The point Mossberg was making is that OS X already had the features Vista is trying to tout six years later.
And his point is stupid, because you can easily reverse the comparison just by picking and choosing the "features" you want to talk about.
I still think it's funny that it took over half a decade for Microsoft to implement hardware compositing for the window manager, [...]
Why ? That's about how long it took Apple (NeXT acquired February 1997, release of OS X 10.2 in August, 2002).
Swings and roundabouts, really, it took Apple 6 - 8 years longer than Microsoft (depending on where you want to measure from) to introduce an OS with semi-decent multitasking and memory protection - and personally I'd much rather have that than flashy GUI effects.
(We shouldn't even start on the substantially better SMP support, kernel locking, I/O and, well, kernel functionality in general, of Windows NT over OS X).
So if I get a Core2Duo Mac with a good video card, and boot into Windows, will it run my games as well as a similarly configured PC?
Yes, although you're somewhat constrained by most Macs' relatively weak graphics and lack of upgradeability. To put your own video card in, you're looking at a Mac Pro which, while quite reasonable value for what it is, ain't cheap.
Think about what you're saying. All the stars and all the planets have to form at exactly the same time (which we know is false), evolution follows EXACTLY the same timeline over BILLIONS of years, and EVERY race, without variation, comes to the same technological level within, what, a century of each other? Just for reference, a century is 0.00001% of a billion years. Pretty narrow target to hit.
What's this "century" rubbish ? You could hit within a few million years and still end up with the results we are observing.
The sky is an awfully big place. We haven't looked at every part of it and we *certainly* haven't gone back and looked multiple times at all the places we've looked before. It's not _at all_ unreasonable to assume we simply haven't pointed our equipment in the right direction at the right time.
I agree that the copyright holder can choose to restrict his work, but I don't agree that individuals should be forced to accept that choice.
They're not. If you don't like it, don't buy it. If enough people stop directing business at pro-DRM content producers, they'll get the message.
But what is 'the principle of copyright'?
That "intellectual property" is the same as physical property.
Ie: that the person who creates a piece of "intellectual property" has - by virtue of one of the fundamental principles of our society - the right to control all aspects that piece of "intellectual property".
Is it to reserve as many rights as possible in order to maximize the profit of the copyright holder? Or is it, as I believe, to allow a monopoly on certain (but not all) actions, for a limited time, in order to benefit society as a whole.
The primary _use_ of copyright is to maximise profit, that is true - but the purpose of copyright is to give the creator of a work the same control over that work they would have if it was a physical good.
It seems odd to say that a customary freedom exists only because the technology to restrict it wasn't previously available, and that now the technology can be made, that freedom no longer exists.
Not when you consider the "customary freedom" only really exists because the technology has never existed in the past the restrict it.
Whatever your views on fair use, you must agree that copyright law grants only a temporary monopoly, for 50 years or life plus 90 years or whatever it is in your jurisdiction.
Copyright _law_ certainly does, but the principle behind copyright does not (and its arguable that even copyright law does, these days, with retroactive extensions being continually enacted).
Additionally, my views on fair use have little bearing on the fact - as far as I know - that fair use exists only due to the result of legal precendent, *not* because it was a consideration of copyright from its inception.
Now supposing a publisher doesn't like that, and would prefer something more permanent, so releases a work with DRM that prevents copies and does not expire. Is the DRM still a property of the content? After all we know that under the law the content will become public domain at some point (perhaps next year, if the work is a 1950s music recording released in some countries).
A work doesn't enter the public domain just because its copyright has expired. All that happens is the restrictions around the things you can do with a piece of copyrighted work disappear once its copyright has expired.
So, for example, you cannot demand anyone in possession of a copy of said work make a copy for you, "because it's in the public domain, now".
To me it seems like the DRM is a restriction imposed by unfriendly software, which people are forced to use, removing legal rights which are clearly theirs.
DRM restrictions are chosen by, and only included at the discretion of, the copyright holder. A DRM-capable player will not apply DRM restrictions to content that has no DRM restrictions. Similarly, DRM is not in any way a requirement for copyright law protection.
