidable fact of life. (The fact that snake oil vendors were harmed did not deter us from the development of modern medicine.) Personally, I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
I believe an argument can be made that society can benefit greatly under circumstances where content creators can exercise only minimal control; and I believe the Internet, ubiquitous computing, and even the Free Software movement are shining examples of this.
Perhaps what we need is some form of governance board, perhaps modelled after the Federal Reserve System, which is not beholden to one side or the other to select a dynamic but viable solution. They might choose to raise or lower the cost of publishing (adjusting the interest rates) by modifying the strength of the copyright monopoly vs. fair use, changing the effective term, dictating compulsory licensing (and setting the terms), instituting or changing the registration requirements, etc. I don't know what the balancing formulas would be; we may be just now beginning to think of the "science of Intellectual Property management" in the same sense that we now think of economics as the science of Real Property management".
Legislation is NOT always bad; but in a democracy you do have to eat the meal you've cooked, eat what you're served if you're too lazy to cook for yourself, or go hungry.
Are you hungry enough yet to write a letter? Or even vote?
Free content could not exist, unless it were also simple to create the watermarks, to allow the content to be played. Maybe it will be as simple as dropping it off at the corner drugstore for "processing".
The ability to create the watermarks is what the proponents to this legislation would like to reserve to themselves.
Copyright is fundamentally at odds with free speech. Both are important, so both must be balanced. You can't have absolutes on either side.
I don't think we will go so far as to allow either one to completely override the other. But I do question how far out-of-whack the balance will get before each side realizes they can't live without the other.
The difference is intent.
While Napster may allow (we could even say encourage) piracy, the designers of Napster did not "breathe life" into Napster, giving it the ability to act of it's own accord. Someone has to tell napster to perform an errant action. This is not true of OutLook.
Outlook was designed to allow a remote user to cause your computer to take action on it's own.
In any other industry, this would be termed a product defect (or more likely a product liability) case.
This is a common symptom of an addiction.
Look, if you tell a dope addict that their dealer is "depositing huge sums of money in Osama Bin Laden's personal bank account" would they give it up? Of course not. They're addicted. So are most corporate IT departments. (How would you go about preserving all of your corporation's Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint documents in a usable format if you decided to dump Microsoft applications? How would you retrain all the marketbots and salesdroids?
You can't change their behavior, they will first have to admit they have a problem, then seek treatment for themselves. But neither should you be an enabler; that only hides the problem and prolongs the agony.
The only way to avoid Microsoft lock-in is to retain control over your own computer systems. Don't become an addict; just say no.
Integration (bundling things together, and making them require each other) is a primary method that a corporation can use to differentiate their products from their competitors, to retain control over the product they are selling, to retain their market share, to create barriers to entry of competitors, and to maintain abnormally high prices.
Modularization (breaking things up into little black boxes with well defined interfaces) is a strategy for allowing competition, and is therefore much favored by consumers, in the long run.
Which is not to say that integration is always bad. In a competitive market, integration is a valuable technique for product differentiation, but less valuable as a means to retain product control. In a monopolized market, integration is useless as a product differentiator, but extremely effective for retaining product control.
One of Microsoft's strategies all along has been to pretend they don't have a monopoly, and therefore everything they do must be for the "competitive market" reasons (which are to be encouraged) rather than the "monopolized market" reasons, which earned them their antitrust conviction.
As an example, if you must buy a Ford radio for your Ford car, your choices are more limited than if you can buy any radio, tape player, CD player, etc. and just "plug it in". They can also require you to buy one of their (presumably overpriced) radios with every car they sell, even if you don't need a radio. The example breaks down with software; a Ford truck can't know you've installed a non-Ford radio, and therefore can't demand that you remove it and replace it with a genuine Ford radio. With software, it not only can do this, it can do it by itself.
When Microsoft says they can't create a modular operating system, they just mean it's not in their own interest to do so. The free software community, being built by the consumers of the software, has every incentive to modularize, and little incentive to force integration.
Their embedded product is an example of where they don't yet have a monopoly, in a market that requires a modular product. You bet they have a modular version of Windows to address that market.
