This is what librarians do at many libraries. After you return the book, they destroy the circulation record. There is no record of what books you have read.
That's because the main reason for keeping a record is to ensure that the library can get the books they loan back. The only situation in which they'd want to keep longer records (say the last few loans of a book) would be to guard against possibility of a borrower defacing books. This dosn't do much for books which are defaced whilst still within the library. Typically libraries only find out about damage to their books when someone has either borrowed them or attempted to read them in the library...
Yes, this means giving up using the logs for your own enforcement activities done after the fact. You can have a live database, or even keep the records for a few hours if you want to respond to problems same day. After that, no luck. But why is that so terrible?
There is also a resource cost in keeping stuff long term as well as a cost in searching archived logs.
My first thought when I heard about this was rather similar. That is "why did they send the notices to the university, if they knew the exact students?".
If they knew the exact students they could have addressed the notices to the students. Most likely the university dosn't want to play detective for free.
This is part of the patent system that is broken. There is no incentive to not squat on the patent and wait for someone else to do the work.
Or even squatting on a patent to prevent someone creating a competing product. As well as groups of companies acting as a cartel to keep anyone else from entering "their" market.
I kind of doubt it. For a circular orbit at a distance of 1km above the lunar surface, the velocity of the hammer would have to be ~1500m/s. That's more than 3,000 mph/5,400 kph. That'd be a hell of a toss.
Even if it didn't hit anything there's no way that kind of orbit would be remotley stable. Whilst The Moon does not have any appreciable atmosphere it does have mascons, which means you cannot treat it's gravity as being from a point source so close to the surface.
Dude... have you ever tried playing Unreal Tournament 2004 online? Even a half second (500ms) packet lag puts you at such a severe disadvantage that its very hard to hit any moving target. A 2 second lag would be totally unplayable.
Not really a problem with data archiving, espcially since the lag is going to be fairly constant. Even a fairly long time to wait for an ack isn't a bit problem if you intend sending a large amount of data in one go.
yes but you're missing an important part - the moon's gravity is so weak, you could probably throw a hammer and put it into orbit, because the speed of a dropped hammer is actually pretty low.
Lunar gravity isn't that low. Though there certainly are bodies where throwing a tool (or rock) means that there is a good chance putting it into an orbit which is likely to result in it hitting you.
On the other hand quality of OSS software can be low, documentation often sucks and user friendliness is also an issue although with some proprietary stuff such as certain Oracle products for example user friendliness is nothing to cheer about either and I have seen proprietary software that made me wonder where people get the nerve to demand money for such crap.
Maybe they include a clause in the EULAs forbidding negative reviews.
What you fail to see, is that most regulation is not about limiting what can be shown on TV, it's about limiting when. It provides a period of the day when parents know that certain things will not be shown.
Not everyone is a parent or lives in a house with children. Conventional broadcasting enforces this "children's time" on everyone. Far better to have different kinds of content differentiated by channel.
I'm not a proponent of censorship but if you really want to censor something, censor excessive graphical violence and not sex and nudity.
There are also arguments that the kind of violence which should be censors is that of the "cartoon" variety or where no consequences of violence are shown.
To regulate congress' and the constitution's goal of promoting the sciences and the useful arts. They have failed miserably, don't you think?
It's even arguable if "sciences and the useful arts" was intended to cover "popular entertainment" in the first place.
Ah, but are copyrights (and patents, for that matter) actually incentives, or are they barriers?
Things can be even more obvious with patents, where there are examples of patents stopping basic scientific research. At least part of the problem appears to be that many people have missed the point that what we now call "intellectual property" was intended (at least in the US) as a means to an end.
There is nothing slave-like about it at all. No one is forcing artists to do or not do a particular thing in such a relationship. But no one is going to pay good money for a displeasing work of art. In the modern world, a publishing artist might need to satisfy thousands or millions of customers.
The task might be to convince a publisher that the work will satisfy a huge number of people. It isn't uncommon for what turn out to be very popular works to have had a difficult time getting published in the first place nor is it that uncommon for publishers to spend lots of money promoting something few people are interested in.
Where the artist receives patronage, he only needs to satisfy the patron. It's the same thing, but with a much smaller audience and more targeted approach.
There is a third option that of someone having a regular job to provide income and performing their "art" in the times they are not doing that job. Some, such as musicians providing live music, can even derive some extra income.