Before a work even *gets* to a player, it has had DRM restrictions placed upon it (which probably dicates that the content will not play at all in a DRM-incapable player). Clearly, then, DRM is not a property of the player, because it exists independently of the player.
Fair use - to the best of my knowledge - does not say you have the "right" to do X with a piece of copyrighted work. It says that if you do X with a piece of copyrighted work in your possession, you won't be considered in violation of the author's copyright. There is a subtle, but important, distinction between the two.
Posession is not given as a right to a copyright holder (at least not in many countries) and can thus not be an infringement.
But you are only allowed to have a copy of a work with the copyright holder's permission. Without their permission, the copy is infringing.
You are suggesting that being in possession of a copyright work without the copyright holder's permission is not copyright infringement. You may believe that - and in some jurisdictions it might even be true - but as far as I know, if you were discovered as such by law enforcement, you would be charged (probably civil charges) with copyright infringement.
Considering we're talking about billions of years of time, and our civilization has gone from stone to atomics in a handful of thousands of years, that's highly unlikely.
Unless, of course, there's nothing particular strange about the timeline humanity is following and everyone else is on much the same one.
When people assume "there's nothing special" about humanity, with regards to things like extraterrestrial life, they never seem to make the same assumption for all the other alien civilisations they think are out there.
The fundamental difficulty with any explanation offered for the complete absence (so far) of any sign of other intelligent life in the universe is that the proposed explanation has to be universally valid.
Er, why ? I mean, assuming the whole universe is 100% uniform in every way seems a bit, well, unrealistic (although I'm sure it makes the maths easier)...
The Fermi Paradox seems to be telling something important about the Universe. If only we knew what it is...
That no-one else out there[0] is _significantly_ more advanced than us ?
That whole "principle of mediocrity" think works in both directionsm, you know...
Maybe the Fermi Paradox is telling us something about itself ?
[0] "There" in this case referring to the chunk of space we can actually see.
What do you mean? I fully expect that rotating drives are on their way out. There's too many advantages to flash and the disadvantages with using SSDs in a server environment are being worked out as_we_speak. I'm willing to wager that within 3 years SSDs will beat high end HDDs in every desirable metric sans price- and price is just a matter of time.
I doubt SSDs are going to come within a bull's roar of magnetic media in terms of cost-effectiveness any time soon (if they ever do).
What I *can* see, is the growing use of flash [drives] as an intermediate caching device - in SANs/NASes (eg: each physical array comes with an SSD for caching purposes), individual drives (the drives with flash RAM that have been talked about recently), some magic device that plugs in between the regular drives and the disk controller and the poor-man's DIY version at the OS level (eg: Vista's "ReadyBoost").
I can also see them being used in small scale, very specific tasks (eg: DB transaction logs).
But, flash completely - or even meaningfully - replacing magnetic media in the forseeable future ? No way. It just can't provide sufficient density at a reasonable cost. Price out a 500G (usable) array of flash disk. Even being generous and using a parity-based RAID scheme where you only need n+1 or n+2 disks is still going to have a cost vastly in excess of an array of regular disks (and potentially requiring more physical space as well).
Don't get too excited. They're being sold in relatively small capacities of 36 and 73GB. The reason for this is that any large business wants maximum throughput from the disks - and the way you do this is by spreading the data across as many disks as you can, usually in a RAID5. Who cares if you've only got 73GB/disk capacity when you'll probably stick a dozen of them in a server and get 730GB capacity (losing one as parity and reserving one as a hotspare)?
If it's performance you're interested in, you use RAID10, not RAID5.
Indeed, with dual parity schemes (RAID6, RAIDZ2, RAID-DP) rapidly becoming du jour, it's hard to see a purpose for RAID5 in any array of meaningful size, for people who are interested in reliability (and if you're not, you may as use RAID0 and take the additional performance).
Personally, I think anyone using RAID5 on an array bigger than 6 or so disks - or a couple of terabytes - is insane.
(Then there's ZFS, which in one fell swoop has damn near obseleted the whole idea of hardware RAID arrays and volume management. Awesome work, Sun.)
