Microsoft doesn't immediately switch its Hotmail unit over to Windows servers, Slashdot bitches that they won't use their own stuff.
Naw, I think "snickers" is a much better word than "bitches", though it doesn't serve your purpose to cast posters here as hypocrites, now does it?
Now that they (apparently) have moved over to Win2K, the snickering's a bit quieter, though I have to wonder if MS had to add extra boxen to ensure smooth service.
But hey, if it works, it works.
Microsoft wants their Bungie unit to use Windows serrvers, Slashdot bitches that they want everything to run Windows.
You have it right that time - most posters are bitching that a unit can't use what it believes are the best tools for the job due to corporate policy.
1 out of 2 right...not bad, but you can do better.
RIAA is the music industry cartel. MPAA is the movie industry cartel. RIAA hates Napster and MP3. MPAA hates DeCSS and css-auth. This shit's related, but it's not hard to discern.
I'm about this close to producing a mini-FAQ on copyright battles just so people no longer have an excuse to screw this up.
This story has the bit about an e-mail that went out encouraging beta testers to "vote early and vote often" on a poll at the end of a Jesse Berst column. -------------
LinuxToday got wind of an e-mail that went out to WinME beta testers that encouraged them to rig a poll at ZDnet regarding whether people would buy WinME. Soon after, LT found out about another poll. This was the MSNBC favourite OS poll. They encouraged LT readers to go vote in it, noting it wasn't as easily rigged as the ZDnet poll. A couple LT readers figured out the poll could be rigged by deleting a cookie MSNBC placed on a voting machine and checking for on future votes. It's likely the Linux number of 28% came from a flood of LinuxToday readers, a few using the cookie-delete trick, though I'd like to hope most didn't stoop that low. It should be noted that LT itself didn't promote poll-rigging in its own posts. At one point, Linux had more votes than WinNT/2K.
Early Sunday morning is when the apparently faked votes started flooding in. One report from a reader claimed that for a while, all votes were going into NT/2K, then switched to adding votes for every OS but Linux - the percentages for Mac, BeOS, and Win9x/ME didn't significantly change like the NT and Linux counts.
It looks like the whole thing is a popularity pissing contest. LT is still encouraging their readers to vote (fairly) in polls that have appeared in the last few days, and LT released an open letter to MSNBC regarding the sudden, suspicious increase in NT/2K votes.
Of course, if MSNBC were really carefully rigging things, they also would have rigged the other poll on the same page as the OS popularity poll - the one that showed only 8% of voters were going to buy WinME, opposed to 92% saying ixnay:) -------------
Why don't these people court the networks and do it right?
Well, they are going to the Copyright Board to get approval; if they get it, the company will pay a royalty into the same fund the cable companies dump money into.
For that matter, why aren't there US network affiliates in Canada?
In fact, there used to be a couple affiliates in Ontario back in the '50's. They were eventually purchased by either CBC or CTV (I forget that detail), but a lot of Canadians can still receive US TV signals if they live near the border; Torontonians can receive Buffalo signals, and Windsor/Essex County is absolutely lousy with Detroit stations. Many cable provider here in Southern and Central Ontario (and almost certainly BC) carry US network affiliates out of the nearest US city, and pretty much every provider in Canada carries the so-called "superstations," [opinion]which tend to suck if you ask me.[/opinion]
I doubt a US affiliate could exist today in the current regulatory environment; it would somehow have to broadcast 50% Canadian content based on CRTC regs. Unless Canadian-produced TV shows start taking over US TV, this probably wouldn't happen.
It was not so much the fact that non-Canadians could receive Canadian TV transmissions - oh, I'm sure those re-transmission issues still bothered American broadcasters and content providers, but it wasn't the killer issue.
No, what got iCraveTV in the end was the ad revenue. There were ads around the iCraveTV window, and not a cent of it was going back to the copyright holders in any way, shape, or form. iCraveTV was profiting off copyrighted works without the holders' permission, and that is what got them in the end.
JumpTV is doing things the "right way" in the eyes of the major content providers by getting copyright approval the same way the cable companies are classed up here - as retransmitters. They'll pay fees into a communal royalty fund all cable companies dump money into.
Now, from what I've read of the posts here, it looks like the BorderControl system is easily fooled. Gee, there's a shock. They're in "test" mode right now, so they may work these issues out by launch in 2001.
Yeah, I'd say so; the whole package is GPL'd. The only problem here is the extra license, which is default boilerplate people have to click through before any download. It would probably be easier just for the devel group to offer the package outside of Compaq's regular download system. No big deal, really; just the kind of bumps you get when a company that normally deals in proprietary software tries to join the open source world.