What you are forgetting is that the lack of copyright will reduce the incentive for people to create new material. It's an assumption that having copyright acts as such an incentive. With very little actual evidence that this is actually the case. Even if you could prove this you'd also have to find the optimal copyright term for this to happen.
P2P only makes sense when there isn't an affordable convenient alternative. Tony just priced himself out of business evidently.
Probably more significently Tony's market changed, low cost high speed Internet access came to the part of the world Tony was operating in.
It's all about volume and price point. If Tony had focused on improving his productivity so he could lower his sale price he'd probably still be in business. Even in the black market you have to continue to innovat
If anything you need to innovate more in a "black market" than in a "white" or "grey" market.
This guy was clearing almost $2,000 a week at the peak for a couple years, now he has to get a job. He said he enjoyed fast cars and a nice house - where does the money always go? Why can't people be satisfied with a nice new but still economical honda or something when they make it big? Why always blow it out on frivolous shit?
He made the all too common assumption that the only way his profits could go was up. Whereas what actually happened was his business model became obsolete.
That doesn't change the fact that I now own that single copy I was handed, and can do anything I want with it, just like a pamplet someone on the street handed me. Baring, of course, copying it, which would be a copyright violation. I can give it away, I can sell it, I can write jokes on it and give that away, I can make a hat out of it and wear it, etc. I can keep it as long as I want.
Even if the pamplet said "you can't do X, Y or Z" with it. If the producer said "how dare you use it to make a hat, it says so on page 5" most people would probably laugh at them (they'd laugh even harder if you couldn't read the language it was written in.)
Now, a better solution would a law declaring free archives and mirrors legal for things publicly accessible on the internet,
Would it actually need new laws? Maybe this should be a job for existing copyright libraries
with the requirement that such mirroring organizations remove the material from public access upon request,
Which is not the same a requiring them to destroy their copies...
If the copy is only a stand-in for information which exists at the original source, where it is accessible under the same conditions, then it is a cache. If the copy is made to outlast the original or remove access restrictions, then it is copyright infringement.
Actually it may be copyright infringement. There are plenty of situations where making such a copy is definitly not an infringement as well as some where a court could decide either way.
Archive.org is archiving websites. All credit to the author, etc... remain. Equally, Archive.org is not profiting from the mirrored copy. Upon request, archive.org can and most probably will remove the copy from their site.
As has been stated before, you save a copy of all websites you visit. It's called cache. Archive.org could be seen as a computer browser with a robotic viewer and a bigass cache folder.
Interestingly having an archive is very much part of copyright. Something which in recent times has been overlooked. Every book published goes into a "copyright library", in the US this is The Library of Congress. The original idea was that when a work became public domain there would be at least one place someone could find a copy. Recent changes to copyright laws such as retroactive copyright extension and measuring from death of author (as opposed to publication date)(As well as the likes of sound, video recordings, etc never having been deposited in them inthe first place) have ment that such libraries cannot actually do their jobs. Effectivly archive.org is trying to do something governments should be doing...
However, as the copyright holder, you reserve the right to approach one of the copiers and ask, "I wish for you to delete that." The copier may have fair use defenses for it or may end up deleting it out of respect.
Or they prevent public viewing of the whatever, moving it to a "private vault" until it becomes public domain.
Hmmm, interesting. Are there any browsers out there that could operate with RAM only, and not save files to disc?
Why should the details of a storage device matter. Disk drives can perfectly accuratly be described as "non-volatile RAM". They also tend to have semiconductor memory built in, which can be either volatile or non-volatile. There are also devices fitted with volatile memory which are rarely, if ever, switched off or have specific arrangements to power the memory even when "off".
I think this needs to be in a pamphlet delivered to... everyone in the world. The Internet is a public place. Yes, you may have rights over a part you've designed/created, but it's still supposed to be for public viewing. Like an artist "owns" the work he gives to an art gallery, but can't tell people how to look at or think about it.
They could put a sign up saying "please don't photograph", but they'd look like fools complaining about a photographer who didn't understand the language the sign was written in.
Web crawlers can't tell what websites want to be crawled and they can't negotiate contracts.
Actually they can tell if the website wants to be crawled or not. The person in question simply failed to put up such a notice.
Did she post the notice properly, though? There are laws about how you must post a 'no trespassing' sign on physical properties.
What would be the legal ramifications if you were to post a sign written (only) in an obscure Asian language in North America?
