Because then they'll just come blow our shit up over here.
Most of "them" are actually "militiamen". Thus are not going to travel thousands of miles in persuit of an army, just getting the soldiers off their land/out of their country is sufficent.
where foreigners the world over who otherwise couldn't care less about us--I mean, except for the Palestine thing--now consider us their mortal enemies.
The reason the "Palestine thing" is an issue is that the US has been majorly involved for some time. Obviously George Washington's advice wasn't considered good enough for the USA in the latter part of the 20th century. Randomly bombing civilians tends to make them (quite rationally) consider you a mortal enemy too.
There is certainly nothing wrong with naked female breasts - those of us in the rest of the world were left laughing our heads of at the utter ridiculousness of the outcry over the Janet Jackson "wardrobe misfunction".
One thing most of the world found so silly was that this happened in the middle of a sport so dangerous the players need to wear body armour, but even then there is a great risk of serious injury. Apparently seeing a nipple for a few seconds is far more harmful than watching an athlete being carted away by paramedics.
I think you are confusing your internal desire for the existance of a lottery where you could strike it rich using intectual property with the universal "rightness" of having such a thing. If every single work by every single creative person on earth was instantly and costlessly beamed to everyone else, people would still create. This is one of the fundamental human needs.
However there isn't really that much of a shortage of human creativity. The limitation is more at the level of transporting the "content".
If the system means that one cannot make a living from purely creative activity, these people will have to work a job that pays to sustain their creative endevours, just like me.
The reality is that the vast majority of artists are not supported by their art and never will be, even if they are later seen to be the best of their time.
Even for the tiny minority who do things may not be good. Plenty of "celebrities" appear to wind up having little in common with their "fans", let alone those who wind up seriously ill.
My brother's an author - If his 'books don't go for money' he doesn't put food on the table.
Why should that make him any different from someone who is "made redundent" in any other industry? He may have had more choicein his career than the average Welsh coal miner or Scottish shipbuilder...
IMHO, IP *does* imply scarcity - If my brother spends a year writing a unique book, and you derive pleasure from reading it then you should compensate him.
Why should the reader be obliged to do this. Unless they either in some way forced the author to write the book or agreed to pay whilst the book was being written.
Alright, here's one example: I like to listen to talking books in the car. If the author wasn't compensated he wouldn't be able to write more books.
Except that plenty of people write books for all sorts of reasons. Including reasons unrelated to profit. For most authors there is a large amount of luck involved in getting their first book published.
Without copyright, how does an artist put bread on the table? How do we expect them to pay the rent?
They can get a "day job" (which may or may not be related to their "art"), convince someone to sponser them, perform live, teacher their "art" to paying students, etc, etc.
As such, I should be allowed to watch a pirated movie in my basement just as if I decide to drive 80mph in a 55mph zone. I'm succeptible to the consequences, of course. However, my car does not shut down when I speed, and so why should my DVD player shut down when it "thinks" I'm doing something illegal?
It would be possible to make a car which did shut down. But fortunatly most people realise that cars which randomly shut down are more dangerous than those capable of exceeding some arbitary speed limit.
On the other side, hacking/cracking is always wrong because, in practice, a hacker has no way to ensure that their actions will not cause any harm (e.g. they may cause a system slow-down, crash, release of proprietary info, etc.).
The first two of these are certainly applicable to DRM. Supporting DRM means using lots more software (and hardware) resources in addition to those required simply to render data into sound and vision. It may even be the case that the DRM portion is actually larger than the rendering portion. There's also the possibility of bugs in DRM causing system instability or data corruption.
Yes, and that's exactly why a lot of those one-copy originals are gone forever -- and no one will ever read them again. For example, an unfortunate number of them existed only in the Alexandria library.
You don't even need to look to ancient history to find such examples just 30 years will do it!
From a preservation standpoint, the encryption of content for mass distribution is always an unsavory outcome. What we should have learned from the silent film era is that lots of copies keep stuff safe, and when you only have a few durable copies around, parts of our cultural heritage tend to disappear rapidly from the historical and archaeological record.
Actually it's a lot worst that that, the only copies of movies and TV programmes (both on film and video tape) were being junked almost up until the advent of the domestic VCR.