Back to these little drives, it's hard to see a real need for them. People prioritising performance and/or capacity are almost certainly better off with 3.5" drives in pretty much any given situation. Blades (the most obvious application) generally use a SAN or NAS for their data storage needs and only use local disk to boot from (if they even have local disk at all). The use of such drives in 1U and 2U servers (eg: Sun's Opteron boxes) is a bit silly, IMHO, because it restricts their usefulness as standalone machines (due to limited usable space) without really providing any significant benefit (further exacerbated, in the case of Sun, by their onboard "RAID" controller not supporting RAID5 or RAID10 - dumb, dumb, dumb, DUMB).
Kazaa also tried that route when they started to feel the heat. If you were really serious about being "legitimate" you'd start by filtering out the obviously copyrighted content. This doesn't mean waiting for a DMCA takedown; it means exercising a firm grasp of the obvious and recognizing that Windows Vista and the Borat movie are not legally being made available as free downloads.
By the laws of which locality, should these judgements of "legality" be made ?
Seems to me a torrent indexing site is conceptually no different to Google. Should google be restricting access to "obviously illegal" search results ? By which jurisdiction's laws should they decide what is "obviously illegal" ?
If you sincerely think you "own" the content, I suggest you take one of your CDs, make a few million copies and try to sell them as your own work.
There are certain legal restrictions on making copies, but if you buy a CD it's yours and you do what you like as long as it's not explicitly forbidden by copyright law (the same way that if you buy a car it's yours, but you must obey the highway code).
The CD is not the content, it is the medium.
The whole point of copyright is to protect the _content_. Not the medium, not the player, not the distribution channels. The _content_. Copyright dictates that you never own the content (unless copyright has been transferred to you), you merely have the permission of the copyright holder to use it in certain ways.
And the choice of whether to allow fair use is not the copyright holder's choice. It is decided by copyright law, which in most jurisdictions recognizes a right to fair use (quotations, for example) whether the copyright holder agrees or not.
Firstly, "fair use" depends on your locality (Australia, for example, has no such concept).
Secondly, "fair use" is nothing more than a legal recognition that in the past certain uses of copyrighted material have been impractical - if not impossible - to restrict as much as the principle of copyright would allow.
DRM is not a property of the content because all content, by statute and by fair-use precedent, is allowed to be quoted or time-shifted or used in various other ways which the copyright holder may not like, but are nonetheless recognized as fair use.
DRM most certainly _is_ a property of the content, because it is only present if the copyright hold has chosen to restrict his work with DRM. Much like a copyright holder can choose to release his work from the restrictions of copyright (eg: public domain), he can choose to have publications of his work encumbered with DRM.
If the software didn't have the artificial restrictions of DRM built in, then there would be no DRM.
if the content has no DRM applied to it, whether or not the software uses DRM is utterly irrelevant.
In many cases it's possible (and legal) to use different software with the same content, and avoid having your rights infringed. This is why I say that DRM is something that comes from the software running on your computer.
And you are wrong (doubly so since, as far as I know, "fair use" is not a "right", even in the US, but the result of legal precedent). DRM encumbrance *originates* with the copyright holder. The player is simply doing what the copyright holder instructs it to do. If the copyright holder chooses to release their work without DRM applied, DRM in the player is irrelevant. Indeed, even if content has DRM applied to it, the copyright holder is completely free to instruct the DRM-capable player to take no action that would restrict its use.
In what countries is *possession* considered a right of the copyright holder and thus possession without permision or licenese considered an infringement? Or perhaps more to your statement, in what country can data itself be infringing?
Given that copyright _only_ protects data (or "information", if you prefer), how can the offense of "copyright infringement" (civil or criminal) involve anything else ?
You can't reasonably hold software makers liable for mistakes, since everyone makes mistakes.
99% of security problems - yes, even on Windows - are "user mistakes".
You can hold them accountable for gross negligence, where the mistake has been exposed and is known about, yet the software maker does nothing to fix it. MS is extremely guilty of this; for example, their software still uses ActiveX, even though it's been shown to be a horribly bad idea. That's gross negligence.
Strange how millions of people manage to run ActiveX without incident then, if it's as inherently bad as you say.