Similarly, there are ways to post that notice on your website as well. robots.txt comes to mind. If she didn't bother to post the notice correctly, the case should be just thrown out.
According to the article she just put some text in English on one of the pages.
Put it this way, there used to be a lot of companies in the United States producing all sorts of goods: the Federal Government provided them with no economic shield at all, in fact actively encouraged their destruction with artifices such as "Free Trade".
One irony is that special protection for copyright related industries often turns up in so called "Free Trade" agreements between the US and other countries.
Why is it, exactly, that the media companies (the bulk of whom aren't even U.S. corporations and take their profits elsewhere) feel that we should provide them from some special protection against the winds of change?
Many large corporations are effectively "stateless" when it comes to matters of tax avoidance. Typically they are hypocritical in welcoming "globalization" when it means they can choose where in the world to bank their profits or build factories but activly trying to prevent customers (including retailers) being able to chose where in the world to buy their products from.
Every company since the dawn of the Industrial Age that has been faced with obsolescence has found itself at a crossroads: adapt or die.
This has probably been going on since the paleolithic. Just that then the "company" was one person making tools and since the payment was in food they would literally die if they didn't keep up with technological developments.
Now a few have found a third way: conscript the power of as many major world governments as possible to prop up your failing businesses. That's bad enough in and of itself, but the collateral damage to various legal systems makes this behavior simply intolerable.
The collateral damage isn't just confined to legal systems. It also includes additions to machines which impair their functionality. Such as software to manage DRM and "region coding".
He says they made fewer than 60 mistakes out of 100,000 notices? I'd say that's pretty good... it's a 0.06% error.
He has admitted to the 60. There's no way to know how many of the other 99,940 might also be mistakes. Also he has an interest in mimimising the number of "mistakes" admitted to. The "error rate" would depend on how many of the 100,000 requests involve a good chance that there is infringement of Viacom's copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what librarians do at many libraries. After you return the book, they destroy the circulation record. There is no record of what books you have read.
That's because the main reason for keeping a record is to ensure that the library can get the books they loan back. The only situation in which they'd want to keep longer records (say the last few loans of a book) would be to guard against possibility of a borrower defacing books. This dosn't do much for books which are defaced whilst still within the library. Typically libraries only find out about damage to their books when someone has either borrowed them or attempted to read them in the library...
Yes, this means giving up using the logs for your own enforcement activities done after the fact. You can have a live database, or even keep the records for a few hours if you want to respond to problems same day. After that, no luck. But why is that so terrible?
There is also a resource cost in keeping stuff long term as well as a cost in searching archived logs.
My first thought when I heard about this was rather similar. That is "why did they send the notices to the university, if they knew the exact students?".
If they knew the exact students they could have addressed the notices to the students. Most likely the university dosn't want to play detective for free.
Perhaps giving companies a tax writeoff equal to the amount in revenues that a donated patent generates would work out.
The original article mentions that tax breaks were actually stopped because they were abused.
This is part of the patent system that is broken. There is no incentive to not squat on the patent and wait for someone else to do the work.
Or even squatting on a patent to prevent someone creating a competing product. As well as groups of companies acting as a cartel to keep anyone else from entering "their" market.
I kind of doubt it. For a circular orbit at a distance of 1km above the lunar surface, the velocity of the hammer would have to be ~1500m/s. That's more than 3,000 mph/5,400 kph. That'd be a hell of a toss.
Even if it didn't hit anything there's no way that kind of orbit would be remotley stable. Whilst The Moon does not have any appreciable atmosphere it does have mascons, which means you cannot treat it's gravity as being from a point source so close to the surface.
Dude... have you ever tried playing Unreal Tournament 2004 online? Even a half second (500ms) packet lag puts you at such a severe disadvantage that its very hard to hit any moving target. A 2 second lag would be totally unplayable.
Not really a problem with data archiving, espcially since the lag is going to be fairly constant. Even a fairly long time to wait for an ack isn't a bit problem if you intend sending a large amount of data in one go.
yes but you're missing an important part - the moon's gravity is so weak, you could probably throw a hammer and put it into orbit, because the speed of a dropped hammer is actually pretty low.
Lunar gravity isn't that low. Though there certainly are bodies where throwing a tool (or rock) means that there is a good chance putting it into an orbit which is likely to result in it hitting you.