It's going to be hard enough to read the digitally stored works of our time using the hardware tools of the future.
It can be hard enough to read stuff from only a few decades back, where the formats are documented and even some of the designers are still alive to ask...
It is actually a practical impossibility to design such a DRM scheme. If I were to give you a 5 1/2" floppy right now, could you extract the data? Probably half of us could not, even if allowed hours to root through our attic for dusty old equipment. But with floppies, we have the advantage of knowing the format, and we're not at the mercy of some long-defunct website to give us decryption keys.
The ultimate example of this kind of thing is the BBC Doomsday Project from 1986, where the result of using technology was to create something less easy to read than the Doomsday Book from 1086... In addition to the problem of a defunct data format there are also issues of identifying copyright holders, even after "only" 20 years. (When copyright could potential last 7-8 times that...)
Obviously some limitations have to be set for capitalism to work, but that does not include a "right to make money." Having your idea protected for a limited time to allow you to make money with it is a privilege not a right. And that is what nearly everyone has forgotten.
Even having that privilege is not a "right to make money". There may be little or no money to be made from that idea. The idea behind copyrights and patents is that the possibility of financial rewards encourages people to publish their ideas. The other thing which appears to have been forgotten is that monopolys are harmful to capitalism. It's only in the short term that copyrights (and patents) may be able to do more good than harm. (With this period if time most likely having decreased as communications have improved. It might well have taken years to sell a book worldwide in the 18th century, it certainly dosn't now.)
Even recordings last only as long as the key to their recovery is known.
There's also the lifetime of the original media. There also appears to be an interesting quirk in current copyright law. The BBC recently released a Doctor Who DVD where animation was used to replace episodes where the original video recording was missing. With a copyright date of 2006, rather than 1968. This appears to imply a possible way to extend copyright by delibrate distruction of the original work..
*I admit my anti-copyright bias, but I don't think this is unfair. If you want your work to be protected, you should have to put a notice of copyright within the work, as under the old system. And you should have up to a year or so to decide you want to do that (to prevent people copying your expression.) Beyond that, it's public - period.
You might also want to make copyright libraries workable again. e.g. In order to claim any copyright you must deposit a "plain text" copy in all such libraries clearly labled with the date the work becomes public domain. Acceptable formats, media and labling to be decided by the relevent librarians.
Thing is, there's no hard line between what is illegal and what is fair use. No computer DRM algorithm can independently determine whether a particular use is illegal or fair. Fair use is a defense, its validity determined by the court, not code.
This is the point at which the original question becomes meaningless. Such a DRM system would be way beyond current software (i.e. it simply dosn't exist outside of science fiction) even if such software could be written it would be more likely to demand its 14th ammendement rights than act as a slave to the RIAA/MPAA. Indeed it would probably have a stronger case for being a "person" than the average corporation...
Well, first off, DRM allows for what amounts to unbound copyrights. After all, if I can't read, copy, edit, or redistribute a public-domain work, what use is it to me? Copyright is supposed to be a *bounded* contract between the copyright holder and society. DRM is just an attempt at an end-run around the rules.
Thing is that current copyrights are already broken in that respect. Any copyright term longer than the average human lifespan may as well be infinity for all practical purposes. In order to fix that the maximum copyright term would need to be significently less .
You don't need Vista for harddisk encryption... and Vista's encryption is even not the best solution (for Vista) available, there are several 3rd. party solutions wich are fairly cheap, powerful, and runs on several versions of Windows. You don't even neesd that TCP chip for running real safe encryption...
There is also the issue that proprietary cryptographic products tend to be poor. Even if they use well understood algorithms. Proper review and evaluation of proprietary software is difficult (even if not explicitally forbidden via an EULA) whereas with OSS it's fairly trivial. From a security POV proprietary harddisk encryption, with unknown bugs and unknown backdoors (possibly even an unknown algorithm) isn't really of much use.
the reason you might have to try many oss projects before you find a good one is that places like sourceforge and other big oss places never seem to drop any abandoned projects so they sit around popping up in search results.
That's because even abandoned OSS projects can be valuable and useful
My theory is that all software starts off bad and gets better over time.
It's perfectly possible for software to get worst over time. e.g. through the addition of "features" and a more complex UI.