Having a superuser has _always_ been "shown to be a bad idea", yet most unix systems still have one today. How is that not "gross negligence" as well ?
I love when people lie and claim you have to pay "every year" even though new versions of OS X come out about every 2 to 3 years. Kudos for silently jacking up the price to $150 as well.
Heh. Wasn't that long ago Mac users were crowing about how much Apple r0x0red with their 12 month product cycle...
I can't think of any other profession where the ratios are so unbalanced.
Teaching (especially in the younger grades).
Although this disparity is, arguably, artificially skewed by the development in recent times of social attitudes branding any man interested in children not his own (and sometimes, even his own) as having paedophilic tendencies - attitudes based in the increasing hysteria around "child abuse" in most western societies.
Idiotic, discriminatory and offensive "those who can, do - those who can't, teach" attitudes also exacerbate the problem of dwindling male teacher numbers.
DRM isn't a property of the file, it is a property of the software.
No, it's a property of the _content_. A file may be used to hold the content, as may a CD, RAM, or a myriad other mediums.
But there are cases where the software on the computer is crippled to stop you doing that; and in most of these cases you can't change the software to do what you want, even though it is your computer.
But it's not your content, which is the whole freaking point.
The program doesn't pop up a box saying 'do you wish to use DRM yes/no?'. It makes that choice for you, and you have no way to turn it off.
That's because the choice is not yours to make, but that of the copyright holder. They have as much "right" to say 'you can't access my content without $SOFTWARE' as they do to say 'you can't distribute my work to a million people without reimbursing me'.
You may disagree with that "right" - I certainly do - but you need to be aware that your problem is with _copyright_, not DRM.
For me, that counts as being forced to use DRM. You may have a different definition.
Indeed. Probably one where some "forcing" is actually involved rather than not being able to play content you _chose_ to buy in a manner the copyright holder of that content does not want you to.
He isn't confusing. He wrote code. He wants people to be able to do whatever they want with that code, so long as they keep the source available. That is pretty simple, and the GPLv2 meets his wants.
It significantly exceeds his wants.
If all he wanted to do was keep *his* source code available, the BSDL would have sufficed.
If all he wanted to do was keep his source code *and modifications to that code* available, the LGPL would have sufficed.
The GPL is about requiring *other people's code* to be available. Not your code. Not other people's modifications to your code. Other people's completely new, independently created code.
No, they're not. Publishers are free to release unencumbered content.
The government saying you're not allowed to try and circumvent any protections a publisher may have put on their content, is a different issue completely (and entirely congruent with the spirit, principle and objective of copyright).
Essentially, it's approximately the same as other forms of taxation, taking away part of owners rights to their property and giving them to someone else (in this case the economic value of being able to reproduce the item).
You don't "own" anything someone else holds the copyright to. You may own the media it is on, but DRM does not interfere with any "property rights" you have with regards to that media.
Yeah, and Microsoft doesn't have a literal monopoly, they have a virtual monopoly, whereas you're not literally forced to buy DRM, you're virtually forced to. Microsoft and Apple are both staunch DRM supporters and between them they hold nearly the entire market.
Your rage is being directed at the wrong target. Apple and Microsoft allow DRMed content to be played on their respective platforms. They do do not _require_ DRMed content, nor do they refuse to play non-DRMed content, nor do they force any creators to apply DRM to their content. The responsibility for the presence of DRMed content lies wholely and solely in the hands of those who produce that DRMed content.
If you don't want DRM-encumbered content, don't buy it. If you can only find DRM-encumbered content, *complain to the people making the content, not the people making the tools to view the content*.
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OS X is more secure because Unix is more secure.
In what way(s) ?
The point Mossberg was making is that OS X already had the features Vista is trying to tout six years later.
And his point is stupid, because you can easily reverse the comparison just by picking and choosing the "features" you want to talk about.
I still think it's funny that it took over half a decade for Microsoft to implement hardware compositing for the window manager, [...]
Why ? That's about how long it took Apple (NeXT acquired February 1997, release of OS X 10.2 in August, 2002).