One file #includes Linux kernel headers, so yeah, a bit of Linux code is involved:)
The legal agreement you have to click through to get the code is a standard Compaq thing that the lawyers no doubt mandate for every download from Compaq. I doubt strongly that it overrides the GPV itself.
I downloaded the source and poked through it a bit.
For one thing, the software itself is GPL'd - a copy is included with the source. For another, one file - cpqpjb.c - #includes several header files in the kernel source. So the software itself is clear.
It simply looks as if the file was made available for download the same way other chunks of Compaq software are offered, and no one remembered the legal boilerplate people have to agree to for most software.
A simple e-mail to Compaq legal oughta do the trick; it's only a minor error.
Once again, I underestimate the ability of the legal profession, using a rather complicated combination of Latin, Greek and English known as "legalese", to obfuscate legislation beyond all sense and comprehension by mere mortals.
Remind me to buy a 20 GB hard drive so I can violate the DMCA on Oct. 29th in order to watch "The Matrix" in Linux.
Maybe one day people will learn to respect each others property...
Either that, or "property" as we understand and define it won't exist, a la the Martian setup in Stranger in a Strange Land.
Of course, that assumes humanity will become civilized at some point and move beyond our greedy, xenophobic, i'll-take-yours-but-you-can't-have-mine wild-animal-with-intelligence-but-no-sense selves.
What I mean is that things can be done with hard drives, CPUs, network cards, modems, and the whole kit and kaboodle that are impossible outside of those devices. Applying old concepts of copyright and IP law to an environment where devices can create and destroy millions of copies in a matter of seconds, an user-programmable environment where the user has ultimate dominion over the data, is thoughtless, disingenious, and just plain hopeless. It won't work, because the users won't let it work. About the only way the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, IDSA and the like can "win" (regain total control over content) is to prevent 99% of the population from programming or even just tinkering with their computers, and employing the remaining 1%.
Even though all of the devices are real and physical, software is sufficiently different enough from anything that has come before that different rules immediately apply to it. Copies are only tangible in terms of magnetic domains and energy states; they can be recreated, destroyed and recreated again on the same piece of media with no damage to the matter and no loss in quality - or resources. This only happens with devices that use digital storage and information transfer; this does not happen anywhere else on earth. The rules are different, see?
Of course, it's not really an "alternate dimension"; I'm not a moron. However, the capabilities that computers, the Web, your databases, my copy of Nethack and everything else digital represent are so far removed from anything else in human experience outside of imagination that it is perhaps best to see "cyberspace" - any form of data stored on computers, processed and manipulated in a digital form, transferred to other devices, and existing only as magnetic domains, energy states and pits representing 1s and 0s - as an alternate environment for the sake of argument, and perhaps law. Not fact, though; I just covered what "cyberspace" really is, but can you think of a better way to handle the capabilities and possibilities presented by the digital? Because if you try to discuss things related to software based on hard facts, things get way too complicated, confusing, and ambiguous for feeble human brains and law to handle.
Think of it this way; by definition, any part of Windows 9x/NT/2000 stored in RAM is an extra copy, and might be infringment.
I quoth a poster in a later thread, the DMCA comments thread:
From page 9 of the submission from the American Film Marketing Association, Association of American Publishers, Business Software Alliance, Interactive Digital Software Association, Motion Picture Association of America, National Music Publishers' Association, and Recording Industry Association of America:
...it has long been clear under U.S. law that the placement of copyrighted material into computer memory (ie RAM) is a reproduction of that material.
So if you have a legal copy on your hard drive, the action of putting it into RAM, in order to run it, or otherwise access it, falls under copyright law.
See what I mean? At some point, going strictly by legalities and hard facts gets really, really stupid. Thus, different thinking is a good idea in those circumstances.
Used CD stores profit from songs without having to pay the copyright owners a single cent. Profiting without reimbursement is fine in some cases, I think it should okay in this one too.
Good point, although the difference with used CD stores is that an actual physical copy is being transferred, along with whatever "rights" go along with that copy. Here, I think mp3.com was making money off advertising linked to the Beam-It service. Different animal.
Interesting point another poster brought up; mp3.com isn't paying compensatory damages. There aren't any, to my surprise. No, these are punitive damages - a deterrent to anyone who would dare let two entities with legally purchased copies of the same CD stream that CD to one another. It seems the judge has rubber-stamped a cartel oligopoly on private streaming services. Thanks, judge. Now the cartel will let me pay yet again to listen to the same songs I already purchased on CD.
I have a collection here at home, it is on CDs. Many radio stations digitize their CDs by loading them onto harddrives as part of their daily program. It is cheaper.