That's an excellent point I had not considered, but I'm not sure I agree with you. I guess it would depend on wether the GPL 'shrink-wrap' license is enforceable or not.
From Section 5 under Terms and Conditions of the GPL:
As I read this, if the code has already shipped, the agreement is set in stone. I don't believe the GPL offeres any way to terminate ones obligations once the license is accepted.
This section immediately follows section 4, which states:
I take this to mean that if you use GPL'd software in your proprietary software product and distribute a copy to me, I have inherited full GPL rights to all of the code (including your closed portion) even if you are later found noncompliant, and your rights to distribute the code are terminated. Although I could see an agrument made that, if the code could be deemed to have been distributed without accepting the GPL license, then the license would "automatically terminate", leaving me with no license under which to demand your source.
It does beg the question of what happens when the GPL grants me the right to receive code from you that the GPL prohibits you from distributing to me.
They do own those computers, both in the Hax0r sense and in every other sense which is important to this discussion.
A computer is only useful in the sense that it can be used to run software. When you run software written by someone else, it will perform those functions which the software author programmed it to perform. If part of the author's goal is to use that computer to their own benefit, the fact that you bought the hardware makes no difference. And while the software itself can only do so much, much software is accompanied by a license agreement which greatly extends the rights you've granted to that software author, according to their demands.
This is what makes software so different from anything else, and makes a software monopoly so much more dangerous than anything else; software has loyalty. A computer which has been indoctrinated by Microsoft (or any other software manufacturer, including open source) becomes an agent of the will of the software author. In most cases, the author just wants the software to perform as you expect, the other cases we often call spyware. But Microsoft has proven themselves particularly good at using their control over the operating system software to promote their applications software, and vice-versa. These are the network effects Judge Jackson noted and was infuriated by. Open source has the same ability to take over your computer for purposes other than what you want, but of course it's a lot harder to do with many eyes looking at the source than it is to in a precompiled binary protected by a non-disclosure agreement and a "no reverse engineering" license clause.
Many people don't realize what they're getting themselves (or their organization) into when they blindly accept a license agreement. In this case, Microsoft doesn't have to force the school to undergo an audit, because the school already agreed to undergo an audit when they accepted the license.
Think about it this way; if Microsoft were to introduce a new program "Microsoft Four: the answer to the age old question what do you get when you add two and two?" which always comes up with the answer five you would have no recourse save what Microsoft offers to give you out of the kindness of its heart. Read the license: AS IS, NO WARRANTY. And if part of the license terms you agreed to included allowing them access to your hardware whenever they demand, why do you think you should be relieved of your end of the bargain?
The GPL is viral in that all of the closed code compiled with it would become open-sourced by such a violation. If I owned such closed source, I might well consider that a "taking", especially if the GPL part was included by some under-paid contractor, against my wishes. (But then again, I shouldn't have used GPL'd stuff in my closed source, should I?)
Come to think of it, this might just be the reason BillyG is losing sleep over the GPL. If a thousand or so Slashdotters each put up half a WinXP license ($100) toward a bounty, Microsoft would be just one disgruntled contractor, licensee, or code reviewer away from seeing their monopoly disappear in a puff of GPL smoke. To be sure, they'd simply pay anything not to be put out of business in this fashion.
To counter that, they're probably making sure everyone at MS knows not to include GPL'd code in their shipping product, but if it's already shipped, it's too late. I'd suspect that's why MS feels it has to discredit the GPL first.
Kinda like when I used to tell my little brother "You don't want any of these cookies...chomp chomp...because they all contain worms...chomp chomp...so I'll just finish them off...chomp chomp...so you aren't tempted...chomp chomp...
sell shares to raise funds. say, $10 a piece.
offer a bounty for whistleblowers (licensees, contractors, coders with options underwater, etc) who can demonstrate uses of GPL'd code in shipping, closed-source products.
conduct BSA-style raids on firms selling closed-source software.
since a proven violation would likely open-source the product, terminate that firm's ability to sell it further, and result in heavy fines (triple damages, plus all the ill-gotten gains) there would be a strong incentive to settle out-of-court.
the settlement funds are fed-back into the organization to offer more bounties, and pay dividends to the share holders, etc.