Bad closed source is harder to find because they don't release until they think they can sell it or they go out of buisness and nobody is allowed to spread it.
Which can lead to "reinventing the wheel" because programmers lack examples of how to effectivly do X (as well as how not to attempt to do X).
Police can arrest people for drug dealing even if the white powder that they were representing and selling as drugs was really just baking soda.
Whilst the police might be able to do this Joe Random Public certainly can't. (At least not without a large risk of getting arrested as a "drug dealer". Even the police have to be careful exactly how they do this kind of thing.)
Watching that would be ever so slightly more amusing than watching one of my European customers when maintaining one of my employer's half-metric half-imperial products. It's fun hearing things like "This wrench won't fit, and this one is too big. Is this a 9.5mm nut? Oh shit. It's American."
They'd read the instructions, but when they tried to print them out the printer just sat there flashing "PC LOAD LETTER"...
All of your current units of measurement have been defined relative to the metric system for the past 50 years or so. From the wiki: "One inch international measure is exactly 25.4 millimeters, while one inch U.S. survey measure is defined so that 39.37 inches is exactly 1 meter".
Actually it's more like 60+ years. Originally the "English" and Imperial inches were slightly different. The 25.4 mm inch was a compromise between the two values, so as to ensure that parts manufactured for the war (WWII) effort would actually fit.
Well we could apply for extradition, it's just such a trivial offence that nobody would bother - and for similar reasons a Canadian court would probably tell anybody who tried to get lost.
The alternative is to put him on a "watch list" so he gets arrested the moment he returns to the UK.
2) The county dumps in my area have declared the CFLs to be toxic waste. This makes it illegal to throw them in the garbage when they do die. The stores that sell the bulbs are not collecting them, so the only legal way to get rid of them is by driving them to the dump.
One thing WalMart could do would be to collect old lamps. Whilst a brand new lamp is just as "toxic" as an expired one is possible that the relevent authorities would make this difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
Because then they'll just come blow our shit up over here.
Most of "them" are actually "militiamen". Thus are not going to travel thousands of miles in persuit of an army, just getting the soldiers off their land/out of their country is sufficent.
where foreigners the world over who otherwise couldn't care less about us--I mean, except for the Palestine thing--now consider us their mortal enemies.
The reason the "Palestine thing" is an issue is that the US has been majorly involved for some time. Obviously George Washington's advice wasn't considered good enough for the USA in the latter part of the 20th century.
Randomly bombing civilians tends to make them (quite rationally) consider you a mortal enemy too.
There is certainly nothing wrong with naked female breasts - those of us in the rest of the world were left laughing our heads of at the utter ridiculousness of the outcry over the Janet Jackson "wardrobe misfunction".
One thing most of the world found so silly was that this happened in the middle of a sport so dangerous the players need to wear body armour, but even then there is a great risk of serious injury. Apparently seeing a nipple for a few seconds is far more harmful than watching an athlete being carted away by paramedics.
I think you are confusing your internal desire for the existance of a lottery where you could strike it rich using intectual property with the universal "rightness" of having such a thing. If every single work by every single creative person on earth was instantly and costlessly beamed to everyone else, people would still create. This is one of the fundamental human needs.
However there isn't really that much of a shortage of human creativity. The limitation is more at the level of transporting the "content".
If the system means that one cannot make a living from purely creative activity, these people will have to work a job that pays to sustain their creative endevours, just like me. The reality is that the vast majority of artists are not supported by their art and never will be, even if they are later seen to be the best of their time.
Even for the tiny minority who do things may not be good. Plenty of "celebrities" appear to wind up having little in common with their "fans", let alone those who wind up seriously ill.
My brother's an author - If his 'books don't go for money' he doesn't put food on the table.
Why should that make him any different from someone who is "made redundent" in any other industry? He may have had more choicein his career than the average Welsh coal miner or Scottish shipbuilder...
IMHO, IP *does* imply scarcity - If my brother spends a year writing a unique book, and you derive pleasure from reading it then you should compensate him.
Why should the reader be obliged to do this. Unless they either in some way forced the author to write the book or agreed to pay whilst the book was being written.
Alright, here's one example: I like to listen to talking books in the car. If the author wasn't compensated he wouldn't be able to write more books.