At this point, I guaran-damn-tee someone will bring up the "radio stations pay royalties" point.
Why do they pay royalties? Because the listeners might not have purchased a copy of the music being broadcast, and the station is running advertisements to make money. That first is especially important here. With radio, the listener more often than not does not have a legally-acquired copy of the songs being played, therefore the station has to pay for public broadcast of that music to people who haven't paid for the music.
Now, we come to my.mp3.com. I didn't use it, so I don't know if the client and any web pages involved in selecting songs had ads, or if the service itself cost anything - if so, mp3.com loses on that point for profiting from to copyrighted works without providing proper royalties to the copyright holders.. I'll come back to this point with regard to the punishment.
my.mp3.com and each listener legally purchased the CDs. Each listener had to prove they had the CDs before they could stream the songs from mp3.com. Therefore, both streamer and listener have legal copies, unlike traditional radio. This is where the radio argument falls down; my.mp3.com is not like radio. I can do the same thing by ripping my own CDs, setting up a shoutcast/icecast streamer, but requiring a password to activate the streaming so that not just any joe schmoe can abuse my collection. It's not public broadcast, and as long as no advertising without copyright holder approval is inserted, it can't be subject to broadcast royalties; you're all listening to the same song, it's a private directcast unlike radio that no one else can tap into, and all parties involved have paid for their copies and associated fair use rights. The only potential extra copy being made is the bits being sent from my.mp3.com to the listener, and those fall right back into the ether as soon as the player is done with them; they are not being stored.
Of course, the bigger reason the record cartel is going after MP3.com for this is so that they don't have any outside competition in the streaming arena; just watch as they all throw up their own Beam-it style services Real Soon Now. And you can bet they'll cost money to use.
mp3.com should be forced to compensate companies for any ad revenue/subscription fees they made in relation to my.mp3.com. On this point, I don't think "copyright infringment" is the proper term here. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a proper legal term for "unlawful profit from use of a copyrighted work". Copyright infringment sounds too much like selling extra copies, while here everyone had a copy, paid for them, and the only extra "copy" was a stream of bits that disappeared after passing through the player software.
Cyberspace is not meatspace, and should not be defined or limited by meatspace rules, because there are about 6 billion things you can do in cyberspace that are impractical or impossible in meatspace. Millions of copies of a chunk of data can be made and wiped out in a matter of seconds; this, I think, is the reality that nearly everyone - record execs, real-worlders, and geeks - still haven't come to fully realize. It works by different rules by default; therefore, it's absurd to force ethereal, ever-changing and infinitely malleable cyberspace to conform completely to meatspace rules. The implementation shouldn't be the problem here, only proper compensation. I don't think compensation here = $25k/CD, not by a long shot. A better solution would be to determine the ad revenue from my.mp3.com, double that, there's your punishment to be divided between all plaintiffs. Anything more is improper.
my.mp3.com was a great idea. If there hadn't been an ad near any part of the service, the record companies wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on. Never mind that a lot of legal wisdom and commonly-used analogy collapses when applied to bits, bytes and data structures that can be created and destroyed at will; law and the human habit of making bad comparisons will have the hardest time adjusting to the new world. As it stands, the cartel (actually, the artists, but that's another hill of beans) has a right to be properly compensated for money made off their holdings, but not for any sort of "piracy"; all copies (with the possible exception of one) were meatspace-defined legal.
What a mess. I guess in closing, I think lot of IP law will have to be rethought and retooled to ensure that what can be done in cyberspace isn't stifled by meatspace rules that make no sense in the ethereal. As long as the holders have been paid for copies and fair use rights, and are being compensated for any ad/subscription revenue, there shouldn't be a problem.
I think what their gripe really boils down to is they're giving away hardware and attempting to build a software and service business model around that.
And this is the flawed reasoning that will kill a lot of "free/cheap hardware, but buy our service" businesses. A lot of people, including some misguided business owners and managers, can't deal with the fact that computers are, in the end, user-programmable devices. If you develop hardware centered around a computer, someone can (and these days will) develop a free implementation of the software end, just because they can. All the legal threats and letters in the world won't stop an interested hacker from indulging his/her curiosity and reverse-engineering something, especially if that something is hardware that currently doesn't work with his/her favoured OS. As long as no secret documents or specs have been stolen directly from the company (as in, broke into their computers/offices and copied/took the docs) or leaked by an employee under an NDA, nothing legally or morally wrong has been done.
Either some business owners need to wake up to that reality now and learn to live with it, or the future will see even more legal stupidity as frightened CEOs loose their attack dogs in futile attempts to stifle curiosity and interoperability outside of their control.
By providing a link to this, this, or even this, I'm committing an injurious act to interests in the state of California.