I realize this would never work (the community would never support it; free software has never been about taking software from others unwilling to give it) but it's fun to dream about it.
Prior to the breakup of AT&T in 1984, telephony in North America was governed by monopoly conditions similar to what you see in many "third world" countries today. The network, lines, and (for a long time) even the phones were property of the telephone company. You paid a lease charge and could only use the equipment in ways which were profitable to Ma Bell. There was even a case where the phone company sued to stop the sale of a plastic cone (to cover the mouthpiece and block out noise) because of the damage it might cause to the network.
It should not surprise anyone to learn that, also up until about 1984, the state-of-the-art in telephone switching equipment was, for the most part, still compatible with equipment state-of-the-art for half a century before. (The difference is roughly equivalent to the technological differences between an 80386 based system, and one based on a Pentium; a little more speed, a little more capacity, a completely new math co-processor on the same chip, but the same tired engine underneath it all.)
Several things happened in 1984 with the AT&T consent decree: for one, competition was mandated back into the market. Legislation was introduced mandating that all calls (yes even ones carrying data over 2400 baud modems) had to be treated the same. (the Common Carrier laws) Also, special protection was created for "Data services"; which the telephone companies were prohibited from offering, even though they were (at the time) in apparently the best position to offer those services.
The effects were both immediately apparent, and blindingly unobvious. The expected part was the drop in long distance rates when Sprint and MCI entered the long distance market and offered real competition. But the unobvious part was the effect the telephony deregulation had on data communications. It's no coincidence that modem technology, home computing, and the Internet all took-off at about the same time. The Internet we enjoy today is the direct result of deregulation that occurred 20 years ago. But it would have occurred even earlier if Ma Bell had not had a profit incentive to prevent it from occurring earlier.
This is not to say Bell Labs didn't advance the state-of-the-art in telephony. Anyone living through those times will tell you that most of the innovation within that industry was coming from the company holding the monopoly control over it. But looking back, you have to wonder if, but for the Ma Bell monopoly, we might have had the Internet revolution back in the 1960's.
Don't just knock the phone companies. They are doing what any business with a monopoly must do; use every trick in the book to prevent challenger technologies from getting a foothold and knocking out their cash cow.
In the interest of full disclosure here, I should point out that I entered the telephony industry at the start of that deregulation wave, rode it hard and long (and profitably) and now find myself part of that industry in danger of being routed by these voice-over-IP interlopers.
But what really concerns me is that we're seeing the next wave of monopolies being built today, using the same tired tricks, and to the same disgusting ends. If you believe your Internet Service Provider won't block H323 (voice over IP) and start charging you for it just as soon as they can be sure you won't jump to their competitor when they do, you're dreaming. If you think AOL, or MSN, or Earthlink, or whomever won't terminate service to "unprofitable parts" of the Internet just as soon as they've gained monopoly control over the rest, it's probably because you've never lived through it yourself. (Wasn't that you asking them to block SPAM from Asia?) You can bet that the majority of "computer software innovation" for the next little while are going to be coming out of Redmond. But if you think that's because noone without an M$ badge can understand computers, you're falling into the same trap your grandparents fell into 80 years ago.
We're seeing the death of the Telephony monopoly in these very days, and many say it's about time. Don't feel guilty taking pleasure in the breath of fresh air it provides; you have paid dearly for it, and waited far too long. But neither let the lessons it teaches escape your grasp. In the AT&T case, their 100+year monopoly may have been well deserved. After all it isn't easy to run a twisted copper pair to every household in North America, and give it five-nines reliability. We're not talking carpet bomb the whole nation with install disks hard or strong-arm the OEM's against the competitors hard. We're talking back breaking, ditch digging, sweat dripping, pole climbing, mile after mile after mile hard. If they had a monopoly over the telephone network, at least they earned it.
But we're also building new monopolies even as we speak. Without legislation mandating that AOL (or whoever eventually wins the fight) provide common-carrier type service, you can bet everything other than web and email will be like DTMF dialing: an extra $3.95/month premium service. If the Microsoft antitrust settlement fails to preserve competition in the computer software market, we may spend another 50 years or so (how old will you be then) getting incremental technological advancements to Windows, and still be using menus and mice before it's finally over. Slashdot may be remembered not as news for nerds but for the glimpses of technology which might have been but never were.