On the other hand quality of OSS software can be low, documentation often sucks and user friendliness is also an issue although with some proprietary stuff such as certain Oracle products for example user friendliness is nothing to cheer about either and I have seen proprietary software that made me wonder where people get the nerve to demand money for such crap.
Maybe they include a clause in the EULAs forbidding negative reviews.
What you fail to see, is that most regulation is not about limiting what can be shown on TV, it's about limiting when. It provides a period of the day when parents know that certain things will not be shown.
Not everyone is a parent or lives in a house with children. Conventional broadcasting enforces this "children's time" on everyone. Far better to have different kinds of content differentiated by channel.
I'm not a proponent of censorship but if you really want to censor something, censor excessive graphical violence and not sex and nudity.
There are also arguments that the kind of violence which should be censors is that of the "cartoon" variety or where no consequences of violence are shown.
To regulate congress' and the constitution's goal of promoting the sciences and the useful arts. They have failed miserably, don't you think?
It's even arguable if "sciences and the useful arts" was intended to cover "popular entertainment" in the first place.
Ah, but are copyrights (and patents, for that matter) actually incentives, or are they barriers?
Things can be even more obvious with patents, where there are examples of patents stopping basic scientific research. At least part of the problem appears to be that many people have missed the point that what we now call "intellectual property" was intended (at least in the US) as a means to an end.
There is nothing slave-like about it at all. No one is forcing artists to do or not do a particular thing in such a relationship. But no one is going to pay good money for a displeasing work of art. In the modern world, a publishing artist might need to satisfy thousands or millions of customers.
The task might be to convince a publisher that the work will satisfy a huge number of people. It isn't uncommon for what turn out to be very popular works to have had a difficult time getting published in the first place nor is it that uncommon for publishers to spend lots of money promoting something few people are interested in.
Where the artist receives patronage, he only needs to satisfy the patron. It's the same thing, but with a much smaller audience and more targeted approach.
There is a third option that of someone having a regular job to provide income and performing their "art" in the times they are not doing that job. Some, such as musicians providing live music, can even derive some extra income.
What you are forgetting is that the lack of copyright will reduce the incentive for people to create new material.
It's an assumption that having copyright acts as such an incentive. With very little actual evidence that this is actually the case. Even if you could prove this you'd also have to find the optimal copyright term for this to happen.
I'd wager it is also releasing to dvd long after the theatre release.
There's also the whole staggered release thing.
P2P only makes sense when there isn't an affordable convenient alternative. Tony just priced himself out of business evidently.
Probably more significently Tony's market changed, low cost high speed Internet access came to the part of the world Tony was operating in.
It's all about volume and price point. If Tony had focused on improving his productivity so he could lower his sale price he'd probably still be in business. Even in the black market you have to continue to innovat
If anything you need to innovate more in a "black market" than in a "white" or "grey" market.
This guy was clearing almost $2,000 a week at the peak for a couple years, now he has to get a job. He said he enjoyed fast cars and a nice house - where does the money always go? Why can't people be satisfied with a nice new but still economical honda or something when they make it big? Why always blow it out on frivolous shit?
He made the all too common assumption that the only way his profits could go was up. Whereas what actually happened was his business model became obsolete.
That doesn't change the fact that I now own that single copy I was handed, and can do anything I want with it, just like a pamplet someone on the street handed me. Baring, of course, copying it, which would be a copyright violation. I can give it away, I can sell it, I can write jokes on it and give that away, I can make a hat out of it and wear it, etc. I can keep it as long as I want.
Even if the pamplet said "you can't do X, Y or Z" with it. If the producer said "how dare you use it to make a hat, it says so on page 5" most people would probably laugh at them (they'd laugh even harder if you couldn't read the language it was written in.)
Now, a better solution would a law declaring free archives and mirrors legal for things publicly accessible on the internet,
Would it actually need new laws? Maybe this should be a job for existing copyright libraries
with the requirement that such mirroring organizations remove the material from public access upon request,
Which is not the same a requiring them to destroy their copies...
If the copy is only a stand-in for information which exists at the original source, where it is accessible under the same conditions, then it is a cache. If the copy is made to outlast the original or remove access restrictions, then it is copyright infringement.
Actually it may be copyright infringement. There are plenty of situations where making such a copy is definitly not an infringement as well as some where a court could decide either way.