Swings and roundabouts, really, it took Apple 6 - 8 years longer than Microsoft (depending on where you want to measure from) to introduce an OS with semi-decent multitasking and memory protection - and personally I'd much rather have that than flashy GUI effects.
(We shouldn't even start on the substantially better SMP support, kernel locking, I/O and, well, kernel functionality in general, of Windows NT over OS X).
So if I get a Core2Duo Mac with a good video card, and boot into Windows, will it run my games as well as a similarly configured PC?
Yes, although you're somewhat constrained by most Macs' relatively weak graphics and lack of upgradeability. To put your own video card in, you're looking at a Mac Pro which, while quite reasonable value for what it is, ain't cheap.
Think about what you're saying. All the stars and all the planets have to form at exactly the same time (which we know is false), evolution follows EXACTLY the same timeline over BILLIONS of years, and EVERY race, without variation, comes to the same technological level within, what, a century of each other? Just for reference, a century is 0.00001% of a billion years. Pretty narrow target to hit.
What's this "century" rubbish ? You could hit within a few million years and still end up with the results we are observing.
The sky is an awfully big place. We haven't looked at every part of it and we *certainly* haven't gone back and looked multiple times at all the places we've looked before. It's not _at all_ unreasonable to assume we simply haven't pointed our equipment in the right direction at the right time.
I agree that the copyright holder can choose to restrict his work, but I don't agree that individuals should be forced to accept that choice.
They're not. If you don't like it, don't buy it. If enough people stop directing business at pro-DRM content producers, they'll get the message.
But what is 'the principle of copyright'?
That "intellectual property" is the same as physical property.
Ie: that the person who creates a piece of "intellectual property" has - by virtue of one of the fundamental principles of our society - the right to control all aspects that piece of "intellectual property".
Is it to reserve as many rights as possible in order to maximize the profit of the copyright holder? Or is it, as I believe, to allow a monopoly on certain (but not all) actions, for a limited time, in order to benefit society as a whole.
The primary _use_ of copyright is to maximise profit, that is true - but the purpose of copyright is to give the creator of a work the same control over that work they would have if it was a physical good.
It seems odd to say that a customary freedom exists only because the technology to restrict it wasn't previously available, and that now the technology can be made, that freedom no longer exists.
Not when you consider the "customary freedom" only really exists because the technology has never existed in the past the restrict it.
Whatever your views on fair use, you must agree that copyright law grants only a temporary monopoly, for 50 years or life plus 90 years or whatever it is in your jurisdiction.
Copyright _law_ certainly does, but the principle behind copyright does not (and its arguable that even copyright law does, these days, with retroactive extensions being continually enacted).
Additionally, my views on fair use have little bearing on the fact - as far as I know - that fair use exists only due to the result of legal precendent, *not* because it was a consideration of copyright from its inception.
Now supposing a publisher doesn't like that, and would prefer something more permanent, so releases a work with DRM that prevents copies and does not expire. Is the DRM still a property of the content? After all we know that under the law the content will become public domain at some point (perhaps next year, if the work is a 1950s music recording released in some countries).
A work doesn't enter the public domain just because its copyright has expired. All that happens is the restrictions around the things you can do with a piece of copyrighted work disappear once its copyright has expired.
So, for example, you cannot demand anyone in possession of a copy of said work make a copy for you, "because it's in the public domain, now".
To me it seems like the DRM is a restriction imposed by unfriendly software, which people are forced to use, removing legal rights which are clearly theirs.
DRM restrictions are chosen by, and only included at the discretion of, the copyright holder. A DRM-capable player will not apply DRM restrictions to content that has no DRM restrictions. Similarly, DRM is not in any way a requirement for copyright law protection.
Before a work even *gets* to a player, it has had DRM restrictions placed upon it (which probably dicates that the content will not play at all in a DRM-incapable player). Clearly, then, DRM is not a property of the player, because it exists independently of the player.
Fair use - to the best of my knowledge - does not say you have the "right" to do X with a piece of copyrighted work. It says that if you do X with a piece of copyrighted work in your possession, you won't be considered in violation of the author's copyright. There is a subtle, but important, distinction between the two.