Never mind that I legally purchased every single one of my DVDs. Never mind that I legally purchased the necessary hardware to play those DVDs, and that the DVD CCA got their cut from my purchases. Never mind that DeCSS "circumvents" CSS the same way entering my password "circumvents" the/etc/shadow file on my computer.
By aiding and abetting an open source programmer, I'm working to steal the intellectual property of Hollywood? I injured consumer electronics and computer manufacturers in California (whose products I legally purchased in order to be able to use the software player LiVid and the CSS decrypter DeCSS)?
After a quick parse of the article, I get the feeling the author's definition of an OS springs from what a consumer might consider to be a "real" operating system, forgetting that people at home aren't the only ones with uses for a computer.
A server doesn't necessarily need a web browser, media player or word processor. The admin might want these installed, but the lack of such doesn't mean there isn't an OS installed. In fact, programs that seem indispensable to home users might be detrimental to the smooth operation of a mission-critical server.
By the writer's definition, each Linux distro is an OS, but someone putting together a kernel, filesystem, shell, and a few specific tools from scratch isn't - even though the latter could easily make a far superior server-type environment than any prepackaged distribution.
I think the author forgot that computers have more uses than playing MP3s, browsing the web and typing articles for online tech mags. Just because an OS doesn't include tools and a GUI that a home user would find useful, doesn't mean it isn't a real OS.
How about because most pieces of software for the past 30 years have shipped with default passwords?
Ok, so why was the Pirhana default password a story then? By your lights, that shouldn't have been reported either.
I think the Pirhana thing hit big due to the discovery of the "seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" thing in a chunk of MS software that I can't recall right now just a few days earlier, kind of a tit-for-tat thing. In any event, I think M$ needs all the media help it can get, in the face of antitrust, ILOVEYOU and the delays in getting any kind of a patch out, among other things.
On second thought, fudge 'em. About time they got dragged into the light. Maybe someone will also rake Red Hat and other Linux distributors over the coals a bit for their gaping-wide default installs:)
The story does make a good point about what kind of stories the media picks up on and how such things are reported, although I tend to cringe whenever I see a "Linux vs. Windows" story on/. nowadays; I know there's a potential flamewar sure to brew and lower the collective intelligence around here by another half-point.
In open source, who do you sue when the bug loses you money?
How about don't waste time suing in the first place? It seems a rather naive idea, not coming from someone in the business world, but I wonder whatever happened to the concept of "fix the problem, buck up, and move the fsck on." Losing money for various reasons is a fact of life that individuals deal with their entire lives, and unless that money is illegally taken from them, most people don't go to court to get it back. It doesn't surprise me that a corporation doesn't work this way, but that doesn't make me feel any better about the reality.
Want to really show the offending company/programmer your displeasure? Write 'em a nice letter explaining why you won't be using any of their software and/or going with a competitor's solution in the future.
Assuming that companies do try to sue for faulty software...I wonder how much cheaper it would be to forgo a legal route, send the bloody letter, and spend time making up for lost money rather than pissing more away in the courtroom whining about "lost profits". I can see where a small, struggling company might want to go this route in the event of a great disaster, but don't most licenses preclude legal action, anyway?
In any event, the suing angle is a straw man. In open source, you fix the bug - or get the programmer to - because you have the source.
Just tell your boss "...and if it fails, we can fix it right away and get back on our feet in short order. We don't have to bother threatening the programmer, because his code is right here for us to fix ourselves." Eh, it's worth a shot.
That makes it clear Moody didn't read the stats page clauses very carefully. They clearly state that a vulnerability in a package distributed with the OS is counted as an OS vulnerability. Which would explain NT's ugly numbers - thanks IIS!
And even considering all the software packed into Linux distros...they still have fewer gaping holes than Windows9x/NT and the payloads it carries. Nice misuse of the "it' pronoun, keeping things nice and ambiguous.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft doesn't immediately switch its Hotmail unit over to Windows servers, Slashdot bitches that they won't use their own stuff.
Naw, I think "snickers" is a much better word than "bitches", though it doesn't serve your purpose to cast posters here as hypocrites, now does it?
Now that they (apparently) have moved over to Win2K, the snickering's a bit quieter, though I have to wonder if MS had to add extra boxen to ensure smooth service.
But hey, if it works, it works.
Microsoft wants their Bungie unit to use Windows serrvers, Slashdot bitches that they want everything to run Windows.
You have it right that time - most posters are bitching that a unit can't use what it believes are the best tools for the job due to corporate policy.
1 out of 2 right...not bad, but you can do better.
-------------
and watching RIAA sanctioned DVD's.
AAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!