Except that plenty of people write books for all sorts of reasons. Including reasons unrelated to profit. For most authors there is a large amount of luck involved in getting their first book published.
Without copyright, how does an artist put bread on the table? How do we expect them to pay the rent?
They can get a "day job" (which may or may not be related to their "art"), convince someone to sponser them, perform live, teacher their "art" to paying students, etc, etc.
As such, I should be allowed to watch a pirated movie in my basement just as if I decide to drive 80mph in a 55mph zone. I'm succeptible to the consequences, of course. However, my car does not shut down when I speed, and so why should my DVD player shut down when it "thinks" I'm doing something illegal?
It would be possible to make a car which did shut down. But fortunatly most people realise that cars which randomly shut down are more dangerous than those capable of exceeding some arbitary speed limit.
On the other side, hacking/cracking is always wrong because, in practice, a hacker has no way to ensure that their actions will not cause any harm (e.g. they may cause a system slow-down, crash, release of proprietary info, etc.).
The first two of these are certainly applicable to DRM. Supporting DRM means using lots more software (and hardware) resources in addition to those required simply to render data into sound and vision. It may even be the case that the DRM portion is actually larger than the rendering portion. There's also the possibility of bugs in DRM causing system instability or data corruption.
Yes, and that's exactly why a lot of those one-copy originals are gone forever -- and no one will ever read them again. For example, an unfortunate number of them existed only in the Alexandria library.
You don't even need to look to ancient history to find such examples just 30 years will do it!
From a preservation standpoint, the encryption of content for mass distribution is always an unsavory outcome. What we should have learned from the silent film era is that lots of copies keep stuff safe, and when you only have a few durable copies around, parts of our cultural heritage tend to disappear rapidly from the historical and archaeological record.
Actually it's a lot worst that that, the only copies of movies and TV programmes (both on film and video tape) were being junked almost up until the advent of the domestic VCR.
It's going to be hard enough to read the digitally stored works of our time using the hardware tools of the future.
It can be hard enough to read stuff from only a few decades back, where the formats are documented and even some of the designers are still alive to ask...
It is actually a practical impossibility to design such a DRM scheme. If I were to give you a 5 1/2" floppy right now, could you extract the data? Probably half of us could not, even if allowed hours to root through our attic for dusty old equipment. But with floppies, we have the advantage of knowing the format, and we're not at the mercy of some long-defunct website to give us decryption keys.
The ultimate example of this kind of thing is the BBC Doomsday Project from 1986, where the result of using technology was to create something less easy to read than the Doomsday Book from 1086... In addition to the problem of a defunct data format there are also issues of identifying copyright holders, even after "only" 20 years. (When copyright could potential last 7-8 times that...)
Obviously some limitations have to be set for capitalism to work, but that does not include a "right to make money." Having your idea protected for a limited time to allow you to make money with it is a privilege not a right. And that is what nearly everyone has forgotten.
Even having that privilege is not a "right to make money". There may be little or no money to be made from that idea.
The idea behind copyrights and patents is that the possibility of financial rewards encourages people to publish their ideas. The other thing which appears to have been forgotten is that monopolys are harmful to capitalism. It's only in the short term that copyrights (and patents) may be able to do more good than harm. (With this period if time most likely having decreased as communications have improved. It might well have taken years to sell a book worldwide in the 18th century, it certainly dosn't now.)
Even recordings last only as long as the key to their recovery is known.
There's also the lifetime of the original media. There also appears to be an interesting quirk in current copyright law. The BBC recently released a Doctor Who DVD where animation was used to replace episodes where the original video recording was missing. With a copyright date of 2006, rather than 1968.
This appears to imply a possible way to extend copyright by delibrate distruction of the original work..
*I admit my anti-copyright bias, but I don't think this is unfair. If you want your work to be protected, you should have to put a notice of copyright within the work, as under the old system. And you should have up to a year or so to decide you want to do that (to prevent people copying your expression.) Beyond that, it's public - period.
You might also want to make copyright libraries workable again. e.g. In order to claim any copyright you must deposit a "plain text" copy in all such libraries clearly labled with the date the work becomes public domain. Acceptable formats, media and labling to be decided by the relevent librarians.