Posession is not given as a right to a copyright holder (at least not in many countries) and can thus not be an infringement.
But you are only allowed to have a copy of a work with the copyright holder's permission. Without their permission, the copy is infringing.
You are suggesting that being in possession of a copyright work without the copyright holder's permission is not copyright infringement. You may believe that - and in some jurisdictions it might even be true - but as far as I know, if you were discovered as such by law enforcement, you would be charged (probably civil charges) with copyright infringement.
Considering we're talking about billions of years of time, and our civilization has gone from stone to atomics in a handful of thousands of years, that's highly unlikely.
Unless, of course, there's nothing particular strange about the timeline humanity is following and everyone else is on much the same one.
When people assume "there's nothing special" about humanity, with regards to things like extraterrestrial life, they never seem to make the same assumption for all the other alien civilisations they think are out there.
Self replicating is ruled out due to risk. That sounds fairly silly since computers are computers. They do what we tell them to and not a thing more.
That's the problem. Computers do what we say, not what we mean.
That none of them did argues that we're unique in the galaxy.
Or that we're just like everyone else and *no-one* has yet developed sufficient technology.
The fundamental difficulty with any explanation offered for the complete absence (so far) of any sign of other intelligent life in the universe is that the proposed explanation has to be universally valid.
Er, why ? I mean, assuming the whole universe is 100% uniform in every way seems a bit, well, unrealistic (although I'm sure it makes the maths easier)...
The Fermi Paradox seems to be telling something important about the Universe. If only we knew what it is...
That no-one else out there[0] is _significantly_ more advanced than us ?
That whole "principle of mediocrity" think works in both directionsm, you know...
Maybe the Fermi Paradox is telling us something about itself ?
[0] "There" in this case referring to the chunk of space we can actually see.
What do you mean? I fully expect that rotating drives are on their way out. There's too many advantages to flash and the disadvantages with using SSDs in a server environment are being worked out as_we_speak. I'm willing to wager that within 3 years SSDs will beat high end HDDs in every desirable metric sans price- and price is just a matter of time.
I doubt SSDs are going to come within a bull's roar of magnetic media in terms of cost-effectiveness any time soon (if they ever do).
What I *can* see, is the growing use of flash [drives] as an intermediate caching device - in SANs/NASes (eg: each physical array comes with an SSD for caching purposes), individual drives (the drives with flash RAM that have been talked about recently), some magic device that plugs in between the regular drives and the disk controller and the poor-man's DIY version at the OS level (eg: Vista's "ReadyBoost").
I can also see them being used in small scale, very specific tasks (eg: DB transaction logs).
But, flash completely - or even meaningfully - replacing magnetic media in the forseeable future ? No way. It just can't provide sufficient density at a reasonable cost. Price out a 500G (usable) array of flash disk. Even being generous and using a parity-based RAID scheme where you only need n+1 or n+2 disks is still going to have a cost vastly in excess of an array of regular disks (and potentially requiring more physical space as well).
Don't get too excited. They're being sold in relatively small capacities of 36 and 73GB. The reason for this is that any large business wants maximum throughput from the disks - and the way you do this is by spreading the data across as many disks as you can, usually in a RAID5. Who cares if you've only got 73GB/disk capacity when you'll probably stick a dozen of them in a server and get 730GB capacity (losing one as parity and reserving one as a hotspare)?
If it's performance you're interested in, you use RAID10, not RAID5.
Indeed, with dual parity schemes (RAID6, RAIDZ2, RAID-DP) rapidly becoming du jour, it's hard to see a purpose for RAID5 in any array of meaningful size, for people who are interested in reliability (and if you're not, you may as use RAID0 and take the additional performance).
Personally, I think anyone using RAID5 on an array bigger than 6 or so disks - or a couple of terabytes - is insane.
(Then there's ZFS, which in one fell swoop has damn near obseleted the whole idea of hardware RAID arrays and volume management. Awesome work, Sun.)