MPAA! MPAA! Say MPAA, bobdammit!
RIAA is the music industry cartel. MPAA is the movie industry cartel. RIAA hates Napster and MP3. MPAA hates DeCSS and css-auth. This shit's related, but it's not hard to discern.
I'm about this close to producing a mini-FAQ on copyright battles just so people no longer have an excuse to screw this up.
*exhales*...all better now.
-------------
Stop spreading FUD.
Tell that to The Register - they reported it first.
-------------
This story has the bit about an e-mail that went out encouraging beta testers to "vote early and vote often" on a poll at the end of a Jesse Berst column.
-------------
Here's the deal:
LinuxToday got wind of an e-mail that went out to WinME beta testers that encouraged them to rig a poll at ZDnet regarding whether people would buy WinME. Soon after, LT found out about another poll. This was the MSNBC favourite OS poll. They encouraged LT readers to go vote in it, noting it wasn't as easily rigged as the ZDnet poll. A couple LT readers figured out the poll could be rigged by deleting a cookie MSNBC placed on a voting machine and checking for on future votes. It's likely the Linux number of 28% came from a flood of LinuxToday readers, a few using the cookie-delete trick, though I'd like to hope most didn't stoop that low. It should be noted that LT itself didn't promote poll-rigging in its own posts. At one point, Linux had more votes than WinNT/2K.
Early Sunday morning is when the apparently faked votes started flooding in. One report from a reader claimed that for a while, all votes were going into NT/2K, then switched to adding votes for every OS but Linux - the percentages for Mac, BeOS, and Win9x/ME didn't significantly change like the NT and Linux counts.
It looks like the whole thing is a popularity pissing contest. LT is still encouraging their readers to vote (fairly) in polls that have appeared in the last few days, and LT released an open letter to MSNBC regarding the sudden, suspicious increase in NT/2K votes.
Of course, if MSNBC were really carefully rigging things, they also would have rigged the other poll on the same page as the OS popularity poll - the one that showed only 8% of voters were going to buy WinME, opposed to 92% saying ixnay:)
-------------
Why don't these people court the networks and do it right?
Well, they are going to the Copyright Board to get approval; if they get it, the company will pay a royalty into the same fund the cable companies dump money into.
For that matter, why aren't there US network affiliates in Canada?
In fact, there used to be a couple affiliates in Ontario back in the '50's. They were eventually purchased by either CBC or CTV (I forget that detail), but a lot of Canadians can still receive US TV signals if they live near the border; Torontonians can receive Buffalo signals, and Windsor/Essex County is absolutely lousy with Detroit stations. Many cable provider here in Southern and Central Ontario (and almost certainly BC) carry US network affiliates out of the nearest US city, and pretty much every provider in Canada carries the so-called "superstations," [opinion]which tend to suck if you ask me.[/opinion]
I doubt a US affiliate could exist today in the current regulatory environment; it would somehow have to broadcast 50% Canadian content based on CRTC regs. Unless Canadian-produced TV shows start taking over US TV, this probably wouldn't happen.
It was not so much the fact that non-Canadians could receive Canadian TV transmissions - oh, I'm sure those re-transmission issues still bothered American broadcasters and content providers, but it wasn't the killer issue.
No, what got iCraveTV in the end was the ad revenue. There were ads around the iCraveTV window, and not a cent of it was going back to the copyright holders in any way, shape, or form. iCraveTV was profiting off copyrighted works without the holders' permission, and that is what got them in the end.
JumpTV is doing things the "right way" in the eyes of the major content providers by getting copyright approval the same way the cable companies are classed up here - as retransmitters. They'll pay fees into a communal royalty fund all cable companies dump money into.
Now, from what I've read of the posts here, it looks like the BorderControl system is easily fooled. Gee, there's a shock. They're in "test" mode right now, so they may work these issues out by launch in 2001.
There is at least some GPL code involved.
Yeah, I'd say so; the whole package is GPL'd. The only problem here is the extra license, which is default boilerplate people have to click through before any download. It would probably be easier just for the devel group to offer the package outside of Compaq's regular download system. No big deal, really; just the kind of bumps you get when a company that normally deals in proprietary software tries to join the open source world.
Interesting. And a good idea, really, considering how many programs that run on Linux probably include those headers.
In any event, the research lab licensed the whole package under the GPL anyway, so it's a moot point. I just found it kinda interesting.
One file #includes Linux kernel headers, so yeah, a bit of Linux code is involved:)
The legal agreement you have to click through to get the code is a standard Compaq thing that the lawyers no doubt mandate for every download from Compaq. I doubt strongly that it overrides the GPV itself.
Figured as much. A minor error, easily corrected.
