So, what would you do? Give users admin rights on their computers so that they can change the time? Great, now they can install malware (but I really like WeatherBug!), as well as fsck up their entire install, as opposed to just their profile. Now, they should have probably prepared a bit more - I'm not sure how on earth they could have managed to have the time rolled two hours forward, short of applying a patch and then maybe manually changing the time via a script or something, but giving everyone local admin rights is not a good solution.
A much easier solution would be to have workstations find out about what time it is from a server...
This is not a criminal case and the RIAA are not prosecuting him: they are suing him and the standard is "the balance of probabilities (BOP) also known as the "preponderance of evidence."
The plaintiff still needs to prove their case. The difference is that the standard of proof is lesser than in a criminal case.
So, it is up to him to prove his "innocence".
Since proving "innocence" may require proving a negative this isn't very practical. Instead what the accused does is to defend themselves (hence they are called the "defendant") against the accusations made against them.
Why not? People without children pay taxes to run elementary schools. People without cars pay taxes to build roads. Living in a civilized society means sometimes making sacrifices for the benefit of the group as a whole.
The difference is that there are credible arguments for education and road building being of help to society as a whole. Thus it is perfectly possible that people without children may derive a benefit from everyone being given a basic education and people without cars may derive a benefit from the existance of roads. The difference is that there are a lot fewer aguments in favour of supporting an obsolete business model. At least from the point of view of society as a whole.
When you were growing up, making durable, faithful copies of an audio or video signal was a technically difficult and impressive service. It was a source of value, and the market rewards a service with value by exchanging other things of value for it. Today, making perfect copies of an audio or video signal is something with a material and skill cost so negligible it is practically nothing.
Indeed the copy may well be more valuable than the original. Convert a CD into an MP3 and you go from having a plastic disk which requires a fairly bulky machine to use into something you can put on a music playing machine small enough to put in your pocket.
It's simpler than that. The rest of us apply for a job, and then do the work required for money delivered.
Most likely saving some of that money to try and ensure that we are not poor when we are old.
Muscicans and such do things backwards:
It isn't even all musicians (and other artists) plenty have a "day job" and make music because they enjoy making music and/or enjoy entertaining an audiance. In order for someone to be capable of earning a living as a musician tends to take a combination of talent and luck. Even then someone doing it for their entire working life is unlikely
they do the job then whine when somebody uses the service already performed without paying for it. Then they want "protections" so they can do things backwards.
Or even some of them complain that the supply of money from work they did nearly half a century ago might stop. At which point most people are likely to realise that most people's working lives last for less than 50 years. When it gets to the point of expecting to be paid for work done by a parent or grandparent it's doubtful that most people will be especially sympathetic.
Well, reality recently caught up with content makers. Either switch to a "Agree to pay, do work, then pay" like everybody else does, or shut up.
Even in the "entertainment industry" this is already mostly the case. It's not as if sound engineers, cameramen, makeup artists, set builders, even not staring actors, etc work for free.
The problem with your analogy is that Volvo and Toyota have sold me unique cars that they haven't sold to anyone else.
It's also not practical for someone to make a perfect clone of your car.
The entertainment industry wants to eat it's cake and have it too, they want the convenience of digital distribution, but they don't want the headache to make it truely secure.
Things are actually a bit more subtle than that. Some time ago the only way to distribute a recording was to have it closely tied with a physical piece of media. The details of that media and how the data encoded mattered. Whereas now they do not.
The issue for non-pirates here is anonymity. This technology causes anyone to expose their identity if they publish a video using the equipment. If you are an activist exposing some kind of sensitive stuff about your local tyrant, then you would do well to steer clear of these devices.
The risk may well be greater in the case of said "local tyrant" being someone who is otherwise believed to be an "upstanding citizen"/"great leader"/etc. Simply because he or she has more to loose by being outed.
Yes -- and it would stop 98% of the creative output in the world. Rare is the artist who will dance for your amusement while starving to death.