Back to these little drives, it's hard to see a real need for them. People prioritising performance and/or capacity are almost certainly better off with 3.5" drives in pretty much any given situation. Blades (the most obvious application) generally use a SAN or NAS for their data storage needs and only use local disk to boot from (if they even have local disk at all). The use of such drives in 1U and 2U servers (eg: Sun's Opteron boxes) is a bit silly, IMHO, because it restricts their usefulness as standalone machines (due to limited usable space) without really providing any significant benefit (further exacerbated, in the case of Sun, by their onboard "RAID" controller not supporting RAID5 or RAID10 - dumb, dumb, dumb, DUMB).
when something is stolen from you, you have LOST it, by law you need to PAY for another copy.
Even when the item is subsequently found ?
Conceptually, how is acquiring another copy of lost data any different to the recovery of a lost physical item ?
Kazaa also tried that route when they started to feel the heat. If you were really serious about being "legitimate" you'd start by filtering out the obviously copyrighted content. This doesn't mean waiting for a DMCA takedown; it means exercising a firm grasp of the obvious and recognizing that Windows Vista and the Borat movie are not legally being made available as free downloads.
By the laws of which locality, should these judgements of "legality" be made ?
Seems to me a torrent indexing site is conceptually no different to Google. Should google be restricting access to "obviously illegal" search results ? By which jurisdiction's laws should they decide what is "obviously illegal" ?
Actually it is your content.
No, it's not.
If you sincerely think you "own" the content, I suggest you take one of your CDs, make a few million copies and try to sell them as your own work.
There are certain legal restrictions on making copies, but if you buy a CD it's yours and you do what you like as long as it's not explicitly forbidden by copyright law (the same way that if you buy a car it's yours, but you must obey the highway code).
The CD is not the content, it is the medium.
The whole point of copyright is to protect the _content_. Not the medium, not the player, not the distribution channels. The _content_. Copyright dictates that you never own the content (unless copyright has been transferred to you), you merely have the permission of the copyright holder to use it in certain ways.
And the choice of whether to allow fair use is not the copyright holder's choice. It is decided by copyright law, which in most jurisdictions recognizes a right to fair use (quotations, for example) whether the copyright holder agrees or not.
Firstly, "fair use" depends on your locality (Australia, for example, has no such concept).
Secondly, "fair use" is nothing more than a legal recognition that in the past certain uses of copyrighted material have been impractical - if not impossible - to restrict as much as the principle of copyright would allow.
DRM is not a property of the content because all content, by statute and by fair-use precedent, is allowed to be quoted or time-shifted or used in various other ways which the copyright holder may not like, but are nonetheless recognized as fair use.
DRM most certainly _is_ a property of the content, because it is only present if the copyright hold has chosen to restrict his work with DRM. Much like a copyright holder can choose to release his work from the restrictions of copyright (eg: public domain), he can choose to have publications of his work encumbered with DRM.
If the software didn't have the artificial restrictions of DRM built in, then there would be no DRM.
if the content has no DRM applied to it, whether or not the software uses DRM is utterly irrelevant.
In many cases it's possible (and legal) to use different software with the same content, and avoid having your rights infringed. This is why I say that DRM is something that comes from the software running on your computer.
And you are wrong (doubly so since, as far as I know, "fair use" is not a "right", even in the US, but the result of legal precedent). DRM encumbrance *originates* with the copyright holder. The player is simply doing what the copyright holder instructs it to do. If the copyright holder chooses to release their work without DRM applied, DRM in the player is irrelevant. Indeed, even if content has DRM applied to it, the copyright holder is completely free to instruct the DRM-capable player to take no action that would restrict its use.
In general, a work's "articistic merit" [...]
Ugh, keyboard dyslexia this week. "Artistic".
In what countries is *possession* considered a right of the copyright holder and thus possession without permision or licenese considered an infringement? Or perhaps more to your statement, in what country can data itself be infringing?
Given that copyright _only_ protects data (or "information", if you prefer), how can the offense of "copyright infringement" (civil or criminal) involve anything else ?
What exactly defines "legitimate art?"
In general, a work's "articistic merit" is inversely proportional to the number of people who a) like it and b) know what the hell it is.
Can you show them to be grossly negligent?
At least as much as you can Microsoft.