I'm gathering you're not a GPL fan?
I downloaded the source and poked through it a bit.
For one thing, the software itself is GPL'd - a copy is included with the source. For another, one file - cpqpjb.c - #includes several header files in the kernel source. So the software itself is clear.
It simply looks as if the file was made available for download the same way other chunks of Compaq software are offered, and no one remembered the legal boilerplate people have to agree to for most software.
A simple e-mail to Compaq legal oughta do the trick; it's only a minor error.
Already done - running 2.4.0-test8 and loving it:)
Once again, I underestimate the ability of the legal profession, using a rather complicated combination of Latin, Greek and English known as "legalese", to obfuscate legislation beyond all sense and comprehension by mere mortals.
Remind me to buy a 20 GB hard drive so I can violate the DMCA on Oct. 29th in order to watch "The Matrix" in Linux.
After October 28, 2000 it will be illegal to circumvent an access control according to the DMCA.
After Oct. 28, 2000?
It is now Sept. 10, 2000.
Either the date up there is wrong, different parts of the DMCA kick in at different times, or something is seriously screwy here.
If the "illegal circumvention" measure doesn't kick in until Oct. 28, then DeCSS still isn't illegal software yet, oui?
If that's true, then what legal footing did the MPAA have against 2600?
Nah. Your date's gotta be wrong - either the DMCA is already in effect, or these legal exercises have all been based on nothing.
Call me confused.
Maybe one day people will learn to respect each others property...
Either that, or "property" as we understand and define it won't exist, a la the Martian setup in Stranger in a Strange Land.
Of course, that assumes humanity will become civilized at some point and move beyond our greedy, xenophobic, i'll-take-yours-but-you-can't-have-mine wild-animal-with-intelligence-but-no-sense selves.
What I mean is that things can be done with hard drives, CPUs, network cards, modems, and the whole kit and kaboodle that are impossible outside of those devices. Applying old concepts of copyright and IP law to an environment where devices can create and destroy millions of copies in a matter of seconds, an user-programmable environment where the user has ultimate dominion over the data, is thoughtless, disingenious, and just plain hopeless. It won't work, because the users won't let it work. About the only way the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, IDSA and the like can "win" (regain total control over content) is to prevent 99% of the population from programming or even just tinkering with their computers, and employing the remaining 1%.
...it has long been clear under U.S. law that the placement of copyrighted material into computer memory (ie RAM) is a reproduction of that material.
Even though all of the devices are real and physical, software is sufficiently different enough from anything that has come before that different rules immediately apply to it. Copies are only tangible in terms of magnetic domains and energy states; they can be recreated, destroyed and recreated again on the same piece of media with no damage to the matter and no loss in quality - or resources. This only happens with devices that use digital storage and information transfer; this does not happen anywhere else on earth. The rules are different, see?
Of course, it's not really an "alternate dimension"; I'm not a moron. However, the capabilities that computers, the Web, your databases, my copy of Nethack and everything else digital represent are so far removed from anything else in human experience outside of imagination that it is perhaps best to see "cyberspace" - any form of data stored on computers, processed and manipulated in a digital form, transferred to other devices, and existing only as magnetic domains, energy states and pits representing 1s and 0s - as an alternate environment for the sake of argument, and perhaps law. Not fact, though; I just covered what "cyberspace" really is, but can you think of a better way to handle the capabilities and possibilities presented by the digital? Because if you try to discuss things related to software based on hard facts, things get way too complicated, confusing, and ambiguous for feeble human brains and law to handle.
Think of it this way; by definition, any part of Windows 9x/NT/2000 stored in RAM is an extra copy, and might be infringment.
I quoth a poster in a later thread, the DMCA comments thread:
From page 9 of the submission from the American Film Marketing Association, Association of American Publishers, Business Software Alliance, Interactive Digital Software Association, Motion Picture Association of America, National Music Publishers' Association, and Recording Industry Association of America:
So if you have a legal copy on your hard drive, the action of putting it into RAM, in order to run it, or otherwise access it, falls under copyright law.
See what I mean? At some point, going strictly by legalities and hard facts gets really, really stupid. Thus, different thinking is a good idea in those circumstances.
eh, i've said my piece for now.
Used CD stores profit from songs without having to pay the copyright owners a single cent. Profiting without reimbursement is fine in some cases, I think it should okay in this one too.
Good point, although the difference with used CD stores is that an actual physical copy is being transferred, along with whatever "rights" go along with that copy. Here, I think mp3.com was making money off advertising linked to the Beam-It service. Different animal.