Not the best example, since copyright really only makes a difference to recorded performances. Whereas the example is of a live performance. The real lquestion is "Does copyright encourage publication and distribution?" Even if the answer is "yes" then there is still the issue of "What is the most optional form and quantity of copyright to do this?" (In many cases an excess of something otherwise benifical is actually more harmful than an complete absence. Thus a strong case needs to be made that "copyright overdose" is not possible.)
The idea is that the message is only a few bits, so it's embedded with a *huge* amount of redundency. To get rid of a watermark, you generally have to specifically attack it, not just throw in noise/compression/whatever blindly.
How secret do you think the steganography algorithm used will be? If not the actual steganography used how about the algorithms used to detect and interpret the hidden data...
So what if my own video clips or fair use excerpts won't get me prosecuted?
We have already seen the likes of DMCA "takedowns" abused even in cases where there is no possibility of infringement. Consider the case of someone posting footage from a TV news broadcast which shows something odd happening...
There will still be a unique ID in them.
Assuming the unique ID mechanism actually works.
You could just as easily wind up with your "unique ID" on something you had nothing to do with.
The massive database you refer to doesn't need to track media ownership, but only player location (ownership can be determined after-the-fact;
This is still a difficult task.
even just recording the IP address from which a player last dialed home [this is for high-end, network-connectivity-enabled boxes] would be adequate).
Not only are there all sorts of situations where this isn't that useful, VPNs, proxies, onion routing, etc. Having an IP will only tell you the owner of that netblock. You need to go through possibly several stages (which include getting the relevent court orders) to have any idea who that IP might relate to. In addition there's the issue that if the device fails to work if it cannot "phone home" the problem has better not be on your side. Since if it's in anyway "your fault" that your customers cannot use their (expensive) device at best they will just be angry, at worst they will be reaching for their lawyers.
More generally, it's a feature that isn't beneficial to the owner of the product. If it's my video encoder, it should do things that are useful for me - a feature that serves no purpose except to allow others to track my behavior doesn't belong in my stuff.
Especially given that it's using your processor and your electricity to perform the task.
This isn't unlike the unique tracking patterns that laser printers output on printouts.
Whilst using your toner to do this.
but embedding insidious tracking codes into all of our electronics just isn't something that should be considered even slightly socially acceptable.
In order for this to be useful at all there is quite an administrative overhead in keeping track of where the equiptment is and who has it. This may well include the components which actually contain the tracking number. There's also the problem of tracking sales, especially "presents" bought at retail outlets.
Compromise?! Who decided the copyright cartel deserves even that?
Wouldn't it only be a "compromise" if the public actually gained something they didn't have before. Otherwise "less of a power grab by the copyright cartel" might be a better description.
And I'll continue to demand neither, thankyouverymuch!
"watermarking" isn't actually new with copyrighted items. Be it maps with deliberate errors or "numbered editions". What appears to be more this issue here is that a third party is doing the watermarking.
Personally, I think this is an outstanding compromise; it leaves legitimate fair use rights in place, but provides a means for large-scale-distribution violations to be prosecuted. It's certainly a far better deal than mandatory DRM, which in all seriousness is the other contender. I'll take watermarks over DRM any day
However cunning the steganography involved in these watermarks is the details are likely to become known quite quickly. Making it possible to alter the data. No doubt someone could easily produce a codec guarenteed to mangle such data in an existing video file.
For instance, one can insert genes from mammals or other higher organisms into maize. This type of "lateral transfer" has practically no chance of ever occurring through any breeding/selection/mutagenesis. So the effects on the phenotype can be much more severe, and not just accelerated in pace.
There's also the issue of what "side effects" may be produced. Which may be overlooked, especially if they depend exacly where the alien genes end up in the target organism.
Genetic engineering allows you to add things that would otherwise be nearly impossible to obtain from the organism's original genome.