We have a choice here. (At least I hope we still do.) We can nip these monopolies in the bud, restore competition to the market place, and begin reaping the Internet equivalent of 3 cents a minute long distance, or we can forget the lessons of the history we're living through, and let our children 30 years hence talk about this 'new fangled internet service that lets you create your own programs, compile them, and even share them with others, without having to buy a license or anything.
If it's anything like I'm thinking, someday people studying history will look back to the turn of this century and say "How could they have lived through that and not seen what was going on. It's so blatently obvious!".
As the article points out, there's a very small number of authors who already have good name recognition (like King) and are already making a lot of money off their publications. This distribution model wouldn't work well for them because very few people are going to "discover" King as an author this way then proceed to purchase books of his they would otherwise not known about.
This was one of the mistakes King made. Schneier had good reason for naming it the "Street Performers Protocol": it's not necessarily effective for Broadway headliners.
Probably the same as his attitude would be if Ace started publishing paperbacks of one of the books he hasn't put up at the Free Library for $1 less than Baen and not paying him any royalties.
Just because it's less work to illegally re-publish a work that's been distributed electronically (as compared to one where you'd have to scan and OCR it) doesn't make it any more legal.
And, as any good slashdotter knows, encrypting the books at the Free Library wouldn't keep them from being pirated. But, as the article points out, leaving them unencrypted has completely stoped them from being pirated.
Please forgive the US-centric nature of this post.
No. Copyright law is really (and should be) about promoting the progress of science and the useful arts by encouraging Authors and Inventors to share their ideas.
At the time when the Congress was empowered to create a Copyright law, it seemed very reasonable to achieve that goal by (among other things) offering authors a limited monopoly to the publishing of their works.
There is no reason to believe that such a limited monopoly is the only way to go about achieving the goals which the Constitution grants Congress the task of achieving.
If, for example, it were determined that such a limited copyright had no effect on promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, it could be argued such a determination would remove Congress's authority to provide any sort of monopoly rights to an author.
The "exclusive copyright monopoly for the author" is by no means set in stone, but that's exactly what todays publishers what you to believe.
I'm not sure if you were aware of this or not, but your introductory statememt is almost a textbook definition of a ponzi scheme.
Years ago, our company did all software development on large IBM mainframes. All code storage, design tools, code editors, compilers, test tools, etc. Everything. Every designer had to have an account, storage space, access to a terminal, and processing time on the mainframe. That was reasonable enough.
But to tie everything together, that meant that everyone else also had to have a mainframe account, many of whom did not otherwise need access to the design environment or need mainframe training. We're talking about sales folk (to check on the projected release date) business managers (availability), technical writers, secretaries (t oaccess email) etc. That was a lot of training, account space, and processing power which could have been better spent elsewhere.
It was a great boon when we started deploying personal computers (less contention for the 3270 mainframe terminals) and things really took off when we moved to web-based distribution of information. That meant that you could access most of the derivative portion of the environment (project planning, documentation, etc) from whatever computer (PC, Macintosh, UNIX workstationi, VT100) you happened to already have and be trained for.
You no longer had to have a specific computer running a specific operating system to access the information you needed. Sounds familiar?
Nowadays, the company has moved back to creating IE-specific web pages. That means everyone in the company has to have a PC running Windows to get any information out of our development environment.
The funny part is, just after we moved the content to the web, we moved the design tools to UNIX. So now all the designers need UNIX workstations...where IE support is just a bad joke. Care to guess what we do when management says "please review the important corporate information off the (IE-only) web page..."?
So getting back to the world where you don't have to have a specific application running under a specific operating system to access the corporate information is a good thing. Anything which promotes diversity in that realm is good.
Naturalists, and other environmental resource managers have a saying: A fed bear is a dead bear.
So it might seem reasonable to assume that, because a software package (or a nugget of food) is being provided free, it must be to your benefit to take it. This is a very short-sighted attitude to take.