Interesting point another poster brought up; mp3.com isn't paying compensatory damages. There aren't any, to my surprise. No, these are punitive damages - a deterrent to anyone who would dare let two entities with legally purchased copies of the same CD stream that CD to one another. It seems the judge has rubber-stamped a cartel oligopoly on private streaming services. Thanks, judge. Now the cartel will let me pay yet again to listen to the same songs I already purchased on CD.
*sigh*
I have a collection here at home, it is on CDs. Many radio stations digitize their CDs by loading them onto harddrives as part of their daily program. It is cheaper.
At this point, I guaran-damn-tee someone will bring up the "radio stations pay royalties" point.
Why do they pay royalties? Because the listeners might not have purchased a copy of the music being broadcast, and the station is running advertisements to make money. That first is especially important here. With radio, the listener more often than not does not have a legally-acquired copy of the songs being played, therefore the station has to pay for public broadcast of that music to people who haven't paid for the music.
Now, we come to my.mp3.com. I didn't use it, so I don't know if the client and any web pages involved in selecting songs had ads, or if the service itself cost anything - if so, mp3.com loses on that point for profiting from to copyrighted works without providing proper royalties to the copyright holders.. I'll come back to this point with regard to the punishment.
my.mp3.com and each listener legally purchased the CDs. Each listener had to prove they had the CDs before they could stream the songs from mp3.com. Therefore, both streamer and listener have legal copies, unlike traditional radio. This is where the radio argument falls down; my.mp3.com is not like radio. I can do the same thing by ripping my own CDs, setting up a shoutcast/icecast streamer, but requiring a password to activate the streaming so that not just any joe schmoe can abuse my collection. It's not public broadcast, and as long as no advertising without copyright holder approval is inserted, it can't be subject to broadcast royalties; you're all listening to the same song, it's a private directcast unlike radio that no one else can tap into, and all parties involved have paid for their copies and associated fair use rights. The only potential extra copy being made is the bits being sent from my.mp3.com to the listener, and those fall right back into the ether as soon as the player is done with them; they are not being stored.
Of course, the bigger reason the record cartel is going after MP3.com for this is so that they don't have any outside competition in the streaming arena; just watch as they all throw up their own Beam-it style services Real Soon Now. And you can bet they'll cost money to use.
mp3.com should be forced to compensate companies for any ad revenue/subscription fees they made in relation to my.mp3.com. On this point, I don't think "copyright infringment" is the proper term here. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a proper legal term for "unlawful profit from use of a copyrighted work". Copyright infringment sounds too much like selling extra copies, while here everyone had a copy, paid for them, and the only extra "copy" was a stream of bits that disappeared after passing through the player software.
Cyberspace is not meatspace, and should not be defined or limited by meatspace rules, because there are about 6 billion things you can do in cyberspace that are impractical or impossible in meatspace. Millions of copies of a chunk of data can be made and wiped out in a matter of seconds; this, I think, is the reality that nearly everyone - record execs, real-worlders, and geeks - still haven't come to fully realize. It works by different rules by default; therefore, it's absurd to force ethereal, ever-changing and infinitely malleable cyberspace to conform completely to meatspace rules. The implementation shouldn't be the problem here, only proper compensation. I don't think compensation here = $25k/CD, not by a long shot. A better solution would be to determine the ad revenue from my.mp3.com, double that, there's your punishment to be divided between all plaintiffs. Anything more is improper.
my.mp3.com was a great idea. If there hadn't been an ad near any part of the service, the record companies wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on. Never mind that a lot of legal wisdom and commonly-used analogy collapses when applied to bits, bytes and data structures that can be created and destroyed at will; law and the human habit of making bad comparisons will have the hardest time adjusting to the new world. As it stands, the cartel (actually, the artists, but that's another hill of beans) has a right to be properly compensated for money made off their holdings, but not for any sort of "piracy"; all copies (with the possible exception of one) were meatspace-defined legal.
What a mess. I guess in closing, I think lot of IP law will have to be rethought and retooled to ensure that what can be done in cyberspace isn't stifled by meatspace rules that make no sense in the ethereal. As long as the holders have been paid for copies and fair use rights, and are being compensated for any ad/subscription revenue, there shouldn't be a problem.
I think what their gripe really boils down to is they're giving away hardware and attempting to build a software and service business model around that.
And this is the flawed reasoning that will kill a lot of "free/cheap hardware, but buy our service" businesses. A lot of people, including some misguided business owners and managers, can't deal with the fact that computers are, in the end, user-programmable devices. If you develop hardware centered around a computer, someone can (and these days will) develop a free implementation of the software end, just because they can. All the legal threats and letters in the world won't stop an interested hacker from indulging his/her curiosity and reverse-engineering something, especially if that something is hardware that currently doesn't work with his/her favoured OS. As long as no secret documents or specs have been stolen directly from the company (as in, broke into their computers/offices and copied/took the docs) or leaked by an employee under an NDA, nothing legally or morally wrong has been done.