Actually it allows you to do things to the organism which are impossible with its original genome. Since you can put genes into the organism where were never present in that species of organism before.
They actually are (at least in the US) legally identical to individuals. That's in the sense that they can commit crimes and get sued or pay taxes.
Except that corporations don't tend to have their freedoms constrained at the point they are charged with a crime. Not many real people can be "business as usual" whilst awaiting a trial, let alone only only have their lawyers attend the trial. Even if found guilty there is no corporate equivalent of a prison sentence. When it comes to criminal law corporations and individuals are treated (very) differently. Even if the same statute theoretically applies to both situations.
The problem is that most people have lost sight of that fact. In exchange for limited liability and effective immortality, corporations are supposed to act with restraint.
The term "limited liability" started off with one specific meaning. That was that shareholders' financial liability was limited to the amount of their investment. i.e. if the enterprise failed the worst that could happen is that they would have some worthless pieces of paper, creditors could not persue the "owners" of the business. Nothing to do with the idea of a business not being liable for the consequences of the actions of its executives.
In meatspace, we already have constraints on distribution channels for so-called "adult" material. I can send my kid to Toys R Us and know that he won't find porn. (I think that there are lots of problems with the junk sold there, but porn is not one of them.)
You won't find much porn at www.toysrus.com either. AFAIK they don't sell "adult toys" at all.
Those people are serious idiots, but the real problem is a lot more insidious...people are not installing private applications on company computers so much as installing private applications on private computers and then connecting those private computers to company resources via either VPN/extranet or sneakernet (laptops.) This problem is pervasive and promises to be one of the largest security challenges going forward.
The problem is more that a "personal computer" is the wrong tool for the job. What's actually needed is some kind of terminal, probably one capable of graphics and including a good cipher machine.
The trivial solution is simply to have anyone caught doing this crap publicly executed, preferably by wild horses or flaying alive or some such. These people are stupid enough to think it's a good idea to install Kazaa on their work computer. For the good of the human race, we cannot risk letting them breed.
There's also the problem of whoever though it was a good idea to have machines where it was possible for ordinary users to install arbitrary programs.
It sounds like the network administrators in said "governmental offices" should take the precautions neccessary to police the bandwidth. Furthermore, any environment in which said p2p applications are capable of leaking any private information need to be under closer scrutiny.
Actually the software shouldn't even be capable of running on the machines in the first place. Unfortunatly Windows still appears to be playing "catchup" with unix type systems when it comes to the concept of execute permissions and filesystem options to override file permissions.
Indeed, where I used to work (Pentagon), an Air Force officer used a floppy to transfer an unclassified Word Document from the isolated classified network to the open unclassified network. The Word document had scooped up random classified data from the hard drive in its buffers.
This is a known problem with MS Word which has been there for a long time (of course if this kind of bug were present in an OSS program it wouldn't still be there over a decade after it was first found).
In these cases, I do not know why:
1. The systems had classified data and were hooked to the Internet. That alone should land people in jail.
2. The employees had permission to install *anything* on the system. Unless they were administrators, that would have counted as a violation of security by itself, and if they were administrators, doing anything unauthorized should have had them canned. I had to go through hoops just to install new tools on development machines.
If anything the second is a far more serious problem that the first as well as making the first a lot more of a risk that it would otherwise be.
3. The employees were not jailed with no questions asked. I guarantee that would put a stop to the practice.
4. The whole section was not audited, leading to immediate correction of the above.
Those who needed jailing might well include the officers/managers who allowed such a situation to occur.
It also makes me very nervous about the government's insistence of late on creating large integrated databases. Even if I trusted them to use the data ethically (I don't) I do not have confidence that they could secure it adequately.
Especially when the data is ment to be used for identification and/or authentication purposes.