You can't reasonably hold software makers liable for mistakes, since everyone makes mistakes.
99% of security problems - yes, even on Windows - are "user mistakes".
You can hold them accountable for gross negligence, where the mistake has been exposed and is known about, yet the software maker does nothing to fix it. MS is extremely guilty of this; for example, their software still uses ActiveX, even though it's been shown to be a horribly bad idea. That's gross negligence.
Strange how millions of people manage to run ActiveX without incident then, if it's as inherently bad as you say.
Having a superuser has _always_ been "shown to be a bad idea", yet most unix systems still have one today. How is that not "gross negligence" as well ?
I love when people lie and claim you have to pay "every year" even though new versions of OS X come out about every 2 to 3 years. Kudos for silently jacking up the price to $150 as well.
Heh. Wasn't that long ago Mac users were crowing about how much Apple r0x0red with their 12 month product cycle...
I can't think of any other profession where the ratios are so unbalanced.
Teaching (especially in the younger grades).
Although this disparity is, arguably, artificially skewed by the development in recent times of social attitudes branding any man interested in children not his own (and sometimes, even his own) as having paedophilic tendencies - attitudes based in the increasing hysteria around "child abuse" in most western societies.
Idiotic, discriminatory and offensive "those who can, do - those who can't, teach" attitudes also exacerbate the problem of dwindling male teacher numbers.
DRM isn't a property of the file, it is a property of the software.
No, it's a property of the _content_. A file may be used to hold the content, as may a CD, RAM, or a myriad other mediums.
But there are cases where the software on the computer is crippled to stop you doing that; and in most of these cases you can't change the software to do what you want, even though it is your computer.
But it's not your content, which is the whole freaking point.
The program doesn't pop up a box saying 'do you wish to use DRM yes/no?'. It makes that choice for you, and you have no way to turn it off.
That's because the choice is not yours to make, but that of the copyright holder. They have as much "right" to say 'you can't access my content without $SOFTWARE' as they do to say 'you can't distribute my work to a million people without reimbursing me'.
You may disagree with that "right" - I certainly do - but you need to be aware that your problem is with _copyright_, not DRM.
For me, that counts as being forced to use DRM. You may have a different definition.
Indeed. Probably one where some "forcing" is actually involved rather than not being able to play content you _chose_ to buy in a manner the copyright holder of that content does not want you to.
He isn't confusing. He wrote code. He wants people to be able to do whatever they want with that code, so long as they keep the source available. That is pretty simple, and the GPLv2 meets his wants.
It significantly exceeds his wants.
If all he wanted to do was keep *his* source code available, the BSDL would have sufficed.
If all he wanted to do was keep his source code *and modifications to that code* available, the LGPL would have sufficed.
The GPL is about requiring *other people's code* to be available. Not your code. Not other people's modifications to your code. Other people's completely new, independently created code.
Anti-circumvention laws are such a dictate.
No, they're not. Publishers are free to release unencumbered content.
The government saying you're not allowed to try and circumvent any protections a publisher may have put on their content, is a different issue completely (and entirely congruent with the spirit, principle and objective of copyright).
Essentially, it's approximately the same as other forms of taxation, taking away part of owners rights to their property and giving them to someone else (in this case the economic value of being able to reproduce the item).
You don't "own" anything someone else holds the copyright to. You may own the media it is on, but DRM does not interfere with any "property rights" you have with regards to that media.
Yeah, and Microsoft doesn't have a literal monopoly, they have a virtual monopoly, whereas you're not literally forced to buy DRM, you're virtually forced to. Microsoft and Apple are both staunch DRM supporters and between them they hold nearly the entire market.
Your rage is being directed at the wrong target. Apple and Microsoft allow DRMed content to be played on their respective platforms. They do do not _require_ DRMed content, nor do they refuse to play non-DRMed content, nor do they force any creators to apply DRM to their content. The responsibility for the presence of DRMed content lies wholely and solely in the hands of those who produce that DRMed content.
If you don't want DRM-encumbered content, don't buy it. If you can only find DRM-encumbered content, *complain to the people making the content, not the people making the tools to view the content*.