Archive.org is archiving websites. All credit to the author, etc... remain. Equally, Archive.org is not profiting from the mirrored copy. Upon request, archive.org can and most probably will remove the copy from their site.
As has been stated before, you save a copy of all websites you visit. It's called cache. Archive.org could be seen as a computer browser with a robotic viewer and a bigass cache folder.
Interestingly having an archive is very much part of copyright. Something which in recent times has been overlooked. Every book published goes into a "copyright library", in the US this is The Library of Congress. The original idea was that when a work became public domain there would be at least one place someone could find a copy. Recent changes to copyright laws such as retroactive copyright extension and measuring from death of author (as opposed to publication date)(As well as the likes of sound, video recordings, etc never having been deposited in them inthe first place) have ment that such libraries cannot actually do their jobs.
Effectivly archive.org is trying to do something governments should be doing...
However, as the copyright holder, you reserve the right to approach one of the copiers and ask, "I wish for you to delete that." The copier may have fair use defenses for it or may end up deleting it out of respect.
Or they prevent public viewing of the whatever, moving it to a "private vault" until it becomes public domain.
Hmmm, interesting. Are there any browsers out there that could operate with RAM only, and not save files to disc?
Why should the details of a storage device matter. Disk drives can perfectly accuratly be described as "non-volatile RAM". They also tend to have semiconductor memory built in, which can be either volatile or non-volatile. There are also devices fitted with volatile memory which are rarely, if ever, switched off or have specific arrangements to power the memory even when "off".
I think this needs to be in a pamphlet delivered to... everyone in the world. The Internet is a public place. Yes, you may have rights over a part you've designed/created, but it's still supposed to be for public viewing. Like an artist "owns" the work he gives to an art gallery, but can't tell people how to look at or think about it.
They could put a sign up saying "please don't photograph", but they'd look like fools complaining about a photographer who didn't understand the language the sign was written in.
Web crawlers can't tell what websites want to be crawled and they can't negotiate contracts.
Actually they can tell if the website wants to be crawled or not. The person in question simply failed to put up such a notice.
Did she post the notice properly, though? There are laws about how you must post a 'no trespassing' sign on physical properties.
What would be the legal ramifications if you were to post a sign written (only) in an obscure Asian language in North America?
Similarly, there are ways to post that notice on your website as well. robots.txt comes to mind. If she didn't bother to post the notice correctly, the case should be just thrown out.
According to the article she just put some text in English on one of the pages.
Put it this way, there used to be a lot of companies in the United States producing all sorts of goods: the Federal Government provided them with no economic shield at all, in fact actively encouraged their destruction with artifices such as "Free Trade".
One irony is that special protection for copyright related industries often turns up in so called "Free Trade" agreements between the US and other countries.
Why is it, exactly, that the media companies (the bulk of whom aren't even U.S. corporations and take their profits elsewhere) feel that we should provide them from some special protection against the winds of change?
Many large corporations are effectively "stateless" when it comes to matters of tax avoidance. Typically they are hypocritical in welcoming "globalization" when it means they can choose where in the world to bank their profits or build factories but activly trying to prevent customers (including retailers) being able to chose where in the world to buy their products from.
Every company since the dawn of the Industrial Age that has been faced with obsolescence has found itself at a crossroads: adapt or die.
This has probably been going on since the paleolithic. Just that then the "company" was one person making tools and since the payment was in food they would literally die if they didn't keep up with technological developments.
Now a few have found a third way: conscript the power of as many major world governments as possible to prop up your failing businesses. That's bad enough in and of itself, but the collateral damage to various legal systems makes this behavior simply intolerable.
The collateral damage isn't just confined to legal systems. It also includes additions to machines which impair their functionality. Such as software to manage DRM and "region coding".
You'd be surprised how infrequently anyone is prosecuted for perjury.
Even in criminal cases where someone has blatantly lied...
I think increasing the cost of a DMCA takedown notice would resolve the issue.
e.g. Getting rid of the whole idea and requring a "court injunction" before any "takedown" happens.
He says they made fewer than 60 mistakes out of 100,000 notices? I'd say that's pretty good... it's a 0.06% error.
He has admitted to the 60. There's no way to know how many of the other 99,940 might also be mistakes. Also he has an interest in mimimising the number of "mistakes" admitted to. The "error rate" would depend on how many of the 100,000 requests involve a good chance that there is infringement of Viacom's copyright.