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So, what would you do? Give users admin rights on their computers so that they can change the time? Great, now they can install malware (but I really like WeatherBug!), as well as fsck up their entire install, as opposed to just their profile. Now, they should have probably prepared a bit more - I'm not sure how on earth they could have managed to have the time rolled two hours forward, short of applying a patch and then maybe manually changing the time via a script or something, but giving everyone local admin rights is not a good solution.
A much easier solution would be to have workstations find out about what time it is from a server...
This is not a criminal case and the RIAA are not prosecuting him: they are suing him and the standard is "the balance of probabilities (BOP) also known as the "preponderance of evidence."
The plaintiff still needs to prove their case. The difference is that the standard of proof is lesser than in a criminal case.
So, it is up to him to prove his "innocence".
Since proving "innocence" may require proving a negative this isn't very practical. Instead what the accused does is to defend themselves (hence they are called the "defendant") against the accusations made against them.
Why not? People without children pay taxes to run elementary schools. People without cars pay taxes to build roads. Living in a civilized society means sometimes making sacrifices for the benefit of the group as a whole.
The difference is that there are credible arguments for education and road building being of help to society as a whole. Thus it is perfectly possible that people without children may derive a benefit from everyone being given a basic education and people without cars may derive a benefit from the existance of roads.
The difference is that there are a lot fewer aguments in favour of supporting an obsolete business model. At least from the point of view of society as a whole.
When you were growing up, making durable, faithful copies of an audio or video signal was a technically difficult and impressive service. It was a source of value, and the market rewards a service with value by exchanging other things of value for it. Today, making perfect copies of an audio or video signal is something with a material and skill cost so negligible it is practically nothing.
Indeed the copy may well be more valuable than the original. Convert a CD into an MP3 and you go from having a plastic disk which requires a fairly bulky machine to use into something you can put on a music playing machine small enough to put in your pocket.
It's simpler than that. The rest of us apply for a job, and then do the work required for money delivered.
Most likely saving some of that money to try and ensure that we are not poor when we are old.
Muscicans and such do things backwards:
It isn't even all musicians (and other artists) plenty have a "day job" and make music because they enjoy making music and/or enjoy entertaining an audiance.
In order for someone to be capable of earning a living as a musician tends to take a combination of talent and luck. Even then someone doing it for their entire working life is unlikely
they do the job then whine when somebody uses the service already performed without paying for it. Then they want "protections" so they can do things backwards.
Or even some of them complain that the supply of money from work they did nearly half a century ago might stop. At which point most people are likely to realise that most people's working lives last for less than 50 years. When it gets to the point of expecting to be paid for work done by a parent or grandparent it's doubtful that most people will be especially sympathetic.
Well, reality recently caught up with content makers. Either switch to a "Agree to pay, do work, then pay" like everybody else does, or shut up.
Even in the "entertainment industry" this is already mostly the case. It's not as if sound engineers, cameramen, makeup artists, set builders, even not staring actors, etc work for free.
The problem with your analogy is that Volvo and Toyota have sold me unique cars that they haven't sold to anyone else.
It's also not practical for someone to make a perfect clone of your car.
The entertainment industry wants to eat it's cake and have it too, they want the convenience of digital distribution, but they don't want the headache to make it truely secure.
Things are actually a bit more subtle than that. Some time ago the only way to distribute a recording was to have it closely tied with a physical piece of media. The details of that media and how the data encoded mattered. Whereas now they do not.
The issue for non-pirates here is anonymity. This technology causes anyone to expose their identity if they publish a video using the equipment. If you are an activist exposing some kind of sensitive stuff about your local tyrant, then you would do well to steer clear of these devices.
The risk may well be greater in the case of said "local tyrant" being someone who is otherwise believed to be an "upstanding citizen"/"great leader"/etc. Simply because he or she has more to loose by being outed.
Yes -- and it would stop 98% of the creative output in the world. Rare is the artist who will dance for your amusement while starving to death.
Not the best example, since copyright really only makes a difference to recorded performances. Whereas the example is of a live performance.