Feeding a bear benefits the bear by temporarily giving him access to the food, but also permanently destroys the bear's independence. Microsoft is well aware that by providing their web browser (or other packages) for free they are gaining market share which will be to their benefit (and your detriment) in the long run.
In other words, I hope you really like what's being given to you for free, because it may be all you get for a long time to come. Alternately, you may find yourself starving when that hand stops feeding you. It does not benefit Microsoft to give away high quality software once there are no competitors. Instead, you can expect the innovation to cease or the price to increase.
Are you a dead bear waiting to happen? Or are you smarter than the average bear.
I believe you are misinterpreting this.
This is not saying such fragmentation would return the state-of-the-art to the point where it was 20 years ago, but rather that the current state-of-the-art would remain frozen for 20 years, with no possibility for advancement.
That should make it clear that the statement was nothing more than nonsense and was never meant to be taken seriously.
I challenge you to prove that assertion.
Further, I challenge you to prove that an author makes less money by allowing (or being required to allow) his book to be sold used than by restricting the sale of used books.
And while you're at it, prove that the benefit to society of supporting the "first sale doctrine" is less than the benefit to society should we do away with it. After all, copyright is not something created for the benefit of authors and publishers, it was created for the benefit of society; it just happens to be beneficial for authors and publishers.
The idea is to take someone with a large government budget to spend and indoctrinate them for 6 month or a year in some IT corporation, while at the same time giving a senior IT executive from the same company a chance to spend a half year or so meeting the players inside the government, learning what problems they face and recommending the best possible solution ("...which our company just happens to sell...") for those problems.
This is nothing more than legalized influence peddling. If I ran an IT company, I'd pay good money to get this program running, too.
In general, it's the making a copy part that's prohibited, not the what you do with it. You can buy a work and give it away on the NET, so long as you don't make a copy in the process. When you figure out how to do that, let us know.
This is an excellent point which is often overlooked, but it goes much deeper. Think about state of the art computing ten years ago (1992). The 386's were just begining to gain popularity, and Windows 95 was just a proposal on Microsoft's 5 year plan. If you were "computer literate" back then, you likely bought (or otherwise acquired) some software to run on it. How much of that software do you still have? How much of it will still run on any sort of computer you still have access to?
Go back another decade to 1982, the era of the Commodore Vic20 and the Timex/Sinclair ZX80/ZX81. Apple's Macintosh wouldn't hit the market for another two years yet; their Apple ][ was dominant. How much of that software do you still have? How much of it will still run on any sort of computer you still have access to today? Emulation is fair game.
And that's just looking twenty years into the past.
Now think about electronic media going forward. You know that eBook you bought last week? Do you think your eBook reader will still be running 10 years from now? 20 years? Do you think your license will still be valid? What about that DVD? How long do you suppose you have before the 'new and improved' DVD players won't play the 2002-format DVD's, even if you've kept them in mint condition? And you can bet DMCA-like laws will make emulation a non-option.
Now go to your bookshelf and see if you can find a book with a copyright date in the 1992 or 1982 era. Got some? Can you still read them? Is the information still relevant? Heck, I've got magazines from back then, some of which I haven't got around to reading yet. I've got paperback (disposable) books from the 60's. I have hardcover books a century older than those. In many cases, the publisher is long out of business, but fortunately my license (and ability) to read those books is not dependent on the publisher being around.
I can't fault the authors or publishers for choosing the more money option over the less money option, and I guess they think there's more money for them if a new copy is sold over an old copy being resold. But what we see here again is the age old truism that businesses like dumb consumers. Where education will lead the consumers to purchase less product, a business has only one incentive to educate or inform: competition. This is why the Author's Guild is reacting against Amazon; in this case, Amazon is providing a service which is beneficial to consumers at the (percieved) expense of the members of the Author's Guild. It also shows how important competition and the free exchange of information has become in this new wired world, and how damaging a monopolistic construction, or the obstruction of free information flow can be.
Unfortunately, there's more money in the set of { stoopid with money } than in the set of { intelligent with money }, even though the few in the intelligent set generally have more money. The money in the stoopid set is less well guarded, too.