Thing is, there's no hard line between what is illegal and what is fair use. No computer DRM algorithm can independently determine whether a particular use is illegal or fair. Fair use is a defense, its validity determined by the court, not code.
This is the point at which the original question becomes meaningless. Such a DRM system would be way beyond current software (i.e. it simply dosn't exist outside of science fiction) even if such software could be written it would be more likely to demand its 14th ammendement rights than act as a slave to the RIAA/MPAA. Indeed it would probably have a stronger case for being a "person" than the average corporation...
Well, first off, DRM allows for what amounts to unbound copyrights. After all, if I can't read, copy, edit, or redistribute a public-domain work, what use is it to me? Copyright is supposed to be a *bounded* contract between the copyright holder and society. DRM is just an attempt at an end-run around the rules.
Thing is that current copyrights are already broken in that respect. Any copyright term longer than the average human lifespan may as well be infinity for all practical purposes. In order to fix that the maximum copyright term would need to be significently less .
You don't need Vista for harddisk encryption... and Vista's encryption is even not the best solution (for Vista) available, there are several 3rd. party solutions wich are fairly cheap, powerful, and runs on several versions of Windows. You don't even neesd that TCP chip for running real safe encryption...
There is also the issue that proprietary cryptographic products tend to be poor. Even if they use well understood algorithms. Proper review and evaluation of proprietary software is difficult (even if not explicitally forbidden via an EULA) whereas with OSS it's fairly trivial.
From a security POV proprietary harddisk encryption, with unknown bugs and unknown backdoors (possibly even an unknown algorithm) isn't really of much use.
the reason you might have to try many oss projects before you find a good one is that places like sourceforge and other big oss places never seem to drop any abandoned projects so they sit around popping up in search results.
That's because even abandoned OSS projects can be valuable and useful
My theory is that all software starts off bad and gets better over time.
It's perfectly possible for software to get worst over time. e.g. through the addition of "features" and a more complex UI.
Bad closed source is harder to find because they don't release until they think they can sell it or they go out of buisness and nobody is allowed to spread it.
Which can lead to "reinventing the wheel" because programmers lack examples of how to effectivly do X (as well as how
not to attempt to do X).
Police can arrest people for drug dealing even if the white powder that they were representing and selling as drugs was really just baking soda.
Whilst the police might be able to do this Joe Random Public certainly can't. (At least not without a large risk of getting arrested as a "drug dealer". Even the police have to be careful exactly how they do this kind of thing.)
Watching that would be ever so slightly more amusing than watching one of my European customers when maintaining one of my employer's half-metric half-imperial products. It's fun hearing things like "This wrench won't fit, and this one is too big. Is this a 9.5mm nut? Oh shit. It's American."
They'd read the instructions, but when they tried to print them out the printer just sat there flashing "PC LOAD LETTER"...
All of your current units of measurement have been defined relative to the metric system for the past 50 years or so. From the wiki: "One inch international measure is exactly 25.4 millimeters, while one inch U.S. survey measure is defined so that 39.37 inches is exactly 1 meter".
Actually it's more like 60+ years. Originally the "English" and Imperial inches were slightly different. The 25.4 mm inch was a compromise between the two values, so as to ensure that parts manufactured for the war (WWII) effort would actually fit.
Except where exactly is the transaction taking place? Is it in the purchaser's home, or where AllOfMP3's server's are located?
Or some other location...
Well we could apply for extradition, it's just such a trivial offence that nobody would bother - and for similar reasons a Canadian court would probably tell anybody who tried to get lost.
The alternative is to put him on a "watch list" so he gets arrested the moment he returns to the UK.
2) The county dumps in my area have declared the CFLs to be toxic waste. This makes it illegal to throw them in the garbage when they do die. The stores that sell the bulbs are not collecting them, so the only legal way to get rid of them is by driving them to the dump.
One thing WalMart could do would be to collect old lamps. Whilst a brand new lamp is just as "toxic" as an expired one is possible that the relevent authorities would make this difficult.
The matter is that I can (and I am forced) to take steps to ensure the security of my data. And I alone am to blame if I fail to do so.
There's quite a lot of data where handing it over to some third party is mutually exclusive with ensuring its security...