The real lquestion is "Does copyright encourage publication and distribution?" Even if the answer is "yes" then there is still the issue of "What is the most optional form and quantity of copyright to do this?" (In many cases an excess of something otherwise benifical is actually more harmful than an complete absence. Thus a strong case needs to be made that "copyright overdose" is not possible.)
The idea is that the message is only a few bits, so it's embedded with a *huge* amount of redundency. To get rid of a watermark, you generally have to specifically attack it, not just throw in noise/compression/whatever blindly.
How secret do you think the steganography algorithm used will be? If not the actual steganography used how about the algorithms used to detect and interpret the hidden data...
So what if my own video clips or fair use excerpts won't get me prosecuted?
We have already seen the likes of DMCA "takedowns" abused even in cases where there is no possibility of infringement. Consider the case of someone posting footage from a TV news broadcast which shows something odd happening...
There will still be a unique ID in them.
Assuming the unique ID mechanism actually works.
You could just as easily wind up with your "unique ID" on something you had nothing to do with.
Tagging illegally recorded video is one thing, and might just be acceptable
How can a machine possibly tell if a specific recording is "illegal" or not? Even human beings cannot always agree...
The massive database you refer to doesn't need to track media ownership, but only player location (ownership can be determined after-the-fact;
This is still a difficult task.
even just recording the IP address from which a player last dialed home [this is for high-end, network-connectivity-enabled boxes] would be adequate).
Not only are there all sorts of situations where this isn't that useful, VPNs, proxies, onion routing, etc. Having an IP will only tell you the owner of that netblock. You need to go through possibly several stages (which include getting the relevent court orders) to have any idea who that IP might relate to.
In addition there's the issue that if the device fails to work if it cannot "phone home" the problem has better not be on your side. Since if it's in anyway "your fault" that your customers cannot use their (expensive) device at best they will just be angry, at worst they will be reaching for their lawyers.
More generally, it's a feature that isn't beneficial to the owner of the product. If it's my video encoder, it should do things that are useful for me - a feature that serves no purpose except to allow others to track my behavior doesn't belong in my stuff.
Especially given that it's using your processor and your electricity to perform the task.
This isn't unlike the unique tracking patterns that laser printers output on printouts.
Whilst using your toner to do this.
but embedding insidious tracking codes into all of our electronics just isn't something that should be considered even slightly socially acceptable.
In order for this to be useful at all there is quite an administrative overhead in keeping track of where the equiptment is and who has it. This may well include the components which actually contain the tracking number. There's also the problem of tracking sales, especially "presents" bought at retail outlets.
How does watermarking remove functionality from a product?
Because the the processor resources used to perform this function could otherwise be used to perform something else.
Compromise?! Who decided the copyright cartel deserves even that?
Wouldn't it only be a "compromise" if the public actually gained something they didn't have before. Otherwise "less of a power grab by the copyright cartel" might be a better description.
And I'll continue to demand neither, thankyouverymuch!
"watermarking" isn't actually new with copyrighted items. Be it maps with deliberate errors or "numbered editions". What appears to be more this issue here is that a third party is doing the watermarking.
Personally, I think this is an outstanding compromise; it leaves legitimate fair use rights in place, but provides a means for large-scale-distribution violations to be prosecuted. It's certainly a far better deal than mandatory DRM, which in all seriousness is the other contender. I'll take watermarks over DRM any day
However cunning the steganography involved in these watermarks is the details are likely to become known quite quickly. Making it possible to alter the data. No doubt someone could easily produce a codec guarenteed to mangle such data in an existing video file.
For instance, one can insert genes from mammals or other higher organisms into maize. This type of "lateral transfer" has practically no chance of ever occurring through any breeding/selection/mutagenesis. So the effects on the phenotype can be much more severe, and not just accelerated in pace.
There's also the issue of what "side effects" may be produced. Which may be overlooked, especially if they depend exacly where the alien genes end up in the target organism.