Either some business owners need to wake up to that reality now and learn to live with it, or the future will see even more legal stupidity as frightened CEOs loose their attack dogs in futile attempts to stifle curiosity and interoperability outside of their control.
Let me see if I follow this logic:
/etc/shadow file on my computer.
By providing a link to this, this, or even this, I'm committing an injurious act to interests in the state of California.
Never mind that I legally purchased every single one of my DVDs. Never mind that I legally purchased the necessary hardware to play those DVDs, and that the DVD CCA got their cut from my purchases. Never mind that DeCSS "circumvents" CSS the same way entering my password "circumvents" the
By aiding and abetting an open source programmer, I'm working to steal the intellectual property of Hollywood? I injured consumer electronics and computer manufacturers in California (whose products I legally purchased in order to be able to use the software player LiVid and the CSS decrypter DeCSS)?
If I have, then come get me .
After a quick parse of the article, I get the feeling the author's definition of an OS springs from what a consumer might consider to be a "real" operating system, forgetting that people at home aren't the only ones with uses for a computer.
A server doesn't necessarily need a web browser, media player or word processor. The admin might want these installed, but the lack of such doesn't mean there isn't an OS installed. In fact, programs that seem indispensable to home users might be detrimental to the smooth operation of a mission-critical server.
By the writer's definition, each Linux distro is an OS, but someone putting together a kernel, filesystem, shell, and a few specific tools from scratch isn't - even though the latter could easily make a far superior server-type environment than any prepackaged distribution.
I think the author forgot that computers have more uses than playing MP3s, browsing the web and typing articles for online tech mags. Just because an OS doesn't include tools and a GUI that a home user would find useful, doesn't mean it isn't a real OS.
How about because most pieces of software for the past 30 years have shipped with default passwords?
/. nowadays; I know there's a potential flamewar sure to brew and lower the collective intelligence around here by another half-point.
Ok, so why was the Pirhana default password a story then? By your lights, that shouldn't have been reported either.
I think the Pirhana thing hit big due to the discovery of the "seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" thing in a chunk of MS software that I can't recall right now just a few days earlier, kind of a tit-for-tat thing. In any event, I think M$ needs all the media help it can get, in the face of antitrust, ILOVEYOU and the delays in getting any kind of a patch out, among other things.
On second thought, fudge 'em. About time they got dragged into the light. Maybe someone will also rake Red Hat and other Linux distributors over the coals a bit for their gaping-wide default installs:)
The story does make a good point about what kind of stories the media picks up on and how such things are reported, although I tend to cringe whenever I see a "Linux vs. Windows" story on
This must be a first - Slashdot not providing a link so the main server won't be slashdotted out of the gate.
Either Taco's growing a conscience, or he's just tired of "why are you linking before the mirrors go up??????????" posts.
In open source, who do you sue when the bug loses you money?
How about don't waste time suing in the first place? It seems a rather naive idea, not coming from someone in the business world, but I wonder whatever happened to the concept of "fix the problem, buck up, and move the fsck on." Losing money for various reasons is a fact of life that individuals deal with their entire lives, and unless that money is illegally taken from them, most people don't go to court to get it back. It doesn't surprise me that a corporation doesn't work this way, but that doesn't make me feel any better about the reality.
Want to really show the offending company/programmer your displeasure? Write 'em a nice letter explaining why you won't be using any of their software and/or going with a competitor's solution in the future.
Assuming that companies do try to sue for faulty software...I wonder how much cheaper it would be to forgo a legal route, send the bloody letter, and spend time making up for lost money rather than pissing more away in the courtroom whining about "lost profits". I can see where a small, struggling company might want to go this route in the event of a great disaster, but don't most licenses preclude legal action, anyway?
In any event, the suing angle is a straw man. In open source, you fix the bug - or get the programmer to - because you have the source.
Just tell your boss "...and if it fails, we can fix it right away and get back on our feet in short order. We don't have to bother threatening the programmer, because his code is right here for us to fix ourselves." Eh, it's worth a shot.
That makes it clear Moody didn't read the stats page clauses very carefully. They clearly state that a vulnerability in a package distributed with the OS is counted as an OS vulnerability. Which would explain NT's ugly numbers - thanks IIS!
And even considering all the software packed into Linux distros...they still have fewer gaping holes than Windows9x/NT and the payloads it carries. Nice misuse of the "it' pronoun, keeping things nice and ambiguous.
Fred Moody, lord of the double standard.