Genetic engineering allows you to add things that would otherwise be nearly impossible to obtain from the organism's original genome.
Actually it allows you to do things to the organism which are impossible with its original genome. Since you can put genes into the organism where were never present in that species of organism before.
They actually are (at least in the US) legally identical to individuals. That's in the sense that they can commit crimes and get sued or pay taxes.
Except that corporations don't tend to have their freedoms constrained at the point they are charged with a crime. Not many real people can be "business as usual" whilst awaiting a trial, let alone only only have their lawyers attend the trial. Even if found guilty there is no corporate equivalent of a prison sentence. When it comes to criminal law corporations and individuals are treated (very) differently. Even if the same statute theoretically applies to both situations.
The problem is that most people have lost sight of that fact. In exchange for limited liability and effective immortality, corporations are supposed to act with restraint.
The term "limited liability" started off with one specific meaning. That was that shareholders' financial liability was limited to the amount of their investment. i.e. if the enterprise failed the worst that could happen is that they would have some worthless pieces of paper, creditors could not persue the "owners" of the business. Nothing to do with the idea of a business not being liable for the consequences of the actions of its executives.
In meatspace, we already have constraints on distribution channels for so-called "adult" material. I can send my kid to Toys R Us and know that he won't find porn. (I think that there are lots of problems with the junk sold there, but porn is not one of them.)
You won't find much porn at www.toysrus.com either. AFAIK they don't sell "adult toys" at all.
Those people are serious idiots, but the real problem is a lot more insidious...people are not installing private applications on company computers so much as installing private applications on private computers and then connecting those private computers to company resources via either VPN/extranet or sneakernet (laptops.) This problem is pervasive and promises to be one of the largest security challenges going forward.
The problem is more that a "personal computer" is the wrong tool for the job. What's actually needed is some kind of terminal, probably one capable of graphics and including a good cipher machine.
The trivial solution is simply to have anyone caught doing this crap publicly executed, preferably by wild horses or flaying alive or some such. These people are stupid enough to think it's a good idea to install Kazaa on their work computer. For the good of the human race, we cannot risk letting them breed.
There's also the problem of whoever though it was a good idea to have machines where it was possible for ordinary users to install arbitrary programs.
It sounds like the network administrators in said "governmental offices" should take the precautions neccessary to police the bandwidth. Furthermore, any environment in which said p2p applications are capable of leaking any private information need to be under closer scrutiny.
Actually the software shouldn't even be capable of running on the machines in the first place. Unfortunatly Windows still appears to be playing "catchup" with unix type systems when it comes to the concept of execute permissions and filesystem options to override file permissions.
Indeed, where I used to work (Pentagon), an Air Force officer used a floppy to transfer an unclassified Word Document from the isolated classified network to the open unclassified network. The Word document had scooped up random classified data from the hard drive in its buffers.
This is a known problem with MS Word which has been there for a long time (of course if this kind of bug were present in an OSS program it wouldn't still be there over a decade after it was first found).
In these cases, I do not know why:
1. The systems had classified data and were hooked to the Internet. That alone should land people in jail.
2. The employees had permission to install *anything* on the system. Unless they were administrators, that would have counted as a violation of security by itself, and if they were administrators, doing anything unauthorized should have had them canned. I had to go through hoops just to install new tools on development machines.
If anything the second is a far more serious problem that the first as well as making the first a lot more of a risk that it would otherwise be.
3. The employees were not jailed with no questions asked. I guarantee that would put a stop to the practice.
4. The whole section was not audited, leading to immediate correction of the above.
Those who needed jailing might well include the officers/managers who allowed such a situation to occur.
It also makes me very nervous about the government's insistence of late on creating large integrated databases. Even if I trusted them to use the data ethically (I don't) I do not have confidence that they could secure it adequately.
Especially when the data is ment to be used for identification and/or authentication purposes.